One thing this proponent said that resonated with me was that I was a “craftsman,” meaning I created sites, cared about them, and understood them. I was flattered, of course, but that also go me thinking: that’s a pretty good description of many perlmonks, I’d say.

There's a risk to being known as a "Craftsman".

Among peers, being known as a Craftsman is a Very Good Thing. We like to work with people who care about what they do, and who produce good, solid, well-crafted code. Those are the people I want on my team.

Outside of our circle of peers, however, the term can carry very different, sometimes negative, connotations. To the person up the food chain who is funding a project, "craftsman" can be heard as "Oh, no. They're going to burn through cash endlessly polishing instead of delivering a product." This isn't entirely unfair. Lots of projects have been burned one or two programmers who couldn't seem to finish anything, and often times they waived the banner of craftsmanship as a defense. To a higher-up who doesn't have the time or attention span to sort the situation out, this leaves the term "craftsman" tainted.

In my experience, calling oneself a "pragmatic craftsman" defuses the taint. Higher-ups hear "pragmatic" and like it. To them it means good things, like maybe that you can actually finish and ship without running way over budget.

But more than calling yourself pragmatic, you have to be pragmatic, at least when taking someone else's money. It's part of the inner game of Craftsmanship.

In reply to (dws)Re: Permanence and Programming as a "craft" by dws
in thread Permanence and Programming as a "craft" by Hero Zzyzzx

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.