Bulldozer00's Blog

In Founders At Work, Phil Greenspun recounts his tough-love approach toward molding his young programmers into well-rounded and multi-talented individuals:

For programmers, I had a vision—partly because I had been teaching programmers at MIT—that I didn’t like the way that programmer careers turned out. I wanted them to have a real professional résumé.

They would have to develop the skill of starting from the problem. They would invest some time in writing up their results. I was very careful about trying to encourage these people to have an independent professional reputation, so there’s code that had their name on it and that they took responsibility for, documentation that explained what problem they were trying to solve, what alternatives they considered, what the strengths and limitations of this particular implementation that they were releasing were, maybe a white paper on what lessons they learned from a project. I tried to get the programmers to write, which they didn’t want to do.

People don’t like to write. It’s hard. The people who were really good software engineers were usually great writers; they had tremendous ability to organize their thoughts and communicate. The people who were sort of average-quality programmers and had trouble thinking about the larger picture were the ones who couldn’t write.

So, did it work? Sadly, Phil follows up with:

In the end, the project was a failure because the industry trends moved away from that. People don’t want programmers to be professionals; they want programmers to be cheap. They want them to be using inefficient tools like C and Java. They just want to get them in India and pay as little as possible. But I think part of the hostility of industrial managers toward programmers comes from the fact that programmers never had been professionals.

Programmers have not been professionals because they haven’t really cared about quality. How many programmers have you asked, “Is this the right way to do things? Is this going to be good for the users?” They reply, “I don’t know and I don’t care. I get paid, I have my cubicle, and the air-conditioning is set at the right temperature. I’m happy as long as the paycheck comes in.”

FAW was published in 2008. Two years later, do you think attitudes have changed much? What’s your attitude?