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Exactly, but it's worse. There are programmers who love calling themselves "geeks", "nerds", "code monkeys" and promote boot camp style schools as well as myth

by yapcguy 13y ago

Exactly, but it's worse. There are programmers who love calling themselves "geeks", "nerds", "code monkeys" and promote boot camp style schools as well as myths such as "anybody can code" such that people think any homeless person off the street is a coder. You don't get doctors and lawyers talking down their own skills or saying it's easy.

natrius 13y ago
Doctors and lawyers use the legal system to limit the number of people they compete with. I will not model my profession on those.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  I agree. People here are acting as if our collective unwillingness to lobby for rent-seeking legislation, is a personality flaw.
lhnz 13y ago
This is the unfortunate truth. So much for being smart and logical, most will never apply this to anything outside of a computer. And most will turn their noses up at the ethics which would have them converting their technical ability and wealth into long-term power. (To see how this could be done, look at the relationships and rent-seeking behaviour around startup incubators. Others are deftly stealing your lunch.) The affordance which a software engineer now has will not last forever; power left on the table is power lost. As engineering becomes more commoditised (through education and simpler tools) the pay check will drastically decrease but the less-than positive terms will remain. It's a personal choice that anybody can make to raise their opinion of themselves, to learn how an executive (and other professions) behave and to not accept less than they are worth. There's so much opportunity to be had. Nobody should be acting like a cog! You should all be playing greater games and constantly redefining what you believe you can do. A hustler is just a social hacker; a hacker is just a technical hustler. But a human being, they are neither: they are whatever they wish to be.
- chflamplighter 13y ago
  Nailed it right there "A hustler is just a social hacker; a hacker is just a technical hustler. But a human being, they are neither: they are whatever they wish to be."
Iftheshoefits 13y ago
I think there are two different "programmer archetypes" that help prevent unions from forming. The first you identified: programmers who have conflated, mistakenly, "doing what you love is more important than compensation" with "compensation is unimportant if the work you're doing is something you're passionate about." The second is the cadre of elitist programmers who think they are more intelligent than anybody else, and that therefore if a programmer isn't swimming in money shoved at him by an employer it's because he's not good enough. The egos in the software world dwarf those in the academic world I come from (and that is, believe me, an impressive achievement). Hilariously, it seems to me at least that far more programmers fancy themselves a sort of Programming John Galt (or, perhaps, being a citizen of some Programmer's Lake Woebegon, where all the programmers are above average). They relish competition because they believe, erroneously, that they're working in a meritocracy and that their own skills are so exceptional they will definitely rise to the top anyway.
ahomescu1 13y ago
The problem is the opposite is just as bad, if not worse: programmers can't go around saying "I make tons of money because I have a rare skill/high IQ", because that sounds elitist (which is a very bad word these days). If programmers advertise themselves as a caste that you can only get into by luck/genetics, that only makes things worse.

by yapcguy 13y ago

natrius 13y ago

Doctors and lawyers use the legal system to limit the number of people they compete with. I will not model my profession on those.

yetanotherphd 13y ago
I agree. People here are acting as if our collective unwillingness to lobby for rent-seeking legislation, is a personality flaw.

lhnz 13y ago

This is the unfortunate truth. So much for being smart and logical, most will never apply this to anything outside of a computer. And most will turn their noses up at the ethics which would have them converting their technical ability and wealth into long-term power. (To see how this could be done, look at the relationships and rent-seeking behaviour around startup incubators. Others are deftly stealing your lunch.) The affordance which a software engineer now has will not last forever; power left on the table is power lost. As engineering becomes more commoditised (through education and simpler tools) the pay check will drastically decrease but the less-than positive terms will remain. It's a personal choice that anybody can make to raise their opinion of themselves, to learn how an executive (and other professions) behave and to not accept less than they are worth. There's so much opportunity to be had. Nobody should be acting like a cog! You should all be playing greater games and constantly redefining what you believe you can do. A hustler is just a social hacker; a hacker is just a technical hustler. But a human being, they are neither: they are whatever they wish to be.

chflamplighter 13y ago
Nailed it right there "A hustler is just a social hacker; a hacker is just a technical hustler. But a human being, they are neither: they are whatever they wish to be."

Iftheshoefits 13y ago

I think there are two different "programmer archetypes" that help prevent unions from forming. The first you identified: programmers who have conflated, mistakenly, "doing what you love is more important than compensation" with "compensation is unimportant if the work you're doing is something you're passionate about." The second is the cadre of elitist programmers who think they are more intelligent than anybody else, and that therefore if a programmer isn't swimming in money shoved at him by an employer it's because he's not good enough. The egos in the software world dwarf those in the academic world I come from (and that is, believe me, an impressive achievement). Hilariously, it seems to me at least that far more programmers fancy themselves a sort of Programming John Galt (or, perhaps, being a citizen of some Programmer's Lake Woebegon, where all the programmers are above average). They relish competition because they believe, erroneously, that they're working in a meritocracy and that their own skills are so exceptional they will definitely rise to the top anyway.

ahomescu1 13y ago

The problem is the opposite is just as bad, if not worse: programmers can't go around saying "I make tons of money because I have a rare skill/high IQ", because that sounds elitist (which is a very bad word these days). If programmers advertise themselves as a caste that you can only get into by luck/genetics, that only makes things worse.