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Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
81–90 of 203 posts
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#82They'd all start trying to find their way into project management or design or something. Being able to code is an important part of being a software developer but being able to code makes you no more of a software developer than learning newton's laws of motions makes you a mechanical engineer. There are edge cases, debugging, scalability, one off errors integration, backups, etc. We tried this with VB and Acces and…
> being able to code makes you no more of a software developer than learning newton's laws of motions makes you a mechanical engineer. Yes! I wish this point got more attention. So many articles - there was one on here from a16z today - pretend there is this magical thing called learning to code that takes a couple months and suddenly puts you on par with every software developer. The analogy I like to use is claimin…
To the casual observer, the stereotypical age of computer programmers contradicts your claim. ;-)
While I can certainly appreciate that it takes time to mature as a developer, the job market at least reinforces the idea that you can get hired at the entry level after maybe a couple years of study. My mom's programming students got hired that quickly in the 1980s. What I do think is that the small part of software development called coding is something you can learn in a couple years. At that point you may be able to perform a useful role in a larger team of developers, e.g., under the wing of a senior, giving you time to further mature as a full blown developer.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#83The author miss the point that coding complexity is exponential, not linear. I.e. a lot of people can understand 10-20 lines of code, less can 100 LOC, less can 1000 LOC, maybe top 10% can understand 10K, 1% - 100K. So no code can work, just that the size limit of the program will be low (10-100 LOC) . However, most program start at low LOC, but ends up with high LOC, where the low code tools breaks. Hence, the low c…
There is a difference between understanding 10, 100, and maybe 1000+ but beyond that I'm not so sure. Who really understands a 100k code base they didn't write themselves except at a high level anyway? I think once a developer accrues an understanding of certain key abstractions, it's just a matter of exposure and practice working within code bases. No-code is a separate issue. Visually organized programs become very…
Right, a professional programmer uses advanced tools and design pattern such that 100K can look like 1001K or 1000 100 LOC.
The complexity of a software system is due to interaction between its components. A professional developer know how to make it N instead of N2.
Note that most of the big software system that you know, were written by a single/two developers - C++/ Java / Unix / Linux / Riser FS / Kubernetes.
This can be evident by the power law distribution of github commits for every popular github project.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#84One of the main differences I see on the road to learning to code has nothing to do with the tools; it’s the thought process. A major hurdle is trying to get the business people to coherently express what they want. They seem to have a general sense of how something should go, but can’t actually put it down on paper. Or when they do, it looks different than what they imagined (simply because the required logic doesn’…
I don’t think that having a knack for math necessarily matters for making a good programmer. I’ve known many good engineers who were drawn to programming because math was hard for them and they wanted to learn how to get the computer to do it for them. Ironically, coming to understand programming can be a way to understand math better. One of the best programmers I know is a philosophy major, who thinks of code like…
> it helps to be a systems-thinker, and to be able to zoom out and ask “what are we really trying to accomplish here.” Most of the time the elegant software solutions come not from writing brilliant code, but from reframing the problem so that simple code can solve it.
This is exactly what math as a subject in school teaches you. Other subjects can too, but math seems to uniquely challenge people to really bend their mind around concepts, as opposed to many other subjects which often turn into memorization tasks.
I’m talking about stuff like algebra, statistics, etc., not basic adding and multiplication. What is reducing a fraction or using the commutative property to break a problem into smaller chunks, if not “reframing the problem”?
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO it depends on how long your willing to spend teaching people. Most young students can eventually get basic programs working in logo style systems given enough time. Make coding a core part of public education and I think we could see 80+% of people get reasonable competency by high school graduation. Collages and especially boot camps on the other hand expect people to pick things up much more quickly, and I thin…
You only need to spend time teaching a few semesters to have this belief completely turned upside down. I know, because it happened to me.
That wasn’t just a guess, the logo thing was from actual experience.
I have also known people that learned to code over a decade that needed to copy peoples homework to get through collage. One spent a long time setting up and troubleshooting network routers before things clicked. Another learned via increasingly complex sysadmin scripts, until he fell in a pure programming job.
Meanwhile a coworker of mine had a philosophy degree but two programming courses where more than enough to get him productive.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
If learning your first programming language doesn't require patience, I don't know what the word means. I've never met anyone who wasn't frustrated for at least the first few months trying to get even basic programs working. The syntax is orders of magnitude less tolerance of mistakes than any other subject.
Not sure a doctor would agree with that last sentence. Or even a carpenter really. Cut that bit off at the wrong angle and it's not something you're coming back from. Cut a line of code wrong and the test fails, and you try again, and again and again.
I’m not talking about the importance of mistakes or likelihood of making them. I’m talking about the literal binary nature of the (syntax) mistakes. From day 1 to day infinity a single misplaced character is more likely than not completely unacceptable.
But for any physical skill you have some notion of tolerance. Whether that’s millimeter or micrograms things aren’t absolute in the way they are with programming.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
well, you made me (try) to read the article to confirm you didn't get it, but i can only see two paragraphs. still, it seems that was enough to see it isn't about making software that others will pay for, but about avoiding paying a pro to make software when a novice can sling something good enough together. someone with another job doesn't need to make software someone will pay money for. their real job is how they…
> code isn't basketball, it's duck tape. And this viewpoint is why the slack app uses 6GB of ram, and we consider 8GB a minimum amount to browse the web...
"Our stuff made by professionals is also terrible" is maybe not the slam-dunk argument against democratizing code that people think it is.
I don't think many people are looking at the software industry as it exists today and saying, "this is a group with standards." :) So why get upset over whether some minor automation project or side project that an office user writes is of engineering quality when it's being written to get around some half-thought, bad UX we professionals foisted on them in the first place? We build restrictive apps and bad workflows that make it harder for them to do their jobs, and then we have the gall to say that they're not professional enough or predisposed enough to a certain kind of thinking to write their own code?
Give those non-programmers some degree of access to a world where computers are creative tools that can be commanded, not just single-purpose devices that do pre-specified things. Because that world is great, and they should have access to it regardless of whether or not they're good at programming. And it's not like the modern software industry is so wildly quality-controlled right now that we're in any position to tell anyone that they're not good enough or thoughtful enough to deserve having more agency over the tools they use.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren’t they bad examples? There’s a distinction between an extremely rare occurrence of biological factors like being 7 feet tall in order to succeed, and that of needing a decent education in order to think critically.
Some people just cannot wrap their head around pointers. Some just do not get recursion no matter what. I used to teach CS, and tutor in CS. It is as rare as being 7 feet tall, sadly. And without understanding indirection and recursion, the most you'll ever do is ...well..not much...
> It is as rare as being 7 feet tall, sadly.
Objectively not true? Not even close to true.
I guarantee you there are many orders of magnitude more people in the world who understand recursion and that understand pointers than there are people who are 7 feet tall. Being 7 feet tall is extremely rare, and building a functioning C app is not.
The average height of an NBA player at the highest level of the sport is under 7 feet.
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I don't understand why we're all commenting under this thread accepting the premise that good programmers are rare. They're not, look at the size of the industry and the output. The only way this argument makes sense is if you redefine "good" to mean something incredibly exclusionary, and even if you do it's impossible to argue that none of the software coming out of the industry is producing any value for users or solving any problems that they have.
> And without understanding indirection and recursion, the most you'll ever do is ...well..not much...
How do you think we have a software industry at all if you're claiming that both:
A) only an extreme minority of the population (B) it's impossible to build useful tools without them.
One of those two things has to be false, or you have to explain to me why the entire software industry hasn't collapsed by now from lack of talent and lack of output.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that having a knack for math necessarily matters for making a good programmer. I’ve known many good engineers who were drawn to programming because math was hard for them and they wanted to learn how to get the computer to do it for them. Ironically, coming to understand programming can be a way to understand math better. One of the best programmers I know is a philosophy major, who thinks of code like…
> it helps to be a systems-thinker, and to be able to zoom out and ask “what are we really trying to accomplish here.” Most of the time the elegant software solutions come not from writing brilliant code, but from reframing the problem so that simple code can solve it. This is exactly what math as a subject in school teaches you. Other subjects can too, but math seems to uniquely challenge people to really bend their…
Both are exact disciplines that rely on making tools and abstractions as a away to solve problems, knowing how to combine your skills to form new skills, because you are often in a novel situation that doesn't match experience.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#90A lot of non-programmer office workers I've met aren't capable of writing software. Full stop. They're simply too incompetent. It's an uncomfortable truth. I'm talking about scrum masters who have trouble navigating Jira, business analysts who aren't able to have a written conversation, product owners who struggle to create Outlook calendar invites. Imagine asking these same people to write software rather than just…
Does anyone not have trouble navigating Jira? I play Europa Universalis 4[0], and I feel like Jira is more complicated.
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