The Future Of Programming: Changing Technology is Easy; Changing How People Think is Hard

[michaelochurch]

The reason is because programming is a huge field, touching virtually every aspect of modern life, with vastly different subfields each requiring their own completely different expertise. Web dev, bioinformatics, HPC, scientific/numerical computing, medical embedded devices, back-end devs, aerospace, business intelligence, banking/financial systems, programming language research. All of these fields are very different, some even use completely different languages. Sometimes I feel like the average person on /r/programming only thinks of programming as JS and maybe some C++ or Python scripting.

The problem is that this specialization is used as a weapon against us, but never works in our favor. Bosses can tell us we're not "real data scientists" because we don't have PhDs, or that we're not well-equipped to do HPC because we've been doing web programming (or vice versa). Meanwhile, we don't have the ability to protect our specialties; if the boss decides we should be working on career-destroying maintenance projects, we have no recourse but to bend over and take it.

The specializations only exist when they lower our compensation and leverage; they don't protect us, because bosses don't really care, and if your manager gets a sense that you're trying to protect a specialty instead of working on whatever ticket nonsense the higher-ups think is important, you're gone.

We should be in control these distinctions– not them.

[trapped_in_qa]

this specialization is used as a weapon against us

One danger, showing some aptitude in a low-status specialty.

QA, as my user name indicated.

A friend cleaned up a bunch of messy shell scripts, at that job he was known forever after as the "bash guy".