055 Do No-Code Products Threaten Software Development Jobs?

Does the rise in no-code products threaten software development jobs? Will there come a time when software developers are out of a job because anyone can be a developer? These are the questions we will tackle in this episode of Dev Questions.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey. Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology. If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered. Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Do no code products threaten software development jobs? This is a question asked recently on YouTube by Soy Orbison, who was wondering you know, do these products really take away development jobs? Let's talk about that for a minute. So, first let's establish what we're talking about. There are tools out there on the web where you don't have to be a developer in order to create an application. Whether it's drag and drop uh builders that will help you build out an application, it does something, and oftentimes it can get quite impressive what it can do without writing a single line of code. You're just dragging and dropping different blocks together and creating something that does a job, whether it's a simple automation process or a full fill out of form, have it do some things, have it save data, and basically create a full CRUD operation application. Are these applications, are these programming type things going to replace actual software development and actual software developers? And the answer is yes and no. Um, no, from the perspective that I don't really think that we'll ever get to the point where we have these drag and drop builders that are good enough to do all the work that most programmers need to do. Obviously, there'll always be programming, but I don't think there'll ever come a point in time when we don't need as 80% of our developers. AllenPen is ever gonna come to that point. But I do think that there will continue to be a push towards something like this, and that's what we already have with things like C sharp. And you may say, well, Tim, what do you mean by C sharp? C is a programming language. Yes and no, because it's not only a programming language, it's an abstraction. It's a it's a way of doing things where things have already been done for us a lot, and we're putting pieces together where we're building these different building blocks and using them. Now we're writing code to do that. But when I say console.write line, I'm not thinking about how to create or pull up a console, not thinking about how to actually generate the the letters that go on the screen, I'm not thinking about how to generate the little blinky dot, none of that stuff, because it's been done for me in an abstracted way. It's really been a little piece, it's been built for me, and I just use it. And that's what programming is. So these drag and drop builders are really just programming, and that's what they're doing. So that's why I say yes, because I do think that we're gonna continue to evolve our ecosystems to make it easier to build things. I mean, think about for a minute. I create data access to talk to SQL. Somebody else creates data access to talk to SQL, you create data access to talk to SQL. Why are we all doing the same job? What if we create some kind of tool or package or something that will do that for us? Well, the team at Stack Overflow did, and they could call it Dapper. And Microsoft did, and they called it an empty framework. And you know, there's a number of different ones, but they create a package and we just use that. And I think that as time goes on, those will evolve and become more complicated, uh larger, more encompassing, more easy to plug together, and I think we'll see more of the kind of piece together things that create an application versus writing everything from scratch. But really, that's not a threat to developers, not at all. In fact, I am not threatened at all by this idea of an evolving ecosystem where maybe we never even write code itself because that's not our job. You know, we we call software developers coders, we say, oh, you write code. That's not really what you do, that's how you do it. You write code in order to do your job, but it's not really your job. Your job is to put together logic, to identify how to take the pieces that you have and put them together in a way that accomplishes the goal. So your boss comes to you and your boss says, I need to be able to capture new leads in a database. They don't really care, usually and in in general, but they don't really care how you do it. That's not the point. The point is not the code itself. The point is not your boss is like, I can't wait to see you use a console right line. That's not what they're doing. They don't care about that. What they care about is to get the job done. Are you capturing those leads? Are they going into a storage system of some kind that's safe and all the rest? But they just care about the end result, and that's really what our job is, is to produce those end results. So how we do it may evolve over time. Don't get so caught up in, well, you know, I back in my day, I like to do.NET 1.0, and you know, the fact that you guys have gone to, you know, past.NET framework to.NET Core, that's just too far. I like to do it back in things change. They're gonna continue to change. The language may change. It may come to a point where Microsoft says C sharp is no more. I don't think it's gonna happen for decades, probably, but it may come a point because it may have been moved past and other things may come in its place. That's okay because that's not really a threat to our job. Yes, it does mean learning something new, but that's gonna happen every year in C Sharp anyway. I mean,.NET 6 is coming out, and we've got a lot to learn about that's that's changing and evolving over time. It happens because our our way of expressing the software changes. The way we interact with the software changes. It's a fact of life, it's how things work. But our job isn't about the code itself, our job is about getting those end results using our logic. And so is it a threat to software development jobs? No, not at all. It may be a threat to a software development job if you think that I'm gonna stay in C sharp, I'm never gonna change. Maybe in a decade or two, that'll be a threat. Um, but when it comes to actual software development jobs, no, not a threat at all. It may come, we may have visual only drag and drop, probably not, but we may. And if we do, then software developers will be people that that drag and drop. Because just because you can drag and drop doesn't mean you're a software developer. And it doesn't mean that you can produce the results you need to. That's the key. Just because you say, oh, well, I can do this, you know, drag, drop, boom. I'm the I'm a software developer now. That's not really how it works. We spend a lot of time working on logic. We we think through the, you know, what if a person puts bad data in? What if this and what if that? And that's where our real skills come in, is we're thinking through all the logic of it. If you're not trained in it, it's gonna be harder to do, and you'll be more of an entry-level um person in there. Now, that doesn't mean you can't do that, do that. You definitely can. And if you want to start that way, that's cool. But you're gonna have to learn and grow just like all of us have in software development, even if it is drag and drop. So, not a threat to us. Yes, it may come. Um, so that's kind of my my answer to that. Great question. Thanks for asking. Um, if you want to have your question answered or asked, um, I'm sorry, if you want to ask your question and get it answered, how about that? Um, go ahead and either leave that in the comments if you're watching the YouTube video, if you're listening on the podcast, then go to imtimcore.com and there's a link up there for the podcast page where you can leave comments and suggestions for new videos for this dev question series. I appreciate it if you would share this with your social networks and just kind of share what we're doing here and how it can impact other software developers. Thanks for listening, and as always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions. Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer. If you would like to help make more content like this possible, please like, subscribe, rate, and share dev questions. You can also send your questions to questions at iamtimcore.com. Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to imtimcore.com and enroll in a course.