Low-code development becoming business skill 'table stakes':
A shortage of software developers and IT workers in general is forcing businesses to turn to "citizen developers" within their organizations to create business applications supporting digital transformation efforts.
Finding workers with software development skills, or training them in-house, is becoming a priority, according to John Bratincevic, a senior analyst at Forrester. When speaking with business clients, he says, the most common question he gets is how they can stand up and scale a citizen development strategy.
What makes citizen development possible is a raft of low-code and no-code development platforms, which enable business users with little to no coding experience to develop apps based on business needs. Companies are leveraging these platforms to create "hundreds or thousands of citizen developers in their organizations. They want to know how to nurture people, so they become really skilled in low-code," Bratincevic said.
"In my opinion, where this is all going is low-code development will just be table stakes for the business worker — just like personal productivity tools," he added.
[...] A January survey by research firm IDC of 380 enterprises showed that 49% of respondents are purchasing low-code or no-code platforms to move innovation in-house. The second-largest reason for purchasing the software tools (39%) was "pandemic-related needs."
In 2021, the global market for low-code development technology hit $13.8 billion in revenue. And the adoption of low-code software development platforms is growing by more than 20% a year, according to research firm Gartner. By 2023, low-code development is expected to be adopted by more than half of all medium- to large-sized companies.
Low-code development tools abstract away the more commonly used code base and replace it with a graphical user interface or visual "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) interface to build an application. The technology enables employees who may not have a technical background to become citizen developers, expanding opportunities beyond the traditional hiring pool or day-to-day workflow. Additionally, low-code tools allow traditional developers to focus on more challenging tasks while others handle simpler development jobs with low-code technology.
[...] The millennials and younger workers that make up the majority of today's workforce are far more comfortable with technology, including software development, than older workers. "They understand there is an app that provides some utility for them," Torres said. "With these [low-code] platforms, people typically try it out, get some initial success, and then try to do more."
Torres has seen groups ranging from facilities teams to human resources departments develop applications, with the development work done by people who typically don't have technology pedigree.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @04:26PM (2 children)
Just the other day Janrinok was complaining about not having Perl programming skills in-house... now he can get a millennial to whip together a spam-blocking system in Scratch.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @04:41PM (1 child)
Sorry, boomer, Scratch is just a kid's toy. For mission critical applications you want to use a proper low-code language like Minecraft.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Rich on Tuesday July 12 2022, @05:10PM
Using Conway's Game of Life as a benchmark, Minecraft https://youtu.be/D8FMiFswZN8?t=76 [youtu.be] still looks like it has a little bit more overhead than APL ( life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵} ), which is now back in the game, thanks to Unicode.
(Score: 2) by Uncle_Al on Tuesday July 12 2022, @05:13PM (16 children)
And who is going to maintain these little blunders of joy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @05:19PM (1 child)
Gig workers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @08:57PM
offshore AC gig workers. already prevelant. just stop giving them negative pronouns like
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 12 2022, @05:31PM (1 child)
Within our organization these things were so debilitating that we developed a procedure for non-product software validation. Any non-product software which impacts product quality or business integrity in any way STILL needs to go through a software validation procedure, including spreadsheets, Word macros, etc. Product software has its own validation procedures, but even though non-product software validation is an "easier" process, it certainly slows down the use of "that spreadsheet that Jim made last year..."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @05:58PM
Interesting there's this sort-of self-limiting dynamic.
People want cheap coding but then they need to pony up on validation (which everyone HATES). So you can run a cowboy outfit up to the point you need shit to work for realz, then you need switch to the neverending drudgery of QA, documentation, corporate professionalism, etc. Pick one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @05:50PM (1 child)
Did you consider outsourcing to India?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday July 12 2022, @08:37PM
Even the Indians working for those outsourcing companies don't advocate that.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Tuesday July 12 2022, @05:57PM
You are my good sir! ;-)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by EvilSS on Tuesday July 12 2022, @07:48PM (6 children)
"Hey, I made a thing to make that stuff a little easier."
Which turns into:
"Hey, maintaining this thing is now my part time job, but I'm an accountant and not getting paid extra for being a thing maintainer."
Which turns into:
"Hey, you know Gary, the accountant who made that thing? He left for a new job. We need to make an update to the thing. Who is updating the thing now?"
Which finally end up as:
"Hey, IT Bob. Gary the accountant made this thing, and its turned into a really important thing, and he left so now it's your thing. We need these changes made to the thing, ASAP!".
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday July 12 2022, @08:39PM (4 children)
Hi Steve, I'm IT, not Software Development. You might want to hire a Developer to take care of that.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @09:05PM (3 children)
*hires interns*
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 12 2022, @10:24PM (2 children)
Hires interns for IT Bob to manage while they butcher that thing Gary did.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2022, @12:55AM (1 child)
Actually, it would most likely be something like lay off IT Bob; hire interns to butcher that thing Gary did; 10 years minimum experience with Minecraft required.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 14 2022, @05:04PM
Minecraft's all python. What could possibly go wrong?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 12 2022, @10:32PM
I was a $3 per hour intern in 1987 when I built a multi file (remember the 640k limit?) 123 spreadsheet for the 5 year inventory of roads in South Florida for DOT. Lucky for them by 1992 the 640k limit was being torn down in the new spreadsheet software. I believe in 1982 the whole exercise was paper based instead.
Nobody else in the office had the faintest idea how to reproduce the design, but it would run all kinds of totals on all the categories and rows of data, which got reshuffled and recalculated daily for over a month. In 1982 I think they did it once, by hand, had a single reshuffling exercise and just accepted the results of that one because calculating the totals by hand took so long.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @09:35PM
> And who is going to maintain these little blunders of joy?
The same people that maintain Excel macros... (ducking).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2022, @01:50AM
Maintain? WTF that word means?!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @05:23PM (1 child)
I did it before it was cool - it was then the coolest thing. My first steps were in the software called Fusion in late 90s. I made a set of linked blocks and the software generated me the code. Unfortunately the code was in Java and I don't like Java too much. However, I made a few quite good programs with it.
Then, before Borland was bought by this company with long, Spanish-like name (for foreigner it sounds like that :) ), there was RAD idea. I did it in Delphi. Contrary to Java, it was faster and theoretically could be compiled to independent executable.
Simultaneously I made simple websites using non-code tools, called WYSIWYG editors. It allowed a typical person to publish a website without worrying about properly closed tags or line breaks.
Then, open source world said: You don't need WYSIWYG which generates faulty code, you need CMS! And CMS systems started to emerge. There were paid ones and free ones, but nevertheless of their price, their hosting costs were much higher and document flexibility was much lower. Because WYSIWYG web authoring tools could e.g. close the tag without proper line break so they became retired, and even if you want to write a quick help for your software to be distributed as a set of HTML files, you have to do it in pure HTML. Simultaneously many CMSes introduced new features like built-in backdoors in components nobody asked for, populating CSS stylesheets with PHP errors or stopping operation because the server was connected with cable of unfeasible colour. The last one is the thing I have seen, diagnosed and finally fixed by patching the CMS, so no, it is not a legend.
Of course this made the market operate in totally different way. One ordinary user could not get this all, so there was the text writer, the programmer who made forms, and the operator who joined text, images and tables to forms, knowing how to do it. Because many CMS systems could not render it properly and the text had to be "spiced" with proper formatting tags again, for a short time some companies revived the position of metre-am-page (sorry, no idea how is it in English, the guy who breaks lead casts after being formed on a linotype and forms pages of text using them). This also ended the era of "personal webpages" which was definitely a very useful epoch in the Web.
So now, seeing the inflation and possible problems, the business tries to resuscitate the dead badger. Good luck! You did so much to create separate castes of various experts in extremely narrow domains tat now it can be a bit difficult.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @06:05PM
So the business side is always looking at its expensive employees and thinking of ways to turn them into cheap employees? That they can commoditize into $7.25 line workers? And you say that this is the entire point of the business side? Well, I for one am shocked.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @06:30PM (4 children)
Sounds more like there is a shortage of coders willing to work for minimum wage and many hours per week. There are plenty of older IT workers who have been laid off due to ageism. Start recruiting them, but be willing to pay for their knowledge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @07:50PM (2 children)
Why would any business do that? Why would they make themselves beholden to some expensive fossils that want to call the shots? That's not how business works, son.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday July 12 2022, @08:15PM (1 child)
Does "business" want to get the job done and see a return on its investment?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @09:08PM
I think *business* would rather slowly deteriorate and file for bankruptcy, yes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @10:08PM
Try 'work many hours of overtime and be on call 24/7 for no pay on top of their regular minimum wage duties'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @06:38PM
"no/low code" usually just means someone else's Slaveware, and as usual, the Suited Whores could learn how to use a search engine to find talented devs in their local market, but they would rather do the dumbest, laziest thing and suck up to power, and sell out their customers and ultimately their own business. i will enjoy watching these businesses go extinct.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12 2022, @08:09PM
"turn to “citizen developers” within their organizations to create business applications supporting digital transformation efforts."
"The technology enables employees who may not have a technical background to become citizen developers, expanding opportunities beyond the traditional hiring pool or day-to-day workflow."
My my, we're getting close to Gartner-levels of phrasing! Is ServiceNow trying to get a spot in there? Looks like an advert in disguise to appeal to C-level execs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14 2022, @04:38AM
Why does soystain give this trash any attention?
Is this going to be about the waaahmen again, because feminists think this is more important than defending basic human rights like abortion? Or is it because feminists suspect Justice Handmaiden of being a dick girl, and so in their view it makes sense to double-down on some utterly pointless misandry, on the theory that Justice Handmaiden will see the evil of her dick girl ways, and defer to the "real" women on abortion?