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I'm one of those people who gets paid writing B2B CRUD apps, so I certainly have economic incentives to keep CRUD in the hands of professionals. However, back
by blacktriangle 6y ago
I'm one of those people who gets paid writing B2B CRUD apps, so I certainly have economic incentives to keep CRUD in the hands of professionals. However, back in academia I spent a few years working on two different no-code platforms whose target users were PhD researchers, ie smart people with a professional interest in learning how to leverage no-code platforms.
Both projects followed the exact same trajectory: users ultimately rejected the no-code platforms and sent all of the programming work back to professional developers. Now the professional developers were hamstrung by layers of abstraction designed for non-developers and both parties were miserable.
Excel is the shining example of no-code enabling non-professionals to create powerful tools on their own, but it may be the exception and not the rule. Ultimately the challenges of programming are not the code, but thinking abstractly about data, and that's a real skill that developers have trained and non-developers have not, and I don't think it is solvable with tooling.
- satyrnein 6y agoWhat caused them to reject the platforms? Any specifics you can give?
- blacktriangle 6y agoGood question, I'd have to say the pay off per effort simply was not there for them. It didn't help that they had the option of simply dictating the work back to us lower status grad students. So one might say the issues were more largely organizational. But these weren't lazy people, they were always looking at new tools and techniques. And they were struggling to get any payoff with the tools we had. Sadly the focus of the project was not visual programming, so we were not focusing on the users issues.
- satyrnein 6y agoI guess that's also "no code" from their perspective! The incentives might line up better for departments that can't get tech's attention.