Programmer abuse

It always seems to me that women raise the alarm. Programmer abuse continues because so many programmers are insecure about their technical and business abilities, and they allow others to define them.

Has anyone ever noticed what I call the HR "song and dance"?

Many programmers confront the narrative, that their "technical" abilities are first rate, but their "social" and "business" skills are deficient.

This is partly true and partly a song and dance, because the fact is that in many companies, "social and business" skills are a useful catchall for denying programmers simple fairness.

Furthermore...there is a gap between the self-image of programmers and that of society which has been exacerbated by the dot.com bust.

Programmers regard themselves as working with complex and difficult issues, but many users, especially people so highly placed that they don't directly use computers, persist in having John von Neumann's view of programming. Von Neumann, an early computer scientist who may have invented the concept of stored programming, you see, didn't think programming had any intellectual content and he thought of it as the mere one-for-one coding, of clerical interest only, of equations and algorithms fully prepared by mathematicians and by scientists.

In sociological terms, this "reifies" the programmer's specifications where "reification" is making a thing out of a concept.

The problem has been since von Neumann threefold. One fold was constituted in the discovery that software creation is hard, strangely so. The second fold is that its creation is assisted to a great deal by using software to build software, but strangely, this discovery doesn't reduce the size of fold 1. The third is that programmers have consistently discovered that the reified "specs" are almost always incomplete.

Programmer abuse results from the necessary fact that programming is necessarily a form of writing, and in our society we "privilege", somehow, the idea that speech is better than writing. Writing, as was coding to von Neumann, is a dangerous and in principle dispensable supplement to the "real" (the "male") action.

This seems to put programmers at a disadvantage in all areas of life, from the performance review to the singles bar, because their work is socially structured as supplemental, and dangerously so, to "real" work.

To counter programmer abuse, the programmer has to do some real work. Most programmers in my experience are rather conventional and authoritarian in their thinking, although there has been a significant minority of Free Spirits in the field (I am not referencing, here, people who only think they are Free Spirits 'cause off the job they party down while on the job they are often the worst and most unpleasant form of authoritarian lawn troll, his personality made worse by a hangover).

Conventional and authoritarian personalities allow themselves to be overdefined by external markers of success and failure and the work is constituted in the realization that (1) one is able to define one's own success and (2) there are ways of relatedness that allow one to do this, and then hold firm to that vision.

I am certain that the Electronic Arts people are terrorised by job loss, and they have every right to be. At the same time, they can up and leave, perhaps en masse.

But I have found in my world travels and employment that American programmers in particular, and American employees in general, have been drained of empathy and solidarity in contrast to employees in other lands, often while being persuaded by "lifestyles" to think they are "free".

This makes "no, I am not going to sacrifice my family" a lonely choice in America.