Programmers and Managers The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States

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 tha...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kraft, P.
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: New York, NY Springer New York 1977, 1977
Edition:1st ed. 1977
Series:Heidelberg Science Library
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: Springer Book Archives -2004 - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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245 0 0 |a Programmers and Managers  |h Elektronische Ressource  |b The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States  |c by P. Kraft 
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505 0 |a 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 
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653 |a The Computing Profession 
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520 |a 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