One of the things that drove me batshit about being a "professional" programmer was the constant emphasis on getting things done "on time".

Boo hoo, right? But in a new Oxford book on John Rawls, that Harvard philosopher, who developed a stunningly elegant "theory of justice", one of the many good things the author finds to say about this fine man was that he'd delay his books until they said what he wanted them to say.

OK: I understand that tenured college professors, corporate lawyers, and medical doctors, and other people I did not become as I was expected to owing to an interesting combination of environment, heredity and my defects of character, do have this privilege and are admired for taking time.

However, there's a real problem in a paraprofession in which Quality is not a single number but x/y: what you did divided by how much time you took.

In industrial white collar work, this is universal. I mean, really: nobody is a really fine and wonderful cost accountant, file clerk, or stockboy EXCEPT over and above, and quite apart from the content of his job; the best stockboy does exactly as he is told, cheerfully, fixes minor problems, is friendly and loyal to his coworkers, and smiles through it all.

I was an extra in Ang Lee's film Lust, Caution, and if you get the DVD you shall see me float professorially through a scene set at Hong Kong University with an admiring "British student" in 1930s attire, representing nothing more than the prison China was for the Chinese, through which remaining Westerners floated, for the most part unseeing.

I jokingly asked an actor friend if there were any books for extras on how to be good extras, but the very idea is nonsense. Being an extra means standing around and then acting like a normal person while the film is rolling, and doing so repeatedly until the director is happy with the shoot.

Well, this is dehumanizing. Human beings may THINK they would like to be objects but we need to be active, creative, subjects who make plans, change plans, and accomplish things on our own sweet time, and in the past, programming represented this to an older generation of programmers, who because of the novelty of computers could wangle this from management.

But I could see as early as the 1970s how this brought people into collision with each other. One person's Beautiful Code was another person's Maintenance Nightmare.

Corporate executives said they didn't want programmers to be a "priesthood" (a loaded word in American culture, with its nasty tradition of needing Roman Catholic immigrant labor coupled with its Protestant elite's hatred of Rome). Of course, the CEOs don't want this for the very good reason that as the buffer class between the worker (who remains systematically deprived of part, most, or all of the fruits of his labor by the nature of the best system we've devised so far, capitalism) and the owner of the machine; cf. Galbraith.

There are societies run by trained engineers. China is one of them; to get to the top of the only game in town, which remains the Communist party, you have usually to be a highly trained engineer AND a Marxist dialectician: some of my coworkers in Shenzen, who wanted to go on to graduate school, complained to me that they couldn't understand Marx enough to pass the required examination in dialectial materialism with Chinese characteristics.

But America is run by people with high golf scores, and China, despite being run by technocrats, still gets cocked up, most recently in a winter storm which brought the trains to a standstill just before Lunar New Year.

In this the real world, "programming" is a Trivial Pursuit, and in both societies the programmer is consistently measured, not by the absolute quality x of his output, but factored by time taken and "business needs" to such an extent that (as programmers discover) their technical skill never overcomes management resistance if for any reason they piss management off...which many have over time simply by insisting on doing things better.

India may have evolved a different system; not having worked there yet, I don't have a feel for it. But Indian software firms stake their reputation on timeliness as indeed I did when I started out: I was made a programmer when my first program, deemed unwritable, was completed in 24 hours.

I have returned to programming and it's a game and a joy to do it when I want and how fast, but this is because I support myself as a teacher who's always on time for class and meets real human needs in real time. Fighting for enough time, for example at Bell Northern Research to give them The Greatest Compiler In The World, was an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

But I wasn't socialised to take the money and run. My family of origin, with its own evils and corruption, had raised me, along with the old Catholic church, to be what Kant called "the citizen of a better world".

My father, however, couldn't really abide the idea of grown sons who'd do better than he, which is why I made life easy for him by not becoming a true professional. Whereas my Mom's horizons had been stunted by her terrible experiences in the Depression and for her, a job at the phone company was the best you could hope for, especially if they let you smoke at your desk, which the New York phone company started to let "the girls" do during the War.

Their vision became nothing more than buying things: clutter. Well, game's up on that.

They betrayed their ideals, but so did I.