The Myth of Low-Code 2: Career Impact

The most common fears that discourage organizations from adopting low-code are inflexibility, vendor lock-in, security, scalability, and career impact. In this article, I will talk about each fear that discourage organizations from adopting low-code, and why they should not be feared.

Career Impact

        Nowadays, we live in a dynamic world. Technologies develop so fast. Back then, apple harvesting was done by a manual labor. Today, we seen many automated technologies may do that job. But do it really replace the job of the people on the field? No. People are still needed to do the control.

        Some developers these days worried about the presence of low-code will impact their career. With all the ease of use and other advantages, they worried their skill will not be useful anymore. The truth is, they just have to do a little adaptation, and with the presence of low-code, their job will be much easier.

       How low-code experience can foster career progression? Low-code significantly reduces the time spent on mundane manual-coding steps which means developers can focus more on solving business problems and deliver faster solutions. Therefore, they get more opportunity to demonstrate their prowess at solving business problems and gain exposure to more projects and user departments, which makes them more valuable to the business because of their superior business knowledge.

      Businesses that use low-code can innovate more quickly, adapt faster to customers’ changing needs, and therefore achieve a competitive advantage. Thus, improved employment prospects for all employees, including developers, should follow.

How low-code can improve job satisfaction?

• Engineering: Solving complex problems results in a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction for developers.
• Delivery: When a new system or capability gets delivered, it’s more widely understood and celebrated. Perhaps staff, customers, or partners will offer thanks or at least positive feedback, for the way this has improved their work or the customer experience.

For all the workers related to development, maybe you can use these suggestions to adapt easier with low-code.

• IT Leaders:

If you’re an IT leader, chances are you want to increase delivery capacity and rebalance how resources are used. You’d like more effort to be spent on innovation and proportionately less time and budget to be swallowed by maintenance. Sharam Hekmat, CIO at this wealth management company, IOOF, wanted to introduce low-code to speed-up delivery and eliminate an increasing backlog of digital projects. The key elements of IOOF’s approach were as follows:

• The competition was optional so that only motivated and enthusiastic participants took part.
• They paired seasoned developers with people who had technical roles, such as business analysts, to improve team building and cross-training
• Time off was booked to ensure participants could use the self-study training materials and then spend another week building an app that would solve a genuine business requirement.
• Participants that weren’t keen or failed to complete the training did not join the low-code team.
• The best low-coders turned out to be legacy developers because of their traditional systems analysis skills and superior business knowledge.
• Several of the apps built during the competition went on to become productive systems.

• Web and Mobile Developers

If you’re a web or mobile developer, no doubt you want to keep up-to-date with the latest languages and development frameworks. You get frustrated when you get buried in long projects that deflect you from that goal. If you’re starting to see that low-code is positive rather than ruining your career, low-code could accelerate your progress, then why not take OutSystems for an extended test drive? It’s free, and the self-study training videos will get you motoring in no time at all. Once you see how much faster you can build the kinds of applications your organization needs, have a word with your CIO, and suggest the sort of competition described above. With your head start, you could easily be the winner.

• Legacy Developers

If you’re a legacy developer, chances are you’ve been in your organization for years and have hugely valuable knowledge of the business and systems. You’re wondering what the future holds, and whether you’ll get the time needed to gain modern web and mobile development skills before your role is placed at risk. You should have a quick read about the IOOF case study mentioned above. Here are some relevant highlights of the story:

• IOOF recognized the valuable business knowledge of their mature and experienced legacy developers and didn’t want to lose that from the business, even though the legacy systems were being shut down.
• IOOF provided these developers with two weeks off, which was all it took for them to complete the OutSystems self-study training course and build their first prototype app.
• This was much faster than the months it would have taken to retrain these developers on C#, JavaScript, various frameworks, and DevOps tools.
• These legacy developers are now re-tooled, re-motivated, and delivering beautiful, responsive web and mobile applications around four times faster than their hand-coding counterparts.