The future of developer recruitment and the role of Low Code

The future of developer recruitment and the role of Low Code
Roland Hörmann
future of developer recruitment

Having spent more than a decade in software development, one of the big recurring patterns that keep coming up over and over again is the topic of recruiting.

Every single tech company mentions that recruiting developers is among their main priorities (and challenges).

I’m not an HR expert, neither am I an expert on recruiting. As the founder and CEO of SIB Visions, I’ve hired dozens of people in the last 10 years. And even more importantly: As a low-code provider, I’ve seen companies make the switch to a modern development environment with recruiting in mind.

In this article, I’m going to share how Low Code is changing the recruiting game for enterprises as well as smaller teams.

Your legacy system is harming your recruiting efforts

Running legacy systems is not only a technological threat to your business, but it is also harming your hiring efforts.

With many options for developers and engineers around – from small startups to international enterprises to remote work – finding people for your tech stack will become a real challenge.

Most likely, it is already a challenge.

Running a legacy system might mean that the developer or development team who built the system left the company a while ago. Chances are also high that the system has not been fully documented. Or maybe you are just running an old, complex monolith that you don’t want to touch.

Still, there’s one thing for sure: Hiring and onboarding new developers to the system is an impossibility.

The tech stack matters

In a recent article from the Dropbox engineering team, they openly shared their experience on running a technology stack that is outdated and hard to maintain and how this was causing a lot of overhead of training, hiring and retaining developers.

Or as Dropbox put it:

It became increasingly difficult to hire replacement senior engineers with relevant C++ experience who would be interested in mobile development.

As a result, we ended up with a real lack of critical expertise to maintain the C++ codebase.

Young developers strive for the latest and newest frameworks and are eager to get their hands on. Having a tech stack that is – let’s call it – unusual, will definitely make your hiring efforts more challenging.

Keeping up with the latest and greatest is a challenge in a mature product environment with a standard stack. You sacrifice adoption speed for stability.

The role of Low Code in developer recruiting

While companies struggle to find qualified developers, they tend to look for alternatives to traditional outsourcing or hiring efforts. And Low Code became one of those alternatives.

While Low Code is not a direct initiative that will solve all your hiring problems, I can guarantee that it will – at least – help you become more efficient in your software development teams.

Low Code platforms help companies to make software development faster, more automated and easier to replicate.

Faster and automated means less time spent with the actual programming. How does this work you might ask?

Low Code development platforms enable business and development teams to collaborate in a more agile way. So-called citizen developers can already prototype visually, while the development team can go in afterward and do the more sophisticated development work (or it could happen at the same time in real-time).

The Low Code Bandwagon & the future of hiring developers

While we see a big trend in enterprises moving towards Low Code, one of the prejudices among developers is easily explained:

Low Code platforms are taking away our job.

I argue that the opposite is true. Low Code is not taking away anyone’s job. Low Code is helping companies fill open job positions that would have been vacant for years. There are two main reasons, I believe that:

  • Low Code platforms help companies move away from their legacy systems towards a modern, scalable environment. Therefore, the pool of possible, talented developer candidates increases.
  • Low Code platforms make development teams faster (think of automating standard code) and therefore fills the void of vacant job positions.

What’s next?

According to Gartner, three-quarters of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives by 2024.

That is huge. Think about this for a moment. 75% of all enterprises will run multiple Low Code platforms in order to run and maintain their business applications.

By 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity.

No matter if those numbers will hold true or not, we’ve seen a clear trend of organizations – no matter how small or big – moving towards a modern tech environment and transforming their business, with the help of Low Code.

PS: Want to learn more about Low Code? Send me a quick message and I’ll schedule a call with you.

0 Comments

Leave a reply