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Engineering

You may not have heard the term citizen developer yet, but they exist, and they've been here for a long time.

In the nineties, it was the person in accounts payable who bought accounting software off a sales call and, whoops, now there's a Dell server plugged into an ethernet port. Or the early 2000s when the marketing team Dreamweaver'd up some site you have to figure out how to get on IIS 5. Today, it's the person on your sales team downloading Claude Code and spinning up an app that stores PII. Same person, different means.

You might be thinking, this sounds like shadow IT. BOO! It is. Shivers down the spine of CISOs and IT folks everywhere.

When it's discovered, teams tend to treat it as the security incident that it is. Maybe even a slap on the wrist for the person who was... simply using their autonomy to move the business forward?

It is a security incident, sure. But it's also a signal that people have shit to do and they don't have time to wait on the engineering organization. And it's not slowing down. It didn't start with AI either. Gartner found in 2021, before ChatGPT shipped, that 41% of employees were creating technology or analytics capabilities from outside the IT department. Two in five, back when it was still hard. And oh boy, it's sooooo easy now. Half your company is already routing around you. They just aren't telling you.

Who are these people!?

The SDR who asked for a lead management tool, watched it die in backlog grooming, and built a sloppy version himself in an afternoon. His company employs plenty of engineers. None of them work for him, and his ticket was never going to beat a roadmap item in a prioritization fight.

The operations manager at a regional insurance carrier that has never employed a software team in its history. Twenty years of institutional knowledge lives in her spreadsheets, and for the first time there's a way to turn it into something more without hiring anyone. She's not violating the IT policy on this. There isn't one. Nobody ever imagined she'd need it.

And us. The frontend developer dropped into the backend. The backend developer poking at Terraform. I'm not a Node expert, so when I'm in Node, I'm a citizen. My co-founder is a citizen in Elixir. Step outside your lane and you're one of them.

When I first started learning about this role, I thought it was important to disambiguate a "citizen" developer from a "software" developer, until I realized we're all the citizen when we're outside our comfort zone, trying to do something important, something that pushes the business forward, just outside our means. It happens all the time. Nobody in this industry is licensed, and everyone's expertise covers a sliver of an enormous surface. That describes the average software developer more often than we'd like to admit.

The more I've sat with this role from the DevOps/Platform point of view, the more the two look the same from that seat too. Ops has systems that people need to self-serve, and the governance around them (security, compliance, cost) doesn't care who's asking. From where ops sits, the citizen and the professional developer are the same. They are both introducing changes to a production system that we must keep stable. Kinda sounds like we're doing a devop.

When did you become a developer?

How much software must you write or understand before you're granted the title? There's no license to pass. Am I a software developer because I applied for a job and got it? Because I finished one book? One course? A compsci degree? A bootcamp grad with a badge is a developer on day one, and a fifteen-year hobbyist without a job title isn't. That tells you what the title actually measures, nothing. You become a software developer the day a company agrees to call you one.

Maybe you're a seasoned developer. You wrote every line by hand, developer. You wrote them with a language server, still a developer. You wrote them with autocomplete, still a developer. Copilot wrote half, sure, still counts. Claude wrote all of it, but you specified every behavior and caught its bugs. Where in that sequence did you stop being a developer? Nobody can answer, because the question was never about the code.

So what do the SDR and the senior developer actually share? They're both looking at some value the business needs, deciding it should be automatable and interactable through some interface, and willing it into existence. That's the whole job. One of them has more practice. There's a gradient between the expert and the citizen. We drew the boundary because it paid better.

A means to an end

Nobody starts a business thinking, I can't wait to hire forty people who really like to argue about code formatting and blow up my OpEx on cloud spend and send nerds to Vegas to get free shirts. They start a business because they found a problem they want to solve. Software is a means to...