Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software.

How sad is this?

Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.”  If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.

Whatever happened to the profession of computer programmer/analyst? The guy who understood enough about computers, computability and algorithms to actually save you money by suggesting a better solution (better being faster, cheaper, less consuming of whatever resources cost you a lot of money, etc)?

How many are rolling in their graves today?

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Mindstorms, or teaching our children about computers

Do you remember Professor Seymour Papert and his book Mindstorms? At a time when such things were expensive for adults, he put computers and a remote-control robotic turtle in kids classrooms. Armed with a simple robot programming language, these kids created amazing things and broke many educational paradigms. But have you heard anything of this recently?

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Of software and falability

Last week, the Google toolbar, software I have run for years, upgraded itself. As a result of the upgrade, it started offering to translate pages for me.

It’s a nice feature, except for the small problem that pages it was offering to translate were already in English.

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