yea building complex, polished apps using no-code tools is arguably more harder than just writing code and using frameworks. it's a different set of skills, albeit still a skill so i don't get why programmers are feeling threatened by it.
I feel threatened by it in a very specific way. There are pointy haired bosses who will order that: "now we will do low code". When they bump into obstacle that is not doable in low-code they will be angry at the developers that cannot deliver what customer wants. Where with just normal development you would not run into such issues.
As a developer I have some power to say no to such thing but marketing people at low-code can promise everything without ever providing what they promised.
I ran into this in my last federal contracting job. Customer was being sold on using ServiceNow as a low code solution to replace a custom .net application with something like 2 million LOC.
No-code and low-code solutions are seductive to many because they can get easy wins fast, but those easy wins mask the fact that more complex functionality is either more difficult, or outright impossible. Not to mention that once you heavily customize those products, upgrades can become very painful and very costly.
A "low code" or "no code" office would never hire me in the first place, so I'm not really scared of this. My talent lies in making hard things possible, not in the low-hanging fruit that can be done with "low code".
That said, as senior developer I've been very happy lately to get the company to use more off-the-shelf libraries (like Material UI for React) rather than coding our own stuff, lessening our development and maintenance time and letting us work on more stuff that matters instead. Of course, we can also create custom components instead if we have to.
