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It means we have a new prototyping tool. Cool. Don't worry, your skills aren't going to become obsolete :) Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll alw

It means we have a new prototyping tool. Cool. Don't worry, your skills aren't going to become obsolete :) Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll always be very employable. I once worked with a guy who embodied the "grumpy old man" (we were both just out of college btw) attitude for every new, cool thing I brought to his attention. I kept telling him that in order to stay relevant as a programmer in the foreseeable future he would have to stay on top of technology and keep his chops up outside of the very mundane engineering work that we did at that company. He would flatly refuse out of hand and say things like "Someone who only knows COBOL for 40 years will still have a job". It frustrated the hell out of me at the time, but he's probably right. Not saying you're guaranteed a great job or be making google-level salaries, but you have to try pretty hard to become completely irrelevant in technology. There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much. If you have even enough interest to be on this website and explore things like App Maker and question things like this, you're going to be just fine :)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
themodelplumber 10y ago
Thank you. I have a colleague, a graphic designer who is nearing retirement age. Every time Adobe announces a new software tool, she's partly excited, mostly terrified. Adobe likes to show how newbie-friendly these tools are. One click here, another there, and...project is done. She pays money to visit these demonstrations at conferences. Then she watches on, imagining her billable hours being redirected to an intern, the client's nephew or someone like that. Usually the terror gets a sort of beachhead in her mind, and for a while my colleague bears the cognitive cost of this "well there's no need for me anymore" anxiety. It's really sad to watch. > There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much. This is so true. I wish everyone fearing for their career due to new tech could understand it. Braided into a broader whole of business process you've got huge loads of necessary mental capital too, like the ability to deliver on multiple deadlines, the ability to set healthy boundaries, set proper budgets, and communicate well with others. My colleague has all these things; if only she could see new technology is only a small part, and overall a very forgiving part that needs humans like her more than we might think.
- ams6110 10y ago
  I think that people in the tech world underestimate how foreign this all is to a lot of people. We've had "form builders" in various incarnations for a long long time. Most people don't have the first clue what to do with them, and don't even want to try.
  - matdrewin 10y ago
    The new low-code solutions are still used by developers, just allows get to develop much faster without having to worry about UI and cross-platform compatibility and other time consuming things that take up time when building a custom app. I'm afraid that the new generation of low code solutions are not just "form" builders or prototyping tools. We've built a full operational system and client facing portal using a low code solution.
- fencepost 10y ago
  Point out to her that her (and your) customers are not the people who are getting Adobe products and doing their own design work. The people who will take advantage of the new tools that freak her out are mostly people who are already doing it, they're just not doing it as well. Her customers are the people who want someone to "make this work" and who don't want to mess with it themselves any more than they want to buy a big chest of tools and do their own vehicle maintenance. Her customers are not the skilled amateurs now getting better tools. Her customers are the business people who already have too many things to do and aren't looking for ANOTHER project to add to their plates. edit: minor phrasing
isaiahg 10y ago
I'd say COBOL is a bad example. I personally know someone hit by that so bad he became homeless and ended up spray painting street numbers on curbs for money.
- gingerbread-man 10y ago
  I've never understood how that could be possible. What makes COBOL programming so different from work in any other language as to make it impossible to pick up, say, C? I've heard numerous similar anecdotes, but never from programmers who struggled to transition from any language but COBOL. I'm sympathetic, but never having worked in COBOL myself, I can't help but be curious what makes it so distinct.
  - dingaling 10y ago
    I spent many years working with COBOL & CICS on AS/400 and mainframe and PC. COBOL is such an excellent high-level abstraction from the computer hardware that it's almost pseudo-code and one can translate business requirements very easily, but therefore working in nothing but COBOL isolates a developer from underlying technology and trends. I wrote a few algorithms in COBOL, basic sorts and trees, which was really awkward and whilst it can be forced to do other tricks such as data compression and encryption[0] it's really not conducive to such tasks. As a result it's easy to sit in a COBOL-bubble writing IF...ELSE business code all day long and not do anything computer-sciency until the memory and skills fade. Thankfully my COBOL programs called down to C programs to do nitty-gritty work otherwise I'd probably have been pigeonholed both in skills and career; many companies seem to ignore COBOL experience as 'not proper programming', for the reasons above. However being one of the few people dealing with the old COBOL code gave me huge experience in working with the business clients. [0] we had one vendor offer us AES-in-COBOL for scary amounts of money.
  - marktangotango 10y ago
    CObol is the epitome of a walled garden. Everything from accessing data to ui is done the cobol way. Simple things like arbitrary length string and dynamic memory allocation aren't in standard cobol. Many companies used to run cobol bootcamps to hire developers. As recently as 2004, one local company was still doing them here. Very few of their developers studied cs in school. The boot campers studied who knows, and those who studied computers often majored in cis or mis. So you can see how those people are really starting off at zero when it comes to switching to more modern dev stacks. I've personally seen very few make the transition. My first paid dev job was at such a place, doing mainframe cobol, but I'd been doing hobby programming since I was 12, and writing games in c++, so I wasn't typical. I completed a bs in cs at night and moved on.
mbesto 10y ago
> It means we have a new prototyping tool. Cool. Don't worry, your skills aren't going to become obsolete Not at all actually. There is a ton of demand for light code app builders (waves hand) for simple CRUD stuff in most businesses. These apps are usually cost prohibitive to build and maintain, so things App Maker make a ton of sense.
- Clubber 10y ago
  What happens when the business outgrows what AppBuilder can do? I would assume that's a ground up rewrite. Seems like it's kicking the issue down the road and accumulating technical debt along the way.
  - mbesto 10y ago
    > What happens when the business outgrows what AppBuilder can do? Then they just find an off-the-shelf solution (SaaS most likely) to replace it. > Seems like it's kicking the issue down the road and accumulating technical debt along the way. If you do a ground-up rewrite or find an off-the-shelf solution then technical debt doesn't matter anyway does it?
    - marktangotango 10y ago
      You see this same situation with large and small legacy systems that have reached end of life and need to be replaced. In some since the app or system can serve as the requirement for the replacement, but no one ever sees it that way. Why is the rewrite late? Still waiting for requirements! That running system over there is your requirement! Wait, that old crap? Yes that old crap.
  - kartickv 10y ago
    If App Maker takes an order of magnitude less time than writing the software they want, then it can be low-risk. If something takes a long time and may not work, that's when it's risky.
  - aryehof 10y ago
cookiecaper 10y ago
>Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll always be very employable. This is true, but there are a few caveats. The one that I've been running up against most recently is that a lot of this new-fangled stuff does not really have a strong value proposition, and I personally do not want to waste time on it. This has become especially true since "cloud" hit critical mass. Junk seems to get generated 20 times faster than it used to and see much wider adoption. GitHub profiles are now status symbols and everyone feels a need to have a bundle of their own showpieces to display. A lot of the fads are totally perplexing, from the perspective of an engineer who is more interested in building a robust system than padding his resume. JavaScript on the backend (or, even more horrifying, the desktop)? Single-page app frameworks like Angular for everything, including very simple pages? Why? Yet, it's hard to find a web-oriented position that isn't asking for a background with some SPA and some Node.js. Maybe it's a fad, but it's still going to impact your job prospects. The takeaway: stay on top of fads and new tech, even if you resent it and think it's really dumb. I had the same experience with Rails; I hated so much about it and put off getting serious experience with it for 4 years or so. Turns out I still hate it after years of usage, but it was much easier to find work, both as an employee and a consultant, when I had significant experience in the fad. Didn't matter that I was learning all kinds of new tech that I thought was interesting. As much as one may hate it, it's usually best to bite the bullet and ride the market's waves. The most frustrating one today is Kubernetes and Docker. Ansible was so beautiful. I hate Docker with a seething passion (not necessarily other container systems), and I see Kubernetes as a very rough toolkit for people who have Google-scale problems that no one should be trying to make for themselves. Other caveats: * sometimes techs DO go extinct. Though COBOL is not quite extinct yet, I've known COBOL coders who have gone years unemployed (that doesn't happen to anyone who knows a language/stack still in wide circulation). A small niche has pros and cons, and one of the cons is that the supply:demand ratio is fickle, and may not always be in your favor. * It is very rare that your technical qualifications will be so unique that they will take precedence over your personal and political qualifications. This is something most developers try to dance around, but the fact is that tech is ultimately run by people, and they want to be comfortable more than they care about that loop's runtime. If you're looking for something that will confer huge career benefits, the odds are that improving your people skills will be more valuable than improving your technical skills. This is almost universally true. It's especially true if you think it's not.
mdpopescu 10y ago
> you have to try pretty hard to become completely irrelevant in technology Agreed. I don't know how it is in other countries, but most currency exchange offices I have seen in Romania use FoxPro software running on an MS-DOS equivalent. I haven't used FoxPro in the last 20 years, but some people still make a living with it. [Now that I think about it... I have actually written a small program in Visual FoxPro last year to interface with a .NET application... huh.]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

themodelplumber 10y ago

Thank you. I have a colleague, a graphic designer who is nearing retirement age. Every time Adobe announces a new software tool, she's partly excited, mostly terrified. Adobe likes to show how newbie-friendly these tools are. One click here, another there, and...project is done. She pays money to visit these demonstrations at conferences. Then she watches on, imagining her billable hours being redirected to an intern, the client's nephew or someone like that. Usually the terror gets a sort of beachhead in her mind, and for a while my colleague bears the cognitive cost of this "well there's no need for me anymore" anxiety. It's really sad to watch. > There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much. This is so true. I wish everyone fearing for their career due to new tech could understand it. Braided into a broader whole of business process you've got huge loads of necessary mental capital too, like the ability to deliver on multiple deadlines, the ability to set healthy boundaries, set proper budgets, and communicate well with others. My colleague has all these things; if only she could see new technology is only a small part, and overall a very forgiving part that needs humans like her more than we might think.

ams6110 10y ago
I think that people in the tech world underestimate how foreign this all is to a lot of people. We've had "form builders" in various incarnations for a long long time. Most people don't have the first clue what to do with them, and don't even want to try.
- matdrewin 10y ago
  The new low-code solutions are still used by developers, just allows get to develop much faster without having to worry about UI and cross-platform compatibility and other time consuming things that take up time when building a custom app. I'm afraid that the new generation of low code solutions are not just "form" builders or prototyping tools. We've built a full operational system and client facing portal using a low code solution.
fencepost 10y ago
Point out to her that her (and your) customers are not the people who are getting Adobe products and doing their own design work. The people who will take advantage of the new tools that freak her out are mostly people who are already doing it, they're just not doing it as well. Her customers are the people who want someone to "make this work" and who don't want to mess with it themselves any more than they want to buy a big chest of tools and do their own vehicle maintenance. Her customers are not the skilled amateurs now getting better tools. Her customers are the business people who already have too many things to do and aren't looking for ANOTHER project to add to their plates. edit: minor phrasing

isaiahg 10y ago

I'd say COBOL is a bad example. I personally know someone hit by that so bad he became homeless and ended up spray painting street numbers on curbs for money.

gingerbread-man 10y ago
I've never understood how that could be possible. What makes COBOL programming so different from work in any other language as to make it impossible to pick up, say, C? I've heard numerous similar anecdotes, but never from programmers who struggled to transition from any language but COBOL. I'm sympathetic, but never having worked in COBOL myself, I can't help but be curious what makes it so distinct.
- dingaling 10y ago
  I spent many years working with COBOL & CICS on AS/400 and mainframe and PC. COBOL is such an excellent high-level abstraction from the computer hardware that it's almost pseudo-code and one can translate business requirements very easily, but therefore working in nothing but COBOL isolates a developer from underlying technology and trends. I wrote a few algorithms in COBOL, basic sorts and trees, which was really awkward and whilst it can be forced to do other tricks such as data compression and encryption[0] it's really not conducive to such tasks. As a result it's easy to sit in a COBOL-bubble writing IF...ELSE business code all day long and not do anything computer-sciency until the memory and skills fade. Thankfully my COBOL programs called down to C programs to do nitty-gritty work otherwise I'd probably have been pigeonholed both in skills and career; many companies seem to ignore COBOL experience as 'not proper programming', for the reasons above. However being one of the few people dealing with the old COBOL code gave me huge experience in working with the business clients. [0] we had one vendor offer us AES-in-COBOL for scary amounts of money.
- marktangotango 10y ago
  CObol is the epitome of a walled garden. Everything from accessing data to ui is done the cobol way. Simple things like arbitrary length string and dynamic memory allocation aren't in standard cobol. Many companies used to run cobol bootcamps to hire developers. As recently as 2004, one local company was still doing them here. Very few of their developers studied cs in school. The boot campers studied who knows, and those who studied computers often majored in cis or mis. So you can see how those people are really starting off at zero when it comes to switching to more modern dev stacks. I've personally seen very few make the transition. My first paid dev job was at such a place, doing mainframe cobol, but I'd been doing hobby programming since I was 12, and writing games in c++, so I wasn't typical. I completed a bs in cs at night and moved on.

mbesto 10y ago

> It means we have a new prototyping tool. Cool. Don't worry, your skills aren't going to become obsolete Not at all actually. There is a ton of demand for light code app builders (waves hand) for simple CRUD stuff in most businesses. These apps are usually cost prohibitive to build and maintain, so things App Maker make a ton of sense.

Clubber 10y ago
What happens when the business outgrows what AppBuilder can do? I would assume that's a ground up rewrite. Seems like it's kicking the issue down the road and accumulating technical debt along the way.
- mbesto 10y ago
  > What happens when the business outgrows what AppBuilder can do? Then they just find an off-the-shelf solution (SaaS most likely) to replace it. > Seems like it's kicking the issue down the road and accumulating technical debt along the way. If you do a ground-up rewrite or find an off-the-shelf solution then technical debt doesn't matter anyway does it?
  - marktangotango 10y ago
    You see this same situation with large and small legacy systems that have reached end of life and need to be replaced. In some since the app or system can serve as the requirement for the replacement, but no one ever sees it that way. Why is the rewrite late? Still waiting for requirements! That running system over there is your requirement! Wait, that old crap? Yes that old crap.
- kartickv 10y ago
  If App Maker takes an order of magnitude less time than writing the software they want, then it can be low-risk. If something takes a long time and may not work, that's when it's risky.
- aryehof 10y ago

cookiecaper 10y ago

>Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll always be very employable. This is true, but there are a few caveats. The one that I've been running up against most recently is that a lot of this new-fangled stuff does not really have a strong value proposition, and I personally do not want to waste time on it. This has become especially true since "cloud" hit critical mass. Junk seems to get generated 20 times faster than it used to and see much wider adoption. GitHub profiles are now status symbols and everyone feels a need to have a bundle of their own showpieces to display. A lot of the fads are totally perplexing, from the perspective of an engineer who is more interested in building a robust system than padding his resume. JavaScript on the backend (or, even more horrifying, the desktop)? Single-page app frameworks like Angular for everything, including very simple pages? Why? Yet, it's hard to find a web-oriented position that isn't asking for a background with some SPA and some Node.js. Maybe it's a fad, but it's still going to impact your job prospects. The takeaway: stay on top of fads and new tech, even if you resent it and think it's really dumb. I had the same experience with Rails; I hated so much about it and put off getting serious experience with it for 4 years or so. Turns out I still hate it after years of usage, but it was much easier to find work, both as an employee and a consultant, when I had significant experience in the fad. Didn't matter that I was learning all kinds of new tech that I thought was interesting. As much as one may hate it, it's usually best to bite the bullet and ride the market's waves. The most frustrating one today is Kubernetes and Docker. Ansible was so beautiful. I hate Docker with a seething passion (not necessarily other container systems), and I see Kubernetes as a very rough toolkit for people who have Google-scale problems that no one should be trying to make for themselves. Other caveats: * sometimes techs DO go extinct. Though COBOL is not quite extinct yet, I've known COBOL coders who have gone years unemployed (that doesn't happen to anyone who knows a language/stack still in wide circulation). A small niche has pros and cons, and one of the cons is that the supply:demand ratio is fickle, and may not always be in your favor. * It is very rare that your technical qualifications will be so unique that they will take precedence over your personal and political qualifications. This is something most developers try to dance around, but the fact is that tech is ultimately run by people, and they want to be comfortable more than they care about that loop's runtime. If you're looking for something that will confer huge career benefits, the odds are that improving your people skills will be more valuable than improving your technical skills. This is almost universally true. It's especially true if you think it's not.

mdpopescu 10y ago

> you have to try pretty hard to become completely irrelevant in technology Agreed. I don't know how it is in other countries, but most currency exchange offices I have seen in Romania use FoxPro software running on an MS-DOS equivalent. I haven't used FoxPro in the last 20 years, but some people still make a living with it. [Now that I think about it... I have actually written a small program in Visual FoxPro last year to interface with a .NET application... huh.]