It would be nice to shunt all the blame off on MBAs but programmers have much of the responsibility to shoulder themselves. How many times a month does news.yc

It would be nice to shunt all the blame off on MBAs but programmers have much of the responsibility to shoulder themselves. How many times a month does news.yc have a thread where people debate whether you need any education whatsoever to do our job? If we can't even decide ourselves no wonder others think anyone can do what we do. Another systemic problem in our industry is training. "Training" at most companies, if you're lucky, is a small budget for buying books on amazon.com that you can bring home and read on your own time. Lots of companies will tell you (especially if you're a new grad) they train their new employees and then, once hired, you're shunted off into a cube and the "training" turns out to be an overworked co-worker who comes over to tell you how to set up your workstation, where the source code is oh and if you have any questions just send me an email. Combine the above with a culture of acting like add-afflicted children (oooh shiny erlang, let's rewrite everything in erlang! Rails is sexy. I'm a rockstar!), and the MBA types distrust us and view us as people incapable of managing ourselves, people that need proper structure to deliver anything at all (Joel's last statements). At my last job, soon before I left and after I'd handed in my resignation, a manager (not my manager but another) came around and congratulated me on how much work I'd gotten done in my last couple of weeks, with the obvious subtext that he was surprised I did anything at all since I'd resigned. It was insulting. If he had seen me as a real professional, there's no way he would've said that but he obviously didn't.