Every Visual Workflow Tool Is Just Excel for Developers Who Gave Up

In my experience orgs choose these low code tools because good engineers are expensive and many don't fundamentally understand the process of software development.

I've seen business-side product owners complain "why can't you just make it do XYZ this week, Excel can do that" without realizing the application is being built by like three people and if they want the feature roadmap to be on time -- that they themselves planned months ago -- doing something seemingly trivial might be a non-trivial refactor. Trying to keep them focused on the long term is like dealing with a toddler's attention span.

So then they get impatient and the business goes out and buys Salesforce, because it "does everything for cheap", and then they quickly realize if you want to do some non-trivial thing -- which their custom application of course needs to do -- they're shit out of luck or have to buy Marc Benioff a new island.

I'm super sympathetic to this. Used to cynically point out that Excel was the most popular "notebook like" interface for computers.

That said, there are a few points against this as a complaint. First, is the incredibly important point that many many tools are people rediscovering pivot tables. There was a fun rant a while back about "your startup is just a pivot table." Hilarious read.

After that, visual workflows are clearly easier for people to understand. Just look at the directions you get with any "self assembled" furniture. Some of that, I'm sure, is to avoid having to translate a lot? Hard not to argue that it is still probably the more effective way to communicate things.

My final caveat is that the symbolic nature of program code is one that is largely lost on people. Specifically, people seem to think the software is independent of the execution environment that is necessary to understand in the language they are using.

Weird, my fellow developers usually don't advocate visual tools like Zapier, but instead roll their own solution (non-visual). Which, to be honest, comes with its own problems.

I feel the real problem with excel is that it’s not reusable.

Otherwise it’s a decent tool, but the fact that you write your code in a cell that is so tied to other cells with non-useful names that it’s impractical to reuse is a reason why it sucks.

Whereas many of these visual worksflow tools at least can export to json and be manipulated programatically in a useful way.