Full Stacks and The Developer Ego

Picture this: You’re a world class residential contractor, best anyone has ever seen. You spend months building a foundation and a perfect infrastructure with the best wood you can find, the electrical is perfect, plumbing immaculate. You finally finish and are ready to rent the house.

You find a tenant and walk them through the house pointing out all of the small electrical details you included that they can’t see because it’s behind a wall. They’re just excited that the fridge is going to work and cost less on their electric bill. You highlight the copper pipes that you spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours planning and installing. They still don’t care, they just want to make sure the toilets flush and they water pressure and instant hot water in their shower.

That’s software development in a nutshell. That backend your team spent months developing is equally as important as the user experience and the functions they use, but they don’t care about that. They just need to know that your application works when and where they need it to, which is what your team should be focusing on.

Every team has at least one. The superstar developer that can and will build everything from the ground up no matter how complex or how much time (or money) it takes. These are great people to have. They’re problem solvers who can take on just about anything, but when a better solution is presented and they stand their ground, it’s not a matter of capabilities anymore, it’s a matter of ego.

Low-code provides for a lot of these so-called “ego checks.” Some developers argue that they’re limited by “low code” because they aren’t able to build in the way they would like. That’s reasonable, they spent years perfecting and honing their craft, but that isn’t a limitation of low-code, it’s a limitation of their own ego.

Low-code doesn’t limit what you can do, it may limit how you do it. The payback: speed and reliability. Most teams that use low-code platforms love them because it allows them to bring new team members up to speed in days rather than weeks or months. By predefining the backend, you aren’t limiting your team’s potential, you’re expanding it by allowing them to focus more on what matters: The user experience.

Just like with the house, your customers don’t care about whether your team built everything from the ground up or it came out of a box, they just want it to work, to look good, to be secure and fast, to fit their needs. While your team can build, update, and monitor the stack no problem, why should they have to? Using a low-code platform guarantees that your backend stays working and stays up to date. Not to mention that when something goes wrong, there’s always someone there to help.

Want to see what happens when you remove ego from the conversation? Use the form to the right =>