Letter to the Editor by John Derbyshire

The Mandarin Middle Management Conspiracy

In the June 1991 Programmer's Bookshelf, Ray Duncan takes Ed Yourdon to task:  "What Yourdon views as programming, you and I would consider the tedious paper-pushing of burned-out middle managers."

I am sorry to have to tell Ray that Yourdon's view is the standard in large organizations.  Still the standard.  A full generation after people started to notice that good programmers frequently make poor managers, few big companies -- none at all, actually, in my experience -- have any proper career structure for what Ray correctly calls "the creative labor of programming".  The assumption everywhere is that after three or four years cutting code, you have paid your dues and are entitled to be rewarded with a real job:  issuing memos, drafting proposals, and attending meetings, meetings, meetings.

As a matter of fact, there is some justice in the Yourdon view.  Most of those people who did their three years coding were not much good at it (ask the people who have to maintain their code!) and lapsed gratefully into the Unit Manager slot.  Like most human beings, they had no talent or passion for anything outside their private lives, and so were best employed in a job requiring no talent or passion.  The true casualties are those of us who love making code and are good at it, yet want to arrive at middle age earning a respectable salary.  We are the losers in a culture dominated by the idea, once confined to empires of the bureaucratic-despotic type, that the only worthwhile form of human activity is directing the work of others:   to say to this one, "Come," and he cometh, to say to that one "Go," and he goeth.  The goal of all endeavor is the Mandarin's cap.   Those of us who don't want to be Mandarins, but who would like to be properly rewarded for useful work done with loving attention, are thought of as eccentrics.   Try turning down that promotion to Unit Manager:  They look at you as if you'd asked for a transfer to the mail room.

Between the middle management drone and the nerd hacker who never takes his eyes from the screen (all you ever see of him is his ponytail), there is another breed:  the true programmer/analyst.  We dress for business, and we know business.  Years of working with accountants, engineers, executives, sales reps and warehouse managers have taught us how they think and what their needs are.  We can figure out their requirements, then we can go back to our cubes and turn those requirements into fast, maintainable, waterproof code.  Not total loners, we can play the noncom when necessary, taking on a couple of support programmers and guiding their work to good effect.  We understand the need for CASE methods and can operate perfectly well within them, though we'll never be enthusiastic about "functional specifications," "dataflow diagrams," and all those other submanagerial exercises in applied boredom, eating into time that could be spent coding or fishing around in users' minds.  We don't mind turning to a 4GL for the occasional emergency enhancement, but will never believe that this is real programming.  "ORACLE is for people who don't like computers," a colleague commented to me recently.  We all know what he means:  It's for the three-year people.)

Sick of the Mandarin ethos of large companies, we've tried to go into business for ourselves as code producers, but found we had no skill at marketing.  We end up as "consultants," resented by permanent staff, harassed by the IRS, cut off from the life of the companies we work at.

When programmers first started to appear in business organizations, they were regarded with fear and suspicion, the possessors of arcane knowledge:  anarchic, disruptive elements in the stately world of business management.  The paper-pushers saw early on that computers were a threat to their status.  They acted to contain and neutralize that threat.  Now the Yourdons have taken over and Harmony has been restored.  Programmers -- like engineers in a previous generation (why do you think everything's now made in Japan?) -- have been marginalized and demoralized.  Andy Bender can talk as much as he likes about the "professionalization" of software engineering and the need for a "standard university curriculum;"  but if he thinks graduates of that curriculum will ever have the status of MBAs, he is dreaming.

There are consolations, though.  Programming may, as a Mandarin recently told me, be "nothing but a glorified clerical function," but we still have our skill and our passion.  And, of course, we still have Dr. Dobb's.