When programmers start shoving fluff into an app and they don’t understand a concept called “version 2″. People pay for new versions and devalue your app when you give them something for nothing. Again… Agile wrangles a project in.

A good business analyst knows how to speak business jive and a programmers binary language of moisture evaporators.

i have a cs degree and I currently do qa and support for a security software company. we have a bunch of really smart and capable software engineers. the problem I see most often between the business end and the engineers is that there is no balance between how well the requirements are defined and the level of complication that the engineers will apply to the project when its left up to them.

dont get me wrong, building an application can be complicated, even if it is a simple application with few features, and most non-technical people are unable to cover the majority of the requirements and expected behaviors. what I find is that once requirements arent defined well enough, the engineers turn the product into their little pet project, adding bells and whistles or simply doing things in the most complicated way they can think of. i completely understand that the complexity is a reflection of creativity and a show of great vision, but the ultimate goal in a for-profit organization is to build a product/service that satisfies the current needs of the potential demanding-population in the most quick and efficient manner.

what im saying, is that if everybody in an organization did their job with a little less emotion and a little more preparation and objective thinking, there wouldnt be any thought of eliminating the programmer.

My bigger concern though; am I a engineer or a mechanic?

I’m a Web designer, here via a link on Webmonkey.com. I always encourage clients to fulfill their curiosity about WYSIWYG Web site editors. They always come back afterward.

“I’d have requirements for loans from $0 to $100,000; from $150,000 to $250,000; and for loans over $250,000. But there was a hole between $100,000 and $150,000″

Otherwise we mortals would never have been able to see through all those levels of abstraction and figure out that there was a gap between $100k and $150k.

Using Lisp macros, the complexity of the code remains at the same level while the scope of work increases.

That’s what programmers do. They remove work from humanity. It is naive to assume that because we are the ones doing the culling our jobs are safe from it.

Good software engineers make code that is not simply easier to maintain but doesn’t have to be. Closed to modification. Open for extension. Meaning, good software engineers are already replacing themselves.

IMO if you are not actively working to make your job unnecessary, you are not doing your job. It’s just a matter of time.

“Programmers have a superior ability to analyze problems and come up with solutions. They excel at analyzing preconditions, sequences of events, and outcomes.”

The best programmers are “Mappers”. This essay radically recast and clarified my thinking about programming, CS education, and education generally:

http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-2-thinking-about-programming/

It is “Packer” thinking that you are railing against – the idea that if you just learn some huge set of rules, you will be able to do any job. But the Mappers are much better at programming, because they build and extend mental models which makes them capable and confident.

(* I’m not making any judgment as to whether it’s the best, but it certainly is the most direct. Type systems are theorem provers. I can’t think of any way of convincing yourself that your program is correct that is more direct than putting a formal correctness proof right into its source code.)

“We will never be rid of code, because code represents the details of the requirements. At some level those details cannot be ignored or abstracted; they have to be specified. And specifying requirements in such detail that a machine can execute them is programming. Such a specification is code.” (Emphasis in original.)