Why working as a
low-code developer is great
Low- code development is the perfect combination between developing applications and ‘doing something else entirely’.
12-2020
Author: Marius van der Knaap (Meet Our Team)
Here’s the deal – you’re 20-something years old, freshly graduated off college. You’ve flirted with coding in the past, hacked your way through a few websites and generally have affinity with modern technology. Or maybe you are a psychology student and enjoyed working with statistics. You’re starting to realise that the minor in theatre studies is not going to pay your bills. It is time to get yourself one of them jobs.
And then comes the question of ‘what in the hell am I going to do for a living?’ Writing code is great but you don’t see yourself doing that ‘all day long for the next forty years of your life‘, right? Those were exactly my thoughts three years ago, when my current employer approached me with an offer to come over to talk about low-code development over a cup of coffee.
I’d never heard of low-code development before then. I thought I would either be writing lines of code or doing something else entirely. The work that she described sounded to me as – and still is – the perfect combination between developing applications and the aforementioned ‘doing something else entirely’.
Low-code development is often referred to as rapid development, implying that it is much faster than conventional programming. I believe that the biggest difference between conventional programming and low-code development is that a low-code platform contains everything a web application needs, front to back. This means that every person on a team can usually handle many different aspects of development, be it a front-end user interface issue or a back-end web service integration.
Additionally, low-code developers (or ‘business engineers’ as they call us) generally have more involvement in business decisions. Where traditional development usually takes place in the IT department, developers for low-code platforms are usually physically located within the business department. This makes a huge difference. It means that you don’t get a list of requirements that business expects you to deliver – you collaborate with the business to define the requirements.
This has some unexpected consequences. Traditionally, programmers are stereotyped as the nerdy, big-glasses guy behind a desk in the basement of a big office building. While that image is shifting, part of the stereotype holds up. The IT sector is still a male-dominated world, with men outnumbering women six to one.
With low-code development, that stereotype doesn’t hold up. I’ve had the pleasure of working with business engineers from completely different academic fields including biomedical science, psychology and industrial engineering. At some point, women even outnumbered the men in the team. As my interdisciplinary college professor used to say: the whole is greater than the sum of each parts.
Companies are usually great places to work for too. They have to be, in order to attract and retain the right people. While working as a business engineer, you’ll usually enjoy a lot of freedom in companies that greatly value their employees and show it.
So, there you have it. While working as a low-code developer, you can enjoy working on technical problems and actively interacting with your client during the process of building amazing apps. What more do you want: working for great companies with amazing colleagues.
If this story interested you, make sure to contact us and come over for a cup of coffee!
