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Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

The Software Industry needs to take notes from this. They are the ones who have beaten the fun out of Programming and turned it into a drudgery/chore and have caused many Programmers who loved their craft to quit the field entirely. It is possible to meet customer/business needs and still create/maintain a work environment where the programming activity itself is fun for the developers. The way to do it is to abandon Taylorism Management and approach Software Development as a "Human-first" activity akin to that of a poet/painter/artist. Promote Autonomy, challenges compatible with competence, encourage novelty/learning/training and focus less on schedules, micromanagement and detailed processes.

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> ...akin to that of a poet/painter/artist.

Anecdotally, programmer colleagues that view themselves as artists are generally harder to work with than those that identifies as craftsmen. It's generally much easier to have a sound argument about someone's work if they don't view it as their art.

"Craft" is very much an emotional identity and art form, and for many people craft is fun as well - maybe not the exact same emotion, but for me craft is the quiet kind of fun.

I identify as a craftsman but I resonate with the above comment.

Ultimately programming is half technical (what does the computer do) and half human expression (reading and writing code).

The latter [0] is really more of an art than a science or an engineering discipline. Look at all the attempts to prove that one particular way of writing programs is more productive, comprehensible or maintainable than others. They all failed in unique ways, perhaps because human communication is highly complex and contextual. The only thing we all might agree on is "consistency is good".

[0] The former is in my opinion generally overlooked in many fields, even though it's the most measurable. But it is apparently often in conflict with with the latter unfortunately.

Second that. I have been in the industry for 37 years. The Taylorism didn't exist until "Agile" came along around the year 2000. Every programmer was a craftsman before that.

These days, I wouldn't take (or get)a job in most software companies. I suspect that in quite a few non software companies there are software craftspeople working away quietly.

> The Taylorism didn't exist until "Agile" came along around the year 2000.

Its widespread adoption (and usually counter to the spirit of the original Manifest itself) took years however — years where most places, the craftfulness was still prevalent. Myself I haven't encountered that in teams until the mid-2010s, less than a decade ago. Might have been earlier in SV, of course, though. And the bigger Java/.NET/Enterprise shops.

> The Taylorism didn't exist until "Agile" came along around the year 2000.

There was plenty of that before 2000, but it was more in the mainframe world. "Data processing". Government contracts. Business applications. "Software analysts" who broke the problem down into small chunks, and gave those to programmers.

I have been in the industry for 39 years, and I avoided almost all of that, but it was there...

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