are programmers "failures"?

[Don Shepherd]

(03-24-2019 01:26 AM)toml_12953 Wrote:  Of course there are usually time constraints. 1. The users want it NOW. 2. It's got to be ready to ship on Wednesday. NO EXCEPTIONS! 3. You have this other list of programs waiting. You can't spend too much time on just one. So it goes.

Tom L, back in the early 1970's when I began as a programmer for a large federal government agency, the experience was somewhat different from what you describe. I was assigned to write and test a program that would run in batch mode on the Univac mainframe. There was no "user," per se. There was no test department also. It was my responsibility to write it, test it, and when I was convinced that it was ready, turn it over to production where it would be run 50 times, once for each state. That put a lot of responsibility on the programmer to make sure it was right, and I never recall any of my group's programs having to be rerun in production because an error was found after the production runs completed. That was a great environment for a beginning programmer.

I think programmers today don't have it that easy, unfortunately.