The profession of programmer
We’re still waiting for any programmer to become a household name. The social status of our profession is somewhere between busboy and dishwasher by the larger public, assumed to be boring, unintellectual (yes they think that), and generally meaningless. The frustration that regular people feel when wrestling with a Microsoft Word document that has collected some particularly nasty invisible formatting codes—this must be what programming is like.
(…)
As we know, it just isn’t like that. Most of us do work with passion to produce things of value and of beauty, that will please their users and last for years to come. The many little decisions that make up our days affect software products much more than the back scratching, eye clawing theatre of the conference room. And we know software better than anyone that doesn’t write it: what is possible now, what will be possible soon, and what really needs to happen for the next breakthrough. This passion for the how of computing, nerdy as it sounds, isn’t any more pathetic than tweeting a photo from an iPhone is pathetic. Computing is what humans do these days, and we make it possible.
From Codecraft by Nathan Hamblen.
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