A trade that found out it was a craft

You can draw the timeline: Turing, then the languages, then free software, then agile methods, then the platforms. It is true and it teaches nothing. What matters is elsewhere: in the late 1990s part of the profession started describing itself in the language of craft (code smells, refactoring, design patterns) without having decided to. Like Molière’s bourgeois discovering he has been speaking prose for forty years.

The most telling lineage is not from computing. Design patterns were taken from an architect trying to name the configurations that make a place fit to live in. The word crossed over, and with it the idea that a trade advances by writing down what works rather than rediscovering it on every site.

• —Judging a piece of work by whether it can be taken over. A craftsman does not just deliver an object, they deliver one somebody else can repair. It is the only criterion that survives its maker leaving.
• —Talking about apprenticeship rather than level. You advance by taking on problems graded one notch harder, not by changing job titles.
• —Holding that lasting is itself a skill. Like an athlete, you practise to keep going and stay wary of injury, which means counting the stretches where nothing is produced.

• GitHub Octoverse
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020

The analogy grants no title. In France artisan is a registered status, and IT consulting does not fall under it. Nor does it say anything about actual conditions: psychosocial harm, impostor syndrome and overwork cultures are not settled with workshop vocabulary. A profession that narrates itself as craft while exhausting its practitioners has borrowed the word and nothing else.

What remains, once the borrowing is given back, is what can be checked: work another person can read, an apprenticeship measured in problems held, and a practice run to last. The rest is vocabulary.