> And become a goddam profession.
Hurray? What do we gain by becoming a profession? I guess we get 9 to 5 work, conferences, meetings and boredom. Sounds like we're a profession already, but I guess not. Honestly, I'm not sure I'm a big fan of professions.
Shiny things, those are what children like, and I guess children aren't professional so we should get rid of shiny things.
And since we're getting rid of childlike things, let's get rid of:
- The joy of discovery
- The feeling of creating something from nothing
- The empowerment of solving our problems in new ways
- The utter joy of entering a new community of amazing people
I guess we lose all that, because it's time to be a goddamn profession.
So, although it's fun to reinvent wheels - partly to build up your skills and knowledge, and satisfy one's curiosity - the best solution for your customer/client/manager/business might be to use something off the shelf.
Those "childlike things" are amazing, but not at the expense of other people. This is especially important for people who develop line-of-business systems for paying clients. Unless its an explicit part of your value proposition, wasting your client's money is pretty damn unethical. And if becoming a profession makes us more ethical, then it can't happen soon enough.
Until I reminded myself to assume good faith about the author (which is usually worth it with this author), I felt myself assuming he was disparaging all things new as being shiny and therefore unprofessional.
I don't believe that is the point of this article, and I worry the caricature is a little so over the top that people will interpret it as such a little too easily.
I think the point is this: don't confuse movement with progress. New is not necessarily better. The world of software tools is like any other marketplace of ideas: you will have a curve of early adopters onto the stragglers. It is not worth assuming that a tool is worth upending the world over just because the early adopters are jumping up and down about how it will. Most things won't. But some things will.
The point isn't novelty. It is value. Novelty has value, particularly social and sentimental value, but often it is fleeting. Other forms of value aren't. It is worth considering the new thing in all perspectives of value.
Apart from that, logarithm functions do not converge ftw.
