August 31, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Where Are the Programmers?
August 31, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Steve, “developer” means something else and more than a “programmer” used to mean. Check my avatar, if you will. As a “developer” I am now expected to do things that used to be domain of “computer system analysts.” IMO the fact that I am still in business and not a teacher of English as a second language as lots of my colleagues, years ago crack COBOL programmers, attests that I know what I am talking about.
September 1, 2010 at 12:39 am
Hehe BIDS are already here.
The human ego and the drive for being recognized and a better salary etc lives within many people.
September 1, 2010 at 12:54 am
Funny - we still use the term programmer where I work. And it is used with the connotation that a developer is a higher level than the programmer.
Programmers here are also referred to as coders that can only write code as instructed - a very jr developer.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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September 1, 2010 at 1:09 am
I'd agree with that. I see a programmer as someone that writes code closely following a spec, and very little else. A developer "develops" a solution to a problem, and implements the solution (by writing code).
September 1, 2010 at 1:19 am
I see a programmer as someone who is highly specialised their craft, much more so than a developer. A developer, on the other hand, also tackles higher level tasks - sometimes even some tasks that business analysts would normally do.
One is not superior or less intelligent than the other, they're just different IMHO. That's why I describe my role at the company where I work as "Programmer/Developer/DBA-by-Accident."
September 1, 2010 at 1:20 am
Sounds Cool to have titles like.. DTS, DSS, .
BIDS would be more cooler.
September 1, 2010 at 1:26 am
Hmmm...
When I'm talking to lay people, I still use "programmer" or "I build web sites".
When I'm talking to someone technichal, I'm a developer.
A relatively young co-worker (15 years my junior) was full enough of himself with his engineering school degree to be "Senior Software Engineer" while myself and the owner of the company (about same age as me) were Senior Developer and Senior Architect respectively.
Interesting, but I actually do think the Developer or even better Engineer label fits. What's the difference?
In my mind, a developer builds a solution from the ground up.
An Engineer "scientifically" applies known development patterns to solve a problem.
It is all really about how "programming" has progressed so far that it is now closer to a true, measureable, science compared to the witchcraft some of us [you] were conjuring up in the 70's/80's/90's.
September 1, 2010 at 4:01 am
I agree 100%
I like to be very concrete.
When at the client I just say.... I provide IT solutions and I live of my job since 20 y, let's talk about the problem and let's see how and if I can help you. Then (when) I solve the problem and he find me affordable he calls me again.
That's all. Imho that's the important image. Don't worry about acronyms, they are folkloristics, but nomore.
September 1, 2010 at 4:22 am
As I remember it, the restrictive meaning of a programmer was invented in the early days of computing where organizations/academics wanted to differentiate between the various “specialized tasks” in computing. Think of functional analysis, designing, programming/coding, testing, administrating. In this view people back then, not knowing a damn thing about computers, let alone about the people working with them, a programmer was near the bottom of the intellectual hierarchy.
But every early day programmer knows the reverse was actually true.
In general it went like this...throw the theoretical design out of the window and do the whole process yourself as the designs were impossible or would perform horrific. The programmer was almighty and had the most technical and intellectual knowledge of the whole chain of specialists. Yet the old hierarchical, not to mention backwards people view things differently of course and this was reflected in education. When I went from a hobby to get education as a programmer, I was shocked at the level of knowledge my teachers had…akin to zero by any standard. We had to make graphical representations (PSD) of code flow for even the smallest pieces of logic, such as ‘if then else’ blocks before we could even type a single letter of actual code! We made those in WordPerfect using graphical characters (high end ASCII codes) and it was very time consuming. The solutions were then judged by the teacher...without the code ever been made and run!
It was this backwards bureaucratic nonsense mindset (origin: academics, who were running far behind the facts) that shitted all over the brilliant people that did all the actual work and made the advances in those early days. My blood still boils when I think about it and I still have a very low regard to higher IT education because of. I see it as way too disconnected from reality and very damaging to individuals they get to be lead by them in the end. A current day equivalent situation is managers…despite adding little they get the big paychecks due to their educational background and are generally seen as "above" the working people. We actually still haven’t got rid of the **cast** system and in 40 years from now an angry person will write something akin to my post here and tell how backwards we as a society were today!
History tends to repeat itself!
September 1, 2010 at 5:01 am
dhamilton-905368 (9/1/2010)
It is all really about how "programming" has progressed so far that it is now closer to a true, measureable, science compared to the witchcraft some of us [you] were conjuring up in the 70's/80's/90's.
It was witchcraft to the people that had no idea what computers did or how they worked. But the patterns were already there and widely used and recognized among the programmer population as such. It was the catching up of the academics and in a wider sense the educational system that later formalized the practices long in use and labeled them as their own advances. And since they write the books, their truth will prevail, despite their poor track record. An example of such "inventions" is refactoring, I learned of the concept 15 years after I started using it as part of my work!
The gap between software development practice and science has closed a bit, but I still feel the wrong people are in position of influence. Most new people we get over the floor have inadequate knowledge and skills. This mostly thanks to the way the educational system still works and is organized.
No wonder you end up with a heap of titles in circulation to attempt to get some differentiation, but it won't do anything but to damage the profession as a whole as titles have become meaningless and the clients will not know this. But for old time sake, I like the title programmer the most as that signifies (for me), technical expertise and creativity combined with a good mind for solving problems. Developer, and other titles are fancy titles introduced by the people not in the know, just to look cooler.
September 1, 2010 at 5:04 am
When I first started as a "programmer" we used to hand write COBOL onto coding sheets, and debug the code by the simple method of writing test data down on a pad, then going through the code a line at a time, pretending to be a computer and checking out the functions (updating the variables on the pad [memory]). When you were happy that it worked, then the coding sheets were passed off to an iput department who typed the code in, then the operators compiled and ran the code (and woe betide any programer whose code failed to compile, as we only got one compile per week).
I first started to call myself a developer when the workbench environments came out allowing you to write and compile your own code locally to test it and "develop" it before it was sent off to be integrated into the whole. Suddenly you could get 3 or 4 compiles a day instead of one a week.
I think this changed the mind-set of the "programmer" and gave rise to the "developer", as suddenly you could make on-the-fly changes to your code and see the results immediately (well, in a couple of hours).
I do sometimes think that today's modern workbench environments open the door to some extremely lazy "developers", now they're no longer restricted to trying to provide the most efficient solution possible, and have moved to producing the solution in the shortest time possible. As a DBA now, I code -review some of the SQL produced by younger developers who've never known that kind of discipline and I despair at some of the horrendous inefficiencies in their code, but these days faster is better in so many things 😉
September 1, 2010 at 5:28 am
I think part of this is due to the increasing complexity of computer systems, and the need as that happens for many of us to specialise more and more in particular areas. In the past it was far more plausible for an experienced techie in whatever field to know all there was to know about their area of IT, be that programming, systems, networks etc, but now that is almost impossible for a single person to do.
The increased variety of job titles used in the industry reflects this, with people trying to differentiate themselves from others with related but different skills. I think part of this is purely an ego thing, but of course in terms of future employment everyone wants a job title that shows off the full extent of their knowledge and experience in as few words as possible.
Of course where this all falls down is in the lack of any real standardisation of titles. While there are of course rough guidelines of what different job titles refer to, there is so much wiggle room that it makes it difficult to know what they actually mean exactly. For instance take a Systems Administrator, I'm sure there are some with that title who more accurately should be called Server Administrator's, while there are others who also encompass Network Admin, Security Admin, Database Admin etc, yet their title doesn't truly reflect what they are employed to do. And of course when you add Engineer and Architect into each of those it gets even more complicated.
In a way I've always thought there could do with being a properly laid out standard for the hierarchy of job titles in IT. For instance, while I imagine Architect is the top dog, does Administrator trump Engineer or is it the other way around? I'm sure other industries have it so you can clearly see what an individual does and is capable of doing, and I think we as an industry could really do with having the same. Without it job titles become worthless, and that will only get worse as the division of labour increases over time.
September 1, 2010 at 6:03 am
At my company, we use the title programmer for people who write code and develop solutions and applications. For myself, I think of developer and programmer as synonymous.
September 1, 2010 at 6:27 am
Heh... so far as I'm concerned, there really aren't any computer programmers left in most of the world. 😉 There are a whole lot of computer "users" using high level languages to solve problems for other users and I refer to those folks as "developers". I wouldn't call them "computer programmers" because they don't actually program the computer anymore. They tell the computer what they want through a modern "programming" "language" and a maze of "libraries" and the computer figures out how to do what's been asked.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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