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from the there-are-still-some-of-us-left dept.
Over at ACM Yegor Bugayenko writes:
In the 1970s, when Microsoft and Apple were founded, programming was an art only a limited group of dedicated enthusiasts actually knew how to perform properly. CPUs were rather slow, personal computers had a very limited amount of memory, and monitors were lo-res. To create something decent, a programmer had to fight against actual hardware limitations.
In order to win in this war, programmers had to be both trained and talented in computer science, a science that was at that time mostly about algorithms and data structures.
[...] Most programmers were calling themselves "hackers," even though in the early 1980s this word, according to Steven Levy's book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, "had acquired a specific and negative connotation." Since the 1990s, this label has become "a shibboleth that identifies one as a member of the tribe," as linguist Geoff Nunberg pointed out.
[...] it would appear that the skills required of professional and successful programmers are drastically different from the ones needed back in the 1990s. The profession now requires less mathematics and algorithms and instead emphasizes more skills under the umbrella term "sociotech." Susan Long illustrates in her book Socioanalytic Methods: Discovering the Hidden in Organizations and Social Systems that the term "sociotechnical systems" was coined by Eric Trist et al. in the World War II era based on their work with English coal miners at the Tavistock Institute in London. The term now seems more suitable to the new skills and techniques modern programmers need.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @09:30PM (3 children)
You're excused. If you've done this for any length of time, you've seen projects collapse because the customer decides to make wide ranging, fundamental changes. As an independent contractor you could not allow this because blame would be levelled at you.
Never happened. [wikipedia.org] Nothing good ever came of it. [folklore.org]
Really? [businessinsider.com]
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Sunday April 29 2018, @09:21AM (2 children)
Ok, I see that you're an expert at twisting words and changing their obvious meaning by taking them out of context.
Given that you are just trolling, I'll stop arguing, it's not worth my time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @11:37AM (1 child)
I wasn't trolling. If you want an example from the telecoms world, review the story of the failure of multics and subsequent creation of unix. Review also Brooks Law [wikipedia.org] and Price's Law [amarketplaceofideas.com]
(Score: 1) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday April 30 2018, @10:18PM
I had an old friend at NASA who said that they had done an internal study that put a ratio of 30:1 of geniuses who did the heavy creative work to their support. Not to say that the support was unnecessary.