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weitendorf 13 hours ago

A huge number of those people only interact with computers as a consumer. Beyond that, maybe schools assignments, texting and other social media, light email, and video games (eg through steam or a console). There is a big gap between that and someone comfortable using git.

Don’t be an asshole to them about that, think about how many developers would do anything it takes to avoid calling someone on the phone. Obviously they can learn it, but they know they’re going to be bad at it for a while (true for both git and phone calls) and they don’t know how long it’s going to take, or the extent of what they don’t know.

The thing about software companies is that they know how to automate and build stuff so why invest the time in learning a CMS if it’s something they could quickly solve for their own use case? Well, the same applies to people who just want to point and click and write, wondering whether it’s worth it to learn what a rebase does.

sublinear 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> think about how many developers would do anything it takes to avoid calling someone on the phone

Think about all the developers we force into that situation all the time anyway.

> they know how to automate and build stuff

To an extent, yes, but as the author said "content management" is a complex problem.

> wondering whether it’s worth it to learn what a rebase does

This is the crux of the problem. Versioning is fundamental to project management for the kind of project you'd use a CMS for, yet with a CMS everyone is too siloed and the oversimplified interface ruins any chance of doing better. Any CMS is a dead end that leads to chronically incorrect assets, incomplete patches, broken links, etc. This is also generally true for many other low/no-code solutions.

I'm not saying the "non-technical" people need to work directly in git, but they do need to be familiar with this kind of workflow when discussing with developers, and developers are absolutely still needed. Any CMS workflow is too restrictive. Nobody experienced and sane would prefer it over a git based solution unless they're being bullied into using a CMS. It's been like this forever and no CMS has ever been able to overcome this reputation.

At some point one needs to ask why a CMS is preferred and time and time again the answer is only cost cutting. In any other business decision that reason wouldn't be good enough. CMS products only exist because of neglect, ignorance, and cheapness.