Re: What are a programmer's rights to what he writes?

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

When I started my computing career in the early 1960's it was not unusual for 
Operators to get paid much more than Programmers.  The Operators had a task 
not unlike System Administrators today, in which changing media & forms had 
to be done with great reaction speed as needed, but was small portion of 
total work.  They tended to be hamstrung with not very good tools to perform 
their work, while tools to help programmers tended to be more mature & 
user-friendly.

That part is still true today on the AS/400.  The tools for System Operators 
& Administrators are not near as user-friendly as the tools for Programmers.  
System Management is fraught with weird stuff going wrong that needs to be 
figured out & fixed really fast.  Programmers are working in a more stable 
environment, in which surprise change is externally imposed decision.

Management perception, at companies whose Managers were good at their job of 
over-seeing Computer Services, was that the task of the Programmer was more 
straightforward & well defined, like an engineer, or a draftsman, or 
mechanic, while the work of the Operator was that of a trouble-shooter whose 
system knowledge & speed of tech-support response was akin to today's 
Paramedics, keeping mission-critical systems running no matter what went 
wrong, able to leap small buildings in a single bound, and perform whatever 
magic was required with a technology not well understood outside the computer 
services department.

The highest pay went to Systems Analysts who figured out what was needed, and 
to Technical Writers who prepared & maintained the documentation interfaces & 
end-user training.  These latter 2 jobs have disappeared, absorbed into other 
people functions. 

Programmers were given the leisure to produce good quality software, and 
thoroughly test it, before it was packaged with documentation for the end 
users.  The culture has changed for Programmers - no longer are we asked to 
spend a chunk of time to perfect a quality mission-critical new product, but 
rather we are expected as fast as possible to deliver something that is good 
enough.

    - Lou Forlini wrote
>  
>      In most cases, operators made well more than the programmers at 
>  their equivalent experience level.  One operator who moved over to 
>  programming took a significant pay cut.  He was the only one known to 
>  me to have ever done so there, and his colleagues thought him insane. 
>  But he did it because he was young, and he saw the writing on the 
>  wall as far as future demand for programmers vs. operators.
>  
>      It was certainly a backward situation compared to most shops, but 
>  that's what came of having part of the shop unionized, and part not. 
>  Accompanied by the inevitable morale problem.

I have had the good fortune since the late 1960s to almost always have jobs 
that are a mixture of Programming & Operations & Administration & Security & 
Analysis ... so I get to experience almost the total spectrum of computing 
development, although there are some tasks I am really glad I not doing any 
more, even though I became extremely proficient at all of them, such as: 
modifying paper tape printer controls (one place where I worked had a 
supplies constraint so we had to be able to fill in old holes); repair of 
damaged punched cards; removing pieces of adhesive labels from the innards of 
printers; writing machine language; modifying MAPICS.  I have been through 
countless conversions & I expect that painful experience is not something I 
can get out of in the future.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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