Creating software seems to be an expensive venture, there are many things adding up to that. How to significantly lower costs of IT industry and what changes must be made to achieve cheap programming services.
Obstacles on the road to cheap programming services
Programmers
Programmers themselves are becoming more and more expensive, that is not surprising. The demand for programmers is constantly growing. That doesn’t seem to decrease in the near future. That’s why software engineers salary won’t be any lower as well. Forcing salary cut would only increase the demand as programmers would leave. The only way to overcome that is making software development more productive.
Through years software development is being optimized, we came from low-level programming with Assembly, to High-level programming with modern languages and frameworks. Why it didn’t make demand lower? Simply, software is becoming much more complex, and there are more companies moving to digital space. We need more optimization. We need to make software engineering more like manufacture, where there are rules defined by senior developers, and the rest of the team generates code based on these rules and adjust it to the needs of some feature.
At the end, programming is pretty monotonous in most cases. We need a lot of boilerplate code in order to keep code readable and maintainable, but this could actually be automated.
Communication
We move more into specialization, which is good for being expert in some specific field, But in most cases we don’t need that. We need generalists. Big teams of developers requires management, with management there comes more meetings, and with more meetings come huge waste of time. Smaller teams move much faster. The more skills one person have, the less communication bottleneck there is. Imagine a mobile developer with backend development knowledge. There is no need for very specific documentation, as the person who uses the backend is as well the creator of it. What is more, such person knows more about platform specific obstacles, and creates software which better cooperates with each other.
The perfect situation would be having Designer, Mobile developer and backend developer in one person. But that’s simply not possible right now. Programming is not as effective as it should be therefore, we should thrive to creating tools optimizing programmers work to achieve cheap programming services.
Cheap programming services – possible solutions
NoCode – MVP development
NoCode is already quite popular, however it is not the best solution in most cases as creator is condemned to possibilities given by specific NoCode tool. Although, it is not useless. This is a great solution for creating MVP or prototype of your software with negligible costs. NoCode tools usually costs around 10-$50 per month, which in comparison to development team is almost free. You can implement your idea by yourself and test it out on real users. If the idea is verified positively, you can invest more in real solution. The best NoCode tool for mobile apps for now is FlutterFlow which I highly recommend trying!
LowCode – The real cheap programming services solution
LowCode is something that optimizes work of software engineers and does not try to replace them. This is the best solution to provide cheap programming services, and not being dependent on tools limitations. The perfect LowCode tool is something that allows the programmer to automate monotonous and repetitive tasks, but still allows him to add completely custom solutions and features not provided by the tool creator.
For now, most of such tools take care of code in big picture: Setting up infrastructure, handling database operations and authorization. But we need to go deeper, and allow generation of code in details: Building generic layout based on data, operating on data, etc. Simple CRUD mobile application should be possible to be generated based on swagger/OpenAPI documentation only. Then programmer’s job is to customize the generated codebase to specific needs.
Summary
The best way to achieve cheap programming services is to optimize software development itself. With that, we will get rid of few factors influencing software development cost. With less development to be made, we need fewer programmers. Having fewer programmers, we don’t need project managers, so perfect LowCode tool could truly disrupt the whole IT industry.
For now at Stonks we are working as full stack developers taking care of your backend and mobile app at once. What is more we are constantly working on improving quality and development time of our services. Contact us if you have your app idea and want to talk about it.
