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In some context, I think desktop apps are far better than the web, and it's now super simple to roll out desktop apps using tools like Intune. However, I'm talking about general business apps here. The likes of Zoho, Salesforce, and, to some extent, Dynamics are covering some of this space—but again, they're expensive. The main point of my post was that if I were 18 today and starting my first job, it'd be much harder to acquire the skills needed to grow. With VB or Delphi and a book, you could become pretty productive within a year or so, and the cost of entry was very low. The skills you learned opened the door to a whole new world for little cost. Especially, as others have mentioned, finding "DVDs lying around" :) which, of course, doesn't work for web tools in 2024! I was lucky my company provided, but i know friends who learned from the other approach. These web based NoCode companies should provide people starting out with free, fully functional accounts—but then restrict live users to about 5. Atlassian/JIRA was always good at this with their $10 entry point. While it's not a programming tool, this approach is why it's found everywhere. It allowed someone wanting to experiment and learn to pay just $10 for access to the complete platform. You might say there is plenty of open source out there, and this is correct, but again, in companies, this is not always used. They want the known companies. What the generation do have today which we never did is access to high quality training beyond books - and now AI! Wish I was 18 again! |
Besides, if you think that installing desktop software is ever easy - especially if something goes wrong - take a look at what happened with CrowdStrike.
As far as learning how to code, everyone has a web browser and can download VSCode or even Visual Studio for free. All languages are free and you can download free versions of every popular database for hobby level work.
Heck these days you can stay in the free tier of AWS forever if you stay serverless.
And software developers aren’t expensive as is maintaining software?
I was hired as a lead developer back in 2016 by a then new director. He had four mid level developers working there. After he interviewed me, he asked two of the developers to interview me while he was in the room.
They said they wanted to do address validation and they were trying to think through all of the corner cases - this was a real world issue not a coding challenge.
They asked me did I have any suggestions. I said sure, there are third party CASS solutions that are USPS approved and they shouldn’t be building that in house.
I was initially hired to modernize their homegrown Electronic Medical Records system built on PowerBuilder in 1999 using Sql server 2001 (this was 2016). It had been maintained by two other “developers” who had been at the company for 10 and 20 years respectively. I walked him through my proposed strategy if I were hired.
It didn’t take long to realize that this company had no business writing software. They were a low margin company that sent nurses to homes of special needs kids and made most of their money from Medicaid reimbursements.
I started leading the effort to do data migrations and being part of negotiations with SaaS companies as the company I worked for started buying up other companies in their vertical.
The company ended up laying off the developers who interviewed me and turning the other two into report writers and doing data analytics.
A year and half later, I had a frank discussion with the director. I told him we both know you don’t need me. I found another job three weeks later. I literally “put myself out of a job”