Yes, that’s more what I think I was getting at with my statement. When you say…

>>Being forced to work between existing boundaries does NOT necessarily mean that you’re not a professional.

…I wholeheartedly agree. Doing the best you can *within* the bounded context you are given is more what I was after with my distinction.

And IMHO this has nothing at all to do with introducing NHibernate, IoC containers, etc. into the architecture of an existing, tightly-coupled, ball-of-mud-type app that’s been in maintenance-mode for many years and can’t be rewritten on the whims of every dev assigned to the project.

Just because the rest of the existing code is a holy mess doesn’t mean that someone approaching working on that code has to make it worse by perpetuating the mistakes of the past. If the existing code was written by someone following the procedural programming style that VB4/5/6 encouraged, there’s nothing that says that when you start to extend that app you have to follow the same non-OO practices.

Encapsulate your new effort properly, use good OO principles for YOUR work, maybe even write a SINGLE unit test for the small corner of the code that you are extending that just covers that one little thing you added. This is the mantra that even one unit test is infinitely better then zero.

There is (if more developers would just think even a little about it) actually PLENTY of wiggle-room to improvie the way developers practice their profession in even the most constrained contexts — my experience is that entirely too many people just don’t look hard enough for such opportunities to improve the way they work and the things they work on.

I agree, that old post from Scott does nail it quite right; its not WHAT you do, its HOW you approach doing it.

I’ve been thinking about what you said about the distinction between “having a ‘job’” and “practicing a ‘profession’”.

In hindsight I think I focused too much on ‘the work that one has to do to be able to pay the rent’ and less on the mindset / passion that a developer has/should have.

As it happens I just came across this old MSDN Magazine article by Scott Hanselman, titled ‘Passion for the Craft’, which I think fits nicely here.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc135988.aspx

LOL! entirely too true

And the observer pattern isn’t when you decide to watch a video on you-tube instead of fixing that annoying off-by-one iteration bug that was reported last week by half your user-base

What I said was that not everybody can introduce new technologies/practices into their organization. Being forced to work between existing boundaries does NOT necessarily mean that you’re not a professional.

One

Me: The latest HanselMinutes/DotNetRocks was really great.
CoWorker: Huh ?
Me: never mind.

One

I think what I was trying to get at with that statement was that I see “continuous improvement of my skills and the and constant questioning of whether I am doing the best work I can” as one of the defining distinctions between “having a ‘job’” and “practicing a ‘profession’”.

I don’t mean to imply in an elitist way that every software developer that tries to better themselves will eventually end up arriving at ALT.NET, but the average quality level of discussions that I have with ALT.NET participants seems to be consistently higher than those I am able to have with developers who have never heard of ALT.NET.

I consider that I have run across many more people who approach software engineering from the ‘professional’ perspective than the ‘job’ perspective in ALT.NET contexts and I consider this a sad state of affairs since I think (wish) everyone who considered themselves a software engineer truely approached their ‘job’ with the focus of a ‘professional’.