The Erosion Of The Status Of Software Developers As Professionals

I am also an old fart who decries the lack of respect by the young'uns these days. OP claims that's not his point; yet he is part of that demographic.

Cogent points: there is dilution of the coder's message (code is hard; skills are needed) by the fire hose of media including the internet.

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 off computer science and software engineering. I'm sure the mathematicians were upset then at the degradation of the profession.

Then, software engineering advanced to the point that ever higher levels of abstraction were present on ever faster computers, no longer did you have to get the logic right _and_ the math perfect for your program to run in acceptable time. And higher level languages emerged, assembly leading to c leading to python and JavaScript. And at every stage there was moaning, and excitement.

Now, we stand on the precipice of the next great division. People can get a reasonably complicated website up by configuring Wordpress or Joomla or Drupal without writing a single line of code. A 14 year old can run a mcafe script at the geek squad counter and get the users computer back in decent shape. We are at the point of adding moderately skilled technicians to our field.

We can piss and moan about the division, or we can recognize that it's part of the process of the industry and vocation maturing.

The engineers at GM aren't bemoaning the fact that "car maintenance gurus (mechanics) don't have to understand the heat displacement of aluminum vs steel"

Having mechanics makes the car industry more efficient and lets the engineers focus on the real hard problems. The same will be true of software, eventually.

London definitely has an exaggerated case of this (Nathan Barley really is far too close to home regarding the way he treats Pingu), but it's happening everywhere.

The thing is it's like tax preparation: most people should probably be able to do it themselves, but once you want something interesting done you're going to need a professional. If all you develop as a software developer is monkey patching stuff together, then yes, you're in trouble, either from normal people, or from the products of other developers. However, the fun part of the job has always been being able to punch through big piles of crap to find ways to radically simplify what's going on in order to get an apparently magical improvement. That part is an art, and isn't going away in a hurry.

"If you're ambitious and good at office politics and self-promotion, it's entirely possible - maybe even easier - to pass from junior programmer to executive management without actually passing through a stage of technical competence. It's a sort of turbo-charged Peter Principle that operates in the software industry."

This feels so true at every business and academic institution I've worked for.

My last CIO was a lawyer....

I don't think your history is really quite correct in its nuance. Programming as an actual trade emerged quickly in the 50s. The 60s saw the rise of computer science degrees, often coming from either the Math or the EE side. During the 50s and 60s, the computers had tons of people working with FORTRAN/COBOL (& others) to churn out business code. This accelerated in the 70s. There were armies of basic programmers out there. It only takes flipping through Dijikstra to realize that these people were not super well trained.

Occasionally in the recollections of the really early programmers, we learn that they were hired from the secretarial pool and trained if they had math aptitude. Not from physicists or the PhDs always. I am sure this was very true for the line of business & banking apps.