Programming is still such a black magic to the majority of people that
even today, as of 2007, anyone who claims to be able to program must be
a genius, and everything he says must be the Truth.

  I find it rather perplexing and worrying that even currently there are
many employers hiring programmers solely on the basis that the person
itself claims he knows how to program. Also anything the person says is
automatically taken as the truth. For example, if the "programmer" says
that something cannot be done, that must be the Truth, the whole Truth
and nothing but the Truth. Even the idea that it's simply a case of the
programmer not knowing how to do it doesn't cross the employer's mind.

  And of course these employers completely lack the notion that a program
can be inefficient and that more efficient solutions might be possible.
If a program takes 2 minutes to perform some task, that must be because
the task really requires 2 minutes to compute. It never crosses their
minds that maybe, just maybe, it's taking 2 minutes because the program
is crap. I believe that at least some of these people seem to think that
there's only one way to implement any given problem, and thus all possible
implementations are equally fast, ergo any given implementation is the
normal implementation and there can't be anything better. The only way to
make it faster is to buy a faster computer (a notion often reinforced by
the claims of incompetent programmers who can't admit that they just don't
know how to do it properly).

  Maybe this is because employers have the same attitude towards programmers
as they do towards other specialists, such as for example structural
engineers. If a structural engineer says that the proposed type of bridge
cannot be implemented, that's probably the truth. He is a professional,
probably has a lot of experience and he knows what he is talking about.

  While it's usually valid to believe anything a structural engineer claims,
employers fail to realize that programming is a completely different matter.
Not many people go around claiming they are professional structural
engineers when they really aren't. If they get caught they might be even
hold liable for caused damages. This is certainly not the case with
programmers: Anyone can claim he is a programmer, and it's quite difficult
to corroborate this, especially by someone who doesn't know anything
about programming.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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