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Professionalism is for Amateurs

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Re: Professionalism is for Amateurs

#4
post #2

First, "professional" and "amateur" should be defined to better make his point. Also, the examples are anecdotal.

"First, "professional" and "amateur" should be defined to better make his point."

I think that the whole article is the definition, if not explicit than at least inferred from the examples. Not that I think that the only proper definition of 'professional' is: boring, limited, uninspiring (the author seems to suggest that).

On the contrary - there are some things that discern professional software development from unorganized mess and I'd rather have them in place: source control, automatic and repeatable build and deployment, regression tests etc.

Re: Professionalism is for Amateurs

#8
I never use the term "professional" in the context of computing - it pretty much means nothing as far as I am concerned as to various people it can mean:

- Wearing a suit, shirt and tie

- Writing lots of documents that nobody reads

- Having source control, automated build process and unit tests

- Always saying yes to a customer

I also know quite a few "real" professionals (doctors, lawyers, professionally qualified engineers) - using those standards I'm quite happy to state that I'm not a professional if anyone asks.

[Edit: Obviously I do think one of those points above is important!]

Re: Professionalism is for Amateurs

#9
Professionalism makes the difference between bad quality and reasonable quality. For creating something amazing professionalism is not enough. Following the rules just leads you to a certain level, after that you have to break some of them.
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