Comment by mrguyorama
3 years ago
Naw, we should be honest about what we actually do, mostly so we can stop pretending our industry is good at what we do.
We are "Framework and API plumbers" by and large, taking existing packages and just hooking them into each other.
Plumbing generally works despite being constrained by real world non-idealities and things like wear-and-tear.
We belong with the lawyers, who are working in an entirely human constructed framework but have somehow fucked it up so bad that it has loopholes and undefined/unexpected behavior.
Is that not what we're doing with distributed systems? A lot of the theory & practice of our field is how to elegantly cope with servers dying, data being corrupted, load limits of single machines, etc. We have a lot of constraints.
And there's no possible way not to have some leaky abstractions with this in front of us.
I will concede that in some instances we reach a level of thoroughness that could be considered more like plumbing.
But it is less funny if we go with code-plumber, the goal here is to justify trying to steal the protected job title.
There is a large world of programmers outside of the Web world.