One of the most exciting aspects about the no code wave is how many professionals are being enabled with the ability to build things that used to be reserved for hard core developers. This disruption is lowering the barrier to entry in many freelance arenas, and is rapidly evolving the capability of the business in large enterprises. I’d like to share a few anecdotes from both of these worlds to illustrate the opportunities that will only continue to increase.
The No Code Developer in the Enterprise
From fresh hires out of graduate school to experienced professionals straddling the line between IT and the business, I’ve seen careers jump started and transformed by no code development tools. I remember saving a quote from one of the young professionals who was tasked to pick up a no code tool I sold to one of that fastest growing loan originators in North America. “I used to spend 6 hours piecing together scripts and code to accomplish something that took 2 minutes in your no code platform.” Now this associate would be the first to concede that he’s not a master code slinger, but I think that shows the potential of no code development tools. With more and more college graduates majoring in disciplines like Information Systems that bring a wealth of general technical knowledge without deep code experience, these tools can transform them into highly productive members of extremely agile technology teams where there is less translation going on between the business requirements and the code.
Another example of this is a professional who had been working at one of the largest privately held banks in North America in the IT department who found his career path changing rapidly in a more favorable and flexible direction after demonstrating how productive he could be with a no code development platform. In fact, he was accomplishing as many development tasks as a team of code level developers and was giving ownership over a special business unit that served a variety of functions within the bank.
Over time, adopting these tools will become less of a risk and more of the norm. In fact, we are already starting to see job postings requiring experience in no code development toolsets. It’s more common in some of the larger and older vendors such as this example, but more and more I expect experience with these toolsets to become as common as the marketing automation or CRM tools we rely on day to day.
The No Code Freelancer
I was working with a friend at the Divi Dojo a few days ago on a web project for a client, and he’s been working with no code development tools to build websites since Microsoft FrontPage in the 1990s. The industry has come along way since then, and so has his skillset as he’s transformed his side job into a full time business with WordPress and Divi Theme development expertise. (Disclosure: NoCodeDev has an affiliate relationship with Divi and we may be compensated if you use that link to learn and buy the toolset.) The Divi Dojo story is a fun one – complete with quitting the corporate job in favor of the side hustle and relocating the family to the US Virgin Islands until a recent hurricane blew the house away. Their HQ is in Florida now, and he enjoys delivering high quality corporate and other websites to clients without touching code.
It’s not only website development that is growing in its no code development capacity. Full blown enterprise applications are being delivered by former implementation specialists who have left their corporate role implementing various vendor products for a more creative role as a true solution developer on top of these no code development platforms. There are even a few Harvard MBA dropouts turned no code app developers who now have a thriving agency at airdev.co. If you think that’s cool, but assume they must be building pretty simple apps, think again. They’ve delivered a solution that allowed Dividend Finance to scale to hundreds of millions of dollars per year and tens of thousands of reps in a fraction of the time it would have taken a code level development agency.
The Opportunity
If you can wrangle web services and a few database connections, you might have what it takes to be a “developer” without having to write any code. If you are a student trying to decide on a major, it might not need to be computer science if you want to be hands on building stuff. This is still a relatively new career path, but there are leaders you can follow if you want to explore it.
