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I definitely agree that some of the manual "vocations," such as electrician or plumber are really great trades, and are ideal careers for a certain personality

by geebee 17y ago

I definitely agree that some of the manual "vocations," such as electrician or plumber are really great trades, and are ideal careers for a certain personality type. Some people really need to work with their hands, and just can't abide a cubicle. I wouldn't deter my kid from these trades either. That said, I think CS is pretty far from these fields. It's a little hard to say, because I don't have a background in these vocations, but in some ways I think they have more in common with nursing or even medicine. There's a required and tightly enforced educational background, formal licensing, and apprenticeship, and when you leave, you really are prepared (again, I presume) for practice. Truth is, we have no such thing in programming. CS really doesn't prepare you to be a programmer. While I suppose some things in programming are becoming standardized, there ultimately is no agreement on fairly basic things. As five programmers to write a webapp, and I mean a simple, two page, database driven crud app, and you'll get five very different implementations. There really is no accepted way of doing things for us, not on the level of a formal vocation. Of course, I say this not really knowing. For all I know, electricians graduate from their apprenticeship, show up a their first job, and figure it all out for the first time like programmers do.) I sure hope not, though ;)

javanix 17y ago
I agree that most of CS is far more freeform than these professions, but I mentioned systems/applications programmers for a reason. They need to write their software to behave compatibly with certain system restraints, and thus don't have quite the freedom afforded to web app developers and their fairly lax-by-comparison set of browser requirements. Granted, the similarities only go so far - being a mechanic is far more diagnostic and enhancing of the underlying system than being a programmer is (and hence, as you said, probably closer to the medical profession). However, a mechanic's ability to diagnose issues based on the subtlest of clues seems fairly close, at least in my experience, to a skilled programmer's ability to track down a quirky bug - both are based almost entirely on their exhaustive knowledge of the underlying system. The medical field's underlying system is biologic rather than mechanical in nature - hence most of the diagnostics have to be based on generic tests that are variably reliable (at least now, prior to surely-forthcoming genomic advances in medicine), rather than solely intuition and experience.

by geebee 17y ago

javanix 17y ago

I agree that most of CS is far more freeform than these professions, but I mentioned systems/applications programmers for a reason. They need to write their software to behave compatibly with certain system restraints, and thus don't have quite the freedom afforded to web app developers and their fairly lax-by-comparison set of browser requirements. Granted, the similarities only go so far - being a mechanic is far more diagnostic and enhancing of the underlying system than being a programmer is (and hence, as you said, probably closer to the medical profession). However, a mechanic's ability to diagnose issues based on the subtlest of clues seems fairly close, at least in my experience, to a skilled programmer's ability to track down a quirky bug - both are based almost entirely on their exhaustive knowledge of the underlying system. The medical field's underlying system is biologic rather than mechanical in nature - hence most of the diagnostics have to be based on generic tests that are variably reliable (at least now, prior to surely-forthcoming genomic advances in medicine), rather than solely intuition and experience.