Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States (Heidelberg Science Library)

Kraft, P.

ISBN 10: 0387902481 / ISBN 13: 9780387902487

Published by Springer, 1977

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States (Heidelberg Science Library)
• Publisher: Springer
• Publication Date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0387902481
• ISBN 13: 9780387902487
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Norbert Wiener, perhaps better than anyone else, understood the intimate and delicate relationship between control and communication: that messages intended as commands do not necessarily differ from those intended simply as facts. Wiener noted the paradox when the modem computer was hardly more than a laboratory curiosity. Thirty years later, the same paradox is at the heart of a severe identity crisis which con­ fronts computer programmers. Are they primarily members of "management" acting as foremen, whose task it is to ensure that orders emanating from executive suites are faithfully trans­ lated into comprehensible messages? Or are they perhaps sim­ ply engineers preoccupied with the technical difficulties of relating "software" to "hardware" and vice versa? Are they aware, furthermore, of the degree to which their work­ whether as manager or engineer-routinizes the work of others and thereby helps shape the structure of social class relation­ ships? I doubt that many of us who lived through the first heady and frantic years of software development-at places like the RAND and System Development Corporations-ever took time to think about such questions. The science fiction-like setting of mysterious machines, blinking lights, and torrents of numbers served to awe outsiders who could only marvel at the complexity of it all. We were insiders who constituted a secret society into which only initiates were welcome. So today I marvel at the boundless audacity of a rank out­ sider in writing a book like Programmers and Managers.