Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2022 Expands the Definition of Developer
By Raman Sharma, VP of Product Marketing and Developer Relations at DigitalOcean
Today’s developer is someone who writes code, builds features, and works with other similarly skilled people in technical teams to deploy and operate the software on some kind of infrastructure. These hard skills will still be necessary, but a new wave of tools and technologies-like serverless and Low-Code / No-Code tools-is now enabling a whole new set of people to participate in software creation. Everyone from designers and data analysts to non-technical entrepreneurs will be able to utilize these tools to build software of all kinds. As a result, the definition of the developer will expand and become more inclusive in 2022.
Low-Code/No-Code Tools Gain Popularity
Recent research from Gartner found that 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies by 2025, which is over a 50% increase from applications developed by low-code or no-code in 2020. These projections are largely the result of the developer skill shortage impacting the IT industry. In fact, other research around low-code found that 77% of enterprises already adopted low-code to meet developer demand created by the shortage. This increased adoption of both low-code and no-code tools means two things for most companies.
First, it means software creation is no longer relegated to the few with the hard skills necessary to create applications. Second, it means that the adage, “every company is a software company,” holds more true than ever. As more companies invest in application development to create software to correspond with different portions of their business, the demand for developers will only increase. Additionally, a trend is emerging where companies and solopreneurs are beginning to use low-code/no-code tools to build external applications as SaaS, further helping entrepreneurship by removing technical obstacles.
With a virtually endless demand for software development and the ongoing labor shortage, it’s no wonder so many companies have been adopting means to streamline the development process.
The Rise of the Citizen Developer
As more and more companies push the development of software beyond the borders of their own IT departments, more companies will see the arrival of citizen developers. Gartner defines the term “citizen developer” as an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units. All of this means that more and more employees within an organization will eventually be empowered to develop their own applications for their own departments. They may not have the same hard skills as developers, but with easily accessible basic coding skills and the right tools, non-IT folks can learn pretty quickly how to create applications.
In practice this means a member of the data analytics team could design a tool to organize their data or a member of the HR department could craft a way to sync employee personal data with their financial information to streamline insurance payments. No matter what citizen developers apply themselves to, the end result is the same: more citizen developers means less burden on a company’s professionally trained developers. With more people building applications for their own departments, leadership can better leverage the few professional developers they do have to drive innovation that impacts business results.
The Benefits of Change
Widening the definition of developer won’t only address the developer shortage, it can also positively affect other parts of the business. For example, consider the teams working closest to the end-user experience. Before low-code and no-code solutions, these teams would relay customer pain points for developers to address and resolve in future updates and releases. Now, developer tools mean the folks closest to customer issues can tackle these issues themselves, which is an exciting change for any startup or enterprise. When citizen developers have an expert understanding of the end user’s pain points, they’re able to build applications that address those pain points more effectively as experienced subject experts.
However, better support for end-users is the not only benefit of low-code and no-code adoption. Eventually, as more verticals of an enterprise integrate low-code and no-code solutions into their operations, more citizen developers will be able to tackle issues with the advantage of having first-hand knowledge and additional context of the problem. Legal, HR, data, and finance divisions alike will all be better equipped to create software solutions to the particular problems plaguing their departments.
Going Forward
For a long time, the title and role of a developer have been siloed to a very specific group of employees within a company. Low-code and no-code tools broaden this definition and empower more members of separate departments to develop their own applications. As businesses everywhere lean into software models and development, it’s a good thing the answer to “who’s a developer?” will get a bit broader.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raman Sharma is the VP of Product Marketing and Developer Relations at DigitalOcean. He has focused on developers as an audience throughout his career – from being a software developer himself, to doing product management and product marketing for developer tools and cloud services. Prior to DigitalOcean, Raman has also worked with Veritas, Adobe and Microsoft. Raman got a computer engineering degree from Delhi University in India, and earned his MBA from Duke University in Durham, NC.
