<p><pre><code> > "Software design and programming were considered clerical work."
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I realize that there's a certain art of code, and even a science that goes into the underlying algorithms, languages, and methodologies. Indeed I've spent the majority of my life now in one way or another transfixed by software development.<p>But it seems to me that the vast amount of code written is still, in fact, "clerical work". Whether it's gluing together enterpriseBeanBuilderExpressionListMochaBusinessLogicAuditingFactories, or hooking up your node.js to your express.js to your bootstrap.js to transfer JSON over REST into your DOM, or even converting your 4000 character, 50 pipe bash one-liners into nicely polished scripts that properly account for exit codes, handle non-standard locations for sysfs, and work on a multitude of platforms, at the end of the day, a lot of this really does come down to clerical-style work. The difference is that the language, terminology, abstractions, and platforms are more obtuse than the previous generation's clerical work. The nouns are different and strange, but the predicates are all the same.<p>There are indeed wondrous areas in computer science and software engineering, but I think for most of us, we're just doing fairly menial work. We feel smart doing it, because it's still new enough that the objects and content of it are still uncustomary for most folks, and in fact the best of secretaries and clerks have indeed possessed great intelligence. But at the end of the day, we need to recognize that most of what we do is mere clerical work, glorified only by the odd shapes of the more obscure symbol keys on our keyboards.<p><i>ducks</i><p>"I swear, by clerical, I meant the clergy!"<p><i>ducks again</i>