No such thing as "real programming"

I went to work for a large company to develop a software that while the OODBMS has been maintained the companies software that runs on it has been behind. They had a new product in "new development" that was up to date on the backend but their core product that their entire client base was running on was 35 years old.

I quit because after 6 months I was being choked by it. If I'm not working with Object Orientated code, SQL or an OORDBMS (actually using objects) I will lose my mind because if boredom.

So the product we were working in used cache basic. Variables had no datatype. Arrays were easy to work with but we're challenging apparently to the people at the company. They called it coding, it was honestly scripting. They were taking templates, taking the clients interface spec and then mapping pieces of the interface transactions to variables which would be handled in the next routine.

It was buggy, it wasn't programming, and the people didn't want it to change. They had all worked there for 5-15 years and many considered what they did "programming".

They were nice people, I hated to leave because the people were awesome. However, I said multiple times that "this isn't programming". When I was working in the reporting software and teaching some more advances SQL techniques and one guy jokingly said ,"is this what you call development?" I said ,"no this SQL scripting and basically report writing. When you write a stored procedure i. SQL code that maintains a type 2 slowly changing dimension in sql, yeah that is a bit more of an object/action."

I script all the time. I'm proud of scripting. I love automating things but I don't call it "development" or "coding" as I believe those are in the realm of a "software engineer".

I don't pay a civil engineer to design a bridge that works under the right conditions, I pay a civil engineer to design a bridge under ALL conditions. This involves fail safes, innovative ideas at handling difficulties while still have fail safes. The best engineers in history that made our landmarks used the latest and greatest technology and sometimes "over built" something as the technology was brand new and untested.

Software Engineer's work in the products of the last 10 years and want to push the limits of their software and them selves.

At my last job, people didn't want to learn new things. They worked 100x harder than they should have. It's like calling yourself an "civil engineer" when you don't know how to build in the latest tools and you are trying to build a bridge using techniques the Egyptians used to build the pyramids.

Don't call yourself a civil engineer when you can't use Autocad or similar drafting product. Civil engineers who can't use Autocad are called retired Civil Engineers.

Same applies to Software Engineering, if you aren't working in some type of Object Orientated code, low level hardware code, SQL code, or OODBMS.... can you really call your self an engineer? If you aren't working in an up to date language are you just maintaining old code at that point and simply making modifications to old code.

Its hard for me to even think of a language that doesn't fall in the above catagories but they are out there.

I think it comes down to if someone is a software engineer or not. I think much of this comes down to the person.

/r/PHP Thread Parent Link - brightball.com