The Shift to Low-Code Skillsets

I’m not too worried. I’ve followed a path from ops to devops, and even people who can’t code at all, but know how to use all the tools well, are in high demand. A lot of (most?) ops and dev work isn’t done with individual consumers in mind, but with making companies more competitive. When you have that sort of arms-race scenario, you never hit a point where the technology is “good enough” and you can tell all the folks designing, delivering, and maintaining it to pack up and go home.

Twenty years ago, you had to pay a specialist exorbitant amounts of money just to establish a web presence. If the article’s thesis were correct, business owners wouldn’t have spent a dime on web developers for the past 10 years, or however long it’s been feasible for a nonexpert to follow some tutorials and get a wordpress site up and running on Digital Ocean within half a workday. But of course, if you want to be competitive, you need more than that, because your competitors have more than that. Yeah, a few years from now we’ll have semitechnical people googling for an hour or two and spinning up sophisticated web apps with load balancing, a CDN, automatic backups, etc. But by then the cutting edge sites and apps will be even more sophisticated and reliable than CloudFormation et al can accomplish today.

It’s just like how we still have slow software despite moore’s law, or how we’re still polluting like crazy (even per capita) despite tremendous efficiency gains in the machines that pollute. As our resources increase our demands and expectations increase just as—if not more—quickly. As soon as the average joe can wrap his head around using yesterday’s technology to achieve yesterday’s results without the cost, there’s already an army of geeks who are ready to use today’s (or sometimes tomorrow’s) technology to achieve a better result—at a price.