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Also consider that the vast majority of the problems these non-programmers are trying to solve are not things "IT" is interested in solving. Many of the no-cod

Also consider that the vast majority of the problems these non-programmers are trying to solve are not things "IT" is interested in solving. Many of the no-code apps I see getting built by non-programmers at my place of employment are things that IT has outright rejected because developers are a limited resource and there are bigger fish to fry. But that doesn't mean these problems aren't impacting teams in real ways. Some horrible workflow for a small department that functions by manually juggling 3 spreadsheets may not rise to the level of an IT provided solution being created, but with the proper tooling the non-programmers can create a better solution than what currently exists.

danShumway 5y ago
Exactly. And in a lot ways this is something of an Open Source/hacker mantra: that people shouldn't have to ask permission from a bunch of gatekeepers to solve their own software problems, particularly when no one else is interested in solving them. Part of the narrative of hacker culture is a bunch of hobbyists looking at established businesses or processes that aren't addressing their needs and saying, "well heck you, I don't need your validation, I'm going to build software that accomplishes my goals and I don't care if you think it looks professional or not and I don't care if it scales to whatever tech stack or business that you think it needs to." There's nothing more "hacker" than a non-engineer sitting down with a no-code app and cobbling together an actually working, tangible solution to their problems that lets them calculate payroll, or coordinate schedules, or automate some data import task or whatever, all while a bunch of people on a web forum mock them for using Excel instead of a database language or argue that their solution is bad because it's not backed up by Git or doesn't use pointers correctly. That's the most hacker crud ever, and it says something about us if we push those people down instead of encouraging them.

danShumway 5y ago

Exactly. And in a lot ways this is something of an Open Source/hacker mantra: that people shouldn't have to ask permission from a bunch of gatekeepers to solve their own software problems, particularly when no one else is interested in solving them. Part of the narrative of hacker culture is a bunch of hobbyists looking at established businesses or processes that aren't addressing their needs and saying, "well heck you, I don't need your validation, I'm going to build software that accomplishes my goals and I don't care if you think it looks professional or not and I don't care if it scales to whatever tech stack or business that you think it needs to." There's nothing more "hacker" than a non-engineer sitting down with a no-code app and cobbling together an actually working, tangible solution to their problems that lets them calculate payroll, or coordinate schedules, or automate some data import task or whatever, all while a bunch of people on a web forum mock them for using Excel instead of a database language or argue that their solution is bad because it's not backed up by Git or doesn't use pointers correctly. That's the most hacker crud ever, and it says something about us if we push those people down instead of encouraging them.