When I studied at Rhode Island School of Design my focus was on letterpress printing and wood engraving. Today these techniques are rare and beautiful artistic crafts, but in the past they were vital industries. Typesetters developed tremendous skill in pulling letters from California job cases, setting them quickly in their composing sticks. But when the linotype machine was invented, all those hard-earned skills became obsolete. And when photographic typesetting was invented all those glorious linotype machines were reduced to scrap metal, and their operators were out of work. And when digital typesetting arrived, so long Compugraphic and hello QuarkXpress.
Technological disruption always has negative effects on some segments of the workforce, even as it brings great benefits to the rest of the world. We might bemoan these negative consequences, but it’s just the way things are.
And today the Low-Code/No-Code revolution is having the same impact on web developers.
Up until the last four or five years, if you wanted a truly custom designed website, with custom themes, and custom functionality—you needed web developers with skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and at least one programming language like PHP.
But not anymore. While there are still specialized skills needed to produce Low-Code/No-Code websites, those no longer include working with the core technologies. As a result fully custom websites can be built faster and less expensively, all the while increasing their flexibility and functionality.
When disruptions like this happen, the segment of the workforce being displaced doesn’t usually just shrug their shoulders and move on. They don’t give up their jobs without a fight. And the first tactic is to disparage the technology that’s threatening to take their job away. They will search for any and every reason why the new technology is flawed, or isn’t quality.
I remember back in the early nineties how hard it was to persuade art directors that digital typography was just as good as photographically set type galleys. And then I showed them how, with digital, since we didn’t have to slice and dice type and rubber cement it to mechanicals—they could play with ideas on screen, giving them more opportunity to experiment with different typographic ideas in their layouts.
It took awhile, but as we know, digital won the day.
This same disruption and resistance is happening again between web developers that still want to hand code websites, and the platforms and frameworks that are making that costly and time consuming approach obsolete.
And I’m again back in the role of persuading marketers that they don’t need to be restricted by hand coding, you’re free to experiment and work much more flexibly now that the burden of hand coding has been removed.
And just as I had to counter the claims of type house reps, desperately trying to secure their accounts in the face of digital obsolescence, now I have to confront attempts to disparage the Low-Code/No-Code revolution by web developers who understandably want to keep their jobs.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are still jobs out there for web developers—but those jobs are shifting away from building websites directly, to jobs building the tools used in Low-Code/No-Code development. But of course, this still represents a shrinking of the market and a consolidation of opportunities for web developers.
So in the next set of videos I’m going to address the claims of web developers that Low-Code/No-Code tools aren’t an acceptable alternative to their hand coded skills. These objections include the claims that Low-Code tools cannot be fully customized, that their interfaces are too complicated, that they don’t produce clean code, and that they are not as “performant” as hand coded sites—that they are comparatively slower and bogged down with plugins.
But before I address those claims in the next few videos, I want to set forth an important concept in making choices around these issues. Because there is a degree of truth in each of those critiques. This concept is well known by great economists like Mises, Hayek, and Sowell, but much less appreciated by people in the software industry. This is the concept of trade offs versus solutions.
In any marketplace where there are numerous options for consumers, we have to make purchasing decisions by comparing features and benefits. And when we do we are always making trade offs. Now marketers claim their solution can meet all your needs, but we all know that every product or service has its strengths and weaknesses. And as consumers we want to maximize strengths and minimize weakness when choosing among options within our budget range.
Unfortunately, most programmers are schooled in the “solutions” mentality—always striving for the perfect system. Developers like elegance, simplicity, cleanness, and optimization. And those are always good aims. We may grant these observations by web developers, but we need to challenge their conclusions. The old hand-coded approach is not without some benefits, but compared to what alternatives, and at what cost?
In the next series of videos I’ll unpack the relative trade offs involved between the old costly hand-coded approach and the new Low-Code/No-Code Revolution. And when we set these options alongside each other, we’ll be able to see how much better websites can be with a Low-Code/No-Code framework.
So, until next time,
Viva la Revolución!
