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.

Inhalt

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.