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Companies Are Developing More Apps With Fewer Developers (fortune.com)
Fortune reports that the "yawning gap in tech skills" has resulted in a surprising shift in supply and demand in the software industry. And in many companies now, a growing trend of developer jobs being given to non-developers can be seen. From the article: That's because a relatively new technology, known as low-code or no-code platforms, is now doing a big chunk of the work that high-priced human talent used to do. Low-code platforms are designed so that people with little or no coding or software engineering background -- known in the business as "citizen developers" -- can create apps, both for use in-house and for clients. Not surprisingly, the low-code platform industry, made up of about 40 small companies (so far), is growing like crazy. A recent Forrester Research report put its total revenues at about $1.7 billion in 2015, a figure that's projected to balloon to $15 billion in the next four years. Low-code-platform providers, notes Forrester, are typically seeing sales increases in excess of 50% a year.The report cites QuickBase, a company whose low-code platforms are used by half of the Fortune 500 companies, as an example. Its CEO Allison Mnookin says that almost any employee can now do most or all of the same work that developers used to do. Mnookin adds that there's a big advantage in this. "Opening an app's development to the non-techies who need the app removes misunderstandings between the IT department and other employees about what the end user needs."
Multi user too.
Writing some macros that tie word and a spreadsheet together might work ok for the non developer that created it, but once multiple people start using it, the fact that the author didn't know anything about mutex or acid or race conditions will be a re-run of the mid to late 90s all over again.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
No, we will not see "programming disappear". This same stuff has been predicted continuously for decades now. People skilled in the use of tools are many times more productive than those who are unskilled. As the tools themselves get more productive, the skilled users become more valuable. What I suspect we are seeing here is the temporary drop in the usefulness of software due to phones and tablets causing the unskilled to be able to produce "state of the art". This is a temporary phenomena that will end when software and computers become more useful again.
I don't think we will see programming disappear, but I think we will see the low hanging fruit moving away from professional developers and into a generic white collar worker. Think about the progression of clerical functions - years ago you had a pool of typists, because it was both a manual skill that most office workers did not have, and difficult enough that it was worthwhile to farm it out to specialists (though in this case the specialists were cheap). Then we had word processing come in, and initially it was done by clerical staff, but the bar was raised in terms of what constituted "professional looking" output. Then the software became easy enough, and the office workers sufficiently used to typing and using computers that word processing as a dedicated job function has moved into a publishing role.
Now we have a situation where everyone is expected to be able to use a word processor, and while anyone can type up a simple letter or paper, turning those same people loose on a multi-chapter book that is expected to use consistent styles and formatting rules is asking for trouble. Talk to any tech writer or publisher, and you will hear horror stories about documents in exactly the same way we talk about spaghetti code.
Because MS FrontPage put millions of programmers outta job back in the day...
This is just a passing fad. We'll see what happens when the first big security flaw is exploited.
"Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification."
Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."