"It’s not simply the insidious dehumanisation and the patronising that bothers me - which to be fair, is a human condition - rather it’s the attempted commoditi

"It’s not simply the insidious dehumanisation and the patronising that bothers me - which to be fair, is a human condition - rather it’s the attempted commoditisation of what is a highly specialised trade. When you trivialise a trade, you make the trades-people interchangeable." This pushback has been going on since the very earliest days of the attempts to professionalise software development. Here's Nathan Ensmenger in "The Computer Boys Take Over": "In response to this perceived challenge to their authority, managers developed a number of interrelated responses intended to restore them to their proper role in the organizational hierarchy. The first was to define programming as an activity, and by definition programmers as professionals, in such a way as to assign it and them a subordinate role as mere technicians or service staff workers. As the sociologists Haroun Jamous and Bernard Peloille argued in their groundbreaking study of the organizational politics of professional development, this technique of reducing the contributions of competing groups to the merely technical is a time-honored strategy for defending occupational and professional boundaries. We have already seen some of the ways in which the rhetoric of management literature reinforced the notion that computer specialists were self-interested, narrow technicians rather than future-minded, bottom-line-oriented good corporate citizens. “People close to the machine can also lose perspective,” maintained one computer programming “textbook” for managers. “Some of the most enthusiastic have an unfortunate knack of behaving as if the computer were a toy. The term ‘addictive’ comes to mind.”"