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Kind of misses the point. Forget technical details; no code systems let you hire cheap replaceable folk instead of highly paid technical folk. …or, just a few

Kind of misses the point. Forget technical details; no code systems let you hire cheap replaceable folk instead of highly paid technical folk. …or, just a few technical folk to clean up all the rubbish the others make. ..and who’s to judge? Yes, you end up with a pile of crap. …but, if it lets you bootstrap your business without spending half of your capital on expensive programmers, isn’t that a net win? Let’s be honest; in most situations, cloning an existing successful business is a pretty easy, well defined task. That’s why you get things like “here’s my free clone of strava” or whatever. Once the problem is solved, building it is easy. Defining the solution, building a customer base, handling support… those are the things which are (usually) hard and expensive. So.. you know, don’t trash talk no code without understanding what it’s for. The exception for this is when you’re trying to do something technically difficult; but really, most businesses probably aren’t. If your business/startup is, then don’t pick no code; you’ll fight the tools trying to bend them into your shape and end up with expensive [no code system here] experts, defeating the entire point. That’s it. In all other circumstances, you probably want some combination of no code stuff / generic off the shelf stuff to let you get past all the tedious stuff you don’t care about.

valenterry 4y ago
That's what is promised under the term "no code" or "low code", but it's not how it actually works. Low code and no code already exist and they are already successful where they work. For instance, you can now create a website using wordpress with quite a bit of functionality without coding at all. That _is_ "no code". And you can use Excel to create quite complicated logic and calculations with very little coding. And that _is_ "low code". Even using an IDE and a high-level programming language is in some sense "low code". Pretty much every other usage of this term by startups or others is purely marketing and promising something it can't do. I wish it were different because then I could build things even faster with less effort, but from what I can see and what the last decade shows, progress towards this goal is made in different ways. > Let’s be honest; in most situations, cloning an existing successful business is a pretty easy, well defined task. That’s why you get things like “here’s my free clone of strava” or whatever. > Once the problem is solved, building it is easy. Yeah, but the mistake is to assume that solving the problem doesn't require technical folks. Even if something is not technically difficult, it still requires a lot of work and skills to translate vague thoughts in human language into computer-executable logic that behaves as one wants. This will be solved once we have some intelligent machine that can do that. Once we have that, the world will turn upside down.
BigJono 4y ago
> no code systems let you hire cheap replaceable folk instead of highly paid technical folk Until they don't, then you get to this point: > just a few technical folk to clean up all the rubbish the others make Which gets exponentially harder and more expensive as the size of the "no-code" codebase grows. Going no-code for a startup is crazy. Your failure state isn't "it ends up being x% more expensive", it's that you hit a brick wall and you either rewrite from scratch (if you're small and agile enough), or your startup dies instantly (if you have enough users and competition that not delivering any features ever again isn't a viable strategy). If I'm an investor and you're pitching a startup that's using no-code for anything other than a throwaway version for the purposes of a sales pitch, that's an instant dealbreaker. I don't care how good the idea is or how smart your team is, I'll happily bet the house on it failing.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
> Forget technical details; no code systems let you hire cheap replaceable folk instead of highly paid technical folk. Honestly, from what I've seen, they're not that replacable. They're less of them so straight away it becomes harder to replace then. They cost roughly the same per hour as other devs in that area.
dagw 4y ago
no code systems let you hire cheap replaceable folk instead of highly paid technical folk. Does it? Anecdotally and based on observation, people who know their way around, for example, PowerBI and can use it solve problems earn the same as people who know their way around Python or JavaScript. And people who really understand PowerBI and actually use it to its full potential can charge every bit as much as talented programmers.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  People who “really understand PowerBI and actually use it to it's full potential” are, on top of other skills, talented programmers proficient in a niche functional language, so it's not really surprising that they can charge every bit as much as talented programmers. (Of course, not sure what this says about “no code” platforms except that the label is usually a lie.)

valenterry 4y ago

That's what is promised under the term "no code" or "low code", but it's not how it actually works. Low code and no code already exist and they are already successful where they work. For instance, you can now create a website using wordpress with quite a bit of functionality without coding at all. That _is_ "no code". And you can use Excel to create quite complicated logic and calculations with very little coding. And that _is_ "low code". Even using an IDE and a high-level programming language is in some sense "low code". Pretty much every other usage of this term by startups or others is purely marketing and promising something it can't do. I wish it were different because then I could build things even faster with less effort, but from what I can see and what the last decade shows, progress towards this goal is made in different ways. > Let’s be honest; in most situations, cloning an existing successful business is a pretty easy, well defined task. That’s why you get things like “here’s my free clone of strava” or whatever. > Once the problem is solved, building it is easy. Yeah, but the mistake is to assume that solving the problem doesn't require technical folks. Even if something is not technically difficult, it still requires a lot of work and skills to translate vague thoughts in human language into computer-executable logic that behaves as one wants. This will be solved once we have some intelligent machine that can do that. Once we have that, the world will turn upside down.

BigJono 4y ago

> no code systems let you hire cheap replaceable folk instead of highly paid technical folk Until they don't, then you get to this point: > just a few technical folk to clean up all the rubbish the others make Which gets exponentially harder and more expensive as the size of the "no-code" codebase grows. Going no-code for a startup is crazy. Your failure state isn't "it ends up being x% more expensive", it's that you hit a brick wall and you either rewrite from scratch (if you're small and agile enough), or your startup dies instantly (if you have enough users and competition that not delivering any features ever again isn't a viable strategy). If I'm an investor and you're pitching a startup that's using no-code for anything other than a throwaway version for the purposes of a sales pitch, that's an instant dealbreaker. I don't care how good the idea is or how smart your team is, I'll happily bet the house on it failing.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

> Forget technical details; no code systems let you hire cheap replaceable folk instead of highly paid technical folk. Honestly, from what I've seen, they're not that replacable. They're less of them so straight away it becomes harder to replace then. They cost roughly the same per hour as other devs in that area.

dagw 4y ago

no code systems let you hire cheap replaceable folk instead of highly paid technical folk. Does it? Anecdotally and based on observation, people who know their way around, for example, PowerBI and can use it solve problems earn the same as people who know their way around Python or JavaScript. And people who really understand PowerBI and actually use it to its full potential can charge every bit as much as talented programmers.

dragonwriter 4y ago
People who “really understand PowerBI and actually use it to it's full potential” are, on top of other skills, talented programmers proficient in a niche functional language, so it's not really surprising that they can charge every bit as much as talented programmers. (Of course, not sure what this says about “no code” platforms except that the label is usually a lie.)