Professional programmer: artisan or artist?
In the beginning I will tell a little prehistory that prompted me to write this topic.
At one point, I felt that programming (at work) had ceased to bring me past pleasure. I can relate this crisis to the fact that I began to engage in new tasks not on developing, but on supporting projects. Tasks have become routine and not interesting: insert the check box in ui, look and run the project, prepare a list of questions, add a scroll bar to the window, etc. The fact that I know how to improve the system is doubly unpleasant (the existing one is sooo far from ideal, to understand this, just look at such a piece of code (java): String molStr = new String (""). And this is just flowers =) , but they do not give it to me because “the customer will not be satisfied”. Projects are made using outdated technologies (Java 1.4, WL 8.1, everything else is in the same vein), but the new features are simply ignored: “there is no time, we don’t have time to do so”. Refactoring is not done (although projects desperately need it), coupling (coupling) of classes is great, and coupling (cohesion) is low, but this fact doesn’t bother anyone, I won’t even talk about performance ... After some time, it seems an attempt to improve a huge antipattern.
To all my remarks on this subject, I received about the following answer: “It’s very good that you noticed it, but now there is no time for corrections, but perhaps in the future we will fix it.” But the expected moment of the future still does not come ...
Having said everything to my boss, I received the answer “Be professional!”.
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Then I realized that we had a big gap with the head in understanding the meaning of this word. Here is the explanation of this term I found in Ozhegov's dictionary: “A professional is a person engaged in something as a profession (as opposed to an amateur)”, “A profession is the main occupation, labor activity”, “1. A person who has an inclination, an addiction to something. 2. One who does something in his free time is not like a professional. ”
It seems to me that a programmer is rather an amateur professional (in the 1st meaning of this term), I read a similar opinion in Robert Glass’s book Creative Programming. The boss believes that programming is only a means of making money, although for me it is something more (“You live in some kind of ideal world”).
I would like to hear your opinion on this? What is programming: art or craft?
PS It seems to me that at least programming is my bread, an opportunity to make money, but you cannot sit down to write code without a creative approach.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/66828/
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