The Sony thing was a bit jarring. I suppose I wouldn't expect people who hang out on a site called "hacker news" to agree that Sony, Target, and Yahoo set the

The Sony thing was a bit jarring. I suppose I wouldn't expect people who hang out on a site called "hacker news" to agree that Sony, Target, and Yahoo set the gold standard for software development ;) I do think the underlying point, though, is a good one - this is a difficult field, and success eludes people who spend their lives working on it and companies that spend a lot of money hiring them (or at least attempting to). I like the author's notion that programmers would have a greater role and status in firms: "Coders are not used in law firms the way they are in most businesses. They are seen as tools to get things done, not as an integral and necessary part of law firm operations, let alone management." That I like this is no surprise, seeing as I am a software developer myself. Unfortunately, I don't think the "integral and necessary" part of a firm actually reflects the reality of open offices, scrum, limited autonomy, and short career spans. Oh one thing - although the author talks about "expert technologists", I don't see anything here about requiring a degree, nor do I agree that the author has advocated for institutionalizing incompetence. I think he's trying to argue that software development is sufficiently complicated that asking lawyers to become programmers is on a par with asking programmers to suddenly become lawyers. I'd say the thesis here is: software is actually very difficult to do well, and the best solution is to integrate programmers into the firm - this author even advocates doing it at an equity level! Sounds great to me, though honestly I don't really see it happening (like I said, I think the author greatly overestimates the extent to which this occurs outside law firms. Organizations are often very resistant to providing this status and integration to software developers, though some have managed to do this, with success).