8 ms·

The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

59 points by philk10 13y ago

JoeAltmaier 13y ago
I am also an old fart who decries the lack of respect by the young'uns these days. OP claims that's not his point; yet he is part of that demographic. Cogent points: there is dilution of the coder's message (code is hard; skills are needed) by the fire hose of media including the internet.
- mildtrepidation 13y ago
  It's not hard to see at least some of the angles it probably comes from. It's popular for politicians to bank on things like "everyone should learn to code" for publicity; outsourcing makes development look like a cheap commodity and a second thought; bottom of the barrel "website in a night" generators are crap, but they're cheap and easy, and most people can't tell the difference; websites like codeacademy present the image of a skillset you can pick up effectively in your downtime. So much of the public perception of programming has gone from "ooh, you do what? I have no idea how that works!" to "oh, you do that? Anyone can do that."
eternalban 13y ago
These people [1] had a clue regarding leveraging deep competence in specialized domains that made their contemporaries' eyes glaze over. The world runs on software. Just think about it and it should be clear what are the necessary steps to take. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar
thatthatis 13y ago
To write software, you used to have to be a physiscist. Or a least a mathematician with a deep understanding of why the registers were working. Then, the physics was more or less mastered and the profession split into electrical engineering (the physicists lamented this degradation I'm sure) and applied mathematics. Then, the math was more or less mastered to a level it could safely be abstracted away and math spun off computer science and software engineering. I'm sure the mathematicians were upset then at the degradation of the profession. Then, software engineering advanced to the point that ever higher levels of abstraction were present on ever faster computers, no longer did you have to get the logic right _and_ the math perfect for your program to run in acceptable time. And higher level languages emerged, assembly leading to c leading to python and JavaScript. And at every stage there was moaning, and excitement. Now, we stand on the precipice of the next great division. People can get a reasonably complicated website up by configuring Wordpress or Joomla or Drupal without writing a single line of code. A 14 year old can run a mcafe script at the geek squad counter and get the users computer back in decent shape. We are at the point of adding moderately skilled technicians to our field. We can piss and moan about the division, or we can recognize that it's part of the process of the industry and vocation maturing. The engineers at GM aren't bemoaning the fact that "car maintenance gurus (mechanics) don't have to understand the heat displacement of aluminum vs steel" Having mechanics makes the car industry more efficient and lets the engineers focus on the real hard problems. The same will be true of software, eventually.
- pnathan 13y ago
  I don't think your history is really quite correct in its nuance. Programming as an actual trade emerged quickly in the 50s. The 60s saw the rise of computer science degrees, often coming from either the Math or the EE side. During the 50s and 60s, the computers had tons of people working with FORTRAN/COBOL (& others) to churn out business code. This accelerated in the 70s. There were armies of basic programmers out there. It only takes flipping through Dijikstra to realize that these people were not super well trained. Occasionally in the recollections of the really early programmers, we learn that they were hired from the secretarial pool and trained if they had math aptitude. Not from physicists or the PhDs always. I am sure this was very true for the line of business & banking apps.
  - thatthatis 13y ago
    Thanks for the addition. I made un-researched generalizations based on limited knowledge of the skills possessed by the pioneers in the field. I agree that it has, at the least, nuanced errors. But, I try not to let the exact truth get in the way of a good story unless the exact truth is the crux of the argument.
    - angersock 13y ago
      "But, I try not to let the exact truth get in the way of a good story unless the exact truth is the crux of the argument." The computer cares not for your platitudes. Fix your shit. (More specifically, at least put some timelines on your milestones--you overlook, for example, a lot of computer early adoption by banks and insurance companies. A lot. See Burroughs et al.) (These feel-good stories only serve to further undermine our profession.)
      - thatthatis 13y ago
        I think I gave an account of history that is accurate enough on a first order approximation, and it is history as parable to come sideways until I got to the key point of: specialization is a good thing. Are any of the field divisions I mentioned inaccurate? Or is it the chronology youre objecting to? This isn't a feel good story, it is a parable. My entire point could be rephrased in a more hostile fashion as: It is not presently feasible to be an expert in every aspect of computing, so why is further division of the field a bad thing?
fidotron 13y ago
London definitely has an exaggerated case of this (Nathan Barley really is far too close to home regarding the way he treats Pingu), but it's happening everywhere. The thing is it's like tax preparation: most people should probably be able to do it themselves, but once you want something interesting done you're going to need a professional. If all you develop as a software developer is monkey patching stuff together, then yes, you're in trouble, either from normal people, or from the products of other developers. However, the fun part of the job has always been being able to punch through big piles of crap to find ways to radically simplify what's going on in order to get an apparently magical improvement. That part is an art, and isn't going away in a hurry.
- walshemj 13y ago
  At the silicon milkabout recently it was wall to wall macbooks and MBA's.
dhfjgkrgjg 13y ago
In the old days people thought about design, the wrote software, they supported their product. Nowadays all the wannabees think installing a metric ton of shit from npm or the gem equivalents makes them a super productive brogrammer rock star developer. They have a single page website that requires gigabytes of javascript from fourty external locations to run a basic blog. They spend all day on github, but are borderline code unaware. They argue lack of generics in go is good. They are what the business and clients see, and that is why the people paying for software services end up labelling us all as muppets.
- MAGZine 13y ago
  TIL software reuse is for brogrammers and DRY is a farce.
  - anaphor 13y ago
    parent said they dislike generics so how could they like DRY?
nickthemagicman 13y ago
"If you're ambitious and good at office politics and self-promotion, it's entirely possible - maybe even easier - to pass from junior programmer to executive management without actually passing through a stage of technical competence. It's a sort of turbo-charged Peter Principle that operates in the software industry." This feels so true at every business and academic institution I've worked for. My last CIO was a lawyer....
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pessimizer 13y ago
Were we ever considered professionals? There's no test - all you have to do to be a software developer is declare yourself to be one. There's no overarching professional organization or boards, therefore incompetents aren't de-certified and national lobbying isn't coherent. In fact, the largest companies that we work for are frequently lobbying for things that programmers don't support, or actively damage our interests in relation to management. We're also generally professional middle-class conservative enough that we're anti-union in a way that only people who are members of professional organizations that are at least 100 years old can afford to be. For doctors and lawyers it's easy to ignore cognitive dissonance because the freebies they get are so baked into government that it's hard to remember that people actually had to make a conscious effort to make that happen. There's no reason for programmers to be so complacent. The transistor isn't even as old as the National Association of Realtors. People in real estate have more clout, baked in advantage, and respect as a member of a profession than anybody can be expected to get by calling themselves a programmer. At least they have to take a test.
- Havoc 13y ago
  >the freebies they get are so baked into government What exactly do you understand under freebies [for 100y+ prof org members]? Interesting point about the older prof members being both anti-union and but joining a prof body. I reckon the two have different functions though. e.g. In my case the only thing I hear from my prof org is messages with a "comply or else" tone. Sure they do set minimum salaries for apprenticeships, but those are so far below market rate that its does even matter. A union in contrast would fit for better work conditions, better pay, better benefits etc. The only benefit I see is accreditation (admittedly a large benefit)...but that is hardly a freebie (took blood, sweat & many tears).
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    >What exactly do you understand under freebies [for 100y+ prof org members]? Doctors, Lawyers, Realtors, etc. have written 90% of the state laws that they are governed under, and most of the federal ones. They've protected themselves against foreign competition, and shielded themselves against liability.
endlessvoid94 13y ago
I totally agree with you. However, that doesn't mean it will stop. Imagine what it was like to be a scribe; you were a craftsman, who cared about the details of your work, had the intuition and experience to anticipate how your work would change in the future, and to understand subtle nuances lost on the illiterate. What happened to the scribes? As literacy matured, and became widespread, they were out of a job. And it wasn't because they somehow became bad at their work. It was because they became obsolete. Now, I'm not arguing this will happen quickly, and it may look different, but I can't help but look around and see how much more accessible basic programming has become (tryruby.org and all the others). Slowly, very slowly, more people are becoming literate. They're not experts, and they may never be experts. But all of a sudden these people are experiencing an ability to see their ideas become reality, and more importantly, they're experiencing a new way to think. This is exactly what happened when people became literate, and the scribes disappeared. Figure out a way to ride this wave, and you'll never be obsolete.
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Scribe is a lovely choice. The modern equivalent might be editor. They are now essentially unemployable with the advent of word processors, which make everyone think they can write. Thus all the illiterate menus, signs, fliers that pervade our world.
- solidsnack9000 13y ago
  Scribes didn't become obsolete due to the spread of literacy. It was due to the printing press.
  - endlessvoid94 13y ago
    Good point. I guess I could pedantically counter with "the printing press enabled literacy". I don't think it changes my point too much, though :-)
corresation 13y ago
As he posits some may conclude, it does just read like bitter sour grapes...yet I've been professionally programming since 1995. Is someone casting their own lot as the lot of the world? http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-behavior-indicative-of-l,421/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-b... By and large I think having demonstrated skills in software development (and truthfully this means less that you can point to years of experience -- which may be 1 year of experience 20 times, or 20 years of experience -- or pieces of paper and demand respect) is just enormously powerful right now. I am incredibly, enormously grateful for the position I am in, and that my aptitudes as a child happened to bring me into the fold of something that ended up being one of the few careers where you can write your own meal ticket.
- MetaCosm 13y ago
  Couldn't agree more (and wonderful link). The article was so disconnected from my reality as to be confusing. (redacted probably irrelevant comment) EDIT: Part of the reason for this confusion may well be cultural. I am a US developer, and have heard similar "I get no respect" type rants from Canadian developers... often shocked by the pay and respect they can demand just a bit south.
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mattgreenrocks 13y ago
Why do developers resist being professionalized? Are we really all so naive to think that the world will grovel at our feet for the rest of time? Fact is, it's extremely likely you've been taken advantage of, financially at some point, for your skills. It's an ugly reality, but I'm betting it has happened to a lot of people, or is happening. There are people who love nothing more than to take advantage of information asymmetries to extract disproportionate amounts of value from you. I'm having a hard time thinking of any downsides to professionalizing. It cements our place in society, makes it a 'thing' for laypeople to ascribe importance to (however idiotic that concept is), which starts a feedback loop of expecting respect, both personally and professionally.
- arethuza 13y ago
  "I'm having a hard time thinking of any downsides to professionalizing" Well, if you are a real professional then a complaint can result in your being struck off and it being legally impossible for you to work in that area again. I really don't see how (or indeed why) that model could be applied to general software development or why it would be in any way desirable. NB: It might be applicable in very small niche areas - safety critical systems etc.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    It's actually very very hard to get struck off as a lawyer or a doctor.
    - herge 13y ago
      But once you're persona non-gratta, it's impossible to get back into the good graces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass
      - walshemj 13y ago
        Journalists are only professionals in the same way hookers are. As Baldwin said “Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Will any of the NOW hacks who hacked phones have a problem getting a new job NO. Was Rupert Murdoch stripped of his newspapers as a result of the NOW scandal NO
cushychicken 13y ago
I think Zed Shaw nailed it with respect to this topic: "People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines." Tech doesn't value code because everyone knows it. There are tons of fields where your skills are still treated with Godlike reverence.
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rprospero 13y ago
Honestly, the reason that programming is getting a reputation for being easy is because it is easy. That's entirely the point of computer programming. If writing a program was harder than doing it by hand, we would just do it by hand. Honestly, any other profession would love to have it as easy as we have it. A surgeon doesn't get to mount the backup after a surgery fails. The engineers of the Mississippi river bridge couldn't checkout a standing bridge from their git repo. When a physicist wants to study particle physics, she can't download her own, personal LHC and start smashing protons. CEO's don't get separate development and testing companies where they can try out their business plans before it gets promoted to the actual corporation. Compared to everything else I do at work, programming is by far the easiest task. It's also the easiest to learn. Yes, a lot of those programers are pretty terrible, but there's a lot of terrible drivers, too.
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- vinceguidry 13y ago
  It's getting easier. It still isn't easy. > A surgeon doesn't get to mount the backup after a surgery fails. The engineers of the Mississippi river bridge couldn't checkout a standing bridge from their git repo. When a physicist wants to study particle physics, she can't download her own, personal LHC and start smashing protons. CEO's don't get separate development and testing companies where they can try out their business plans before it gets promoted to the actual corporation. You don't get these things either, unless you do the hard work to learn them and integrate them into your process. This isn't easy. Some of us are lucky enough to work in shops with this stuff already integrated, but for the rest of us we have to do it ourselves. At my job, my biggest codebase was split up into three repos, with a lot of nasty and brittle glue code written to make deployment work. It took a solid week's worth of after-hours work to get rid of all that brokeness and make deployment sane again. The advantages tooling brings to software development are often silently lost, only to be found out when your cloud provider loses your server and none of your backups work, and spinning up a new server from the repo takes, if you're lucky, all weekend to get working.
- Mvandenbergh 13y ago
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bobochan 13y ago
I wonder if any of this is related to the growing hyper-specialization in the industry. When my dad finished grad school in engineering he did a lot of work in military radio communications and engineers were expected to be able to design all of the equipment (including certifying the plans for the transmission towers) and get the entire system working. Being a "programmer" used to mean something similar, we took responsibility for getting everything done. I took a course a few years ago on an "enterprise" development tool and asked a question about how the sample code mapped to fields in the database. The disappointing answer was that I "didn't need to worry about that" because that is something that the database engineers and deployment engineers would handle. Apparently I was supposed to be grateful that my role had been compartmentalized. Now programmers identify themselves as "Language X Developers," or even by their project roles, e.g. "Implementation Manager," "Software Architect." It is time to be a bit more bold. I am a Programmer. Capital P, full stop. Any language, any system, any project, any time.
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codystebbins 13y ago
So reading this it seems the primary argument against programming as a professional career is that entry level programming is becoming more accessible to a wider audience. However I think the author fails to make the argument though that just because some 14 year old can learn JavaScript quickly with a service like codeschool, that means I could hire that kid to replace a senior level programmer with a deep understanding of design patterns, data structures, algorithms, etc. The claim to me states understanding a basic script is all you need to write large scale, complex software. I do not know about everyone else, but I picked up coding pretty quickly and picked up everything else about software over years of patient study so this seems suspect to me. Software is not just about code, to focus on that makes our job look easy. I also have some problems with the "credentials = professionalism" argument, but many others in the thread have addressed it.
- bobochan 13y ago
  I agree with you, but I think that "entry level programming" is unfortunately much further away from the general public. I can still roll over to my Apple //e, reach around and flick the power switch, and be right into a BASIC prompt so that I can start typing in commands. Writing a game in the mid-80s meant a text adventure that would eventually be printed out and published in magazine. The first game that I ever bought was "Ultima" and it came on a floppy inside a resealable gallon kitchen bag. I talk to middle school students all the time that want to know how to code their first FPS before they have even got Hello World up and running. Setting aside what is best for programmers and their "status," it seems to me that what business needs are hundreds of thousands of employees that have at least enough of a programming background that they can automate some of their most mundane and repetitive tasks. I used to work in finance and I would sometimes wander through the rows of analysts and account managers copying and pasting spreadsheet data and making charts and presentations deep into the night. It is time to stop that insanity, to expose everyone to enough programming so that concepts like loops and if/then statements are understandable.
crncosta 13y ago
<i>If you're ambitious and good at office politics and self-promotion, it's entirely possible - maybe even easier - to pass from junior programmer to executive management without actually passing through a stage of technical competence.</i> Sad to see this happening, but (unfortunately) being politic is more important in this century than used to be before.
wes-exp 13y ago
Even barbers are licensed professionals. Meanwhile wannabe "software engineers" are copy-pasting together web applications that store the personal information of millions of people without the slightest thought behind security or proper design. We collectively wonder why there aren't more programmers... maybe the problem has never been a lack of education, but a lack of prestige and respect.
c--misura 13y ago
I'm sorry, but this sounds like sour grapes. If you build software, you're an exogenic source of that erosion too. You've created tools that have made it easier for the next person to contribute. This practice makes software development unique and exciting. There are plenty of competent and incompetent engineers and self-taught developers alike. The currency of expertise is not exclusive to post-secondary accredited programmers. It's earned with results and hard work.
gopher1 13y ago
His only evidence of this so-called erosion of status is that anecdotally some non-technical folks got management jobs in tech companies and some journalists were ignorant about programming. I'm sorry but I don't consider this to be a very compelling argument. With this level of evidence it would be just as easy to argue that programmers today are given a higher status, and not looked down upon as geeky, despite the fact that it's easier than ever to learn about and become a programmer.

59 points by philk10 13y ago

I am also an old fart who decries the lack of respect by the young'uns these days. OP claims that's not his point; yet he is part of that demographic. Cogent points: there is dilution of the coder's message (code is hard; skills are needed) by the fire hose of media including the internet.

mildtrepidation 13y ago
It's not hard to see at least some of the angles it probably comes from. It's popular for politicians to bank on things like "everyone should learn to code" for publicity; outsourcing makes development look like a cheap commodity and a second thought; bottom of the barrel "website in a night" generators are crap, but they're cheap and easy, and most people can't tell the difference; websites like codeacademy present the image of a skillset you can pick up effectively in your downtime. So much of the public perception of programming has gone from "ooh, you do what? I have no idea how that works!" to "oh, you do that? Anyone can do that."

eternalban 13y ago

These people [1] had a clue regarding leveraging deep competence in specialized domains that made their contemporaries' eyes glaze over. The world runs on software. Just think about it and it should be clear what are the necessary steps to take. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar

thatthatis 13y ago

To write software, you used to have to be a physiscist. Or a least a mathematician with a deep understanding of why the registers were working. Then, the physics was more or less mastered and the profession split into electrical engineering (the physicists lamented this degradation I'm sure) and applied mathematics. Then, the math was more or less mastered to a level it could safely be abstracted away and math spun off computer science and software engineering. I'm sure the mathematicians were upset then at the degradation of the profession. Then, software engineering advanced to the point that ever higher levels of abstraction were present on ever faster computers, no longer did you have to get the logic right _and_ the math perfect for your program to run in acceptable time. And higher level languages emerged, assembly leading to c leading to python and JavaScript. And at every stage there was moaning, and excitement. Now, we stand on the precipice of the next great division. People can get a reasonably complicated website up by configuring Wordpress or Joomla or Drupal without writing a single line of code. A 14 year old can run a mcafe script at the geek squad counter and get the users computer back in decent shape. We are at the point of adding moderately skilled technicians to our field. We can piss and moan about the division, or we can recognize that it's part of the process of the industry and vocation maturing. The engineers at GM aren't bemoaning the fact that "car maintenance gurus (mechanics) don't have to understand the heat displacement of aluminum vs steel" Having mechanics makes the car industry more efficient and lets the engineers focus on the real hard problems. The same will be true of software, eventually.

pnathan 13y ago
I don't think your history is really quite correct in its nuance. Programming as an actual trade emerged quickly in the 50s. The 60s saw the rise of computer science degrees, often coming from either the Math or the EE side. During the 50s and 60s, the computers had tons of people working with FORTRAN/COBOL (& others) to churn out business code. This accelerated in the 70s. There were armies of basic programmers out there. It only takes flipping through Dijikstra to realize that these people were not super well trained. Occasionally in the recollections of the really early programmers, we learn that they were hired from the secretarial pool and trained if they had math aptitude. Not from physicists or the PhDs always. I am sure this was very true for the line of business & banking apps.
- thatthatis 13y ago
  Thanks for the addition. I made un-researched generalizations based on limited knowledge of the skills possessed by the pioneers in the field. I agree that it has, at the least, nuanced errors. But, I try not to let the exact truth get in the way of a good story unless the exact truth is the crux of the argument.
  - angersock 13y ago
    "But, I try not to let the exact truth get in the way of a good story unless the exact truth is the crux of the argument." The computer cares not for your platitudes. Fix your shit. (More specifically, at least put some timelines on your milestones--you overlook, for example, a lot of computer early adoption by banks and insurance companies. A lot. See Burroughs et al.) (These feel-good stories only serve to further undermine our profession.)
    - thatthatis 13y ago
      I think I gave an account of history that is accurate enough on a first order approximation, and it is history as parable to come sideways until I got to the key point of: specialization is a good thing. Are any of the field divisions I mentioned inaccurate? Or is it the chronology youre objecting to? This isn't a feel good story, it is a parable. My entire point could be rephrased in a more hostile fashion as: It is not presently feasible to be an expert in every aspect of computing, so why is further division of the field a bad thing?

fidotron 13y ago

London definitely has an exaggerated case of this (Nathan Barley really is far too close to home regarding the way he treats Pingu), but it's happening everywhere. The thing is it's like tax preparation: most people should probably be able to do it themselves, but once you want something interesting done you're going to need a professional. If all you develop as a software developer is monkey patching stuff together, then yes, you're in trouble, either from normal people, or from the products of other developers. However, the fun part of the job has always been being able to punch through big piles of crap to find ways to radically simplify what's going on in order to get an apparently magical improvement. That part is an art, and isn't going away in a hurry.

walshemj 13y ago
At the silicon milkabout recently it was wall to wall macbooks and MBA's.

dhfjgkrgjg 13y ago

In the old days people thought about design, the wrote software, they supported their product. Nowadays all the wannabees think installing a metric ton of shit from npm or the gem equivalents makes them a super productive brogrammer rock star developer. They have a single page website that requires gigabytes of javascript from fourty external locations to run a basic blog. They spend all day on github, but are borderline code unaware. They argue lack of generics in go is good. They are what the business and clients see, and that is why the people paying for software services end up labelling us all as muppets.

MAGZine 13y ago
TIL software reuse is for brogrammers and DRY is a farce.
- anaphor 13y ago
  parent said they dislike generics so how could they like DRY?

nickthemagicman 13y ago

"If you're ambitious and good at office politics and self-promotion, it's entirely possible - maybe even easier - to pass from junior programmer to executive management without actually passing through a stage of technical competence. It's a sort of turbo-charged Peter Principle that operates in the software industry." This feels so true at every business and academic institution I've worked for. My last CIO was a lawyer....

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pessimizer 13y ago

Were we ever considered professionals? There's no test - all you have to do to be a software developer is declare yourself to be one. There's no overarching professional organization or boards, therefore incompetents aren't de-certified and national lobbying isn't coherent. In fact, the largest companies that we work for are frequently lobbying for things that programmers don't support, or actively damage our interests in relation to management. We're also generally professional middle-class conservative enough that we're anti-union in a way that only people who are members of professional organizations that are at least 100 years old can afford to be. For doctors and lawyers it's easy to ignore cognitive dissonance because the freebies they get are so baked into government that it's hard to remember that people actually had to make a conscious effort to make that happen. There's no reason for programmers to be so complacent. The transistor isn't even as old as the National Association of Realtors. People in real estate have more clout, baked in advantage, and respect as a member of a profession than anybody can be expected to get by calling themselves a programmer. At least they have to take a test.

Havoc 13y ago
>the freebies they get are so baked into government What exactly do you understand under freebies [for 100y+ prof org members]? Interesting point about the older prof members being both anti-union and but joining a prof body. I reckon the two have different functions though. e.g. In my case the only thing I hear from my prof org is messages with a "comply or else" tone. Sure they do set minimum salaries for apprenticeships, but those are so far below market rate that its does even matter. A union in contrast would fit for better work conditions, better pay, better benefits etc. The only benefit I see is accreditation (admittedly a large benefit)...but that is hardly a freebie (took blood, sweat & many tears).
- pessimizer 13y ago
  >What exactly do you understand under freebies [for 100y+ prof org members]? Doctors, Lawyers, Realtors, etc. have written 90% of the state laws that they are governed under, and most of the federal ones. They've protected themselves against foreign competition, and shielded themselves against liability.

endlessvoid94 13y ago

I totally agree with you. However, that doesn't mean it will stop. Imagine what it was like to be a scribe; you were a craftsman, who cared about the details of your work, had the intuition and experience to anticipate how your work would change in the future, and to understand subtle nuances lost on the illiterate. What happened to the scribes? As literacy matured, and became widespread, they were out of a job. And it wasn't because they somehow became bad at their work. It was because they became obsolete. Now, I'm not arguing this will happen quickly, and it may look different, but I can't help but look around and see how much more accessible basic programming has become (tryruby.org and all the others). Slowly, very slowly, more people are becoming literate. They're not experts, and they may never be experts. But all of a sudden these people are experiencing an ability to see their ideas become reality, and more importantly, they're experiencing a new way to think. This is exactly what happened when people became literate, and the scribes disappeared. Figure out a way to ride this wave, and you'll never be obsolete.

JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Scribe is a lovely choice. The modern equivalent might be editor. They are now essentially unemployable with the advent of word processors, which make everyone think they can write. Thus all the illiterate menus, signs, fliers that pervade our world.
solidsnack9000 13y ago
Scribes didn't become obsolete due to the spread of literacy. It was due to the printing press.
- endlessvoid94 13y ago
  Good point. I guess I could pedantically counter with "the printing press enabled literacy". I don't think it changes my point too much, though :-)

corresation 13y ago

As he posits some may conclude, it does just read like bitter sour grapes...yet I've been professionally programming since 1995. Is someone casting their own lot as the lot of the world? http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-behavior-indicative-of-l,421/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-b... By and large I think having demonstrated skills in software development (and truthfully this means less that you can point to years of experience -- which may be 1 year of experience 20 times, or 20 years of experience -- or pieces of paper and demand respect) is just enormously powerful right now. I am incredibly, enormously grateful for the position I am in, and that my aptitudes as a child happened to bring me into the fold of something that ended up being one of the few careers where you can write your own meal ticket.

MetaCosm 13y ago
Couldn't agree more (and wonderful link). The article was so disconnected from my reality as to be confusing. (redacted probably irrelevant comment) EDIT: Part of the reason for this confusion may well be cultural. I am a US developer, and have heard similar "I get no respect" type rants from Canadian developers... often shocked by the pay and respect they can demand just a bit south.

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mattgreenrocks 13y ago

Why do developers resist being professionalized? Are we really all so naive to think that the world will grovel at our feet for the rest of time? Fact is, it's extremely likely you've been taken advantage of, financially at some point, for your skills. It's an ugly reality, but I'm betting it has happened to a lot of people, or is happening. There are people who love nothing more than to take advantage of information asymmetries to extract disproportionate amounts of value from you. I'm having a hard time thinking of any downsides to professionalizing. It cements our place in society, makes it a 'thing' for laypeople to ascribe importance to (however idiotic that concept is), which starts a feedback loop of expecting respect, both personally and professionally.

arethuza 13y ago
"I'm having a hard time thinking of any downsides to professionalizing" Well, if you are a real professional then a complaint can result in your being struck off and it being legally impossible for you to work in that area again. I really don't see how (or indeed why) that model could be applied to general software development or why it would be in any way desirable. NB: It might be applicable in very small niche areas - safety critical systems etc.
- walshemj 13y ago
  It's actually very very hard to get struck off as a lawyer or a doctor.
  - herge 13y ago
    But once you're persona non-gratta, it's impossible to get back into the good graces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass
    - walshemj 13y ago
      Journalists are only professionals in the same way hookers are. As Baldwin said “Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Will any of the NOW hacks who hacked phones have a problem getting a new job NO. Was Rupert Murdoch stripped of his newspapers as a result of the NOW scandal NO

cushychicken 13y ago

I think Zed Shaw nailed it with respect to this topic: "People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines." Tech doesn't value code because everyone knows it. There are tons of fields where your skills are still treated with Godlike reverence.

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rprospero 13y ago

Honestly, the reason that programming is getting a reputation for being easy is because it is easy. That's entirely the point of computer programming. If writing a program was harder than doing it by hand, we would just do it by hand. Honestly, any other profession would love to have it as easy as we have it. A surgeon doesn't get to mount the backup after a surgery fails. The engineers of the Mississippi river bridge couldn't checkout a standing bridge from their git repo. When a physicist wants to study particle physics, she can't download her own, personal LHC and start smashing protons. CEO's don't get separate development and testing companies where they can try out their business plans before it gets promoted to the actual corporation. Compared to everything else I do at work, programming is by far the easiest task. It's also the easiest to learn. Yes, a lot of those programers are pretty terrible, but there's a lot of terrible drivers, too.

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vinceguidry 13y ago
It's getting easier. It still isn't easy. > A surgeon doesn't get to mount the backup after a surgery fails. The engineers of the Mississippi river bridge couldn't checkout a standing bridge from their git repo. When a physicist wants to study particle physics, she can't download her own, personal LHC and start smashing protons. CEO's don't get separate development and testing companies where they can try out their business plans before it gets promoted to the actual corporation. You don't get these things either, unless you do the hard work to learn them and integrate them into your process. This isn't easy. Some of us are lucky enough to work in shops with this stuff already integrated, but for the rest of us we have to do it ourselves. At my job, my biggest codebase was split up into three repos, with a lot of nasty and brittle glue code written to make deployment work. It took a solid week's worth of after-hours work to get rid of all that brokeness and make deployment sane again. The advantages tooling brings to software development are often silently lost, only to be found out when your cloud provider loses your server and none of your backups work, and spinning up a new server from the repo takes, if you're lucky, all weekend to get working.
Mvandenbergh 13y ago

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bobochan 13y ago

I wonder if any of this is related to the growing hyper-specialization in the industry. When my dad finished grad school in engineering he did a lot of work in military radio communications and engineers were expected to be able to design all of the equipment (including certifying the plans for the transmission towers) and get the entire system working. Being a "programmer" used to mean something similar, we took responsibility for getting everything done. I took a course a few years ago on an "enterprise" development tool and asked a question about how the sample code mapped to fields in the database. The disappointing answer was that I "didn't need to worry about that" because that is something that the database engineers and deployment engineers would handle. Apparently I was supposed to be grateful that my role had been compartmentalized. Now programmers identify themselves as "Language X Developers," or even by their project roles, e.g. "Implementation Manager," "Software Architect." It is time to be a bit more bold. I am a Programmer. Capital P, full stop. Any language, any system, any project, any time.

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codystebbins 13y ago

So reading this it seems the primary argument against programming as a professional career is that entry level programming is becoming more accessible to a wider audience. However I think the author fails to make the argument though that just because some 14 year old can learn JavaScript quickly with a service like codeschool, that means I could hire that kid to replace a senior level programmer with a deep understanding of design patterns, data structures, algorithms, etc. The claim to me states understanding a basic script is all you need to write large scale, complex software. I do not know about everyone else, but I picked up coding pretty quickly and picked up everything else about software over years of patient study so this seems suspect to me. Software is not just about code, to focus on that makes our job look easy. I also have some problems with the "credentials = professionalism" argument, but many others in the thread have addressed it.

bobochan 13y ago
I agree with you, but I think that "entry level programming" is unfortunately much further away from the general public. I can still roll over to my Apple //e, reach around and flick the power switch, and be right into a BASIC prompt so that I can start typing in commands. Writing a game in the mid-80s meant a text adventure that would eventually be printed out and published in magazine. The first game that I ever bought was "Ultima" and it came on a floppy inside a resealable gallon kitchen bag. I talk to middle school students all the time that want to know how to code their first FPS before they have even got Hello World up and running. Setting aside what is best for programmers and their "status," it seems to me that what business needs are hundreds of thousands of employees that have at least enough of a programming background that they can automate some of their most mundane and repetitive tasks. I used to work in finance and I would sometimes wander through the rows of analysts and account managers copying and pasting spreadsheet data and making charts and presentations deep into the night. It is time to stop that insanity, to expose everyone to enough programming so that concepts like loops and if/then statements are understandable.

crncosta 13y ago

<i>If you're ambitious and good at office politics and self-promotion, it's entirely possible - maybe even easier - to pass from junior programmer to executive management without actually passing through a stage of technical competence.</i> Sad to see this happening, but (unfortunately) being politic is more important in this century than used to be before.

wes-exp 13y ago

Even barbers are licensed professionals. Meanwhile wannabe "software engineers" are copy-pasting together web applications that store the personal information of millions of people without the slightest thought behind security or proper design. We collectively wonder why there aren't more programmers... maybe the problem has never been a lack of education, but a lack of prestige and respect.

c--misura 13y ago

I'm sorry, but this sounds like sour grapes. If you build software, you're an exogenic source of that erosion too. You've created tools that have made it easier for the next person to contribute. This practice makes software development unique and exciting. There are plenty of competent and incompetent engineers and self-taught developers alike. The currency of expertise is not exclusive to post-secondary accredited programmers. It's earned with results and hard work.

gopher1 13y ago

His only evidence of this so-called erosion of status is that anecdotally some non-technical folks got management jobs in tech companies and some journalists were ignorant about programming. I'm sorry but I don't consider this to be a very compelling argument. With this level of evidence it would be just as easy to argue that programmers today are given a higher status, and not looked down upon as geeky, despite the fact that it's easier than ever to learn about and become a programmer.