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Don't underestimate the importance of people. This warrants a reply of its own, since it is the core idea of my essays: it is the very difference between a sta

• vidarh 10y ago
  But 99% of what we do are not that of heart surgery. Much of it is playing. Much of it is experimenting. Much of the actual work needs flexibility, familiarity and community more than it needs technical excellence. Which is why I wrote what I did. Your reply manages to turn it entirely on its head. People believe computer science is different from surgery because it is: Nobody dies when my half-assed experiments with OpenGL crashes. Nobody dies if my laptop crashes. There are certainly niches where it is life and death. Let others take care of that - I don't want anything to do with it.
  • Annatar 10y ago
    But 99% of what we do are not that of heart surgery. Much of it is playing. Much of it is experimenting. And it shows. However, just because you can get something to work, in some way, does not suddenly make you (or anyone else) a professional. Case in point: http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/6229/frustration-when-the-op-doesnt-get-it http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/6229/frustration-when-... ...Nor does it make your playful experiment fit for production where people like me are trying to get work done. "I got something to work. Because Linux! Because community! Um... I think I'll go get a job as a computer professional now. What could possibly go wrong? Linux is so awesome!" People believe computer science is different from surgery because it is: Nobody dies when my half-assed experiments with OpenGL crashes. Nobody dies if my laptop crashes. An operating system's kernel is an extremely complex, special piece of software. A bug in such software can cause many people to die, which is why someday you might see disclaimers about running a nuclear facility and fitness of purpose. (Interprocess communication, the original topic, is part of an operating system's kernel.) Writing and diagnosing such software requires very deep insights, which very few have, even among computer professionals. Additionally, it absolutely and without fail requires formal education in the problem domain, it requires experience, and it requires apprenticeship, and I'm writing about physical one on one mentorship. It's not something one can pick up "from the community", never has been, and never will be, and if anybody tells you any different, they're either dangerously ignorant, or lying to you for the purpose of their own agenda. Experimenting is all good and well, but when the entire armies of you start deploying your experiments in production and it becomes a trend and then the rest of us are, in fact, forced to take on such jobs because there aren't better ones, then it becomes a systemic problem. Not to mention that armies of you are currently in the process of artificially driving salaries down and it will be years before the market self-corrects, so make that a double whammy. Now, me, I don't so much mind that cheap Linux labor is artificially driving salaries down, since cream always rises to the top, as they say, but I do so very much mind being forced by contract to work with things like ext3, which is based on concepts from the past century and which have since been long abandoned elsewhere, or that my really cool super slick database becomes unstable because of your experiment ticking underneath it (and before you ask, if it were up to me, I'd never put my database on your experiment). I mind even more when your (plural) experiements end up causing a priority 1 incident in the wee hours in the morning, when I'm busy getting my beauty sleep. In my case, you see, it's "because client contract!" Slightly different slant on things than in your case. Welcome to the industry.