A homeowner hires a carpenter to build some kitchen cabinets and they come out really nice so the homeowner asks the carpenter to design and build a housing development. Me, I'd prefer to have an architect and a planner involved. Can the architect or the planner build kitchen cabinets? Probably not. The carpenter is good at the specifics and might or might not know something about the big picture and the architect is the reverse.

Some programmers are like carpenters and some are like architects, but most I know burn the candle at both ends - we like to think big and plan out all sorts of swell high level object manipulations and software interfaces but we also take pleasure in polishing off the corners on the indents and the idioms in the code itself.

But society doesn't like these things mixed. According to THE RULES (sorry, I lost the URL for the rule book) the specifics should be left to the low level drones. Higher level managers should only concern themselves with the big picture. This means that programmers get treated like craftsmen regardless of their skill level and managers ignore the programmer's planning advice as too specifics-oriented to be real planning.

In reply to Re: Programming Versus Engineering by jZed
in thread (OT) Programming as a craft by revdiablo

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