Profession Equals Job Plus Education

There is some material on WardsWiki already about programming as a profession or career.

• CareerLanguage, on taking the time to make a large learning investment (and then finding that the rules have changed). TeachYourselfProgrammingInTenYears
• JourneyOftheSoftwareProfessional, ManagingTechnicalPeople (books)
• ProgrammingProfession (discussion of, problems with, possible solutions)
• ProfessionalPerfectionism, ProfessionalResponsibility and other LikePages.
• MotivateProgrammers goes down a slightly different track.
• When ProgrammingIsNotFun, being professional helps.

The assertion was that "profession" equals "job" plus

• education

but then...

• some perfectionism as above, to avoid JobSecurity through BadCode
• ...

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Moved from AreLispersTakingOverThisWiki. Not because this is the right place, but it's a better place.

If you use high-fallutin concepts, other developers will complain that they cannot read your code, and you sound like an over-educated dweeb when trying to explain it.

There's something almost tragic about that. Isn't continuing education part of the difference between a job and a profession?

Absolutely. It drives me crazy how many so-called professional programmers only know 1 or 2 languages (usually C/C++ and VisualBasic), and won't bother to learn more because they don't see anybody else using other languages.

[insults removed, explanation left on the original page]

Being that a programming career often has a shelf-life shorter than a sports star, one could argue that "high-end educution" is not justified. Older programmers are simply discriminated against. Bosses don't want to hear software engineering philosophy coming out of their mouth, but the latest buzzwords, with enthusiams ("Woopeee, XML will save the world, boss!"). Besides, bad code is job security because those who dole out the pay don't know how to recognize and measure long-term-friendly designs. The typical corporation is run by NeanderthalMarketers?.

This is discussed a little more in CareerLanguage.