Professionalism in the Software Industry

Good point from the article "The Next Big Thing". Thanks to Paolo Melendres for posting it on PinoyJUG and Jojo Paderes for resurrecting the thread. Here's the section I want to point out:

Let's face it. Our industry is hideously unprofessional. What other industry ships the kind of crap to their customers that we so regularly do?

Don't get me wrong. There are some very professional programmers out there. There are professional teams, and even professional software companies. But they are the exception, not the rule. The rule, the exasperating repetitive depressing rule, is that software products are late, over budget, and buggy.

Companies who hire programmers don't really know what a programmer is, so they hire just about anybody and tell them to write code. Then they don't look at the code they write. They just let them hack away until, five or six years later, a few of them realize that cut and paste might not be the best way to build a system.

One would think that the schools might help. One would think that a degree in computer science might mean that the graduate could write code. One would be wrong. Many CS grads wrote little or no code in order to get their degrees. I find this astounding; but nevertheless it is true. The CS degree means very little in terms of programming ability.

I'm hoping O&B can initiate some sort of standardization in the skillset of the Filipino Java Developer. At some point, we'd like it to be common knowledge among managers and recruiters to know that programming syntax isn't the only prerequisite to a programming job. A programmer has to be able to verify the quality of his code by supporting it with automated unit tests. He has to understand the rudiments of Object-Oriented Design so that his code is efficient to maintain. He has to understand software engineering processes so he knows how to work in a team. And then, he has to know the ins and outs of Java technology so well that he can understand and fix any problem, and not just be dependent on his tools.