I also disagree with several of the minor premises in this article. Such as his statement that "So what advantage does a 60-year-old .NET programmer have over a 27-year-old .NET programmer when they both have, at most, 5 years of experience doing .NET programming? Absolutely none." ... That 60-year-old programmer has more experience and wisdom and that is a huge advantage over a newb!

Overall the author is making a good point. Technology workers have (or are beginning) to wake up to the fact that their skills are commoditizable. Anyone (anywhere) can be trained up to do their job. This is why most tech people get caught in the trap of the never ending skill upgrade cycle ... "If I could just learn and get a certificate in X I can earn the big bucks...". When what they really need to start thinking is how to apply the knowledge that they have into real solutions that they can then monetize.

I personally love programming. I'd gotten to a point a few years ago in my career where I moved out of programming roles only to discover that I missed it. Helping my younger brother through a CS programming really got me going again, and I credit that experience with getting me going on a startup.

That said, sure there's very little cool about being programmer #45 for an insurance company. The truly gifted developers need to be at a software firm, a consulting company (more new dev, less maintenance), working on an open source project, or (best yet) creating their own software.

"There is a prestigious school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, devoted to science and engineering, and while I'm sure that there are some students there who are majoring in 'computer science,' the science that's taught isn't related to the dirty low-prestige job of creating e-commerce websites using ASP.NET"

That note is interesting to me. A major reason I'm on this site right now, in addition to the discussions and the talk about startups, is the fact that Paul Graham was one of the first authors that I read that laid a very solid case for smart programming leading to good business- which of course validated what I and probably most of you already knew or felt. The author of this article is actually saying that an MIT type education is worthless in the real world where you need ASP.NET programming to get the 'real work' done. The author kind of lost all of his credibility for me at that point.

I agree that his views on schools doesn't really translate to coding. The author talks about the prestige of programming being low, which in IT it is, but there are obviously coders that have prestige. John Carmack, for one, is very highly regarded in the computer science field, but he never went to a prestigious CS school. What I find interesting is that programmers only get prestige from actually DOING something. This can happen at a big company but more often than not it happens at a startup. Lawyers and Doctors 'get' their prestige from going to school and getting their title, whether it is deserved or not, but programmers have to earn it through solving problems. I find that much more rewarding, it will mean much more for me to be prestigous because of my work than because of where I went to school.

I agree with jwecker here; when I hit that part of the article, I couldn't help but think of Joel Spolsky's "The Perils of JavaSchools" essay.

EDIT: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html for anyone who's not familiar. It's a good read.

For me, programming is just a means to an end.

I do it not because I find programming intrinsically rewarding necessarily but rather because I find the creation of applications to demonstrate my ideas to be highly rewarding.

So obviously, writing code for someone else would not be rewarding for me.

"Because of this, the computer programming industry within the United States is an industry with a shrinking number of jobs"

Is this backed up with any numbers? People have been predicting the demise of programming jobs in the US for years, yet it never seems to happen. I suspect because the claim is based on the fallacy that there's a finite amount of programming to be done.

"I think that, if you can't get into a Top 14 law school or a top graduate business schol, then public accounting probably provides a better career path than computer programming."

If you have a desire to make things being an accountant will hardly compare with being a programmer.

I don't necessarily agree with the "low prestige" argument. I think that as the internet becomes a greater part of young people's lives (i.e. myspace), the industry becomes more hip and being a programmer for lets say Yahoo! or Google carries a "cooler" image

A programmer for google or yahoo, sure. A programmer for Microsoft or Adobe, not so much. Moreover, outside the big names, software companies are largely unknown; to most of us, hearing that someone works for, e.g, Fog Creek, is pretty nifty, but to the average person, it's meaningless.

Very true, but maybe our overall image is gradually improving, esp. as the tech/internet generation matures.

There are a few points in this article I don't agree with. But it makes an interesting case as to why controlling your own fate, as a small business owner, is a much better choice than 'getting a real job' in the IT industry.

"No one cares if you know how to program in COBOL for example. It's completely useless knowledge."

Well Monster lists 1055 Cobol jobs: http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?q=cobol&fn=&lid=&re=130&cy=us&JSNONREG=1

I think everyone, from the developers to the consumers, would be happier of people like the author of this article stayed out of software.