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As long as the job of a programmer is to be a business subordinate, it will not change and we'll see crappy code forever. Mainstream business culture conceives

As long as the job of a programmer is to be a business subordinate, it will not change and we'll see crappy code forever. Mainstream business culture conceives of management as a greater-than relationship. You're a lesser being than your boss, who's a lesser being than his boss, and so on... It also is inhospitable to the sorts of people who are best at technology itself. Finally and related, it conceives of "working for" someone not as (a) working toward that person's benefit, as in a true profession, but (b) being on-call to be micromanaged. The result is that most programmers end up overmanaged, pigeonholed, disempowered, and disengaged. Shitty code results. If you want to fix code, you have to fix the work environment for programmers. Open allocation is a big step in the right direction, and technical decisions should be made by technical people. Ultimately, we have to stop thinking of "working for" someone as subordination and, instead, as working toward that person's benefit. Otherwise, of course we're going to get shitty code as people desperately scramble (a) up the ladder, or (b) into a comfortable hiding place.

cwyers 12y ago
"As long as the job of a programmer is to be a business subordinate, it will not change and we'll see crappy code forever." Well of course that's the job of the programmer. The programmer is supposed to build something that does something useful. Most of the time, the primary value of the code isn't that it's GOOD, it's that it DOES THE THING. Oh, sure, at the level of (say) the Linux kernel you can almost think of it as code for the sake of code, but you walk back up the chain and you'll find a lot of people contributing indirectly because they want to do THINGS and they find that they need a kernel for those things. But most programmers aren't at that far of a remove from doing things, they work directly for a company engaged in doing something other than selling code. Management at that company wants things done. They insist upon this at a very high level of abstraction, that of "telling you to do the thing for them." You are a leaky abstraction.
- HolyHaddock 12y ago
  Purpose and status aren't linked. There are programmers who without direct day-to-day management produce code that is valuable to the business, and programmers who receive comprehensive managerial attention and produce code that costs the business.

cwyers 12y ago

"As long as the job of a programmer is to be a business subordinate, it will not change and we'll see crappy code forever." Well of course that's the job of the programmer. The programmer is supposed to build something that does something useful. Most of the time, the primary value of the code isn't that it's GOOD, it's that it DOES THE THING. Oh, sure, at the level of (say) the Linux kernel you can almost think of it as code for the sake of code, but you walk back up the chain and you'll find a lot of people contributing indirectly because they want to do THINGS and they find that they need a kernel for those things. But most programmers aren't at that far of a remove from doing things, they work directly for a company engaged in doing something other than selling code. Management at that company wants things done. They insist upon this at a very high level of abstraction, that of "telling you to do the thing for them." You are a leaky abstraction.

HolyHaddock 12y ago
Purpose and status aren't linked. There are programmers who without direct day-to-day management produce code that is valuable to the business, and programmers who receive comprehensive managerial attention and produce code that costs the business.