11 ms·

We are such a weird profession. What other industry is like "Hey, you can do my job. It's easy, here are lots of extremely detailed courses, documentation and g

• choxi 10y ago
  The idea of "open source" is also unique, I can't think of any other professions that have something analogous.
  • CJefferson 10y ago
    No, closed source is I think the more unique thing. I can go to planning offices and see the plans of any building. Almost no-one has "secret painting methods", or "secret plumbing methods".
    • gumby 10y ago
      > Almost no-one has "secret painting methods", or "secret plumbing methods". Magicians! (an exception that proves your rule of course)
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • DougWebb 10y ago
      Almost no-one has "secret painting methods", or "secret plumbing methods". For plumbing, building codes dictate the range of solutions that are available for any given problem, and they're not secret (but buying a guide can be expensive.) However, painters, plumbers, and other trades definitely have tips and techniques that they've learned through experience and from mentors, and you won't find much of that being given away freely. You've got to learn it the way they did, through hard work and apprenticeship. And that's ok, because those skills require mastery to use properly, and that's true in software development too.
      • paganel 10y ago
        > However, painters, plumbers, and other trades definitely have tips and techniques that they've learned through experience and from mentors, and you won't find much of that being given away freely. Exactly this. My father is a civil engineer who's now in his early 60s, and he recently got to work with colleagues much younger than him. He told me that said colleagues didn't know some trade-related stuff which hadn't got covered in university courses (like how to reinforce earth ditches when digging in mountainous terrain with probable heavy rains) but which was paramount in keeping the work going (not much that you can do once a ditch collapses because of heavy rain). He told me that in this instance he had instructed his younger colleagues on what was the correct procedure to take, but he also told me that he's got other professional secrets that he's not ready to share just yet.
        • estebank 10y ago
          > but he also told me that he's got other professional secrets that he's not ready to share just yet. I'm curious enough to ask: why?
          • paganel 10y ago
            For job security, I think. We're lucky enough as programmers not to have to worry about that too much, but when you're a civil engineer in a quite poor part of the country and the continent (I'm talking Eastern Europe) you do not have much better other options.
    • brudgers 10y ago
      I've been in AEC since 1989. I can count with the fingers on one head the number of times I've seen individual architects form a community based on unpaid contributions to some big firm's profit driven project. That's bread and butter at Google. The difference is that construction has long been a commodity industry and software has not become one yet.
    • alphonsegaston 10y ago
      Speaking as an artist, this was untrue for us as well pretty much until the internet democratized things. Prior to this the assumption was that if you're good you should just be able to do it or that it should locked up in guru-like ateliers that parcel it out at high cost like Scientology courses. Of course access to basic art instruction has always been available, but a lot of advanced techniques or knowledge in specific subdomains (e.g. animation) was pretty closely guarded.
    • dntrkv 10y ago
      Those professions cannot be compared with software, you would have to compare an industry where the product is intangible. Do you see musicians making samples and giving them away to other musicians for free? Sure, you can find some online but it is definitely not the norm. Does Hollywood create stock footage and release it for other production companies to use for free? Do photographers allow others to use their photos for free? OSS is very unique to the software world.
      • yellowapple 10y ago
        I reckon the increasing popularity of FOSS is paving the way for the examples you've listed to start becoming mainstream. Social media is already starting to kick that third one into gear, and I wouldn't be surprised if the growing remix culture soon evolves into licensing terms that expand fair use to "you can sample my song as part of your song as long as your song is substantially different from my song".
  • pinkythepig 10y ago
    Closed source is what is unique. I can tear apart any engine to understand how it works. I can rip out the bathroom in my house and install a totally new one. With closed source, I can't just rip out component X and replace it with component Y. I can't read the binary to understand how it works (Technically I could, but I mean that with modern languages, the assembly looks massively different from the original source).
    • loginatnine 10y ago
      You can tear it apart and understands how the mechanism work but you don't have the million details about the manufacturing process, precise drawings with tolerances, material composition, etc.
    • khedoros1 10y ago
      I'd say that analyzing a finished mechanical device is similar to examining disassemblies and hex dumps of program files. You're missing information on the manufacturing process, allowable part tolerances, and so on, that the original manufacturers have access to.
      • bsilvereagle 10y ago
        Once you have the asm of a program, you have 100% knowledge of it if you put the time in to learn& follow the assembly. Sure, it's not as easy as looking at the source, but you have the capability of fully understanding the program. With a mechanical device, you don't know the dimensions on press fits, you don't know what the aluminum was heat treated to, you don't know the silica to aluminum ratio and how that affects thermal expansion, you don't know what lubricant was used, you don't know what blend the fiberglass insulation is, the list goes on and on. It's not possible to obtain 100% knowledge without the drawings. At best, you make assumptions about material processes, what a reasonable press fit would be, occasionally you can spark test to make a guess at material composition, etc. There isn't a "holy grail" (1) mechanical equivalent to a hexdump where if you grind at it long enough you achieve 100% knowledge. (1) Obtaining a complete set of original drawings is, but unlike a hexdump, you can't get the drawings from the finished product.
  • jotux 10y ago
    Cooking and music are two professions that come to mind.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • throwaway360181 10y ago
    It's free labor, and companies love free labor. They claim to value candidates that produce open source, but somehow those who toil night after night on their passion projects never seem to see any job offers materializing as a result. At best they get recruiter spam (for which many here argue they should be grateful) inviting them to submit themselves to a whiteboarding carried out by an arrogant 20-something often fresh out of college and eager to assert their dominance.
• 20years 10y ago
  I think that makes our profession pretty amazing rather than weird. Although, I don't think it's easy.
• pedalpete 10y ago
  Actually, I'm always amazed at how many Real Estate Agents suggest that others should get into it because it is so lucrative. They seem to ignore the fact that they are welcoming more competition in a finite market.
  • brudgers 10y ago
    In the US, there's a bit of pyramid to real-estate commissions and a lot of the recruitment is done by brokers. And even at the sales person level, the commission structure of most company's pays better when an agent sells the listing of another agent in the company so the more agents the better the odds of a better commission. But coming from the architecture profession, I don't discount encouraging others as a form of self-validation of one's own career choices.
    • pedalpete 10y ago
      I was strangely missing that piece. I was going to write in my comment that they are similar to pyramid scheme members, but thought that was a stretch. My step-father and brother are both brokers, so I know how they operate, but I somehow missed how agents get a piece of the action.
      • brudgers 10y ago
        The agent to agent incentives are more akin to profit sharing derived from the increased broker revenue and reduced cost when one broker handles both sides of the transaction. There are also potential informational advantages to having other agents more tightly coupled to an agents social graph, e.g. it is easier to obtain information about seller or buyer motivation and finances through a back channel.
• Clubber 10y ago
  Well, that's because companies can't afford to be as picky right now. Once everyone "learns to code." and there is a glut, you'd better believe degrees become more valuable.
  • greenhatman 10y ago
    It still won't necessarily be degrees that separate the high performers from the low performers.
    • Clubber 10y ago
      In reality, no, but most hiring managers won't know how to tell the difference, so they'll just default to whether or not the person has a degree. Hell, I can't tell the difference between a good an exceptional developer until I've worked with them for a month or two.
      • greenhatman 10y ago
        Yea, I think people who think they can tell how effective a developer is before working with them for a month or two are mostly deluding themselves.
• alexhutcheson 10y ago
  Reminds me of a funny Steve Yegge Blog Rant: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about-interviewing.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about-intervie...
• yourdegreesays 10y ago
  Great point. I've always seen the computer industry completely operates in its own dimension, not like any other industry in history.
• throwaway360181 10y ago
  It's due to our poor social skills. Flight attendants successfully lobbied the media and public to refer to them that way and not as stewardesses/stewards to improve the esteem of the profession, but we're so clueless that we don't object at all when journalists refer to us as coders, a term also used for medical clerical workers. Many here will even argue with you that it's not derogatory.
• hajile 10y ago
  I used to do card tricks for fun. I made an interesting observation about card tricks. I could show someone how to perform the slight of hand. I could even show them the trick and explain how misdirection works. Despite that, they couldn't do the same thing (even if it was a fairly simple trick). Free info simply wasn't enough to copy the trick. They had to have the aptitude and put in the hours if they wanted to do it themselves. As coders, we do something similar. We show the code and explain how it is put together. We even talk about the theory behind the application. But for them to learn, they have to have the aptitude and the practice. Coders have the aptitude, and they seem to insist anyone can do it too. Companies go along because it's in their best interest if this is true. The reality is that people have varying degrees of ability for handling abstract logic. Only a small portion of the population is adept enough to handle abstract logic at scale and we need that skill in more fields than just programming. Reality seems to bear this out as we have increased the amount of recruiting every year at every level of business, school, and government, but with diminishing returns. I believe that we offer to teach because we like finding people who think like we do (or maybe wish to believe we think the same way as the rest of the world), because we like to believe we are making other people's lives better, and on some level, because it's safe in that the returns are small enough to not threaten our own wellbeing, but maybe I'm just too cynical...