Shane Schick wrote this great article on why no-one wants to be a programmer  As an old-school programmer, I laughed out loud about being a cereal inventor, ha ha!  Thanks to George Rafael for sending this to me.

 

I think Shane is bang-on about Microsoft and other vendors have to take some time out from patting themselves on the back for making great products to show prospective computer science students that it stands to solve still more. They have to talk about what those problems are, and why they will be worth spending hours staring at a screen trying to combat them. They have to explain why the only thing better than living in an software-driven world is programming it in the first place.

 

I can tell you that we are still in the stone ages with respect to software development compared to other engineering disciplines.  The industrial revolution has not occurred yet in the software world.  As a programmer, I cant go to a software catalog and order a login component like I can order an integrated circuit in the electronics world.  How many login boxes do you think have been invented over and over again?  Millions!  And we as software developers continue to code these from scratch even today.

 

It would be great if the young bright minds of our computer science students helped us old-school programmers in developing tools that bring us into modern times so that we dont keep coding login boxes over and over again.  In fact it would be great if our Universities actually offered Software Engineering degrees in addition to Computer Science degrees (arent these the same? See Software Engineering, Not Computer Science ), but this idea still seems to be in its infancy in our software world.  Unfortunately, in Canada we are still arguing over the title of Software Engineer 

 

Titles aside, I am hoping that the professional engineering bodies in Canada are trying to help our immature software development world by institutionalizing some solid engineering practices in our computer science programs.  Doing so will bring software development out of the dark ages and into the modern world where our chances of building successful projects on time and budget will increase beyond the less then 20% success rate (The CHAOS Report) we currently have today.