Rectangle movers. That’s a more appropriate name for developers because that’s what their job is most of the time – at least according to Kitze, a developer and co-founder of a developer tool startup Sizzy. That’s what he also calls himself, a rectangle mover.
Kitze has been causing some stir recently, speaking at developer conferences and voicing some unpopular opinions, which has made him as notorious as he is popular. Here are some of them:
Solving non-existent problems
Sometimes I feel like an alien in the web community. Everyone comparing their imaginary status (senior, junior, etc.) and flexing code metrics that don’t mean anything. We’re simply rectangle movers. Fetch some JSON, render some rectangles.
Devs love to pretend that our job is actually more complex than that. Devs nitpicking PRs about “speed” and “scale”. Devs jumping to the next hot framework just to “solve” some imaginary performance problems. It’s so funny to me. I have one simple question that helps me stay grounded and focused: “Will this deliver value to the user?” Of course, this is very hard to follow, and as much as I’m reminding other people to do it, I sometimes need the reminder for myself.
I was doing full test coverage for a library that had 2 GitHub stars and 7 downloads. But I made sure I made that achievement so I could put it on GitHub and say I’ve made a 100% test coverage.
Developer’s ego
Developers take so much pride in their overengineered apps. Sometimes we are more proud of overengineering the app than delivering the solution to users. Most of the time the reason is we use new and hyped technologies, we overcomplicate simple websites, and are in the end most proud of the technologies we used, not the problem we solved.
It’s our egos. Instead of thinking a button on a website is just a button, a simple rectangle that can have three states, our egos make us think: Yes, but our buttons are special! And we have to have several meetings and discuss what technologies are we going to use.
We developers are sitting in our high thrones looking down on everyone else. One can say that we actually deserve all the praise we get, but what we’re missing is the humility to understand that our skills are not irreplaceable.
No-code and low-code tools
Companies like Bubble, Webflow, Carrd, etc. have a small number of developers working on them, and they allow millions of people who are not developers to create apps and websites. Developers are really smart, so I don’t understand how they fail to see this simple math.
I’ve been using Coda in the past year and I’ve created a bunch of mini “apps” to help my life. I did this because it was so quick and easy to make them. Everything is visual, with no compiler errors, what you see is what you get. If I actually tried to create these apps with code, not a single one would’ve existed.
Yes, developers still need to code those no-code/low-code tools. But just a few developers. And only once.
AI replacing developers
No one expected GitHub Copilot to arrive this soon, but it’s already here, and people are already using it. There are so many AI initiatives happening in parallel. AI-generated art, voice, video, self-driving cars…
It’s only a developer’s ego that would let you think AI will replace everything, but it won’t write better code than you. Of course, it will. It has instant access to all the code in the world. It will keep getting better all the time.
Humans barely have 3 productive work hours. We spend most of our time posting memes in Slack and arguing about dumb things in our code reviews. For me, it’s just easier to deal with the sad truth.
I’m already practicing my evil laugh and my “told you so” will be so sweet one day!
