[carapace]

The difference between technician and programmer isn't about predictability, it's about novelty.

The technician has to know the system well enough to respond correctly (or even proactively with preventive maintenance, etc.) to unpredictable problems that are "in the book".

The programmer by definition solves novel problems.

- - - -

edit to add: Beware folks who look down on technicians. It's a kind of "code smell" of the mind.

[ThrowawayR2]

Judging by comments here and elsewhere, programmers look down on all sorts of other adjacent professions: business types, testers, managers, salespeople, etc. If it's a "code smell", we all positively reek of it to high heaven.

[carapace]

Yep.

My thesis is that this is primarily because the normals picked on the nerds up until they realized there was a lot of money to be made if you're the right kind of nerdy (or if you can fake it), around the time of the Dot Com Boom. There's residual resentment there.

Also, people who are otherwise intelligent but unwilling to learn to program computers themselves seem stupid to the dedicated computer nerd, no matter how intelligent they are.

I'm not making excuses, these are just theories about why we nerds can be so ... arrogant?

[kreetx]

There is a difference between something that can be completely automated and where unpredictable problems arise.

[carapace]

I don't understand what you're getting at, how does that relate to what I said above?

[kreetx]

It means that you don't need a technician at all where the problem is completely automatable.

In the original blog post, the developer who was automated away was of that type - adding HTTP API endpoints from protobuf definitions if I read correctly.

[carapace]

Oh yeah, that person should have asked to be re-tasked.

The point I'm making is that that's not what makes a technician (that's what makes a human robot! Ew!)

> It means that you don't need a technician at all where the problem is completely automatable.

You can try to make your systems so good that they seldom need technicians but you can't fire them all because Murphy's Law rules real world systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maytag#Ol'_Lonely

[kreetx]

That person wasn't actually fired either.

[carapace]

Terrific. Do you have anything to say about the point I'm making about the difference between predictability and novelty?