First, a confession - I actually occasionally call myself a coder, but in a tongue in cheek, post-modern and ironic way. Heck, it does make for a good blog title and license plate.
Nevertheless, with all the recent “coding schools” cropping up all over the place - at least if you are in the Bay Area - it does seem that being able to code in the context of a reasonably sought after web technology without much further formal training is the path to new, fulfilling careers and of course untold riches in an economy where recent graduates in all fields have problems finding work. Well, at least a career that allows you to rent a room instead of crashing on somebody’s couch.
There are some problems with the whole “mere coder” thing. Dave Winer has some interesting thoughts on his blog, and I agree with a lot of what he says. Scott Radcliff has some additional thoughts, which I also find myself agreeing with a lot.
The process of building a software system is a lot more than just coding unless you subscribe to the view that all the coders do is to take the gospel handed down by A Visionary Leader and convert it into software. Anybody who’s ever built a moderately complex system knows that software doesn’t happen that way, at least not the type of software that doesn’t collapse under its own weight shortly after its release. Of course that doesn’t sit well with the notion of The Visionary Genius that is all that is required to build the next and the narrative doesn’t work at all once you recognise that building software is, in most cases, a team sport.
Expecting someone who has learned to write code to o create a great piece of software is like expecting someone who’s just gone through a foreign language course of similar length to go and write the next great novel in that particular language. Sometimes you get lucky, but most of the time the flow isn’t there, the language isn’t yet used in an idiomatic way and all that together makes for less than an enjoyable experience. Some of the people who manage to enter the profession of software development will learn on the job and grow into people who can build robust, maintainable systems and those are to be congratulated.
The way most people use the term coder, ie in a non-postmodern ironic way, reminds me very much of the time when a programmer’s job was to unthinkingly program as part of a little cog in the giant waterfall development machine, which led to the WIMP (Why Isn’t Mary Programming) acronym. Basically, if the keyboard wasn’t constantly clattering, there was no programming going on.
That said, maybe we are at a point in time where an army of coders as the modern equivalent of the typing pool is able to create good enough software. Given that most users are conditioned to believe that software is infuriating and buggy, we as an industry might well get away with. Is that the world we want to live in, though?
As creators of software, we do have the ability to choose the environment that we work and live in. If you care about quality, work with like-minded people.
Me? I prefer to call myself a software craftsman. I’m not an engineer, I write code but that’s almost an afterthought once the design is figured out but at the end of the day what I do is build something that wasn’t there before, using vague guidelines that are wrong as often as they are right while trying to tease out what the customer needs rather than what they tell me they want. In most cases there is no detailed blueprint, no perfect specification that only needs to be translated 1:1 into lines of code. Instead, I get to use my experience and judgement to fill in the blanks that most people - myself included - probably didn’t even think were there.
Sounds like a job for a craftsman to me.