12 ms·
That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as som
by mikemainguy 16y ago
That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.
- vishaldpatel 16y agoDocs, mechanics, skilled tradesmen, lawyers,...hell even accountants have location knowledge and expertise that is location specific. - You won't drive your car cross country to a cheaper mechanic. - You won't get a lawyer from India to represent you in America. - You don't go to a doctor... well thats changing isn't it? Too bad doc education still costs so damn much in America. Its about group supply and demand. Don't forget that homes cost and arm and a leg and that a programmer in a particular neighborhood should be able to afford a home in that neighborhood and should charge accordingly.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- eldavido 16y agoProgramming, especially high-paid programming, tends to be highly domain-specific. Whether oil pipelines, financial models, or various control algorithms for aeronautics, you can't just hop jobs. I think most programmers, and even non-programmers, don't really understand how much domain specialization affects their value. To me, this is "localized knowledge" just as much as any mechanic, accountant, or lawyer has.
- raffi 16y agoI read a great article in the Harvard Business Review about what defines a profession. Their question: are managers a profession akin to Doctors and Lawyers? The author defined a professional as someone whose work you have to take on faith. Not being doctors or lawyers ourselves, we're usually unable to evaluate the quality of legal advice or medical care we're receiving. The best we can do is seek another opinion. The author drew this line because he feels it necessitates the things we expect from a profession: shared ethics and a rigorous certification process. Professions require would-be professionals to jump through a number of hoops to make sure that all who deal with these professionals receive some minimum level of service from someone with a minimum level of competence. Have software developers arrived at this point? Can someone check the quality of what they receive from a developer without being a developer? If they can't, will this always be true?
- GBond 16y agoYour comment peaked my interest to read the HBR article you mentioned. Thanks. http://hbr.org/2010/07/the-big-idea-no-management-is-not-a-profession/ar/pr http://hbr.org/2010/07/the-big-idea-no-management-is-not-a-p...
- jdale27 16y agoNo, it piqued your interest.
- adamc 16y agoIs there a name for that phenomenon, where people hear terms in use but map them to the wrong words? Or the opposite, where people learn words through reading but mispronounce them?
- singular 16y agoI submitted a Wikipedia article on this very subject :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477763 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477763 Apologies in advance for engaging in the clichéd 'submit a Wikipedia page' pattern!
- neall 16y agomalapropism
- tesseract 16y agoor "eggcorn", if the substituted term makes some kind of sense in context.
- raffi 16y agoLinguists call them real-word errors. They're very common in writing and spell checkers do nothing to protect against them. I work on a free browser extension called After the Deadline. It picks a lot of this stuff up. It didn't pick up this particular example, next time I deploy an update to our service it will. You may want to check it out, it works here on HN too: http://www.afterthedeadline.com http://www.afterthedeadline.com (as a note, I tend to make the same types of errors)
- jafl5272 16y agoBut lawyers don't normally work in a management hierarchy, do they? And I'm pretty sure hospital administrators hate physicians just as much as managers hate programmers. (Not all of them do, of course, but I'm guessing it's similar.)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mkramlich 16y agoDoctors and lawyers can't engage in their profession since the age of 10 or so, like programmers can. Doctors generally cannot be self-taught like programmers (what practice surgery on a neighbor?). Programmers can literally envision things in their minds, and then make them come to life after putting hands on keyboard -- there's no effective equivalent in medicine and law. (Biology/biochem/chem, sure.) Also doctors and lawyers have to be accredited by a government board at least at the state level, programmers do not. Doctors and lawyers generally have to spend (or go into debt for) 10's to 100's of thousands of US dollars before being officially allowed to practice in their field -- programmers do not. And in general, the cost of mistakes in programming are small, with no lives or fortunes at stake (in the general case.), unlike law and medicine. Lastly, from what I can tell, in the US the average programmer will make anywhere from 1/2 to more likely 1/10 what a lawyer or doctor will make in their respective careers. There are many differences between the professions of programming, medicine and law. So it's hard to make sweeping generalizations and use that to draw definitive conclusions. Programming is very different.
- fleitz 16y agoThe only difference is in the protectionism of the other professions. Most of the barriers you mention are imaginary. Programming errors can have far worse consequences than medicine or law. I've never seen a doctor or lawyer make a rocket ship turn into the ground (Arian V) or oil pipelines explode (buggy versions of pipeline software stolen by Russia) or make airplanes refuse to execute commands ( airbus and apache FCS). They also can't destroy trillions of dollars of wealth (black- sholes and other flawed risk models, high frequency trading)
- mkramlich 16y agoThe examples you gave are edge cases and exceptions -- relatively very rare situations. Most programming work is hum-drum, with errors being no big deal, and easily and cheaply caught and caught early. I was comparing cases "in the main" between these 3 professions. Also, by pointing out the cases that you did, you actually increased the strength of the point I was making: these 3 professions are very different and one cannot reliably draw conclusions based on similarities. Agree programming has less barriers to entry. But the barriers to entry for doctors and lawyers are not imaginary. They're real. Are they arbitrary and "made up" via government rules? Of course, and perhaps that's what you meant. But they are real. If you willfully ignore or bypass them you will suffer real consequences to your person including fines and imprisonment.
- ww520 16y agoDoctors, dentists, and lawyers have legislated their jobs so that they can maintain monopoly through their guilds and licenses. That's why they can charge such a high rate. If programmers can get non-licensed programmers writing code go to jail, their rate would go up, too.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ww520 16y agoHere's this little secret how the dentist association controls the number of dentists licensed each year - they raise and lower the difficulty of the licensing exams each year. Guess who wrote the exams? The existing dentists, who have incentive to restrict the number of new dentists. They can raise the difficulty with frivolous questions that don't impact the dental competency but weed out a number of qualified candidates. Same thing with doctors and lawyers.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- stretchwithme 16y agoI think the fact that a group controls its membership qualifications is not really a problem as long as other groups can compete with them to address the same needs. And without special treatment from the government. A level playing field, not subsidies for one model at the expense of other models. Realtors control their numbers and qualifications too. But you can still be a real estate agent without being a Realtor. Having and protecting a brand is ok. Getting government to put some group in charge of all people addressing a need will raise prices.
- rosejn 16y agoI am incredibly happy that this will never happen in software development. Elitist, protectionist mechanisms like this would dramatically limit the talent pool, slow down innovation, and restrict thinking to a set of norms agreed upon by a conservative organization intending to maintain the status quo. Programming is more of a meritocracy than in many other fields, and I think we should be proud of this. If people want to earn more then they should practice and learn more. Certifications are codifying yesterdays knowledge. How valuable do you think that is to most organizations, as opposed to keeping up with the latest research or the latest developments in open source? And I don't mean reading the headlines, I mean understanding data structures, algorithms, and architectures. Certificates do things like quiz people on how well they know an API. This is absurd, wasteful, and degrading. These training programs attempt to generate assembly line programmers, but it's like trying to learn history by memorizing dates of past events.
- watmough 16y agoIsn't it even worse? None of those professions have access to copy and paste! We all know programmers who would be sunk without it.
- alextingle 16y agoWe should not seek to emulate doctors or lawyers, but cabinetmakers, watchmakers and joiners. Programming isn't a profession, it's a craft. The trouble is that traditional crafts are not really valued any more, as their purpose has largely been supplanted by mass production. So, we have no current role models for how to organise ourselves.
- sanderjd 16y agoHmmm, seems like the appropriate role model to take from this may be "mass production". Perhaps that is the right and proper end game for any craft. But I tend to think that computers can't take all our jobs in this society, because once computers are fully capable of programming themselves our society will cease to exist in its present form.
- regularfry 16y agoThe way I see it, it's both - more like surgery in that regard. How you do it involves a huge amount of craftsmanship. Knowing what to do and why you're doing it is what makes it a profession.
- flsvilling 16y agoProgramming is not a craft. A craftsman produces some product, whereas a programmer designs some product that is then produced by a compiler or by copying a file. That the production of software is trivial and fully automated, doesn't mean that there is no distinction between production and design. We already have mass software production.
- jholman 16y agoOverall, I strongly agree. I agree so strongly, I've been thinking about counter-examples, and I think I've found a few corner cases. ;) Firstly, obviously, some aspects of programming are crafts-like. When we write conditionals as if(4 == x) instead of if(x==4) (for languages where variable assignment in a conditional is legal but not what you want), that's craftsmanship. Analogously, part of the process of designing a building is drafting, and that is a craft. A common error is to think that drafting is the primary task of architecture (at least, that's a common error about programming). Less confidently, I would argue that the closer you get to the metal, the more craft aspects appear (without claiming that these aspects dominate), and that when we use a compiler, part of what we're getting is automated crafting. So we see three cases where we take back that crafting aspect into human hands... First, for a new platform, sometimes some of the work is done by hand. Second, many programmers _enjoy_ the craft of programming, and so practice it for fun. For example, code golf is craft. Third, sometimes crafted is more appropriate. We usually prefer a cheap mass-manufactured physical object (high-quality, but not customized), but sometimes we want something handmade for the situation. I think that writing assembly by hand has some parallels with this (not to argue that writing assembler is more craft than design).
- ojbyrne 16y agoDoctors and lawyers are typically self-employed, or they're employed at institutions that require (often by law) that managers actually have to be doctors or lawyers. So you're correct, they are like programmers, but a solution has been reached already for the problem I describe. I'm not sure skilled tradesman (not to denigrate their work) have the same "productivity is determined by intelligence" issue.
- Alex63 16y agoAgree. And all the replies to this post about the specifics of medicine or law seem to me to be missing the point. There are fields other than programming where "workers" have more domain-specific knowledge than "managers". Mikemainguy was responding to the perceived assertion that programming is the only occupation where this is true. He is offering counterexamples to the statement that "programming is really the first discipline where the primary determinant of the "factor's" productivity is not the manager's skill but actually the intelligence of each individual"