[prog] State of software engineering profession

[Jenn Vesperman]

On Sun, 2003-04-13 at 11:31, Jimen Ching wrote:

> Every industry has standards.  The difference is, everyone else follow
> theirs, but we seem to consider our standards as some obstacle we need to
> overcome.  We have lots of standards.  The problem is that we don't follow
> them because it constrains our artistic selves.  Not only do we not follow
> them, but we consider the lack of conformance to be acceptable practice.

Bzzt.

How often do you find people - programmers, sysadmins, etc - screaming
at major companies precisely because their products DON'T follow the
standards? Around me, it's very, very frequent.

Many programmers know RFCs forwards, backwards and sideways, and produce
their work to conform to them. Sometimes they then get pressured by
pointy-hairs (upper management types) to change the program for
marketing reasons, or other non-technical reasons.

Don't blame the foot sloggers for standards non-compliance. Sure, some
of them don't comply. But some try to, and some put their jobs on the
line for the sake of standards compliance.


Jenn V.
-- 
    "Do you ever wonder if there's a whole section of geek culture 
        	you miss out on by being a geek?" - Dancer.
   My book 'Essential CVS': published by O'Reilly in June 2003.
jenn at anthill.echidna.id.au     http://anthill.echidna.id.au/~jenn/