I am a programmer

Usually it comes out to something like this, "Do we take pleasure in our art and pursue the art, or do we take pleasure in selling our art in pursuing that?"

It's painfully obvious that good businesses pay people to create a positive value proposition for them. Therefore, if you are running your career like a business, you need to be seeking to maximize your value proposition. Part of that is passing yourself off as a maximal value creator. That is one half of the essence of patio11's point.

A lot of the artists I've dealt with are content to seek their art and to work in badly paid jobs to maximize their pursuit of their art. As someone who can program computers, we can draw value from our art. We do not need to hack at night and work as a barista during the day. That is the other half of the essence of patio11's point.

No one has to take patio11's advice, and their priorities may not align with his priorities.

But if you're maximizing wealth creation through being a programmer, you need to stop 'being a programmer/hacker/ninja/rock star/operator' and start 'being a person who creates wealth for other people via technology'.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I disagree that people perceive "programmers" as highly-paid peons. If they did, why would you want to work for them? There are companies who are desperate for good programmers and recognize that good programmers are hard to come by. Negotiating with them is much less adversarial, I assure you.

I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying. I think we can both agree that a good programmer understands their role in the business and should view their practice holistically as a part of a much bigger entity. However, I don't think that people universally see programmers as overly-paid gurus or what-have-you. Assuming they want skilled programmers to work for them, why would they look for replaceable cogs and peons?

The true cost of hiring those kinds of programmers will not be apparent until 5 years down the road when you're spending 80% of your budget and time fixing bugs and putting out fires from pissed off client who cannot believe you would ship them such a shoddy product.

Again.. maybe there are people in the world who still do not know what a programmer does or the value of hiring good programmers. I would argue that they're probably in the minority or hiring for a position that doesn't require a lot of skill. In that case perhaps Patrick is right -- but again, why would you want to work for them unless you're desperate to fill in your H1B requirements or you're straight out of school and have no experience. A good programmer can do a lot better in my experience.

Jacques is essentially saying, "I'm a programmer, and I'm secure in that. Even when I'm just gluing existing code together, I'm damn good at it. I know that being a programmer who hacks code, first and foremost, doesn't make me a replaceable cog."

Others are not satisfied to think of themselves as doing gritty work that is not always an act of creative expression or a uniquely inspired solution. If I'm just wiring stuff together, the thought goes, surely anyone can do that? Ah, but the creativity lies in the problem solving, and that's what the employer/client cares about anyway. So I'm a problem-solver, first, and a programmer second.

I think some people are happy to be "just programmers" or "programmers first" and others are "programmers second."

In reality, there aren't two different jobs called "Software Engineer" and "Programmer" across companies, though glamour of title may be a hint as to how a company values and treats their programmers/engineers. If you have 20 years of programming experience and are hired to write code, you're a programmer by default. Whether the work is dull or interesting, creative or rote, or paints you as an "artiste" or a "cog in a machine" depends on the job rather than what you call yourself.

It can't hurt to bill yourself as a problem-solver with business and entrepreneurial savvy, etc., as companies will always say they want people with iniative and higher-level thinking, even if they aren't prepared to let you exercise it. Put another way, no potential employer is going to say, "We're looking for a programmer, but it says here you're an engineer. Are you sure you're not over-qualified for this position?" Your self-given title won't save you. On the flip side, a good company looking for highly creative engineers will know that many of them call themselves "programmers."

In summary, I see the "don't call yourself a programmer" advice as coming out of fear of being a replaceable menial worker, more than reflecting any reality about hiring practices or the deep nature of programming. Jacques's argument is, "Programming can be pretty menial sometimes, but good programmers are hard to replace. So avoid the duller work, and solve people's problems, and you can have a happy, highly-paid career."

One of the sloppiest and haphazard programmers I ever worked with is now writing software for non-critical medical monitoring devices (external monitors like O2 sensors, and blood pressure monitors) and it scares the living daylights out of me. When I'm in a hospital room I look around to see if his company's hardware is in use. It might not kill me, but it could contribute to that end.

I'll come full circle around to my initial assertion that I don't know if we can even get to the point of a true Professional Software Engineer. Many of the tasks we deal with are highly abstract. How do we define an acceptable failure rate for a TCP stack? And even if we do, how do we take that into account for a monitoring application? There are many hard questions we have to tackle prior to our industry being taken seriously as a true engineering discipline.

What troubles me is that very few of the leaders in the software community even care about these questions.