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Comment by darepublic | Hacker News Reader

On an ironic note, your company is part of a trend that threatens the livelihood of devs everywhere

I absolutely don't think this is the case, and paradoxically something like Webflow actually creates more demand for coders and software engineers. Today, only 0.25% of the world knows how to write code, meaning the amount of software being created is limited to that subset of the population. No-code tools potentially will raise that percentage to 25% or even higher, meaning 2 orders of magnitude more people are potentially starting new software projects – however small initially.

Inevitably, those projects will need more functionality than visual or declarative abstractions currently allow, which raises demand for code-based developers. Code will always outpace higher-order tools in flexibility and power, and coders will always be in demand.

Think of it like what happened with spreadsheets... initially there was a lot of fear that moving e.g. financial modeling workflows from e.g. Pascal, etc to visual spreadsheets might make developers less relevant. But that's the opposite of what happened.

Sure, there might be some developers who only do very basic tasks like converting a PSD file to HTML/CSS, but that started fading out as a highly sought out skill even before Webflow was prevalent. But there will always be a need for devs, and there's a massive shortage of them in the world still, so I'm honestly a lot less worried about this.

Additionally, I think that tools like Webflow empower devs as well. Why spend hours writing a custom piece of code when it can be done in Webflow in a fraction of the time, and potentially even handed off to a non-dev to manage/maintain.

To me it's ironic to say that greater automation is threatening the livelihood of devs. That's what good devs should do, automate themselves out of their job and move up one tier of abstraction. Maybe those devs who feel threatened should start writing webflow extensions

ReRe's Law of Repetition and Redundancy [3] agrees with you:

  A programmer can accurately estimate the schedule for only the repeated and the redundant. Yet,
  A programmer's job is to automate the repeated and the redundant. Thus,
  A programmer delivering to an estimated or predictable schedule is...
  Not doing their job (or is redundant).

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249822

Fighting to keep the world complicated and inefficient, so that you can keep the same job forever and never have to learn anything new, is not looked upon favorably by history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

When we automate the boring stuff, we are free to work on harder and more important problems. This is the arc of progress, and it's in the interest of the greater good.

Well, I didn't say to keep the world complicated and inefficient, I just thought it was funny to write a thank you to devs for saving their company when by some considerations their company could potentially hurt the employability of certain devs. But yeah, I am not trying to be a luddite, (not that I care about how history would judge me)

That wasn't the case with Luddites. They were fighting against the transition to unskilled labor but even more so against worse working conditions and pay. When technological progress makes it more efficient to exploit people, there is a problem, and more efficient production does not make that go away or balance it out.

This is like thinking that WordPress is bad for developers. No, it just helps people get to the point where they need + can afford a developer.

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