The overwhelming majority of bespoke software is a CRUD app in disguise (to a lesser or greater extent). You don't need to be an expert to develop things like that - a basic knowledge data structures, connecting to a database, and some UI and off you go. That isn't going to change. So I would argue that yes, we need the horde. We need more of the people at the "bottom" doing the boring stuff than we need at the top doing the hard stuff.
99% of those companies building boring CRUD solutions don't even need developers. They could just piece something together off the shelf and be done with it. There's tons of products out there.
Firstly a tiny amount of people know C, C++, Java, Python & Ruby. If you found someone with that lot I'd probably hire them on the spot. That shows some real skill, multi-linguists are actually pretty rare, discounting the obligatory uni taught LISP and Javascript.
Secondly there's a constant need for people who make CRUD apps. Constant. Almost every business can benefit from a totally custom app with it's own special workflow. We tried RAD tools, we tried auto-generate tools, we tried plugin workflow that would be 'user' edited. Turns out if you don't involve a programmer it all goes very wrong.
After 20 years of promises from Delphi, VB6, Java, Rails, etc. the reality is it's getting harder to make good apps because everyone's expectations only go up. Bottom line is to make a CRUD app you still need a programmer. Almost every business is realising they need a programmer.
The market's only going to get bigger, much, much bigger.
This reads like it's from a person who's never been out of the ivory towers, hasn't actually been inside a real business.
Software isn't art. If a company can break down its problems so much that complete outsiders can make them work in a day then they wouldn't need developers.
What really blows my mind is how overcomplicated so many organisations manage to make these CRUD apps by bolting together as many technologies as humanly possible. I'm sure it's probably boredom that drives people to it, but for me the frustration that results from having to work on these bloated and overcomplicated systems is worse, and I think strongly damaging to businesses.
My own impression, which has only grown stronger with the passage of years, is that if you did the totally necessary CRUD stuff as simply as possible, that would open up opportunities to tech-enable businesses in much more interesting and profitable ways. But, of course, that would involve delaying gratification, and often doesn't play to the prevailing politics.
Interesting software jobs do exist but, boy, do you have to hunt for them.
I've recently given up on the idea of hiring genius level engineers for jobs that require building CRUD applications 80% of their time. It's a waste of money, a waste of the talent pool, a disservice to the candidate and a future risk to the company as such individuals will inevitably get bored and start over-engineering things to keep their minds occupied. For most engineers (but not all), being able to correctly write create, update, delete and query operations at the database level and API level, and being able to call APIs from the front-end level, with proper error handling, with a decent approach to debugging, is enough.
There aren't that many wheels that need inventing, even back in the so-called rockstar era.
> Two, the software talent market is bifurcated. There is basically commodity development of crud apps, and technically complex novel development.
This I think is the source of most of the wheel invention. Someone pays a good deal of money for 'talent' they do not actually require, and they end up working at cross purposes. Assign someone with cleverness to work on a crud app, and they're bound to try to reinvent something, if not to keep their resume fresh, at least to fight the boredom.
But it's not bifurcation, it's trifurcation. It's not build or invent, it's build, buy, or invent. We are too many of us writing applications that were never really needed in the first place. Not for any single reason, but a whole host of them, from empire building, to rent seeking from people who could have made a tool that adapted well to customers, but saw much more money in keeping them engaged with you instead of operating on their own steam. Open source is also driven by a lot of motivations, but 'your own steam' is a pretty compelling one.
This. There are so many "boring" companies out there that could become so much more competitive if they brought in a couple of full-stack devs to write a basic domain-specific CRUD monolith running on AWS hooked up to a basic mobile app.
Having been on the dev side of the conversation with many (mostly MBA students), I can agree with you here. However, this is only one suits v. nerds issue.
Often, I can see that the idea will be large-impact, but the job itself is boring. Sometimes, it's even a simple CRUD app you could Build in a Weekend* but hmm... what I'm doing now is quite exciting so.. "I'll pass. Btw, if you learn Rails, you could build it in a week or two yourself".I can see why this gets people angry. But it's the way demand-driven markets work.
The other side to the coin is that if you knew a little about programming, you could make your project (at least sound) a lot more interesting. (It's a CRUD app, but it needs to be always consistent, and we're trying to offer a zero-downtime service with queues for when the data store goes down, yada yada).
It's a good point but there's a huge field of potential software and opportunity out there that we programmers are not the users of. Who should build it then?
You make a reasonable point, but can the current join-the-dots culture of software development and having fewer “developers” who can actually perform basic development tasks themselves really be entirely unrelated?
In my mind, we need more folks who have both the ability to code and the ability to translate business needs into business logic. That’s not a new problem though.
Maybe, but it's also true that cranking out code is not the same as qualify software development. Lots of people can churn out code, that's the easy part.
In the area I'm most family with, (business applications), many, many systems/applications are basically relatively simple CRUD apps with reporting and dashboard features, and maybe a bit of work flow management.
With the rise of low-code tools/platforms, building such apps is almost trivial. So, the make versus buy decision is not as straightforward as it once might have been, especially for companies who already might have developers on staff.
Thank you for saying this. Sorry, but you don't need a rocket scientist to build your glorified CMS, no matter how neat and innovative you think it is. When you're building the fault-tolerant, highly optimized code to align a communications satellite with a ground station, or sharding code to handle a database dozens of terabytes in size, then you can make a case that you need the top 1%.
For the 99% of CRUD sites, mobile apps, and glorified accounting systems that most programmers will spend their careers on? Not so much.
There's too much vertical integration in software development. We need more 'programming at the edge', with professionals who understand a domain well and can write and build software. There's way too much bs in between business needs and building tools to do the jobs that people need to get done.
There's way too much complexity involved in building software, and the reason is pretty self evident. Most hardware and most developers are employed by gigantic corporations that extract a lot of rent from the rest of the economy.
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