Our Responsibility as Programmers

Just read an article by Robert Martin, of "Clean Code" fame (if you haven't heard of Clean Code, read it -- it's probably the seminal text for clean object-oriented programming... some of the advice in it is dated with test-driven development and Java, but it is worth a skim at least)

"Without software: Phones don't ring. Cars don't start. Planes don't fly. Bombs don't explode. Ships don't sail. Ovens don't bake. Garage doors don't open. Money doesn't change hands. Electricity doesn't get generated. And we can't find our way to the store. Nothing happens without software. And what is software? Software is a set of rules."

Also, this

"If the ranks of programmers has doubled every five years, then it stands to reason that most programmers were hired within the last five years, and so about half the programmers would be under 28. Half of those over 28 would be less than 33. Half of those over 33 would be less than 38, and so on. Less than 0.5% of programmers would be 60 or over. So most of us old programmers are still around writing code. It's just that there never were very many of us.

What does this imply for our industry?

Maybe it's not as bad as Lord of the Flies, but the fact that juniors exponentially outnumbers seniors is concerning. As long as that growth curve continues[4] there will not be enough teachers, role models, and leaders. It means that most software teams will remain relatively unguided, unsupervised, and inexperienced. It means that most software organizations will have to endlessly relearn the lessons they learned the five years before. It means that the industry as a whole will remain dominated by novices, and exist in a state of perpetual immaturity." - Robert Martin, 

Basically the problem is this, more in 2017 than ever -- the world has unwittingly ceded control of its financial, healthcare and private personal information for better or worse to computer programmers. We have a duty to create systems which are maintainable, robust and error free, even if it costs us in the short term.

What are the problems? The problems are in-your-face, serious, and unfortunately have nothing at all to do with coding or computer programming.

Example #1 (easy): Boss asks for deadline, you can take a shortcut. Either you can take a shortcut, or take 20% more time... piss them off now and make them happy later, or go for the short term gain.

Example #2 (hard): You are in a responsibility of great authority to pick a framework or a technology and you can either choose what is cool and hot, and therefore good for your career (great, one more line for your resume!), or choose proven but less cool and less interesting technologies. Balance this against whether or not the technology is about to go out of the market (you can write a website in COBOL but it is NOT a good idea!)

Example #3 (very hard): You have the ear of business people, and you must convince them of the need to create a process or build a framework or library which has no readily apparent business value and no readily apparent use cases, but will increase developer productivity ten-fold down the line, or allow you to enter emerging markets or attack potential competitors.

Example #4 (extreme): You must either sacrifice personal time and personal emotion and energy to create a process / library / frameworks for your company or down the road you see the end of your company or business (at least tech-wise)... the tech is so bad nobody will want to work there or stay there, you see the train coming a mile away but you are superglued to the tracks at least at work. So you either have to sacrifice, in order to move the company in the right direction, and get 0 credit for it, or hold your tongue and hope that the world works differently than you think.

What are the answer to these problems? I could give my answers, but they would be my answers.

The point is, there are no right answers... it depends on the situation, the market, and most of all experience. And, if Robert Martin's numbers are to be believed, experience is severely lacking.

I don't pretend to know anything about making money or business. Maybe markets are all about point in time and maybe writing spaghetti code and awful code is the way to do it -- forget about "tech" things like build processes, GitHub, Open Source, frameworks, automation, libraries and command line tools. Forget about The Art of Unix Programming and give the business people what they want, all the time, because the market wants now and only now and later will be too late because the market won't exist anymore.

Or, we could draw a line and say this far and no further... the line must be drawn here. Either take the time to do it right, or suffer the consequences.

How many "senior" developers, and technical leads and architects know this? How many programmers even care about these issues?

In the end we must all do things we can live with. We all have our own moral codes and standards. The choice is easy. Living with what we choose is the hard part.