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Comments like these are why I'm excited about the no-code movement. So much of the past decade of tech hasn't resulted in anything tangibly better or different.

Comments like these are why I'm excited about the no-code movement. So much of the past decade of tech hasn't resulted in anything tangibly better or different. It's the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them. Once we automate the ability to build these CRUD apps, we'll find out whether corporations still feel a $200k/yr UBI is appropriate.

sushshshsh 6y ago
HAHA a $200,000 pee year UBI is definitely how I would describe most of these jobs... Most of the interesting things in our field can be done with passing json objects around a network and persisting them in whatever way is durable, a bit secure and easy to develop. What we really need to see is the advancement of computer vision, robotics, and dynamic, goal-based software decision making capabilities. And I suppose battery technology and radio networking too, but that's more about electricity and physics than software. When that comes, you will see many mundane human tasks go straight to the robots, and hopefully every family will be permitted to own one (politics is all about limiting people from doing things for sane prices, right?) If a family's robot could till the land, grow food, cook it, synthesize medicines, build a home, serve as physical security and defence, play games for entertainment, transport the family from place to place, etc etc... then quickly the only world industry still in existence would be semiconductor manufacturers :)
- jimbokun 6y ago
  What if the robots decide they have different priorities?
apta 6y ago
Except that there's absolutely no evidence that the so called "no-code" movement will achieve anything beyond what we already have today.
- someguydave 6y ago
  and “no-code” will be used to hype bullshit research and scam products
- altdatathrow 6y ago
  Definitely. But I don’t see the point of paying someone $200k to write a simple web app, even if it’s using react and kubernetes. VC has killed innovation and instead created a cyclical bullshit engine.
  - Existenceblinks 6y ago
    It's not only because VC sort of manipulating software labour values although it's their nature of so called "investment", it's also software developer communities. If you are around those slack channels, forums long enough you start to see there are very few discussion of developing anything real or valuable. Most of them spend time just "playing" technology/tools. It's win-win BS. That's why it keeps going. The reality of its economy comes in delay long enough (e.g. 5 years with no profit, keep funding) that every body is detached from economic principle. With printed money lately .. oh the collapse might not come at all, you can be alive in coma for a decade as long as oxygen keeps pumping into your dead body.
  - apta 6y ago
    You're paying that $200K because otherwise there is no way you're getting the business off the ground. And "simple" is relative, every customer is going to need a customized app. This is not a trivial field, contrary to what some are trying to claim.
    - altdatathrow 6y ago
      > You're paying that $200K because otherwise there is no way you're getting the business off the ground This is a completely absurd comment and notion. There’s talented people all over the world who don’t need $200k salaries and also simply get things accomplished without whining about not being able to use whatever tech is popular on HN at the moment.
lmm 6y ago
Heh, from where I stand "the no-code movement" and "the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them" are much the same thing. What the industry needs is the boring grunt work of replacing frameworks with libraries. Rather than generating a 55-file "project skeleton", we should be able to call standard libraries written in plain old code and get the same behaviour, adding the extra stuff as and when we need it. Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing? I'm pretty sure I've implemented all the pieces you'd need, scattered between the codebases of my last three or four employers: in a language with a decent record system it should be a one-liner to build a set of HTTP routes for a given datatype, not through invisible magic but through a function call that works by plain code. But it's in no-one's interest to package that up to release it. A traditional business doesn't produce new systems often enough to make a general toolkit. A consultancy does new systems but has no need to make them maintainable (thus Rails, which does all the automatic spinning up but doesn't have the comprehensibility to be reliable). And there's no money in selling libraries to developers, partly because developers would rather do it themselves but mostly because a library you have to buy will never be popular enough to get talented developers using it. Occasionally a huge corporation decides it's worth making a framework for their in-house applications, and even more occasionally they find it worth publishing to the outside world, which is an astonishingly inefficient process for our whole industry to depend on.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing? This sounds like Django (models+migrations, views for CRUD/REST (maybe with another library for automatic generation from models), admin pages for editing, and in python).
  - lmm 6y ago
jimbokun 6y ago
I've lost count of how many "no-code" movements we've had since computers were invented. The "no-code" environments from yesteryear were really, really good, and motivated "non-coders" accomplished amazing things with them. Hypercard, for example. But even with Hypercard, at some point you needed to write code if you wanted to go beyond the happy path envisioned by the tool developer. And I imagine the new "no-code" tools will have similar limitations. And then when the "no-code coders" get bored of playing with those toys, will hand it off to the programmers to extend and maintain.
collyw 6y ago
"Code" isn't the difficult part. (OK, it is initially when you are learning, but not in the real world).

sushshshsh 6y ago

HAHA a $200,000 pee year UBI is definitely how I would describe most of these jobs... Most of the interesting things in our field can be done with passing json objects around a network and persisting them in whatever way is durable, a bit secure and easy to develop. What we really need to see is the advancement of computer vision, robotics, and dynamic, goal-based software decision making capabilities. And I suppose battery technology and radio networking too, but that's more about electricity and physics than software. When that comes, you will see many mundane human tasks go straight to the robots, and hopefully every family will be permitted to own one (politics is all about limiting people from doing things for sane prices, right?) If a family's robot could till the land, grow food, cook it, synthesize medicines, build a home, serve as physical security and defence, play games for entertainment, transport the family from place to place, etc etc... then quickly the only world industry still in existence would be semiconductor manufacturers :)

jimbokun 6y ago
What if the robots decide they have different priorities?

apta 6y ago

Except that there's absolutely no evidence that the so called "no-code" movement will achieve anything beyond what we already have today.

someguydave 6y ago
and “no-code” will be used to hype bullshit research and scam products
altdatathrow 6y ago
Definitely. But I don’t see the point of paying someone $200k to write a simple web app, even if it’s using react and kubernetes. VC has killed innovation and instead created a cyclical bullshit engine.
- Existenceblinks 6y ago
  It's not only because VC sort of manipulating software labour values although it's their nature of so called "investment", it's also software developer communities. If you are around those slack channels, forums long enough you start to see there are very few discussion of developing anything real or valuable. Most of them spend time just "playing" technology/tools. It's win-win BS. That's why it keeps going. The reality of its economy comes in delay long enough (e.g. 5 years with no profit, keep funding) that every body is detached from economic principle. With printed money lately .. oh the collapse might not come at all, you can be alive in coma for a decade as long as oxygen keeps pumping into your dead body.
- apta 6y ago
  You're paying that $200K because otherwise there is no way you're getting the business off the ground. And "simple" is relative, every customer is going to need a customized app. This is not a trivial field, contrary to what some are trying to claim.
  - altdatathrow 6y ago
    > You're paying that $200K because otherwise there is no way you're getting the business off the ground This is a completely absurd comment and notion. There’s talented people all over the world who don’t need $200k salaries and also simply get things accomplished without whining about not being able to use whatever tech is popular on HN at the moment.

lmm 6y ago

Heh, from where I stand "the no-code movement" and "the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them" are much the same thing. What the industry needs is the boring grunt work of replacing frameworks with libraries. Rather than generating a 55-file "project skeleton", we should be able to call standard libraries written in plain old code and get the same behaviour, adding the extra stuff as and when we need it. Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing? I'm pretty sure I've implemented all the pieces you'd need, scattered between the codebases of my last three or four employers: in a language with a decent record system it should be a one-liner to build a set of HTTP routes for a given datatype, not through invisible magic but through a function call that works by plain code. But it's in no-one's interest to package that up to release it. A traditional business doesn't produce new systems often enough to make a general toolkit. A consultancy does new systems but has no need to make them maintainable (thus Rails, which does all the automatic spinning up but doesn't have the comprehensibility to be reliable). And there's no money in selling libraries to developers, partly because developers would rather do it themselves but mostly because a library you have to buy will never be popular enough to get talented developers using it. Occasionally a huge corporation decides it's worth making a framework for their in-house applications, and even more occasionally they find it worth publishing to the outside world, which is an astonishingly inefficient process for our whole industry to depend on.

Izkata 6y ago
> Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing? This sounds like Django (models+migrations, views for CRUD/REST (maybe with another library for automatic generation from models), admin pages for editing, and in python).
- lmm 6y ago

jimbokun 6y ago

I've lost count of how many "no-code" movements we've had since computers were invented. The "no-code" environments from yesteryear were really, really good, and motivated "non-coders" accomplished amazing things with them. Hypercard, for example. But even with Hypercard, at some point you needed to write code if you wanted to go beyond the happy path envisioned by the tool developer. And I imagine the new "no-code" tools will have similar limitations. And then when the "no-code coders" get bored of playing with those toys, will hand it off to the programmers to extend and maintain.

collyw 6y ago

"Code" isn't the difficult part. (OK, it is initially when you are learning, but not in the real world).