On 13/11/2011 10:08 PM, Darren New wrote:
> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

Interesting.

I love how I read "you should be able to explain your ideas to a bright 
8 year old or to the CFO", and I immediately wondered whether the CFO 
would be smart enough to comprehend something a small child can 
understand. ;-)

In my limited experience, managers are astonishingly stupid people. 
(Depending on how high up they are, generally. Some of the ones lower 
down actually *have* a clue...)

I also love how a large segment of people are all like "BS! The real 
world isn't like this! You're lying! You don't know WTF you're talking 
about! How made you an expert anyway?" Can you spell "denial"?

Having just said that, I'm not sure that *every* company is actually 
like this. From what I've seen, organisational culture varies from place 
to place.

For example, where I work, few people would try to take credit for 
somebody else's work, or steer the group towards a path of action that 
most benefits themselves. Because, frankly, if you did these things, you 
would be wasting your time. Achievement is not recognised nor rewarded 
here. Nobody ever gets pay rises for any reason. Nobody is thanked for 
their effort. So there's really no reason to try to out-do anybody else. 
(On the contrary, people's attitude is more one of "we're all in this 
together, we're all stuck in this dead-end, let's just make the most of 
it".)

Where my mum works, there's a lot of back-stabbing. Everyone has target 
statistics to meet. And that means that almost every single employee 
constantly operates on the basis of "how can I make this become somebody 
else's problem as fast as possible?" People will try to claim that 
something is another department's responsibility, they will try to dump 
jobs into somebody else's job queue, they will redirect callers to 
someone else - *anyone* else - because if you can just get *rid* of the 
work as fast as possible, you get the best stats.

Those poor unfortunate people who try to actually HELP THE CUSTOMER? 
They are the ones with the awful stats who end up getting hired. Welcome 
to defective management practices.

So in summary, I'm sure there are companies where everyone is very 
up-tight and constantly trying to stab everyone in the back and get the 
glory and the money. And there are other companies where everyone is too 
laid back to care. And companies somewhere inbetween.

What I *will* say is that, seemingly without exception, every 
corporation on Earth seems to regard programmers as "those unnecessary 
people we keep having to spend huge sums of money on; if only we could 
figure out how to get rid of them..." Nobody, anywhere, seems to value 
technical skill in the slightest.

I guess that's just a reflection of the larger issues in society. There 
was a time when people prized the highest-quality goods. Today everybody 
just wants to find the cheapest model on the market. Given the choice 
between a nice quality TV that works well and is easy to use, and a shit 
TV that's 85% cheaper, every single man, women and child will pick the 
cheap one, and then complain like hell that it's unreliable and horribly 
complicated to operate...

Also: This is why I've given up trying to get paid as a programmer. 99% 
of companies don't need anybody to write software for them. 95% of all 
software written is technically trivial. 100% of managers want the 
crappiest, buggiest software you can write. Because software that works 
properly doesn't add any value. (See above.)

On the other hand, the guy who fixes your mission-critical computer 
stuff when it breaks? That guy is seen as necessary and useful, and gets 
paid money. (In varying degrees.) Plus I can walk in the door and say 
that I already get paid to do that for a living. People take that kind 
of thing more seriously.

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