“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone,” it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
Today, blizzard is ours!
Patrick Logan writes:
Agreed…
We’re not so much building on the programming state of the art as continually have each generation of programmers rediscover it.
-Bill de hOra
This old fart agrees too. A far more interesting question: why hasn’t a core of professional knowledge emerged in this industry. Isn’t it normal for a craft to transition into a profession? Why am I not a member of the Association of Computing Machinery. My friends aren’t either. Why when we hire labor do we seek people who have built things rather than people who have been well certified? Why do most project managers see little value in having a few doctors of of Computer Science on their teams?
I see three reasons for the lack of an emerging professional class: fast growth, a culture of anti-professionalism, and competing institutions. I’m sure there are others, and I’m sure that at this point I wouldn’t pick one of these as the dominate one. This has kept the craft much more egalitarian than most highly technical crafts. It’s easier to get into this field because the training barrier is lower and the tools are simpler. Forces are in play which work to keep it that way.
Fast growth has meant the demand for skilled craftsmen, tools, and knowledge has continually outstripped the supply. The rapidly expanding frontier of the industry creates, time and time again, a new landscape where amateurs can achieve huge success. On this new land it’s more important to get there and build something than it is to build it well. In new markets the quantity of your customer relationships always dominates the quality of your technical execution. If your building out into these territories and the labor you can find is generally only slightly trained; well your tools better be simple to use.
Anti-professionalism - man you could write a whole book about this. The mythology of the hacker, open source, and the American cowboy. Libertarianism. The 60’s youth culture. etc. etc. But possibly I can say something a bit new about all that. The scarcity of skill results in loose social networks interconnect the craftsmen. New technology, i.e. network based social interaction tools (email, netnews, etc. etc.) have enabled that scale far better than in previous highly technical trades.
Other institutions competition to be the dominate source of legitimization in the computing industry. That’s a pattern I first noticed in the Medical profession. Medical doctors managed over the course of the 20th century to gain control over their industry. At this point though that control is falling apart as other players - insurance companies, drug companies, etc. etc. are competing to take control of the huge amounts of money in flux. Today my HMO sees to it that a person who’s not even a nurse does any minor surgery. In high tech large vendors play a similar game; but they don’t have to bother to compete with a existing strong profession. So Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, etc. etc. all provide certification programs that substitute for the legitimacy of the professional society working in tandem with universities.
Some of this I think is bad; but other aspects of it are great. It’s very bad for the respect and income that highly skilled practitioners can command. While it certainly holds back the median level of skill of our skill it appears to entrain a larger pool of practitioners. The open source projects might be a substitute for the professional society’s aggregation of a common pool of knowledge.
So it’s great that we remain a craft that sports a reasonably low barrier to entry. It makes my coworkers a more interesting diverse lot and I think it helps keep the problem solving more tied to the problems. Down in the mud not up in the ivory tower. It enables the industry to draw value out of the long tail. It is exciting how the new coordination tools have overcome some portion of the scaling problems. Open source projects are a particularly good example of how sophisticated some of that has become. These is allowed crowds to solve problems that previously only more concentrated efforts could address.
It is healthy that the righteous prideful status riddled behaviors of most professions are somewhat more rare in this line of work.
Scarecrow: I haven’t got a brain… only straw.
Dorothy: How can you talk if you haven’t got a brain?
Scarecrow: I don’t know… But some people without brains do an awful lot of talking… don’t they?
… much later …
Wizard of Oz: Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma.
I’ve never quite gotten the hang of this “political correctness” meme. I’ve not been able to distinguish “polite” from “politically correct.”
Larry Summers, president of Harvard’s, gotten with the program though. Noting that women aren’t found in assorted roles, like in the ruling class at Harvard, he opines that maybe they lack some innate skills. Which reminds me of the the just so story that women are fundamentally more child like because, well, it makes them better able to relate to the children their raising. So much for the powerful in the halls of academia.
Bill Thomas head of ways and means for the US Congress has gotten with the program. He floats the idea that mabye should segregate the old birds into a special class when it comes retirement benefits. So much for those with political power.
And while this one doesn’t rise to the level of the first two Paul Krugman likens a large number of American voters to a naive girlish bride swept off her feet by a mendacious older man. So even the powerful in the fourth estate don’t quite get it any more.
So that’s it! I’ve been confused. I thought “politically correct” was a substitute for “polite” but nope, it’s a mnemonic for stupid, evidence free instal-theories, stereotype and naive metaphors used to reenforce oppression by those in positions of extreme power and their apologists. The point is that powerful people need to be much more careful about speaking outside their areas of expertise; and since there is zero credible evidence for most of the fanciful theories about this or that class being somehow better or worse they should be particularly careful in when it comes to playing with that fire.
Larry Summers’ “apologized,” not for the stupid groundless unfounded statement but for the “any adverse impact.” That’s outrageous. First it indicates that he’s not admitted that he’s clueless in this domain. Expertise in economics, his field, is not expertise in all the social sciences. That’s such a basic part of academic good practice that it make you wonder. Secondly Larry Summers is not just some random academic. Larry Summers is a professionally power broker. He knows how to use the power of his position, his voice, his authority and his reputation. That apology reads like the artillery captain apologize for “any adverse impact.” He knew exactly what he was doing. It was not correct, it was wrong.
No Follow is a darn fine example of standards making. Ten. That’s all, ten. They only had to get ten organizations on board. And it’s very simple too; so they didn’t have to spend months in oddly illuminated rooms discussing character sets and industry politics. Nice thing about small numbers, like 10, is they can execute the entire project in private. They don’t have to polish the idea in the face of millions of bloggers. They can just do it.
I wonder if it took this long to happen because we needed to wait for the blogger and search engine industries to condense to the point that the number fell to ten or less?
All this reminds me of a posting I made a long time ago - “Feeding the link parasites is a sin“. (For about a year after I wrote that posting it was a magnet for spammers experimenting with innovative new attacks.) When I wrote that my concern was how the open posting policy of blogs was creating a plate of agar for various lower live forms. A substrate just like Outlook, Internet Explore, and Windows 99.
At the time it did occurred to me that the right answer to the problem was to mark up the out bound links, I suggested an author=”unknown” attribute in the link. But I really thought that the right thing to do was to mark up all the added content. Then the search engine would be able to distinguish which portions of the site the site’s owner wished to have accrue to his identity.
My hope was that site maintainers would strive to find a solution to the open posting problem because their identity was at risk; and to a large extent that’s been true. But the problem remains really hard - casually usable open systems are hard.
The rel=”nofollow” solution adds weight to the model that the search engines don’t particularly care about the content of your pages, that in end it’s who you know, not what you know that counts. Probably so.
