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For people supposedly so intelligent, programmers often appear quite foolish, at least when compared with other professionals. They give away enormous quantiti

For people supposedly so intelligent, programmers often appear quite foolish, at least when compared with other professionals. They give away enormous quantities of their labor for free through open source (some even going so far as to sign one-sided contracts granting the copyright to for-profit corporations without compensation). They openly denigrate their own skills by spreading egalitarian myths like "everyone can be a programmer" (whereas I doubt many doctors or lawyers would make similar declarations concerning the practice law or medicine) and by preferring the title "coder" over its considerably more prestigious alternatives like "programmer" or "software engineer." They promote bootcamp-style vocational schools to flood the market with cheap labor to compete with them and to further bolster the perception that programming is an easy, low-skill trade, perhaps a rung or two above mere clerical work. And then when it becomes apparent that they are getting screwed by their employers who collude with one another to drive down wages with no-poaching agreements, H-1B visas, and by firing senior devs in favor of 20-somethings, the long-ignored subject of unionization is revived. And of course, being programmers and therefore unsavvy, the model proposed is invariably that of a blue-collar trade union like the United Auto Workers Union and never an innocuous-sounding, white-collar "professional association" like the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, or American Dental Association. These outfits are so successful in both their lobbying and PR that they've made their members among of the highest paid practitioners in the world (particularly doctors), and the gullible masses remain wholly ignorant of their true nature and consequently spare them from the condemnation usually heaped upon unions, both public- and private-sector alike. In fact, their PR has been so successful that I wouldn't be surprised if someone responded to this very post contesting my characterization of them as unions, despite evidence of their anti-competitive practices being trivial to come by: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2006/216804.htm http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2006/216804.h...

gaius 12y ago
You are 100% correct. It is something that infuriates me when I hear people say they love programming so much they would do it for free. That's great but don't say it out loud. Some people are not motivated by money and that's fine but when you work value is created and it has to go somewhere. Even if you don't need it, take as much money as you can get then just donate it to the local animal shelter. Because if you don't, someone else will, and they will not spend it as wisely as you would. I see it all the time, silly kids who think there is something pure and noble about giving themselves carpal tunnel, sacrificing their 20s when they should be having fun and forming relationships, sleep deprivation and associated psychological problems, stress, getting burnt out for 0.001% of a company and their boss buying a Porsche and propping up his "habits". Lawyers and doctors are far savvier.
- nonymous-- 12y ago
  Thanks. I wasn't really advocating unionization or really anything in particular, just marveling at how stunningly clueless (or, if you prefer, generous and egalitarian) programmers can be. The amount of money we collectively leave on the table is staggering.
  - nsfyn55 12y ago
    > The amount of money we collectively leave on the table is staggering. Right if your goal is to make truckloads of money sure. Not all software professionals ascribe a great deal of value to this end. Many major advances in bringing high-end operating and distributed systems to the masses have come from "Open Source" movements. Is is that hard to imagine a more protectionist, profit-driven software industry where these technologies are shelved in favor of propping up current money makers? In effect denying cheap, high quality solutions to a generation of innovators and start up companies? As a side note I found your call for unionization to be a flawed comparison. The organizations you've alluded to (AMA and ABA) deal in inelastic goods that enjoy popular legal protections. This is for good reason, no one wants brain surgery from an amateur, but I might give one a shot at standing up my wordpress site.
    - gaius 12y ago
      You have managed to completely miss my point. Truckloads of money ARE being made. The only question is who controls them. If a programmer creates a product worth millions but only gets a £20k salary, where has the rest of the money gone? Are you really so altruistic that you would rather your boss and his boss got rich, than taint yourself with money? As I say if you don't want it donate it to good causes but either way YOU should control what happens to as much money as possible, because if you don't, someone else will.
      - nsfyn55 12y ago
        I think it is you that has missed the point. Its not about who gets the money, but whether the initiative would have survived at all in a corporate environment. Sometimes the only way to jump over the heads of the paymasters is to do something for free.
fsloth 12y ago
Yeah, this a thousand times. I cannot prove but I believe this happy-go-lucky professional ethos is also quite expensive for the rest of the society since everything runs on computers. Were the programs implemented by a less numerous but higher quality workforce I think the state of software would be much better. I think there is a kind of a institutional schizophreny on the role of the modern programmer since the first programmers were mostly a mechanical part of the machine translation process, punching cards for programs written by someone else. I believe this historical trait has skewed the perception of the requirements for the profession.
- vitd 12y ago
  >Were the programs implemented by a less numerous but higher quality workforce I think the state of software would be much better. While I understand the desire to improve the quality of programming, I don't think what you're proposing would do that. I think all it would do is encourage horrible enterprise practices to spread and create vendor lock-in as smaller companies become less able to compete.
  - fsloth 12y ago
    " I think all it would do is encourage horrible enterprise practices to spread and create vendor lock-in as smaller companies become less able to compete." I suppose it depends on whether the seed population in this parallel universe were composed of lisp hackers or architecture astronauts :)
krick 12y ago
What you are telling is completely true, yet this feels so unpleasant — how it sounds and what natural conclusions we can make from it. Because the same thing can be described in other words: it somehow happens that most of skilled professionals (mentioned doctors and lawyers in the first place) are mostly treating the world as zero-sum game and thus strive for personal success only, trying to be monopolists, restricting their domain of competence to any others, trying to scare off newcomers and make getting to the "inner circle" as hard as they can; while software engineers are treating the world as non-zero-sum game and thus somewhat naively strive to make world better in the first place, believing that they personally would also benefit from that. (Of course there are exceptions on the both sides, the description is purposely rough.) I don't know why it happens to be like that and if such people tend to become programmers or programming makes people to believe such things (although I have some guesses and the former seems more plausible, but that's another topic). But because of that striving to "make the world a better place" it would be much better if it would be natural for us (us people, not us programmers) to describe current behavior of doctors and lawyers as "evil" rather than describing behavior of software engineers as "foolish", even though both are completely valid. After all, the technical progress over last few centuries clearly shows that the world isn't zero-sum game, not yet.
- pacala 12y ago
  The world is not a zero sum game. But adjusted to a 3% annual growth rate, it _is_ a zero sum game. In other words, the growth rate is not arbitrarily large. On top of that, the finance industry is dedicated to capturing the 3% growth, and it's very successful at it. Thanks for making the world a better place, but chances are you won't see much personal gain from it.
  - krick 12y ago
    It would be zero sum game when there's no more place for new people to be born and no resources to feed them. The current state of being is that there are plenty resources just wasted because of very technical reasons and finance industry is very successful at making ones rich virtually for nothing, while others starve (that is money isn't used to unify measuring of value, as it was initially intended, but more like making money is orthogonal to producing value). Yeah, I know, it sounds like advocating communism. But what can I do if it so much naturally better in it's essence! And we would be pretty close to making it almost possible already, if not for that "pragmatic" ideology some people are spreading.
cowpig 12y ago
So foolish it is to enjoy one's work, share it for free. How stupid not to band together to spread misinformation about the nature of one's work in order to increase profitability. ^ What a crap culture that perpetuates this kind of thinking.
- notduncansmith 12y ago
  It is a crap culture. Unfortunately, I fear it's one we'll be stuck with for some time now. In the meantime, I don't think it'd be unreasonable for us to collectively up our business-savviness a bit. Some of us have families to feed, and that only gets harder as our industry's race to the bottom continues.
- revelation 12y ago
  Right, it's perfectly zen to be exploited and have the spoils of your work concentrated in the hands of a few. I'd rather have 100 doctors earn 500k/year than one insurance admin earning $50M. In the meantime, programmers aren't even paid overtime. Because...?
  - zxcvcxz 12y ago
    Contributing to open source != being exploited.
    - revelation 12y ago
      If you pick the one aspect that my comment isn't addressing, you can manage to dismantle it. Surprise! There'd be more open source if programmers were paid more, not bullied into working free overtime on a salary and pressured by companies into vastly expansive, potentially illegal (but what individual has the resources to find out?) contracts that curtail their copyright to even products they develop in their free time. These cases exist.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
shadowfiend 12y ago
For what it's worth, the foolishness you describe—striving for a non-zero-sum game, realizing that giving part of our work for free nets us benefits, being willing to do things in our spare time because our hobby and our work happen to overlap—these do not exclude being smart in the workplace and demanding we be paid what we deserve. Someone can simultaneously work on side projects for the greater benefit of the community around them, and make sure their employer is aware that working on stuff because they're interested in their spare time does not mean they can be underpaid. It's up to those that are considered the best by their peer group to lead the way on this. In fact, it's precisely the same mindset that has us contribute to open source for free, with a vision to expanding our collective knowledge base and propel software development as a whole forward, that should push us to demand better treatment and pay of the other developers around us, commensurate with their abilities. There are often two or three lynchpins at smaller companies who can easily ask for more for themselves, because they are invaluable to the organization. Those same lynchpins can also keep an eye on the other folks at the company and make sure they aren't being treated or paid like dirt. It's possible to do this while keeping the organization's own concerns in mind. Arguably this is the kind of thing that ultimately may lead to some sort of union, guild, or association structure, as the people working at one organization start going to work at other ones, and ask their original champions for help on how to be treated well at their new jobs. I for one will have my foolishness, which I truly feel is a great contributor to how fast our industry is able to move, and eat it, too, by looking out for the folks around me at work and doing what I can to make sure they're paid as they deserve, within the confines of what is possible without bankrupting my company. I'm sure it won't always be easy, but I suppose we wouldn't be talking about this if it were.
switch007 12y ago
> (some even going so far as to sign one-sided contracts granting the copyright to for-profit corporations without compensation) (not rhetorical) In situations where you need a job and don't have the cachet to dictate contract terms, what choice do you have? Such terms (and some equally egregious) are very common in some places. All companies know the value of it (but play dumb) and won't budge an inch.
- nonymous-- 12y ago
  Perhaps I should have been more specific. I was referring in that sentence to Contributor License Agreements (CLAs), specifically the most egregious ones, such as Canonical's CLA that not only transfers your copyright to Canonical but grants them the right to relicense your work under any license they wish, even proprietary. If I'm going to give something I produced away under a permissive license, I'd rather not be harassed to sign an actual, physical contract with some company as well, let alone one that places additional obligations on me while offering nothing in return.
zxcvcxz 12y ago
The thing is, most programming really isn't brain surgery in most cases. Unfortunately most professional programmers are arrogant douches that really do believe they're on the same level as a doctor. Maybe some are, especially if they're coding medical equipment, but the majority of programmers are just regular people with average IQs. Programming is only "hard" because traditional western schooling doesn't introduce you to any programming concepts.
- nonymous-- 12y ago
  http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/24/valley-heavyweight-vinod-khosla-says-replacing-doctors-with-data-crunchers-is-good-medicine/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/24/valley-heavyweight-vinod-k... http://www.businessinsider.com/ibms-watson-may-soon-be-the-best-doctor-in-the-world-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/ibms-watson-may-soon-be-the-b...
  - zxcvcxz 12y ago
    So like 0.1% of programming is brain surgery. But do you go to the brain surgeon when you need a band-aide? How often do you visit the brain surgeon? My point is most programmers are arrogant douches who think that their todo app is the equivalent of brain surgery. And the people coding robots to do surgery couldn't do it without actual surgeons telling them how to do it. And I can almost guarantee you that those programmers are getting paid hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars and are not the ones who are getting screwed by their employers.
    - nonymous-- 12y ago
      You keep touting brain surgery as if it's the yard stick by which all other endeavors (including pure mathematics and astrophysics) should be measured for difficulty and cognitive ability required--it isn't. The brain may be immensely complex, but neuroanatomy at the macroscopic scale isn't and has fewer inter-connected components than a large software project. The only reason you think brain surgery is so complicated is, again, because doctors have excellent PR.
jacques_chester 12y ago
> never an innocuous-sounding, white-collar "professional association" like the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, or American Dental Association. http://acm.org/ http://acm.org/ http://computer.org/ http://computer.org/ These organisations have been around for decades and have been pushing the professional-body wheelbarrow for the whole time.
- skylan_q 12y ago
  You don't go to jail for practicing programming or computer science if you aren't "accredited" by the ACM. Try practicing medicine without a medical license.
  - jacques_chester 12y ago
    If the ACM or IEEE had their way, you would. Which, frankly, would be approximately ridiculous. Even shitty code creates enormous value, and the industries where it matters have already extended their regulations to cover software development.
- gaius 12y ago
  I was a student member of the IMechE. I left when I realized they looked out for engineering employers, the government and actual engineers a very, very distant third.
Morphling 12y ago
I don't know what it is, but I feel same about programming as achieving anything else in my life; if I can do it, so can everyone else. I know how much effort I put into things, like, say a my B.Sc and while it too seemed big and hard thing when I started out I've managed yet again swindle my way through it without much of a hassle. Maybe it's about more you know about stuff the more you know how little you actually know, if that makes any sense at all...
analog31 12y ago
>>>>> They openly denigrate their own skills by spreading egalitarian myths like "everyone can be a programmer"... to further bolster the perception that programming is an easy, low-skill trade, perhaps a rung or two above mere clerical work. I think this works both ways. When I was in high school, it actually seemed like everyone could be a programmer. My mom was teaching programming at a state university extension campus. Her students were getting jobs after one year of school. I was already programming at the same level. Neither my parents nor I could see any reason to spend four years in college learning a skill that anybody could do, and we expected the market to saturate. So I majored in something else, and learned programming on my own. You can try to elevate it by calling it engineering, but it's not. Most programming (truth be told, most product design, not just programming) is done by trial and error. Of course there may be a level of computer related activity above programming, that deserves to be called engineering, that is vital for critical tasks. This is not to denigrate the market value of content knowledge, such as knowing a complicated API inside and out, or the different processes for making things out of metal, that allow a good designer to come up with better designs.
systemdturd 12y ago
I don't see the problem with open source work, any more than I do with legal folk and pro bono work. I do however take your point on the rest. Essentially we are treated how we let the folks treat us. I think this is partly an endemic cultural thing though in big American firms, and firms that emulate them, where they publically say that tech is the lifeblood of their firm, but privately treat it as a cost centre to be mercilessly cut to as close to zero as possible.
fab13n 12y ago
Your comment addresses many things at once, some insightful, others more botched IMO. However I find them wrong in a very interesting way, so let me try to counter them. First, seeing "programming" as a generalised activity is barely more accurate than bundling "doing stuff in front of a screen and keyboard" together. You wouldn't bundle together writing a novel and doing mechanical simulations on Mapple, would you? Same for programming. More specifically, the intersection between fun+unpaid open-source programming and corporate programming is tiny. Nobody's going to write an open-source SAP module for fun. As for big, strategic open-source projects, they have their many unfunny parts done by employees, who typically work for companies who want to commoditize something on their vertical market, by enabling an open-source product. I do hack some stuff for fun, some others for money. I reasonably often manage to write fun stuff for money, and sometimes I even get to open-source it. But my open-source programming? I do that because it's more fun than _World of Warcraft_ or TV watching in my twisted mind; it has little to do with my job (most of the time, and unfortunately). The "I'm no Senior Software Architect I'm just a coder" thing: OK I'm guilty of that one, but it's no modesty, it's just instinctive rejection towards a corporate system we often despise. We have a urge to reject the Dilbert ladder, the way you might reject a medal proposal from a country / organization whose ethics you condemn. Think of the people who declined the Nobel prize, nobody ever believe anyone did that out of modesty. An important point of yours still stands though: not playing along with the corporate charade is going to hurt most of those who indulge in it, in the long term. About ageism, and as a not-so-young person anymore: when you age, you get a broader picture of what you work on, and why, while you lose some sharpness, most notably in speed of learning. This broader view has some value for the company, but only as long as it comes with some managerial skills: your better synthetic view is of no value, if you can't effectively share it with others. Your caricatural Aspergerish programmer doesn't have the interpersonal skills required to transform the insights of maturity into value for a company, and that kind of person is over-represented among the people who still call themselves "coders" when they hit 40. Successful mature hackers hide under other titles, in companies. As for the "everyone can be a programmer", I don't remember having ever witnessed that, quite the opposite. Actually, I'm here because a decade ago, I enjoyed reading some smug essays, from some openly elitist guy who was trying to figure out what made hackers such special bunch ;-) About the dangers of boot camps: if you need to teach someone how to program, he won't be serious competition for any hacker. You'd have to teach a hacker how _not_ to program. Cue that famous story about Mozart [http://betweenletters.quora.com/Mozart-How-Do-You-Write-a-Symphony http://betweenletters.quora.com/Mozart-How-Do-You-Write-a-Sy...]. OTOH, H1B might be more of an issue, I don't know. Sure it's cheaper competition; but what makes the Silicon Valley such a wealth generator is a critical mass of smart people. It might well be that allowing a thousand super-smart foreigners creates interesting jobs for hundreds of thousands of merely-smart Americans? About programmers being typically unsavvy with politics and human relationships, there sure is a strong correlation here. Not being American, I don't understand why you typically despise unions more than the other lobbies which serve wealthier interests, but I can see the savviness in avoiding a name that triggers knee-jerk reactions in many voters. So, back to the core argument: why don't we organize into unions, optionally under a less unamerican name? An issue is that many of the smarter programmers already have a fun job at a decent pay. In Europe, they also typically enjoy a healthy life/work balance, but the American relationship with "work ethics" is yet another thing I won't pretend to understand. Anyway, when you have fun doing something you're good at, you aren't tempted to enter a field you neither like nor master, such as politics, be it the genuine or the corporate kind. And why aren't we typically good at it? Well, we typically enjoy deterministic things with explicit rules, like computers and unlike politics. We also typically can and love to fit complex models in our minds all at once, to design and debug them; I guess it often comes with a solipsist / introvert character. Would I want a programmers' union? I'm not sure. I fear that it would favor a bureaucratized view of development, and suck the fun out of the job. I navigate the anarchic development job market just fine the current way, favoring what I personally care about (lots of from-scratch / exploratory developments, moderate workload, mutual trust with my hierarchy). I don't want to think of my job as a permanent struggle against my nasty overlords, the way automobile workers seem to experience their workday. But sure, there needs to be someone to kick the companies' asses when they implement no-poaching cartels.
vpalanc1 12y ago
It strikes me as incredibly... (foolish, arrogant, etc.) to think that one knows better how a set of certain people (programmers in this case) SHOULD organize their life/defend "their rights". People, in general, don't want to be rich. They want to be happy. Programmers are a happy bunch, when you look at them in aggregate, and compare with other categories of professionals. They are happy to give away enormous quantities of their labour. They spread "egalitarian myths" because they are happy with their lifestyle, and want others to join in. Because they are so confident, that they don't feel they need monopolies to protect or improve their lifestyle. You are making a fundamentally flawed assumption that programmers are not "smart enough to unionise". What if they are smart enough NOT TO unionise? What if they actually know better than you think they do? Never assume you know better how one should live his/her life.

gaius 12y ago

You are 100% correct. It is something that infuriates me when I hear people say they love programming so much they would do it for free. That's great but don't say it out loud. Some people are not motivated by money and that's fine but when you work value is created and it has to go somewhere. Even if you don't need it, take as much money as you can get then just donate it to the local animal shelter. Because if you don't, someone else will, and they will not spend it as wisely as you would. I see it all the time, silly kids who think there is something pure and noble about giving themselves carpal tunnel, sacrificing their 20s when they should be having fun and forming relationships, sleep deprivation and associated psychological problems, stress, getting burnt out for 0.001% of a company and their boss buying a Porsche and propping up his "habits". Lawyers and doctors are far savvier.

nonymous-- 12y ago
Thanks. I wasn't really advocating unionization or really anything in particular, just marveling at how stunningly clueless (or, if you prefer, generous and egalitarian) programmers can be. The amount of money we collectively leave on the table is staggering.
- nsfyn55 12y ago
  > The amount of money we collectively leave on the table is staggering. Right if your goal is to make truckloads of money sure. Not all software professionals ascribe a great deal of value to this end. Many major advances in bringing high-end operating and distributed systems to the masses have come from "Open Source" movements. Is is that hard to imagine a more protectionist, profit-driven software industry where these technologies are shelved in favor of propping up current money makers? In effect denying cheap, high quality solutions to a generation of innovators and start up companies? As a side note I found your call for unionization to be a flawed comparison. The organizations you've alluded to (AMA and ABA) deal in inelastic goods that enjoy popular legal protections. This is for good reason, no one wants brain surgery from an amateur, but I might give one a shot at standing up my wordpress site.
  - gaius 12y ago
    You have managed to completely miss my point. Truckloads of money ARE being made. The only question is who controls them. If a programmer creates a product worth millions but only gets a £20k salary, where has the rest of the money gone? Are you really so altruistic that you would rather your boss and his boss got rich, than taint yourself with money? As I say if you don't want it donate it to good causes but either way YOU should control what happens to as much money as possible, because if you don't, someone else will.
    - nsfyn55 12y ago
      I think it is you that has missed the point. Its not about who gets the money, but whether the initiative would have survived at all in a corporate environment. Sometimes the only way to jump over the heads of the paymasters is to do something for free.

fsloth 12y ago

Yeah, this a thousand times. I cannot prove but I believe this happy-go-lucky professional ethos is also quite expensive for the rest of the society since everything runs on computers. Were the programs implemented by a less numerous but higher quality workforce I think the state of software would be much better. I think there is a kind of a institutional schizophreny on the role of the modern programmer since the first programmers were mostly a mechanical part of the machine translation process, punching cards for programs written by someone else. I believe this historical trait has skewed the perception of the requirements for the profession.

vitd 12y ago
>Were the programs implemented by a less numerous but higher quality workforce I think the state of software would be much better. While I understand the desire to improve the quality of programming, I don't think what you're proposing would do that. I think all it would do is encourage horrible enterprise practices to spread and create vendor lock-in as smaller companies become less able to compete.
- fsloth 12y ago
  " I think all it would do is encourage horrible enterprise practices to spread and create vendor lock-in as smaller companies become less able to compete." I suppose it depends on whether the seed population in this parallel universe were composed of lisp hackers or architecture astronauts :)

krick 12y ago

What you are telling is completely true, yet this feels so unpleasant — how it sounds and what natural conclusions we can make from it. Because the same thing can be described in other words: it somehow happens that most of skilled professionals (mentioned doctors and lawyers in the first place) are mostly treating the world as zero-sum game and thus strive for personal success only, trying to be monopolists, restricting their domain of competence to any others, trying to scare off newcomers and make getting to the "inner circle" as hard as they can; while software engineers are treating the world as non-zero-sum game and thus somewhat naively strive to make world better in the first place, believing that they personally would also benefit from that. (Of course there are exceptions on the both sides, the description is purposely rough.) I don't know why it happens to be like that and if such people tend to become programmers or programming makes people to believe such things (although I have some guesses and the former seems more plausible, but that's another topic). But because of that striving to "make the world a better place" it would be much better if it would be natural for us (us people, not us programmers) to describe current behavior of doctors and lawyers as "evil" rather than describing behavior of software engineers as "foolish", even though both are completely valid. After all, the technical progress over last few centuries clearly shows that the world isn't zero-sum game, not yet.

pacala 12y ago
The world is not a zero sum game. But adjusted to a 3% annual growth rate, it _is_ a zero sum game. In other words, the growth rate is not arbitrarily large. On top of that, the finance industry is dedicated to capturing the 3% growth, and it's very successful at it. Thanks for making the world a better place, but chances are you won't see much personal gain from it.
- krick 12y ago
  It would be zero sum game when there's no more place for new people to be born and no resources to feed them. The current state of being is that there are plenty resources just wasted because of very technical reasons and finance industry is very successful at making ones rich virtually for nothing, while others starve (that is money isn't used to unify measuring of value, as it was initially intended, but more like making money is orthogonal to producing value). Yeah, I know, it sounds like advocating communism. But what can I do if it so much naturally better in it's essence! And we would be pretty close to making it almost possible already, if not for that "pragmatic" ideology some people are spreading.

cowpig 12y ago

So foolish it is to enjoy one's work, share it for free. How stupid not to band together to spread misinformation about the nature of one's work in order to increase profitability. ^ What a crap culture that perpetuates this kind of thinking.

notduncansmith 12y ago
It is a crap culture. Unfortunately, I fear it's one we'll be stuck with for some time now. In the meantime, I don't think it'd be unreasonable for us to collectively up our business-savviness a bit. Some of us have families to feed, and that only gets harder as our industry's race to the bottom continues.
revelation 12y ago
Right, it's perfectly zen to be exploited and have the spoils of your work concentrated in the hands of a few. I'd rather have 100 doctors earn 500k/year than one insurance admin earning $50M. In the meantime, programmers aren't even paid overtime. Because...?
- zxcvcxz 12y ago
  Contributing to open source != being exploited.
  - revelation 12y ago
    If you pick the one aspect that my comment isn't addressing, you can manage to dismantle it. Surprise! There'd be more open source if programmers were paid more, not bullied into working free overtime on a salary and pressured by companies into vastly expansive, potentially illegal (but what individual has the resources to find out?) contracts that curtail their copyright to even products they develop in their free time. These cases exist.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]

shadowfiend 12y ago

For what it's worth, the foolishness you describe—striving for a non-zero-sum game, realizing that giving part of our work for free nets us benefits, being willing to do things in our spare time because our hobby and our work happen to overlap—these do not exclude being smart in the workplace and demanding we be paid what we deserve. Someone can simultaneously work on side projects for the greater benefit of the community around them, and make sure their employer is aware that working on stuff because they're interested in their spare time does not mean they can be underpaid. It's up to those that are considered the best by their peer group to lead the way on this. In fact, it's precisely the same mindset that has us contribute to open source for free, with a vision to expanding our collective knowledge base and propel software development as a whole forward, that should push us to demand better treatment and pay of the other developers around us, commensurate with their abilities. There are often two or three lynchpins at smaller companies who can easily ask for more for themselves, because they are invaluable to the organization. Those same lynchpins can also keep an eye on the other folks at the company and make sure they aren't being treated or paid like dirt. It's possible to do this while keeping the organization's own concerns in mind. Arguably this is the kind of thing that ultimately may lead to some sort of union, guild, or association structure, as the people working at one organization start going to work at other ones, and ask their original champions for help on how to be treated well at their new jobs. I for one will have my foolishness, which I truly feel is a great contributor to how fast our industry is able to move, and eat it, too, by looking out for the folks around me at work and doing what I can to make sure they're paid as they deserve, within the confines of what is possible without bankrupting my company. I'm sure it won't always be easy, but I suppose we wouldn't be talking about this if it were.

switch007 12y ago

> (some even going so far as to sign one-sided contracts granting the copyright to for-profit corporations without compensation) (not rhetorical) In situations where you need a job and don't have the cachet to dictate contract terms, what choice do you have? Such terms (and some equally egregious) are very common in some places. All companies know the value of it (but play dumb) and won't budge an inch.

nonymous-- 12y ago
Perhaps I should have been more specific. I was referring in that sentence to Contributor License Agreements (CLAs), specifically the most egregious ones, such as Canonical's CLA that not only transfers your copyright to Canonical but grants them the right to relicense your work under any license they wish, even proprietary. If I'm going to give something I produced away under a permissive license, I'd rather not be harassed to sign an actual, physical contract with some company as well, let alone one that places additional obligations on me while offering nothing in return.

zxcvcxz 12y ago

The thing is, most programming really isn't brain surgery in most cases. Unfortunately most professional programmers are arrogant douches that really do believe they're on the same level as a doctor. Maybe some are, especially if they're coding medical equipment, but the majority of programmers are just regular people with average IQs. Programming is only "hard" because traditional western schooling doesn't introduce you to any programming concepts.

nonymous-- 12y ago
http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/24/valley-heavyweight-vinod-khosla-says-replacing-doctors-with-data-crunchers-is-good-medicine/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/24/valley-heavyweight-vinod-k... http://www.businessinsider.com/ibms-watson-may-soon-be-the-best-doctor-in-the-world-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/ibms-watson-may-soon-be-the-b...
- zxcvcxz 12y ago
  So like 0.1% of programming is brain surgery. But do you go to the brain surgeon when you need a band-aide? How often do you visit the brain surgeon? My point is most programmers are arrogant douches who think that their todo app is the equivalent of brain surgery. And the people coding robots to do surgery couldn't do it without actual surgeons telling them how to do it. And I can almost guarantee you that those programmers are getting paid hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars and are not the ones who are getting screwed by their employers.
  - nonymous-- 12y ago
    You keep touting brain surgery as if it's the yard stick by which all other endeavors (including pure mathematics and astrophysics) should be measured for difficulty and cognitive ability required--it isn't. The brain may be immensely complex, but neuroanatomy at the macroscopic scale isn't and has fewer inter-connected components than a large software project. The only reason you think brain surgery is so complicated is, again, because doctors have excellent PR.

jacques_chester 12y ago

> never an innocuous-sounding, white-collar "professional association" like the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, or American Dental Association. http://acm.org/ http://acm.org/ http://computer.org/ http://computer.org/ These organisations have been around for decades and have been pushing the professional-body wheelbarrow for the whole time.

skylan_q 12y ago
You don't go to jail for practicing programming or computer science if you aren't "accredited" by the ACM. Try practicing medicine without a medical license.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  If the ACM or IEEE had their way, you would. Which, frankly, would be approximately ridiculous. Even shitty code creates enormous value, and the industries where it matters have already extended their regulations to cover software development.
gaius 12y ago
I was a student member of the IMechE. I left when I realized they looked out for engineering employers, the government and actual engineers a very, very distant third.

Morphling 12y ago

I don't know what it is, but I feel same about programming as achieving anything else in my life; if I can do it, so can everyone else. I know how much effort I put into things, like, say a my B.Sc and while it too seemed big and hard thing when I started out I've managed yet again swindle my way through it without much of a hassle. Maybe it's about more you know about stuff the more you know how little you actually know, if that makes any sense at all...

analog31 12y ago

>>>>> They openly denigrate their own skills by spreading egalitarian myths like "everyone can be a programmer"... to further bolster the perception that programming is an easy, low-skill trade, perhaps a rung or two above mere clerical work. I think this works both ways. When I was in high school, it actually seemed like everyone could be a programmer. My mom was teaching programming at a state university extension campus. Her students were getting jobs after one year of school. I was already programming at the same level. Neither my parents nor I could see any reason to spend four years in college learning a skill that anybody could do, and we expected the market to saturate. So I majored in something else, and learned programming on my own. You can try to elevate it by calling it engineering, but it's not. Most programming (truth be told, most product design, not just programming) is done by trial and error. Of course there may be a level of computer related activity above programming, that deserves to be called engineering, that is vital for critical tasks. This is not to denigrate the market value of content knowledge, such as knowing a complicated API inside and out, or the different processes for making things out of metal, that allow a good designer to come up with better designs.

systemdturd 12y ago

I don't see the problem with open source work, any more than I do with legal folk and pro bono work. I do however take your point on the rest. Essentially we are treated how we let the folks treat us. I think this is partly an endemic cultural thing though in big American firms, and firms that emulate them, where they publically say that tech is the lifeblood of their firm, but privately treat it as a cost centre to be mercilessly cut to as close to zero as possible.

fab13n 12y ago

Your comment addresses many things at once, some insightful, others more botched IMO. However I find them wrong in a very interesting way, so let me try to counter them. First, seeing "programming" as a generalised activity is barely more accurate than bundling "doing stuff in front of a screen and keyboard" together. You wouldn't bundle together writing a novel and doing mechanical simulations on Mapple, would you? Same for programming. More specifically, the intersection between fun+unpaid open-source programming and corporate programming is tiny. Nobody's going to write an open-source SAP module for fun. As for big, strategic open-source projects, they have their many unfunny parts done by employees, who typically work for companies who want to commoditize something on their vertical market, by enabling an open-source product. I do hack some stuff for fun, some others for money. I reasonably often manage to write fun stuff for money, and sometimes I even get to open-source it. But my open-source programming? I do that because it's more fun than _World of Warcraft_ or TV watching in my twisted mind; it has little to do with my job (most of the time, and unfortunately). The "I'm no Senior Software Architect I'm just a coder" thing: OK I'm guilty of that one, but it's no modesty, it's just instinctive rejection towards a corporate system we often despise. We have a urge to reject the Dilbert ladder, the way you might reject a medal proposal from a country / organization whose ethics you condemn. Think of the people who declined the Nobel prize, nobody ever believe anyone did that out of modesty. An important point of yours still stands though: not playing along with the corporate charade is going to hurt most of those who indulge in it, in the long term. About ageism, and as a not-so-young person anymore: when you age, you get a broader picture of what you work on, and why, while you lose some sharpness, most notably in speed of learning. This broader view has some value for the company, but only as long as it comes with some managerial skills: your better synthetic view is of no value, if you can't effectively share it with others. Your caricatural Aspergerish programmer doesn't have the interpersonal skills required to transform the insights of maturity into value for a company, and that kind of person is over-represented among the people who still call themselves "coders" when they hit 40. Successful mature hackers hide under other titles, in companies. As for the "everyone can be a programmer", I don't remember having ever witnessed that, quite the opposite. Actually, I'm here because a decade ago, I enjoyed reading some smug essays, from some openly elitist guy who was trying to figure out what made hackers such special bunch ;-) About the dangers of boot camps: if you need to teach someone how to program, he won't be serious competition for any hacker. You'd have to teach a hacker how _not_ to program. Cue that famous story about Mozart [http://betweenletters.quora.com/Mozart-How-Do-You-Write-a-Symphony http://betweenletters.quora.com/Mozart-How-Do-You-Write-a-Sy...]. OTOH, H1B might be more of an issue, I don't know. Sure it's cheaper competition; but what makes the Silicon Valley such a wealth generator is a critical mass of smart people. It might well be that allowing a thousand super-smart foreigners creates interesting jobs for hundreds of thousands of merely-smart Americans? About programmers being typically unsavvy with politics and human relationships, there sure is a strong correlation here. Not being American, I don't understand why you typically despise unions more than the other lobbies which serve wealthier interests, but I can see the savviness in avoiding a name that triggers knee-jerk reactions in many voters. So, back to the core argument: why don't we organize into unions, optionally under a less unamerican name? An issue is that many of the smarter programmers already have a fun job at a decent pay. In Europe, they also typically enjoy a healthy life/work balance, but the American relationship with "work ethics" is yet another thing I won't pretend to understand. Anyway, when you have fun doing something you're good at, you aren't tempted to enter a field you neither like nor master, such as politics, be it the genuine or the corporate kind. And why aren't we typically good at it? Well, we typically enjoy deterministic things with explicit rules, like computers and unlike politics. We also typically can and love to fit complex models in our minds all at once, to design and debug them; I guess it often comes with a solipsist / introvert character. Would I want a programmers' union? I'm not sure. I fear that it would favor a bureaucratized view of development, and suck the fun out of the job. I navigate the anarchic development job market just fine the current way, favoring what I personally care about (lots of from-scratch / exploratory developments, moderate workload, mutual trust with my hierarchy). I don't want to think of my job as a permanent struggle against my nasty overlords, the way automobile workers seem to experience their workday. But sure, there needs to be someone to kick the companies' asses when they implement no-poaching cartels.

vpalanc1 12y ago

It strikes me as incredibly... (foolish, arrogant, etc.) to think that one knows better how a set of certain people (programmers in this case) SHOULD organize their life/defend "their rights". People, in general, don't want to be rich. They want to be happy. Programmers are a happy bunch, when you look at them in aggregate, and compare with other categories of professionals. They are happy to give away enormous quantities of their labour. They spread "egalitarian myths" because they are happy with their lifestyle, and want others to join in. Because they are so confident, that they don't feel they need monopolies to protect or improve their lifestyle. You are making a fundamentally flawed assumption that programmers are not "smart enough to unionise". What if they are smart enough NOT TO unionise? What if they actually know better than you think they do? Never assume you know better how one should live his/her life.