The Making of Myths
2014-03-19 16:30:12.610592+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Model View Culture: The Making of Myths: Questioning claims that are widely accepted in the technology industry. By Laurent Bossavit. Read it closely, it's worth going deeper than the pull-quotes to understand things like stock photography representations of programming.
But pull-quotes: Mark Hershberger @hexmode chose:
I eventually concluded from this entrenchment of belief that software engineering tended to be a pseudo-scientific discipline, rather than truly empirical. ...
which everyone who has done software development (rather than, say, done training people in software development processes, is pretty sure of), but I've been trying to figure out why I'm so unhappy and unproductive in my current day job (even as I manage to knock out good portions of a consumer product design in a weekend), and Mark's other pull from it is from this paragraph:
... And it also glamorizes the field, ignoring the truth that large chunks of “IT programming” are rote and repetitive work, copying and pasting templates and adjusting variable names.
Yes. That crap. I hate it. Especially when it's accompanied by an inability to actually impact the processes which require all of that mindlessly translating data from one form to another.