Programmers and Managers The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States için kapak resmi
Programmers and Managers The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States
Başlık:
Programmers and Managers The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States
ISBN:
9781461394204
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed. 1977.
Yayın Bilgileri:
New York, NY : Springer New York : Imprint: Springer, 1977.
Fiziksel Tanımlama:
118 p. online resource.
Series:
Heidelberg Science Library
Contents:
Programmers, managers, and sociologists -- Expanding the data base -- How this study is organized -- A note on software scientists -- 1 Computers and the people who make them work -- The division of labor in programming -- Programmers as engineers -- The computer and how it grew -- Separation of user and programmer -- References -- 2 The organization of formal training -- The engineering heritage and its consequences -- Adapting tradition -- Programming and the academy -- References -- 3 De-skilling and fragmentation -- The de-skiller de-skilled -- Programming as mass production work -- References -- 4 The programmer's workplace: Part I the "shop" -- The social structure of the programming workplace -- References -- 5 The programmer's workplace: Part II careers, pay, and professionalism -- Careers for coders and low-level programmers -- Careers for managers -- Careers for technical specialists -- Pay -- Professionalism -- References -- 6 The routinization of computer programming -- Management practice and the de-skilling of programmers -- Predictions and other essays in prophesying -- The future programmers and programming -- References.
Abstract:
Norbert Wiener, perhaps better than anyone else, understood the intimate and delicate relationship between control and communication: that messages intended as commands do not necessarily differ from those intended simply as facts. Wiener noted the paradox when the modem computer was hardly more than a laboratory curiosity. Thirty years later, the same paradox is at the heart of a severe identity crisis which con­ fronts computer programmers. Are they primarily members of "management" acting as foremen, whose task it is to ensure that orders emanating from executive suites are faithfully trans­ lated into comprehensible messages? Or are they perhaps sim­ ply engineers preoccupied with the technical difficulties of relating "software" to "hardware" and vice versa? Are they aware, furthermore, of the degree to which their work­ whether as manager or engineer-routinizes the work of others and thereby helps shape the structure of social class relation­ ships? I doubt that many of us who lived through the first heady and frantic years of software development-at places like the RAND and System Development Corporations-ever took time to think about such questions. The science fiction-like setting of mysterious machines, blinking lights, and torrents of numbers served to awe outsiders who could only marvel at the complexity of it all. We were insiders who constituted a secret society into which only initiates were welcome. So today I marvel at the boundless audacity of a rank out­ sider in writing a book like Programmers and Managers.
Dil:
English