I'm in that category of people the regularly have to unwind the web of Excel or deconstruct the Access databases that grow to rival SAP in terms of intricacy...
... I actually agree with the overall premise that these tools do let non-tech types do real work and I think department power user types should have these things.
But we must also recognize that these tools are a bit like a black hole, too. Not unlike many applications created by professional developers, these users will tend to continually add features and bells and whistles until they pass the event horizon that exists between good judgement and bending these tools to be what they aren't (the most common is turning Excel into a database). On one side of that horizon you can pull back and reasonably find better technology to implement sophisticated capabilities and on the other you start to reduce efficiency as results as the errors and issues with the misuse of these systems overwhelming the benefits. Worst part is... you never really know when you've passed through that horizon... until you're spaghettified that is...
So in-house technologists need to be aware of these things and give good support, and then also provide the technical judgement on when these approaches start to break.
I once build a Rails app that translated a giant Google Sheets document into a web application.
What I found really fascinating was that:
95% of my development time was spent building CRUD, access control, UI that was already more-or-less provided for free in Sheets
5% of my development time was spent writing unit tests and services that implemented the actual logic and formulae in the spreadsheet. Even though this was the tricky, business critical "thinking carefully" part, it was also the least time consuming.
It just goes to show, even compared with Rails, applications like Excel and Sheets give you a LOT for free, out of the box, accessible to everyone.
... I actually agree with the overall premise that these tools do let non-tech types do real work and I think department power user types should have these things.
But we must also recognize that these tools are a bit like a black hole, too. Not unlike many applications created by professional developers, these users will tend to continually add features and bells and whistles until they pass the event horizon that exists between good judgement and bending these tools to be what they aren't (the most common is turning Excel into a database). On one side of that horizon you can pull back and reasonably find better technology to implement sophisticated capabilities and on the other you start to reduce efficiency as results as the errors and issues with the misuse of these systems overwhelming the benefits. Worst part is... you never really know when you've passed through that horizon... until you're spaghettified that is...
So in-house technologists need to be aware of these things and give good support, and then also provide the technical judgement on when these approaches start to break.