The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals • Hacker News Board

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#41

Post by tjr » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:05 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #24

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #18

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…

"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 are…

NB: It might be applicable in very small niche areas - safety critical systems etc.

And such systems are certified (in various ways, depending on the exact nature of the system). It'd be a waste of time and energy to certify an iPhone game.

So rather than certifying the software developer, certify the software, as needed. That way you can work on safety-critical jet software by day, and crank out cheesy, untested mobile entertainment software by night.

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#42

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:07 PM UTC

rprospero wrote: post #28

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 bridg…

[deleted]

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#43

Post by walshemj » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:07 PM UTC

tjr wrote: post #30

pessimizer wrote: post #11

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 interes…

Were we ever considered professionals? Not officially, no. I've always liked this line of thinking, though: http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-...

That's "engineering" language for you :-)

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#44

Post by Mvandenbergh » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:08 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #20

pessimizer wrote: post #11

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 interes…

>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 apprentic…

>The only benefit I see is accreditation (admittedly a large benefit)...but that is hardly a freebie (took blood, sweat & many tears).

Sure, that's by the design of your fellow professionals. It's part of the mechanism for protecting the wages of fully qualified professionals. Unions are often happy enough with much lower apprenticeship wages as well by the way.

The two biggest freebies are also the two traditional markers of the professions: -Self regulation: most misconduct is dealt with by peers under rules set by those peers -Protected entry: lawyers and doctors control how many people can enter those professions and who can call themselves a lawyer or a doctor.

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#45

Post by walshemj » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:08 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #20

pessimizer wrote: post #11

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 interes…

>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 apprentic…

The BMA and RCN do act in the capacity of a trade union in a lot of ways though.

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#46

Post by maratd » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:09 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #11

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 interes…

> There's no overarching professional organization or boards, therefore incompetents aren't de-certified and national lobbying isn't coherent.

Incompetents are rarely de-certified in professions that have what are effectively guilds. How nutty do you have to be to appreciate a holdover from the middle ages?

In fact, it is usually the incompetents who seek the protection of guilds and unions. Without them, where would the air of competence come from?

They might actually be asked ... gasp ... to perform some task to prove their competence! When was the last time you asked your lawyer to perform a "legal test"? We get asked to do small code tests and projects to prove our competence all the time.

> There's no test - all you have to do to be a software developer is declare yourself to be one.

Really? No tests? Because there is no bullshit-institutionalized-social-proof crap, we are asked to take a test and prove our mettle before being hired for every job. A genuine filter to get rid of the incompetents. I am thankful every day that I'm not part of a regulated industry.

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#47

Post by anaphor » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:11 PM UTC

MAGZine wrote: post #23

dhfjgkrgjg wrote: post #7

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 border…

TIL software reuse is for brogrammers and DRY is a farce.

parent said they dislike generics so how could they like DRY?

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#48

Post by CmonDev » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:11 PM UTC

thatthatis wrote: post #4

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 o…

"assembly leading to c leading to python and JavaScript" - it sometimes baffles me why people decided that basic code quality doesn't matter any more and we ended up with script-like languages... Definitely a strong contributor to the subj problem. If the dev world went the OCAML way we could maintain a stronger professional image...

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#49

Post by bobochan » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:13 PM UTC

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.

Re: The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

#50

Post by vinceguidry » Wed, Feb 12, 2014, 5:15 PM UTC

rprospero wrote: post #28

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 bridg…

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.