Innovation Why Pro-Coders And Low-Coders Should Be Friends Earl Duque Brand Contributor ServiceNow BRANDVOICE Storytelling and expertise from marketers | Paid Program Aug 17, 2022, 08:49pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Combining low-code with pro-code leads to faster, more painless development for everyone. Not long ago, I was the new kid in my first developer position on my first development team. My entire experience was development using low-code platforms and tools . (“Low-code” development in this case means that certain previously hard-coded processes are automated or abstracted to a graphical interface. ) And while I was the dedicated low-code developer, management wanted to round out the team with a pro-code veteran who was there decades ago when the original programs were written. There's room at the table for both low-coders and pro-coders. getty “I write code. I was doing this when you were still in elementary school,” he told me. He waxed poetic about Java, Servlets, the glory days of IBM, and whatever else sprang to mind whenever the words “low-code” came up. And I remember thinking “I don’t care. ” Part of my rebelliousness might have been a need to prove myself. But I felt justified because the reality was that his nostalgia wasn’t helping us. Looking back, I see now how old-school experience benefits the architecture of the new. But at that moment, we were assigned to a low-code platform that made everything old school feel obsolete. His Java flexing felt like an order to get off his metaphorical lawn—and quite frankly, I thought I was already in greener pastures. A kinder, gentler coder The “coder” stereotype is well known. They are—obviously—doughy, pasty folks in Star Wars tees, swilling Diet Coke in a basement because they need to be kept safely hidden from customers due to their abject lack of people skills. They’re difficult and often oddly arrogant considering how impossible they are to interact with. Let’s just say that the Venn diagram of people who were good coders and the people who had good people skills has historically been two non-overlapping circles. Low-coders, though—they’re your service-desk employees, your project managers, your analysts who figured out how to write a macro on their own. Soft skills like public speaking, relationship building, and working well on a team are what got them started, and then they developed an interest in coding. Because I wasn’t consumed with boilerplate coding tasks, I had more time to think about solutions and best practices and standards and customer needs. Before I took my first developer position, I had experience as a counselor, event planner, manager, and department liaison. In my new developer position, I was suddenly included in more meetings, strategy sessions, and client presentations (presenting the very things I built myself!). Respect, trust, and the value people saw in me benefited my career trajectory. Low-code development environments abstracted old-school coding tasks into graphical interfaces that made it possible for me to do, in minutes, work that would have taken weeks or months a decade ago. Because I wasn’t consumed with boilerplate coding tasks , I had more time to think about solutions and best practices and standards and customer needs. I had new ways to explain things plainly for my nontechnical colleagues as generally or as detailed as I wanted. Can low-coders and pro-coders find common ground? To the pro-coders out there dreading the day they will be forced to use a low-code platform, I offer the following: It is easier to fix low-code apps than to debug the chaos of queries written decades ago. You will have more time to be creative writing the pro-code exceptions while letting the low-code platform address everything that is repeatable and standard. Development will be faster and onboarding will be easier for your new employees or any new citizen developer. Do you really need to spend your time building a release to change the color of a button? With low-code, you can trust a new employee to not break production, because you know the platform will not let them. Meanwhile, to my fellow low-coders: We still aren’t the unicorns we think we are. You can’t solve 100% of your business problems with low-code. Low-code platforms take over the tedious, the repetitive, and the standard. But unless you learn how to code and script, you’ll likely need a pro-coder to help make your solution just custom enough to satisfy your business’s unique requirements (and we know every business has at least some unique requirements). Those legacy apps you’ve been hired to replace with low-code apps? The pro-coders who wrote those legacy apps know the reasons why they were written in the first place. As the original architects who built the foundation with impossible tools, they probably have wisdom you might not. Want to ensure success? Don’t dismiss them. Better together The best pro-coders know they can use low-code platforms to liberate themselves from tedious boilerplate coding tasks. The best low-coders know they have a lot to learn from legacy systems and the gifted folks who created them. This is not an either-or proposition: Combining low-code with pro-code is a “yes, and” opportunity that leads to faster, more painless development for everyone. And while not everyone needs to be the best public speaker or a warm-and-fuzzy people person, low-code opens up opportunities that developers of yore were excluded from. By using low-code to build a relationship with your stakeholders, you become a bigger part of your solution’s success. Low-code has opened the basement door and welcomed pro-coders into the sunshine, should they wish to come out and play. 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