I don’t think I’ve kept secret my admiration for what Jeff Atwood does over at codinghorror.com. One of his most recent entries really appealed to me.
One of the (many) unfortunate side effects of choosing a career in software development is that, over time, you learn to hate software. I mean really hate it. With a passion. Take the angriest user you’ve ever met, multiply that by a thousand, and you still haven’t come close to how we programmers feel about software. Nobody hates software more than software developers. Even now, writing about the stuff is making me physically angry.
He quotes an interview where someone suggests that “One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year.” Having recently discussed a tangential subject with my TrekWest5 co-host, Peter, and given my on-going involvement in Freenode’s ##PHP channel I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. Once upon a time (in the early 90’s), there was an attempt by a group known as advogato to provide web-of-tust like metrics to certify a programmer’s skill. Given the explosion of social networking in the intervening period, I’m wondering if any of you have ideas on how we can really bring some muscle to bear on this?
