Humans are social animals. The power to cause (or prevent) change in organizations is political in nature. The power to affect operations through technology is at best instrumental to the power to decide what effect is to be implemented. By ignoring these facts, programmers forego the opportunity to be seen as valuable allies and turn themselves into exploitable resources. No amount of progress, or "platformization" is going to change that.

Sure, getting high paying jobs with little accountability can be kind of cool, in the short term. But you need to think what happens next. If social Darwinism is true, idiot managers will die out and be replaced with more competent managers. It will take years, but at the end of day, they will wise up. And if so many of them see programmers as a threat they will cut our jobs.

To a degree, this is what we are seeing now. The older generation of managers learned that programmers are unreliable, so they outsource not to save money, but to mitigate the risk of having to deal with programmers directly. The next generation is learning that the 3rd parties that isolate them from programmers are unreliable too. I expect the next generation will be very reluctanct to have in house development at all, and that they will limit themselves to existing products from reputable companies, if at all.

Hard to tell what happens when that option is also shown to be not reliable.

I hate this trope. There are thousands of professions out there, and most of them involve some kind of specialized knowledge/ability/skill. Do you really expect the head of your organization, the person least likely to have time to do independent work, to be the one with mastery of all the activities in the organization?

> He cannot do what you can do. Therefore, he is an idiot.

This one is even worse. It's not like programmers know how to do everyone else's jobs, and they aren't idiots.

> Nobody wants to take orders from an idiot.

Some cynical folks have argued that the advantage is that idiots are easily manipulated...

> Every single business on the planet is now, one way or another, turning into a technology platform.

Technology != software, and even if it did, very few businesses are viable as a software platform. Software is becoming an increasingly intrinsic part of most businesses, but so is accounting, legal, hr, management...

> This means that in the end, it is programmers who will own and control everything, and not that bunch of idiots.

I can imagine an accountant thinking much the same thing a century ago...

It's considered unethical for doctors or lawyers to have their work supervised by anyone who isn't a doctor or lawyer. They enforce the rule through professional conduct rules and boards. the result is very high prestige, pay, and working conditions for people with similar skills and education to programmers.

But the atomistic libertarianism and lack of solidarity among programmers makes us targets of mass low wage immigration, outsourcing, and every kind of unpleasant work situation.

With lawyers (more familiar there than with doctors) I don't think that's usually the case; the ABA model rules don't prohibit lawyers from being supervised by non-lawyers (though they do prohibit lawyers from co-owning law firms with non-lawyers, or sharing legal fees with non-lawyers, and they do prohibit lawyers from allowing their employer to "to direct or regulate the lawyer's professional judgment" in providing legal services -- whether or not the employer is a lawyer; this doesn't prevent supervision of the lawyer as an employee, it just essentially means that the lawyer doesn't have a Nuremberg defense of "just following orders" for professional nonfeasance or misconduct.)

http://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibilit...

I've supervised lawyers, though I'm not a lawyer. I know the same applies to other people with regards to doctors. The trade establishes rules they can't violate, but there are a ton of caveats on that. Regardless, those restrictions are actually needed by the organizations for specific roles. If a programmer was needed in a similar way for a specific role, it'd largely work out the same way. The main difference is there'd be no independent review board that has no idea what is going on in the day-to-day unless otherwise alerted.

The prestige/pay/working conditions thing is more a result of a trade group, and the consequent standards for people even being part of the trade, than due to supervision by those who lack skill expertise.

If you restrict yourself to the subset of programmers who have similar education, training, and professional validation processes as doctors & lawyers, I think you'll find a lot of prestige, pay, and quality work conditions (lawyers and doctors will tell you that it isn't quite as good as you imagine anyway).

Agreed. How would you even run a small town according to this "logic"? You would need to be a professional in many different fields. That's why you have advisers for, and that's why a good manager will listen to the people he is managing.

Better yet -- they bleed lots of money but don't die out, due to being hugely profitable, so they continue bleeding lots of money and we finally get the trickle-down economy Reagan promised us.