Sarah from Monash posted an interesting essay on being professional [1], to which friend "Tony" mocked her knowledge of SQL [2]. Here is my full response to "Tony".

Part of professionalism unmentioned by Sarah is something that makes programmers uncomfortable and this is that interprofessional solidarity and courtesy, seen amongst lawyers and doctors, that makes the professional assume that another professional is, as a member in good standing, "innocent before being found guilty".

That is: something that annoys people outside the law and outside the practice of medicine is the way in which lawyers will BY DEFAULT speak well of another member of the bar.

People outside these professions take this prima facie as evidence of a City Slicker conspiracy against Good Honest Plain Folk and at times it is...other times it is not.

But most working people, including programmers, lack something that Sarah I am afraid fails to mention, something beyond the control of the programmer, and within the control of the lawyer/doctor: the ability to say who is and is not a lawyer/doctor/professional.

This default protection of the career, which is of course taken away by the peer group in the case of proven malfeasance or misfeasance, gives the boys and girls in the Doctor Hut or the Lawyer Lodge their ability to by default speak well of each other. Generally speaking, it makes it possible for them to manifest at least some of the qualities, including self-education, that Sarah mentions.

I also noticed this at Princeton. Since "getting into Princeton" is so hard, the community tends to accept you without trying to find fault. That's why they gave John Nash the run of Fine Hall during his delusional phase. To be accepted, by default and until proven otherwise, as something other than a Chicago computer consultant in it for the money, was for me refreshing to say the least.

In an artisanal trade or job, Job One, from the interests of the tradesman or employee, is staying employed...usually by assuming the REVERSE of what is assumed by the "real" professional, that his mates are screwups.

Comes now the Tony man to insert something of what I speak, and this is his sarcasm concerning SQL.

Note that he's made what I call above a default assumption, to wit, that most programmers, whether or not they have a Web site, or have written a frigging book, or have coded a compiler, or have won the Nobel prize or invented a cure for cancer, are PROBABLY ignorant and defective characters.

As a cultural meme this is probably a subclass of Baby Boomer self-hatred, filtering down into Generation X, in which overconcentration of economic power teaches people that they are second-rate shop-soiled goods by default and until proven otherwise, in exhausting on the job handstands. It pisses me off, because as a result, wealth and power are today overconcentrated in American life, Bush is President, and Social Security may be destroyed...all because my generational cohort can't stand up for itself, or for its fellow human beings.

But in a highly competitive society, this is what the employee class DOES. It is forced above all to "compete" all the time, whence the eagerness in programming and the other paraprofessions, to establish one's bona fides by trashing another in a zero sum game.

Too often, especially outside universities, "I yam a great programmer" is established not by actually sitting down to CODE (for that would raise the interesting question as to why you didn't find or steal some tool) but by trashing the reputations of others by seizing on specific sound-bytes emitted by one's victims, and putting the WORST possible interpretation by default on that text.

Now, it is not the case, of course, that lawyers and doctors never do this. They will indeed turn on a member who is disfavored and expel her from the loghouse with that savagery which characterises humanity as such.

But they DO so, generally speaking, only after knowing some facts about the scapegoat, not as a default operating assumption.

In a mocking tone of voice, "Tony" here says "keeping up to date by learning SQL" as a default, knee-jerk gesture that's familiar among programmers, who in our economy are forced to "compete", and set thereby each against the other in such a way that they have to be sent to "teamwork" classes at the age of fifty and beyond, who as a result of an economic brutalization ever-present are like King Lear, old before they are wise.

The fact is that you better learn SQL every year, because absent a frozen SQL, SQL considered as a real language KEEPS CHANGING.

"You've got some bigger issues". Nice: the snap judgement, the snap put-down, on someone who knows her trade, but whom "Tony" must perforce trash, taking a few seconds out from his busy schedule doing 1974 vintage SQL and honking through snapshots while the data merrily changes on the server, because in the zero sum tradesman game, there is no PROFESSIONAL committment to the advance of knowledge as a whole, no sense that there might be a need to relearn SQL, perhaps to write a book about "How to Know SQL Independent of Microsoft and Oracle".

Hell's Bells, you can't "know" SQL in Head Hunter Land, because the Hunter of Heads wants an ORACLE guru or an SQL pundit.

I'm afraid as against what Sarah said that owing to factors that are well beyond the capabilities of individual programmers to redress, at least in the USA (Sarah writes from Oz), programmers are not professionals in the sense that no protection is given to the truly skilled programmer (who uses SQL Server and Oracle with equal facility, who is a team player because she's a Good Person, not for any selfish reason, and who does the dirty work with a smile, like, I can well imagine, Donna Davis, who even puts up with me from afar).

If it so suits the company, she is unprotected against the Tonys of the world who snigger in the back of computer classes, alternatively and as it suits them when the instructor recommends they learn what they think they know, or when the instructor actually knows something they do not, which is of course "academic" and "useless" for the oh, so studly Tonys of this world.

Isn't it.

Professionalism demands self-respect and self-esteem, the sort which Sarah exhibits and Tony does not, any more than the poster to the Apress Web site who posted one word in response to my announcement of the package for MS-DOS commands, that being "idiot".

[I won't post at Apress any more until its Web mistress does something about the spam and garbage at the site].

I am very glad to have button-cute Chinese children up to university level breath Goat Flu on me while I help them get into Princeton because I no longer and at long last have to sit in a lunchroom hearing boy wonder programmers snipe at each other, for knowing something they don't, or not knowing something they think they do. And hats off to the Donnas and the Sarahs of this world, wimmen who learn their trade and teach it to others. They are the real pros.