I am not a Computer Scientist

Prepare yourselves. I have an embarrassing and melodramatic admission to make.

My career is a sham.

Although my degree and education are in a field that is typically referred to as "computer science". I am not actually a "scientist". Nor do I "practice science". But I won't be satisfied to go down alone for this charade. I'll going on record saying that I am convinced that for the vast majority of people who were educated in or work in the field of "computer science", the ubiquitous presence of the word "science" in proximity to our work or education, is a tragic misnomer.

I don't know how long this has been on my mind, but I know almost precisely when I became conscious of it. It was a couple months ago. I was newly exposed to devlicio.us, and perusing the blogs hosted there, when I came across a post by Bill McCafferty about a lack of respect and discipline in our field.

Early in the post, Bill reveals an injustice he encountered during his education.

...When I started my undergrad in this subject, I recall reading articles debating whether it should be called a science at all. Gladly, I do not see this argument thrown around much anymore.

I think I am probably not going to make the exact argument here that he disagreed with back then. The things we all studied in school are definitely part of a nebulous field of study that may rightfully be called "computer science". As Bill points out,

"From Knuth's classic work in The Art of Computer Programming to the wide-spread use of pure mathematics in describing algorithmic approaches, computer science has the proper foundations to join other respected sciences such as physics, concrete mathematics, and engineering. Like other sciences, computer science demands of its participants a high level of respect and pursuit of knowledge."

I have no argument with any of this. He's right on. Donald Knuth (who is indeed my homeboy in the sense that we share our hometown) studied and practiced computer science (which if you know anything about Knuth, you'll know is an almost tragic understatement). And thousands of people who have followed in Knuth's foot steps can lay the same claim. However, that's not me. And it's not more than 99% of all programmers in the field today.

Computer science suffers the same type of misnomer as many other disciplines who have adopted the word "science" into their name, such as political science, social science, animal science, food science, etc. And it seems that most such fields, if not all, have done so because the very validity of the field of study itself was subject to severe criticism at some point in the past. So we take on the term "science" to get it through people's heads that there is a root in formal practices and honest intellectual exploration. But to then blanket every profession that derives from this root with the term "science" is a misappropriation of the term.

I can think of a number of examples.... The programmer working for the bank to develop their website, or for the manufacturing company to manage their transaction processing system is no more necessarily a "computer scientist" than the election commentator is necessarily a "political scientist". When someone gets an electrical engineering degree and goes to design circuits for a living we do not say he "works in electrical science". We say he is an electrical engineer. When someone gets a technical degree in mechanics and then goes to support or produce custom machinery, we do not say he "works in mechanical science". We say he is a mechanic, or a technician. Why, then, when someone gets an education that amounts to a "programming degree", and then goes to work doing programming, do we say that he "works in computer science"? It's a uselessly vague and largely inappropriate label.

By contrast, if you have a doctorate in computer science, I'm prepared to say you deserve the label. If you write essays, papers, articles, books, etc. for use by the general practitioner, you probably deserve the label. If you do research, or work on the unexplored fringes of the field--if you are exploring the substance and nature of the information or practices that the rest of us simply consume and implement, then in all likelihood you deserve the label.

Please, please understand that I am by no means belittling the value of our work, or the nobility of our profession. Often we simply consume the information produced by true "computer scientists". But we transform it from theory into practice. We resolve the concrete instances of the abstract problems that the true scientists formally define. We take the pure thought-stuff produced by scientists and turn it into tangible benefit.

This is not trivial. It is not easy. It deserves respect, discipline, study, and care. But it is not "practicing science".

I should say in closing that I am not as upset about all this as the tone of this post might imply. I don't even really have a big problem with the use of the word "science" to refer to a field of study or work that largely does not include research-type activities. I don't like it, but I accept that it happens. But "computer science" has a problem that other similar "sciences" don't. When someone says they work in "political science" or "food science", you can make a guess as to the type of work they do, and it's hard to be significantly incorrect. Though maybe it's my outsider's naïveté that allows me to make this claim. At any rate, "computer science" as a field is so broad and vague that I don't think the term communicates a useful amount of information. But you wouldn't know that by talking to programmers, who seem only too ready to attempt to take hold of the term and own it for themselves.

I think this is one small facet of a larger and far more critical issue in our field in general, which I fully intend to write more about very soon. But until then, lets take the small step of starting to consider what we really mean when we use much of the popular but often ambiguous terminology when discussing our profession.

I work in the field of computer science. This tells you nothing except that I am unlikely to be a prime specimen of the wondrous human physiology. But.... I am a programmer. I have a degree in Computer Engineering. I am interested in programming theory. I work as a software development consultant. And now, you know something about what I know and what I do.

Now what about you?

Update: I forgot to note that in McCafferty's blog entry, he himself makes use of "trade" terminology to categorize different levels of reading materials. Which belies the uncertain nature of programming as a profession. We certainly wouldn't say that a carpenter works in the "wood sciences", would we?

What is a Senior Programmer?

My friend and co-worker Nate recently wrote about some hurdles he has encountered in pursuing his professional ambitions as a software developer. I know what he's going through because I entered both my internship and my first post-college job with tragic misconceptions (non-conceptions really, in the case of my internship) as to how my career would develop.

My first mistake was that, as I began my internship, I had no idea how my career would progress, how it should progress, or how active a participant I would be in whatever progression did occur. I knew that I enjoyed twiddling around with code, and that I seemed to have more of a natural talent for it than most of my classmates. And I figured that if I was going to make a career out of anything, it should be something that I did at least passingly well, and that I enjoyed.

As I entered my first post-college job, I had decided I most definitely did not want to become a manager. I enjoyed programming too much to give it up, for one thing. Further, managers had so far stood mostly as obstacles to my involvement in interesting work, and as incriminating figures more prepared to remonstrate me for my professional flaws rather than empower me to better myself as a programmer. So I wanted nothing to do with that. Instead I set a near-term goal of becoming a "senior developer", at which point I would re-evaluate my career trajectory and adjust course if necessary.

An important question in gauging the advancement of your career as a programmer is to ask what exactly it means to be a senior programmer. I have come to see this title as being tied to the professional respect that one has accumulated in a programming career. A senior programmer is not someone who has served a certain amount of time "in the trenches". Nor is it even someone with a broad experience base.

No, I think there is something a bit more intangible, that identifies someone deserving of the "senior developer" title. Something less measurable. Something that is probably sensed, but not necessarily explicable by those with less experience. But something that would be conspicuous by its absence.

As I see it, what distinguishes someone deserving of the "senior developer" title is a sense of stability. A senior developer is someone who can stand in the middle of the chaos that arises in a project, and exert a calming influence on the people and efforts swirling around him. A senior developer is an anchor to which a project can be tied to keep it from drifting into dangerous waters. He is a sounding board against which claims will ring true or false and goals will ring possible or impossible. He is the steady hand, not necessarily on the rudder of your project's ship, but wherever that hand is needed most. And he is a strong voice that reliably calls out your bearing relative to your destination.

Of course, these metaphors sound a bit grandiose. But the general picture I think is accurate. A senior developer is someone that you put on a project to ensure there's some measure of certainty in the mix. It doesn't mean your project is guaranteed to succeed. But it should mean that you can sleep a little easier knowing that where you think the project is, is where it really is. And that if it's not where it needs to be, that there is someone involved who has a decent idea of how to get it there.

Naturally, these things do come with time and experience. So what I said earlier isn't completely true, in that a senior developer is someone with tenure and experience. However, these are necessary, but not sufficient conditions. Not everyone with 20 years of experience on 5 platforms and 15 languages qualifies. And not everyone with 5 years of experience on 1 platform and 2 languages doesn't qualify. Rather, if you show that you can learn from experiences both positive and negative, port technical and non-technical knowledge from one domain to another, and educate, inspire, or empower colleagues and junior developers.... Then you are showing yourself to have what it takes.

If you're like me, and Nate, you don't feel that you're there yet, but you hope one day to proudly contribute this kind of value. Don't lose hope. Every new experience, technical and non-technical, is a growth opportunity. But it is important to broaden your horizons in both of those respects. If you hope to educate, inspire, and empower others, you must first learn to do so for yourself. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that you can't do that if you feel stagnant. In that case, your first responsibility to yourself is to educate your boss of the professional value you could offer with a little broader exposure. And if that doesn't work, address the issue yourself, dedicating a bit of time outside work. If you can find them, working together with some like-minded friends or co-workers can be very encouraging, like what we have done with our "book club". Remember, nothing changes if things just stay the same.

LINQ: Not just for queries anymore

Take a look at this LINQ raytracer, discovered via Scott Hanselman's latest source code exploration post.

For those of you who don't know what the heck LINQ is, it was created as a language extension for .NET to allow querying of datasets using an in-place SQL-inspired notation. This was a huge step up from maintaining separate bodies of stored queries, or hard-coding and dynamically assembling queries as strings in your source code.

Lately LINQ has been enhanced and expanded upon even further to become a more broadly usable miniature functional/declarative language within .NET. This is impressively illustrated by the raytracer code. The author disclaims that it's probably not the best way to write it, which is probably true. But this in no way detracts from its illustration of the power, expressiveness, and flexibility of LINQ.

I love it! It's a great example of taking a deceptively simple language and showing its power by doing things with it that aren't strictly within the purview of its design. It reminds me of some SQL code that I've written for my current employer, to get functionality out of inefficient PL/SQL and into blazing-fast pure SQL. Stuff that it was said couldn't be done in pure SQL. Of course, this is usually said by people who think that SQL is a second-class citizen among languages, not realizing the power of its declarative foundations. This is something that I hope to write about more extensively in the future, either here or in a new SQL blog I'm considering starting with a friend and coworker.

Anyway, I'm tempted to say that there's a bit of a down side in that this LINQ raytracer is mostly comprised of LETs, which feel more imperative than declarative. However, I've long claimed that just such functionality in actual SQL would make it a tremendously more compact and elegant language, so I won't complain too much about that. =)

My gut reaction upon seeing this code is that it feels like a crazy hybrid of LISP and SQL, but it's written in C#. Which all makes my head spin, but in a good way. I love that C# is becoming such a great hybrid of procedural and functional programming paradigms.

Where will your programming job be in 7 years?

There's been a lot of noise recently about the future of programming, as a profession. Okay, let's be honest, people have been talking about the imminent programming crash for a long time. But they didn't know what they were talking about. When I graduated college a few years back, we were warned that many of us would not find jobs, but this fear turned out to be overblown.

But now the noise is coming from some different directions. It's not analysts, or people who've been layed off, or the people who got screwed in the "dot.com bust". Though to be fair, the analysts are still saying it, louder than ever. But it's also now coming from the people who hire programmers. And unfortunately, if you are a programmer, those are the people you care about. So, what's different this time? Why don't companies need programmers anymore?

Well, they do need programmers. But they need programmers who can do more than just program. So odds are good that if your job title is "programmer", or "programming" constitutes 90% or better of your responsibilities on the job, they're looking at you like day-old tuna salad.

From the ComputerWorld article:

"It's not that you don't need technical skills, but there's much more of a need for the business skills, the more rounded skills"

"Crap," you say to yourself. "I hate business stuff." Or maybe you're saying "Crap. Why didn't I go for that business minor or second major back in school?" Easy, cougar. Don't get too worked up yet. Let's look at the context of this statement. We already know who's saying it: "business people". People working in IT in companies throughout the nation. Not software companies. Not consulting companies. Just regular companies. This is crucial information. It means the positions we are talking about are mostly going to be be "business programming" jobs.

Now we have a few more questions. Where are the jobs going? Why did I put quotes around "business programming"? And why are these jobs going away for real this time?

First answer: they're going to go to people with Associate degrees, and people who are self-taught, and consultants. Some to high-quality on-shore resources, but an awful lot to people who speak Hindi or Urdu (or Chinese, or Korean). Wages and education requirements will be cut for in-house employees, and others jobs are going to consultants. Offshore in most cases.

Next... The reason I put quotes around "business programming" is to distinguish these jobs from other types of programming positions. If you are a "business programmer", you're part of what is currently a pretty huge job market. You're part of a population that does a lot of work for a lot of companies, but is often looked at as an unfortunate necessity by other people at these companies. "Business programming" is the type of programming for which, in the past, a company who sells shoes, would hire some people on full-time and in-house to do. It's order processing, financial reporting, CRM, network management, database scripting, and so on and so forth. And for a long time, management types have had an uneasy feeling that they were getting kind of a raw deal on these guys. And I hate to break it to any business programmers out there.... but they were right.

According to the Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for computer programmers, there are very specific and very real reasons that programming jobs are being phased out.

"Sophisticated computer software now has the capability to write basic code, eliminating the need for many programmers to do this routine work. The consolidation and centralization of systems and applications, developments in packaged software, advances in programming languages and tools, and the growing ability of users to design, write, and implement more of their own programs mean that more of the programming functions can be transferred from programmers to other types of information workers, such as computer software engineers.

Another factor limiting growth in employment is the outsourcing of these jobs to other countries. Computer programmers can perform their job function from anywhere in the world and can digitally transmit their programs to any location via e-mail. Programmers are at a much higher risk of having their jobs outsourced abroad than are workers involved in more complex and sophisticated information technology functions, such as software engineering, because computer programming has become an international language, requiring little localized or specialized knowledge. Additionally, the work of computer programmers can be routinized, once knowledge of a particular programming language is mastered."

I would add to this list that "business programming" is almost inherently redundant. Every company out there that employs in-house developers is reinventing the wheel. 99% of the problems their programmers are solving have been solved by thousands of other programmers at other companies around the country. When I look at it that way, it feels like such a tremendous waste of money and time. These programmers could be working on real problems like true AI, building Skynet, or bringing about the rise of the machines and their subsequent domination over the human race.

So essentially, the big reason is that there is finally a way for a company to separate their technical needs from their business needs. Packaged software has finally come to a point where it solves the general problems, while still providing a minimum amount of flexibility necessary to handle a company's critical peculiarities. When they have a need that isn't fulfilled by some packaged solution out there, contracting resources have become plenteous and cheap enough to fill that need. The company can move the business knowledge into more generic manager roles that are more useful to the company. (Roles with better pay, and job titles such as "software engineer" and "system analyst", and "project manager".) And the technical knowledge can be moved mostly out of the company into a "unpluggable" resource that they only need to pay as long as the work is actually being performed.

So, what's a programmer to do?

Well, first of all, stop being just a programmer. Don't be a code monkey. Yes, the under-appreciated coder-geeks of the world have "owned" that pejorative term. But in the eyes of corporate America, the words "code monkey" are always preceded by the words "just a". Code monkeys abound. They are replaceable. If you don't evolve (pun intended) you're going to end up obsolete when your company finds an offshore contractor that doesn't suck. (Yes, they do exist!)

One way you can evolve is by taking the advice of all the articles and reports I've linked to in this post. You can take courses, get certifications, etc., and become a "software engineer" or a "system analyst" or a "project manager". The numbers show there are plenty of companies out there that will be willing to pay you to do this as long as you don't suck at it. (And some that will even if you do suck. But I strongly advise against sucking.)

Many programmers go this route at some point. And there's no shame in it, if you can let go of coding every day (or at all) as part of your job and not hate yourself for it. I think I might go that route one day, but I'm not ready for it yet. For one thing I don't feel my experience base is either broad or deep enough to be as effective as I would want to be. But also, there are just too many cool languages and libraries out there. Too many programs that haven't been written yet. Too many problems that haven't been solved.

So what is there for me, and those like me? Those who don't want to give up programming as the core of our job, but don't want to end up teaching programming to high school kids by day while we sate our code-lust at night in thankless open source efforts? (No not all open source is thankless. But there are a lot of projects that go nowhere and just end up abandoned.)

Two answers:

1. Consulting. Not everyone is willing to send the work around the world, dealing with language barriers, time-zone difficulties, and security uncertainties, to get it done. There's a definite place in the market for on-shore, face-to-face consulting. This spot is getting tighter though, so you had better make sure you're a top-shelf product.
2. Software companies. The companies that sell the software that's putting code monkeys out of jobs are still raking it in. And they're actually solving new problems, building new technologies, etc. All the exciting stuff I dream of working on as I churn out yet another database script for a client.

These are your new targets. The sooner you make the jump the better. Not only will you be trading up, as far as job satisfaction (and probably pay), but you'll also be contributing your own small part to the further expansion of software technology. Both by actually working on it, and by condemning the tremendously redundant field of "business programming" to the death it has deserved for so long. You'll probably still have to learn that business and management stuff, but you can also probably avoid it taking over your job.

A new kind of Democracy

Friday night I was listening to the Boston-based NPR show On Point. The episode was about how reading affects the brain. It was interesting, but that's not what I want to talk about. There were two guests on the show. The main guest is a professor of child development at Tufts, and the other a professor of educational communication and technology at Wisconsin's very own UW Madison. This latter guest was brought in as a counterpoint to the main guest's fear that people spending more time with videogames and on the internet were missing out on many of the amazing benefits that reading bestows upon the brain.

Given the UW prof's area of focus, the conversation of course eventually came around, briefly, to blogs. She claimed that just as the Guttenberg printing press enabled the "democratization of knowledge", blogging will bring about another fundamental shift. One where, as before, some very nice things will be left behind, forgotten by most, in sacrifice to the emergence of a new mode of interaction that will bring about it's own useful new evolutions and societal impacts. I found this a tremendously interesting proposition, and hoped they would follow this line of thought a bit more, but unfortunately the host had latched onto some earlier point and swung back around to that, never to return.

I'm not sure I heard another word of the broadcast anyway though because my mind was off and racing.

Many people have already staked a claim on the blogosphere as the next frontier in journalism. Rejoicing has already begun that journalism will migrate into the blogosphere and morph into something new and different than ye olde journalisme, bringing enlightenment to all and ushering in the Age of Aquarius.... Certainly it will offer a new value proposition, but I am not yet convinced of the extent to which blog journalism will supplant traditional journalism. Regardless of that, however, these people are thinking too narrowly.

Let's go back for a minute to that statement about "democratized knowledge". I've heard this turn of phrase several times in reference to the rise of the printing press, but never really stopped to think about what is really being expressed there. The history of human communication seems to me to track very closely the history of significant "advancements" in civilization, and with a bit of thought I think it becomes abundantly clear why this should be.

When speech and body language were all that was available, the spread of knowledge was a social affair. You needed to have at least two people, in close proximity, interacting more or less directly. The advent of writing freed knowledge from the bounds of proximity in space and time. But consumption was serial because the recordings required a huge time investment. First one person, then another, then another.... If the recording was not lost or stored away in a private library. The printing press resolved these issues. It became trivial to make multiple copies of a manuscript. Copies could be made as long as there was demand for them. If some were destroyed others would survive.

The printing press made knowledge available to all those who desired to consume it. It was no longer the privilege of rich or powerful men. If you could read, you could learn, regardless whether someone was available to teach you personally. One man's idea could be made available to thousands, across time and space, and generally without concern for the social position of the consumer. This is what is meant by the democratization of knowledge, and it really was a significant turning point in human history.

I contend that the rise of blogging is the next great evolution of human communication. Sir Isaac Newton is quoted as having said "If I have seen farther, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." How do we know they were giants? Because they had the time and resources to make recordings of their ideas, and people valued them enough to demand and preserve them. In the past there were generally two ways you could get your ideas disseminated to humanity at large. If you were privileged enough to have the time and resources, you could finance a recording of your idea regardless of its perceived value. Or if you really believed in your idea, you could make a big sacrifice to get it recorded, and pray that people valued it enough to compensate you for your investment.

With blogging, these restrictions are largely abolished. If you have access to a computer, you can create a blog, for free, as I've done here. You can record your ideas as quickly as you can type them, and once you post it, it is instantly available for billions of people to simultaneously search for, stumble upon, consume, discuss, and share.

Newton and Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. With blogging, we no longer have need of the giants. For you and I to see farther, we can assemble a great pyramid of normal human beings, each with a small contribution that in aggregate has potential that the "little people" of the past could only dream of participating in.

We can also move beyond ideas and into expression and experience. Blogging allows us all to share with the world our unique experiences, our viewpoints, our disasters, our epiphanies, our humanity. No matter how mundane our individualities may be judged by most, we now have the potential to find the other people out there who are weird in the same ways we are. With increasing frequency and ease we can now connect online with someone else who has shared our joys and sufferings, our beliefs and needs. Someone with whom we can identify and be comforted. Or we can peer into the "mundane" individualities of others, and experience the wide breadth of simple but beautiful diversities of humanity. These are often things that are difficult to get published in print, unless the presentation is particularly engaging, or the story is something that we expect will touch large groups of people. Online these barriers do not exist. And we need not simply consume the others' narratives either. We are empowered to interact with the speaker and participate in their narrative.

I could go on into more specifics, but instead maybe I will dedicate another post to that sometime down the line when I've thought about it a bit more.

To put it succinctly, Gutenberg's printing press enabled the democratization of the consumption of knowledge. With the emergence of blogging, we are witnessing the democratization of the production of knowledge and of expression of the human experience.

Maybe not the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.... But I think it's a bit of a "big deal" nonetheless. Though I am probably late to the party on this.

My Grand Entrance

I have officially joined the blogosphere. I'm still not sure I like that word. It sounds like something Dan Simmons would have made up. But here I am nonetheless. My entry was unceremonious, not surprisingly, as my online presence has heretofore consisted solely of my college Senior Design project page and scattered posts on a few unrelated forums in various corners of the internet (some of which I am now thoroughly ashamed of).

I created this blog as an outlet, for my many and varied interests. It has been exceedingly rare to find someone who is willing to listen to me talk about them, let alone actually hold up one end of a discussion. So, hopefully this will provide me a pressure valve, where I can let out some of the thoughts that build up in my head without thoroughly irritating my friends and coworkers.

If I'm lucky, someone will read one of my posts all the way through before realizing they've wasted their time on the ramblings of some idiot on the internet.

And if I'm really lucky, it'll turn out that there's another person out there who actually cares enough about the same things as I do to tell me how ridiculous my ideas are and that I should just close up shop and go back to my day job.

Anyway, here are a few of the things I'll likely blog about:

• Software Development
• Programming Languages (and theory)
• Technology and Culture
• Theoretical Physics
• Education
• Math
  
• Professional Development
• Language / Linguistics
  

If these obscure and esoteric topics look interesting to you, God help you.... I mean stay tuned!