Re: Knowing.NET - Incompetent American Programmers

KevinL — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:16:10 -0000

I can in fact speak about one particular big player: IBM. I used to work for them and in the time frame of 2001-2003 they combined aggressive expansion in India (which was fine with me because there was plenty of work to go around) with significant cutbacks in the USA (which made no sense because there was plenty of work to go around). Stories were everywhere about Microsoft and Sun doing the same thing. Now, the odd thing about IBM was that internally they officially denied up and down that they were being systematic about it. Sadly, the Alliance@IBM pro-union web site became the most reliable information source about IBM's plans (and it was VERY reliable) because management had been flat-out instructed to lie to the rest of us.

At the top of the industry, rhere might not have been an explicit meeting of the big wigs, but it was clear to me that because the technology made outsourcing viable (the environment change you mention) the big players were going to run with it regardless of the larger cost to the discipline.

Re: Knowing.NET - Incompetent American Programmers

KevinL — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:20:49 -0000

I've got 50 books related to programming on my bookshelf at home, from program manuals like Emacs Lisp and Access VBA to the classics (CLR's Intro to Algorithms and TAOCP) to a couple of actual language books (Lisp and C++). I've even got Design Patterns in there. I've also got about a quarter million lines of code under my belt, 20% of which is still in mission-critical production 3 years later and another 20% is F/OSS.

Yet I'm leaving the programming profession behind next month, and in fact I have no plans to ever be paid to write software again or be associated with software development -- there will be no management or architect role in my future.

Why? Simple: the industry sucks. Eight years ago the big players decided that rather than continue to nurture the software development industry into a more mature discipline, rather than work harder with universities to produce an accredited program for Software Engineering that had the same kind of difficulty level as a traditional engineering and similar financial pay for graduates, the big players decided to pursue the short-term bottom line and began moving jobs to the cheapest markets they could find. They could have focused on a program for Software Engineering that included data structures, algorithms, numerical methods, assembly language, procedural programming, OOP, functional programming, economics, personal communication, technical writing, ethics, a class on development in large teams (SCMs, managing large codebases, the roles of architecture and implementation), and finally tracks for either science/engineering programming (heavy on math and some survey courses on physics and chemistry) or business logic programming (GUI, web-based, and database programming). But instead of working on growing programming up to a mature respected discipline the majors decided to abandon it. It's *less* friendly to women (in the USA at least) than it was twenty years ago. It's still practically impossible to find a new job as a programmer after you turn 45. It's the equivalent of what might have happened if GM and Ford had colluded in 1945 to shift most manufacturing to Mexico; how would the American auto industry have developed then?

I saw the light five years ago and started the process of leaving programming behind. It's still fun, I'm still pretty good at it, but I intend to use it only as a toolbox I poke into occasionally in order to further a very different career. I also discovered along the way that programming adds a lot more value to my new career than any skills in it can add to programming, which implies to me that in the ideal world of the future programming will be seen as a different kind of literacy that people will seek to gain early in life along with the other 3 R's (reading, writing, arithmetic). Perhaps programming can be a fourth R called "representation" that is the modeling of an idea into an abstract language.

Maybe you are seeing more incompetent programmers because some sizable fraction of the competent ones are no longer programming. Maybe you see less respect for programming out there because the big money players in the industry have demonstrated that they have no institutional respect for it anymore. Maybe society at large has lost respect for it because women as a whole have been systemically driven away from the field. Maybe society is in the process of placing programming in the non-cool ghetto alongside arithmetic (it is true that lots of math nerds become programmers later).

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Re: Knowing.NET - Incompetent American Programmers

Re: Knowing.NET - Incompetent American Programmers