His conclusion :
> In the years to come, industry experts expect low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete with the development of new tools that remove the need to code completely.
Me wondering how much of it shall we see.
> In the years to come, industry experts expect low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete with the development of new tools that remove the need to code completely.
Me wondering how much of it shall we see.
This creates an entire ecosystem of "low-code-real-developers" who have the skill, commercial foresight (and possibly patience) of working inside the guts of low-code tools, doing Java, JS or what-have-you, but inside an ugly, sparsely-documented propietary API instead of an open-source framework with literal gigabytes of documentation and knowledge accumulated in Stack Overflow over the course of fifteen years...
So now instead of two in-house analyst-developers building business applications, you have Mark from Marketing & Sales building apps in low-code, and four "low-code-high-code" contractors on expensive contracts cleaning up behind Mark.
And so it goes...
I agree there can be massive advantages to tools in the "lower-to-no-code" spectrum; even software developers benefit from the abstraction that frameworks and tooling provide. At a business level, many organizations that offer products and service in said spectrum have been successful at a massive scale: Wordpress, Salesforce, Tableau, Shopify, just off the top of my mind.
However my point about these applications creating a cascade of new jobs still stands. And I don't think more hand-crafted "high code" solutions are going anywhere either; for starters I don't think anyone making this sort of prediction understands the literal oceans handcrafted of code we swim in. Who's going to take care of that, and how long would it take to replace with "no-code"? Well over a century, would be my guess. Software hasn't eaten the world - it has devoured it.
Then there's the natural limitations of these tools. I had to look up HyperCard as I didn't know about it, and it was indeed an initial hit, but it seems like (a) it was limited (for example, Wikipedia mentions people were making "choose-your-own-adventure" games with it, but I know as a fact that some games made by solo devs in the late 80s where infinitely more intricate and deep) and (b) it didn't have that much lasting power. I wonder if the latter is yet another limitation of these tools - that they tend to quick obsolescence as tech trends move at breakneck speed.
Now, this isn't every problem, but it's a very useful tool that will reduce the number of developers for some tasks. I think there is a world where a business has six or seven licenses for no-code solutions that reduce the head count by 10-15 FTEs (or redirects them)
Hypercard dying on the vine has much more to do with Apple's changing priorities than it does with Hypercard itself or what its users thought.
Hire low paid developers to 'save money' at the start.
Low paid developers present working prototypes that aren't scalable or maintainable but the biz people don't know that ,they just see working demos.
Years later the app is a nightmare and the low paid devs have moved on and now they have to pay out the nose to get people to actually work on their stuff.
And so it goes.
You forgot the part where they keep trying to lowball competent developers, struggle to find someone willing to duct tape their system together for "competitive" pay, and throw their hands up declaring there's a Shortage Of Developers™.
Developer tools and user interface components will likely continue to get easier to work with, but chunks of functionality that we compose with arbitrary code in between will always be a better model than a "no-code" monolith we configure.
I'm pretty sure that software development has had by far the most effort put into automating it of any job that has ever existed, simply because every person capable of doing the job has the same skills necessary to automate it.
That has done nothing to decrease salaries for developers. If anything, it has raised them, simply because developers can now produce more useful things in less time and at lower overall cost.
Have you heard of RPA? It's a low-code/no-code way to automate mouse and keyboard actions on top of desktop and web applications.