Why We Need Programmers

Every few years, it seems, there's another push to obsolete programmers.  Sometimes it's overt, like COBOL was ("We'll make it so the businessmen can just say what they want done!"), and sometimes it's more subtle, but it always gets attention from the industries that depend on programmers.

The problem with all these efforts is that we're still a long way from being able to take a fuzzy natural language description of the desired solution and turn that into a working program.  That means that someone who is not a programmer has to write the code for the program in some programming language.  And that leads to all sorts of issues:

1. Naive code - someone who has not learned about programming practices will write code that is difficult to learn and modify.
2. Incomplete or inefficient programs - someone who has not studied programming will lack knowledge of algorithms, and will lack experience of gap analysis.
3. Just plain shoddy work - the erstwhile programmers will not want to be programming, because they want to be solving their real problems.

The explosion of spreadsheets and database query languages exposed many domain experts to a small facet of programming, and as studies have shown, most people think they are more competent at things than they really are, and the least competent are really bad at seeing their cluelessness.

Programmers will have the background to recognize O(n²) algorithms; they will be familiar with the tools like code versioning systems and parsers; they will have passion for the code itself, so that it will be easy to maintain and modify.

I guess it's rather like plumbing.  It's not hard for a homeowner to run a little length of drainpipe, but when it gets to plumbing a whole house, or handling a sewer  connection, they prefer to use a professional.

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More on Offshoring and Its Perils

As my reader(s) know(s) [Hi Brian!], I'm way behind on my "interesting idea for a blog post" list, so I may be pumping a lot of relatively short posts out to try and get back up to the current set of items.

Anyway, I saw this post about offshoring, written by a developer in India, and I felt it worthy of mentioning, as it rings true - contractors never feel as close to project as full-time employees do, and the more remote the home office, the less involved even the employees feel. (look for the letter from the guy from London)

Adding to this is that nowadays, most of the Indian developers are available through the big consulting houses, so you get even less identification with the project, and more opportunities for corporate shenanigans that derail projects.

Of course, there is always the option of hiring directly, but that runs into the problem of scale.  In the US, a job posting might get 100 resumes; 50 can be dumped right away for totally wrong qualifications, 25 for inadequate skills, 15 weeded out in the phone interviews/standardized tests, and the final 10 interviewd face-to-face and the best picked.  However, in India, that same job posting might bring in 1000 candidates, and unless you have 10X the interview staff, you cannot get it winnowed down to the best 10 people - you might get it down to 100, interview 50, and hope for the best.

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