I have a colleague, a graphic designer who is nearing retirement age. Every time Adobe announces a new software tool, she's partly excited, mostly terrified. Adobe likes to show how newbie-friendly these tools are. One click here, another there, and...project is done. She pays money to visit these demonstrations at conferences. Then she watches on, imagining her billable hours being redirected to an intern, the client's nephew or someone like that.
Usually the terror gets a sort of beachhead in her mind, and for a while my colleague bears the cognitive cost of this "well there's no need for me anymore" anxiety. It's really sad to watch.
> There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much.
This is so true. I wish everyone fearing for their career due to new tech could understand it. Braided into a broader whole of business process you've got huge loads of necessary mental capital too, like the ability to deliver on multiple deadlines, the ability to set healthy boundaries, set proper budgets, and communicate well with others. My colleague has all these things; if only she could see new technology is only a small part, and overall a very forgiving part that needs humans like her more than we might think.
I think that people in the tech world underestimate how foreign this all is to a lot of people. We've had "form builders" in various incarnations for a long long time. Most people don't have the first clue what to do with them, and don't even want to try.
The new low-code solutions are still used by developers, just allows get to develop much faster without having to worry about UI and cross-platform compatibility and other time consuming things that take up time when building a custom app.
I'm afraid that the new generation of low code solutions are not just "form" builders or prototyping tools. We've built a full operational system and client facing portal using a low code solution.
Point out to her that her (and your) customers are not the people who are getting Adobe products and doing their own design work. The people who will take advantage of the new tools that freak her out are mostly people who are already doing it, they're just not doing it as well.
Her customers are the people who want someone to "make this work" and who don't want to mess with it themselves any more than they want to buy a big chest of tools and do their own vehicle maintenance.
Her customers are not the skilled amateurs now getting better tools. Her customers are the business people who already have too many things to do and aren't looking for ANOTHER project to add to their plates.
I have a colleague, a graphic designer who is nearing retirement age. Every time Adobe announces a new software tool, she's partly excited, mostly terrified. Adobe likes to show how newbie-friendly these tools are. One click here, another there, and...project is done. She pays money to visit these demonstrations at conferences. Then she watches on, imagining her billable hours being redirected to an intern, the client's nephew or someone like that.
Usually the terror gets a sort of beachhead in her mind, and for a while my colleague bears the cognitive cost of this "well there's no need for me anymore" anxiety. It's really sad to watch.
> There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much.
This is so true. I wish everyone fearing for their career due to new tech could understand it. Braided into a broader whole of business process you've got huge loads of necessary mental capital too, like the ability to deliver on multiple deadlines, the ability to set healthy boundaries, set proper budgets, and communicate well with others. My colleague has all these things; if only she could see new technology is only a small part, and overall a very forgiving part that needs humans like her more than we might think.