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IT: Coding is Creating, Or, On the 7th Day He Created TRON
Thu, 27 Apr 2006

<Ramble> As an infotech grunt, I like to think that what I do is - at its dank primeval murky core - an act of creation. As with any job, a certain amount of work is repetition but it is the gusto and spirit of the work that defines it. Software development is an act of creative violence, of man against the problem, machine and mind and Shanghai noodles banging rocks together until something useful falls out. Software engineering is a symphony.

Years ago I was discussing with my father what coding is. He's an intelligent strong ingenious hard working man (all the things I am not ;) who self-taught a certain amount of engineering for his work as a machine designer. I told him that development at its best follows the same forms - the act of peeling away the layers until a very refined idea can be drafted and designed and aggregated into something useful, and I gave him the age-old developer idea that as with carpentry a good developer can use tools, and make tools, and make tools that make tools - like a hammer. I was careful to also note that this is development at its best, and that most of the time it's more like throwing 10 people at a problem until they've mashed screws into walls using their foreheads.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I think many jobs are treated by the outside world as droll, yet the folks who toil away day by day doing them believe they are doing magic. The problem is the business world, who thinks of us all as working in the slag mines. Its been said before that IT is the new blue-collar and thats the truth my droogs.

I post this as I worry again of all this momentum we have to honouring the business man, the suit, who happily pushes innovation off to another country or cheaps out with outsourcing. I do not believe it is such a large problem as the media makes it out to be, but I do worry about the eroding mindshare.. about the very loss of culture that seems to be ongoing. The culture of fostering the small business, of research spending, of creation and creativity that helped make our nations great. We need more spending on aeronautics and invested in our youth, and to bolster the reputation in IT. Recent statistics suggest that university enrollment in computer science is down and I lay this squarely at the feat of media making up a problem where it may or may not exist. But regardless, with our dependance on technology, on technology already manufactured in other countries.. can we really afford to have it designed somewhere else too?

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