Rise of the Software Craftsmen

by Michael Cheng, senior software engineer at mig33

I had an interesting conversation with a budding startup entrepreneur the other day. He asked me: “Why are computer programmers in Singapore perceived as a low prestige occupation?”

I imagine his statement stems from the fact that he had a hard time looking for a developer for his startup.

I paused for a minute as I had always felt comfortable and secure about my chosen profession. So that statement, at first, felt awkward.

Dot-com Bust

I hypothesized that perhaps Singaporeans were still hurt from the dot-com bust of the late 90s/early-2000s. I was working part-time in a dot-com company in 2001 and I lived through the extravagant and wasteful excesses of that period.

Hot IPOs with high valuations were eventually whittled down to penny stocks in the Singapore Stock Exchange. Many people were burnt back then — including retirees who just cashed out their CPF (retirement fund). As a result, people of our parents’ generation didn’t have a good impression of technology startups in general.

The Era of Middle Managers

After the dot-com bubble burst, the government refocused on a less intimidating image of IT — Infocomm — more soft skills like project management than hard(working) skills like software programming and hardware.

This was on the coattails of the great outsourcing movement of the mid-2000s. The government figured that since countries like India, China and the Philippines are getting all the lower-value outsourcing jobs (like call centers, back-room services and software programming), that we should try to move up the value chain.

So that period saw a big push for a cohort of IT middle managers. Computer programming was perceived as beneath them as they were bred by our system to be managing coders — Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, or some Indochinese outsource partner. They themselves never ever needed to touch an integrated development environment (IDE).

However, the flood of infocomm jobs never really materialized. The new infocomm managers bred for the job were considered too inexperienced to take on million dollar projects or were not needed as much as the actual people doing the projects. The rest either move into networking jobs, web design jobs (if they can do some design) or they end up as insurance agents (ie. not in IT).

Another promise of lucrative IT jobs seemingly broken.

Where are the Programmers?

Sure, there are some well-paying jobs. The computer science graduates got snapped up by banks or government linked agencies and were shoved into enterprise IT oblivion (this blog post has a deeper exposition of the topic). They get slapped with titles like “Analyst” (not programmer, mind you) where they get bogged down by change requests and what-nots — more plumbers than builders.