In today’s article, we are doing something different. We are not focusing on the concerns of the business heads and CEOs but focusing on your tech teams and their concerns. For the last few articles, we have been talking about how revolutionary no-code is and how it easies development efforts. But a big concern that developers have is that this revolution will take their jobs away.

This is not a new phenomenon. Whenever a technology looks like it could take away a job previously held by humans, people get worried. It has happened with printing, accounting and many more, so why not software development.

Answering the big question right at the start, no. No code will not replace developers. NoIn fact, today less than 0.3% of the world population is tech-friendly i.e devs, analysts, users etc. No-code is going to take digitalisation to next level

Abstraction has been in the laws of nature, from cells to complex beings called humans as we reflected in my first blog. Also, it has been a target benchmark of software development since the earliest of times. Software engineers have been hired to build tools that automate tasks since the start and thus it is contended that the same skills can be applied to their jobs. This is exactly why so many domain-specific languages and tools have evolved over the years. People once looked down on languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript and COBOL because they weren’t as “close to the machine” as C, says Airtable engineer Mary Rose Cook.

But today, there is massive adoption, acceptance and community around these.

But then why do developers see this new abstraction as less legitimate and yet worrisome at the same time? Do they not know that this has put them on the wrong side of history before? While we may not have the answer to that, here are a few reasons why we think developers need not worry about no code taking jobs away.

1. No-code is continuously and rapidly evolving from its current form. Anyone who has used a no-code app will tell you that none of these tools can do every single thing that possibly can be achieved by coding.
2. No-code solutions might lead to developers not writing simple applications and MVPs, there shall always be a need to understand the lower-level workings of systems to solve challenging higher-order problems.
3. Putting no-code tools in the hands of users that do not understand the code they generate may lead to a new kind of Frankenstein monster with parts difficult to maintain and evolve. This also could lead to bigger security issues due to both limited knowledge and vulnerabilities arising from non-technical users and the platform respectively
4. Complex customizations and integrations remain a challenge for no-code platforms. If advanced flexibility is needed in the features being developed, there is a need for a developer and capabilities that go beyond no code.

These platforms provide a wider array of integration opportunities by the day but as your apps develop into bigger systems and newer third party add ons emerge, you will have to go to code level and get these integrations without compromising the integrity of the software. Moreover, you can not use no-code to develop and consume the core of today’s complex application’s, APIs. However, this is not true for all no-code platforms.

Here, we would like to plug one of our No-Code partners wem.io which can consume any existing REST API and allow complex business logic to be built separately as well as consume existing logic.

So what should developers do? Like what the developers have done from the 1970’s onward, adapt and adopt.  This tribe is the best at aligning to changes and blend a completely new outcome.

We think that the projections are that no-code is going to become more commonplace in the future. Thus, developers need to continue learning. They need to learn the low and no-code platforms out there so that they are more productive and keep adding value to the business. Their job is to solve problems and writing code will not be enough. Just like very few developers write machine code today, we may live in a future where only specialists write HTML and CSS from scratch and we should be looking at the concept of blending code and no-code together to achieve our goals faster.

Additionally, they also need to learn new and “hot” skills such as machine learning and blockchain. It won’t be enough to just understand programming fundamentals. The successful coders of the next decade will have skills that can not be replicated by the no-code platform as of now, and who knows, they may be working towards making exactly that possible too just like the current developers working on building no-code platforms.

Lastly, developers need to make sure that the products they build are not easily substituted by no code. And if a part of it is substitutable and yet they are not using a library or purchasing a subscription to a no-code platform but rather writing it by hand, they need to have a strong reason for it.

Developers need to focus their time on high leverage tasks and use existing solutions wherever they can. Businesses that adopt the no code wave earliest will create products faster and have the most time to extract value from the platform itself.

After all, product teams that have thrived have always used existing solutions where it has made sense and built custom tools only when it does not. Thus, they could move faster and produce more value for the world.

But now the question is to you. Are you a developer? Are you worried about no code or do you embrace it with open arms? Do let us know along with your reasons in the comment section.