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The number of people conflating the high degree of skills and traits required to be a successful professional software engineer with the basic computer literacy
by kthejoker2 5y ago
The number of people conflating the high degree of skills and traits required to be a successful professional software engineer with the basic computer literacy and "hold my beer" ingenuity of day to day "citizen development" of Excel macros, RAD tools, and browser boommarklets is infuriating.
If you are one of those people: stop right now and go watch someone build something PowerApp or Appian.
Here's a good representative videos, feel free to watch at 2x speed, the details are unimportant.
https://youtu.be/s6-C2xismq4 https://youtu.be/s6-C2xismq4
And then read the comments on that video.
THAT is who this article is talking about; THOSE are citizen developers.
They are not learning Python or Go or recursion or symbolic logic. They are not on StackOverflow or Dev.To, they're not contributing on GitHub, they're not applying for Staff Engineer or even entry level web dev positions.
And they’re self-servicing precisely because anyone who knows how to code like a professional is working on way harder technical problems.
A Michelin chef makes thousands of meals a week, but they can't feed the world.
So we have cookbooks and air fryers and microwaves and ready to eat meals and yes they’re unhealthy or taste like cardboard or whatever but they fill the need.
Nobody is insisting everyone's food be made by Beard winners; but somehow they can't make the same leap that people can develop computer-aided solutions to their business problems without being Alan Turing.
And the "revolution" is just that automation of the middleware required to support these kind of folks - APIs, IaC, data catalogs - is reaching critical mass.
The available ingredients for the "cookbook" are better, and so the possible recipes are better.
Sprinkle in a little AI (think Clippy on steroids) and the home "cook" can make a satisfying enough meal.
Will they work at FAANG or build the next one? No? Who cares...?