[agentultra]

I sometimes wonder if the vulgarity of capitalism forces us to think this way. You don't see lawyers, doctors, or capital-P engineers thinking this way. They have to think about the state of the art and practicing their craft with the utmost attention to detail. Anything less would be unprofessional.

And yet we programmers hear this story time and again: you don't matter, your craft doesn't matter: _all_ that matters is getting that money. If that's what your company values then that's what they'll make you do... and we don't have any profession to back us up when we say, "That's not good enough."

I suspect this is part of the story of how the Equifax's and the like happen: we prioritize profits over integrity and the consumer pays. If you, the professional software developer, refuse the company will simply find someone else who will. And they will probably hire them for less.

And yet if we were to raise the bar, stakeholders argue, then programmers would not be affordable: producing software would be too expensive and nobody would do it.

[mitchellst]

Programming craft does not matter because programming craft has no content. Doctors treat and fix bodily ills; their actions— the uses of their craft— are determined by the state of the patient. Similarly, lawyers' craft is determined by the content of the law. (The results can be encouraging or horrifying depending on whether the laws that apply to your time, place, and situation are just ones.) What determines the content to which a programmer's craft is applied? If it does not make money or serve the public good that your nonprofit addresses, why should your firm support it?

I say this as a programmer who likes writing beautiful code. Nevertheless, when we look around, we see no equivalent of charity hospitals for coders, where philanthropists donate wings and endow chairs to advance the state of the craft. (Not to disparage what we do have: CS Departments, GitHub, some open source foundations are awesome, but do not reflect similar public standing.) Our craft is not valued on its own terms because the broader society does not believe it is inherently beneficial to them. In a day when facebook and twitter throw our elections open to tampering, uber does... whatever uber does, and everyone's even more addicted to Netflix than they were to TV, can you blame them?

Lawyers are valued because they make society freer and fairer. Doctors enhance human dignity by caring for those made weak by sickness. Do you have an equivalently positive outcome for what our profession does when left to its own devices? If not, it's rightly difficult to appeal to the pieties of your profession with someone who does not share that profession.

This isn't meant to be a rebuke, rather, a reminder that good skills are unhelpful unless put to good use. If you don't like money as a means of keeping score on that, there's plenty of work in the public and nonprofit sectors.

[edanm]

"I sometimes wonder if the vulgarity of capitalism forces us to think this way. You don't see lawyers, doctors, or capital-P engineers thinking this way. They have to think about the state of the art and practicing their craft with the utmost attention to detail. Anything less would be unprofessional."

That's ridiculous. Of course they think this way. How many doctors are working in a hospital doing the latest surgical technique, versus how many have opened their own office? Do you think opening a private practice means you concentrate more on medicine vs. administration?

They do it because it pays more.

Thinking programmers are unique in having to balance their profession and business is just plain wrong. It's true that most professionals might not think about it that often, but then again, most programmers don't think this way either.

[agentultra]

How many doctors are still practicing after one malpractice lawsuit? 2? 5?

You have to be insured to practice. There's a professional organization that licenses you to practice. These are the social structures we put in place to limit the damage done by the various forces of the world that would tempt a doctor to be anything but faithful to the practice including profit.

A hospital may ask a doctor it hired to "cut corners," but the doctor should refuse and if the hospital tries to fire them and get away with it anyway... the hospital should pay for that.

What I meant by the last line of my comment is that we have a vested interest in producing more software, not less, and I don't think cost is the problem. Although there are people with a vested interest in the status quo who would see the expense of insured, professional software engineers as being unbearable to their interests... not necessarily because such practices would harm the public good and their reliance on technology.