"A professional always does everything necessary to complete a job. An amateur sometimes chooses only the fun parts."
My problem is, what is "a job"?
Most people work on a team in order to work on "the fun parts" and let someone else deal with the other parts. I'm lousy at marketing and sales. I cannot do graphical design. Don't trust me at all to handle the bookkeeping.
Those are all parts of of the job of releasing a software product. But I only find the programming-related parts to be fun.
That's why I'm a professional programmer, but not a professional in the other fields.
I also don't like this:
"An amateur golfer, for example, may thrill at the crack of hitting a 300-yard drive but hate putting. And so that amateur may frequently choose to pick up the ball once it's “close enough” to the hole."
Golfing has amateur championships. When Tiger Woods competed in the United States Amateur Championship in the mid-1990s, he did not "choose to pick up the ball". He did all of the parts, and did them well.
The USGAs rules about amateur status include things like a limit of $750 max prize money for the tournament. http://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/rules-hub/amateur... It's "amateur" because the golfers aren't making a living from golfing.
There are fun and less-fun parts of programming -- building a new feature? Fun. Analyzing requirements, or doing code review, or spelunking through a crappy and undocumented 3rd party API? Less fun. But all can be part of the same 'job' of developing a feature.
The article is saying the amateur is the one who skims off the fun parts, and avoids the others, whereas the professional does the entire job -- gets to done-done, vs just 'it works'.
On golf: You are correct that Tiger Woods did not pick up the ball on the putting green when playing amateur tournaments. I don't think the article's making a point about the official USGA definition of 'amateur'.
There are professionals - people who get paid to work on projects for a living - who shirk the less-fun parts. The author seems to want to call those people "amateurs".
There are amateurs - people who are not paid to work on projects - who are very serious about their work and do the less-fun parts. Should we call these people "professionals?"
We need only look at volunteer organizations to see non-professionals doing hard and often thankless work. We see people work hard to excel in amateur sports all the time, even if only to make a personal record. It therefore doesn't seem right to associate "amateur" with the qualities that the author is trying to describe.
I pointed out the USGA example precisely because the author seems to think that those terms and definitions can be applied to golf. Since they can't, they likely can't be applied to other fields either.
Wouldn't "lazy worker" and "good worker" be more appropriate terms than "amateur" and "professional"?
