Programming is a part time job

A lot of people are predicting the future these days. Some are saying that in five years applications programmers will be an extinct species. Others are predicting that software will become so extensive that naive users will be able to write their own programs. In any event, the future of applications programmers promises to be insecure at best. I say none of these predictions will come true. With all this advance warning, programmers and programming managers will once again find a way to survive. This is the natural behavior of anyone in danger. But I would like to suggest that we take a fresh look at the situation.

I am not chastising programmers. As their jobs are defined, they are doing what is required of them. They have not deliberately set out to make things difficult for their organizations. The fact is, however, that organizations are in some confusion as to just what good their data processing departments are doing for them. We have been trying for over 25 years to define our jobs in this field, and so far all we've managed to do is protect our own interests. What I am going to suggest here is that we challenge ourselves on this.

One of the ways I suggest we challenge ourselves is to face up to the fact that programming is not a full time job. It is 20% of a job. The remaining 80% is the topic of this paper.