A specter is haunting venture capital - the specter of blue-collar coders. All the powers of Silicon Valley have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Apple and Google, Sand Hill Road and Wall Street, sketchy boot camps, and gatekeeping hiring managers.
All joking aside, the idea that coding is increasingly an area that requires little technical education is changing the value network in ways that are confusing everyone. Capitalists (so decried by my parody target) want scale to generate their returns. Coders with marginal educations would like to see returns on their investments of time and money. People at the periphery would like to know how to do their jobs and then do them well in a way that provides professional fulfillment while allowing them to meet the obligations and desires they have in other contexts.
Blue-collar coding empowers everyone in this chain. However, there are a few ways this happens: no-code, tech-enabled work, and information-driven finance.
So-called “no-code” makes the organization programmable by domain experts in a way that previously required the coordination and expertise of dedicated developers. More - smaller - organizations shape systems to support themselves. And these systems can serve the businesses through adaptations and changes driven by “citizen developers” rather than being at the mercy of external experts who will get to it when they get to it. There are second-order effects of challenging coordination among small units that have their own solutions.
As coding becomes less the domain of experts at the margins, everyone participates. On the one hand, people who might otherwise have line-of-business, clerical, or management jobs will have access to - and will be expected to - contribute to the “code” of the organization. People who can do both will create more value and accelerate their careers. It also means that looking for a “pure” tech job is fighting for a smaller market of people handling the non-edge cases. Instead, “tech” skills will create a competitive advantage for the broader set of jobs. Management, marketing, admin - coding skills will make one more successful in all of them. For forward-looking organizations, coding is desirable in candidates today. They will potentially require this competency in the future. Rather than being a “career jump,” learning coding is a career accelerant today - and insurance tomorrow.
The increasing code in the organization surfaces data. As more explicit information flows grow within organizations, the opportunity for access to capital changes too. Already ERP and CRM flow through many smaller businesses to a degree unheard of a decade ago. Finance is behind his curve. The ever-increasing ratio of information to operations will allow more capital to serve these businesses with lower risk. The rich data lets them see where defaults can happen on an automated basis. The result addresses two of the three pillars of debt finance: default risk and scale. Everything else is negotiating the price in the form of interest rates.
The future of business is tech-enabled, and the future of coding is everyone. Software ate the world. Companies, ambitious career builders, and forward-looking capital allocators unite - there is nothing to lose but your chains.
Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash