Professionalism is for Amateurs | Hacker News Reader

Professionalism is for Amateurs

thenextweb.com

51 pointsjrnkntl30 comments

Without defining "professionalism", this is a useless discussion.

Professionalism, to me, implies a certain standard of conduct: Delivering what you promise, when you promise it. Communicating clearly. Refusing unethical requests. Not flaking out at a critical moment. Keeping your cool even when you're a bit frustrated. Refraining from conduct that will discredit your employer, clients or partners. Being clear about your degree of expertise on a given topic.

Now, this sort of professionalism isn't the only virtue in life: You also need to care passionately about what you do, speak plainly and honestly, and enjoy building stuff. Professionalism is never enough. But the opposite of "professional" isn't "amateur," it's "unprofessional." And I, for one, do not enjoy working with unprofessional colleagues or clients.

Couldnt have said it any better. The opposite of professional is definitely not amateur. At least in this context.

I think your definition is spot on. To say that "professionalism" merely entails putting on a suit and speaking in a certain way is a poor articulation of the term. I can see where the author is coming from, but there could have been a lot less fanatical talk (e.g. Google this and Steve Jobs that) and a lot more insight on the value of skirting the traditional concept of professionalism.

Underdiscussed:

The amateur does the job when and how he sees fit. The professional does the job when and how the client requires.

Passion may exist in either. What one does when there is not passion makes the difference.

The opposite of amateur is expert.

An amateur can be very expert. An amateur is someone who does something because he wants to, for love of the work or subject. It has nothing to do with expertise or competence at the job.

There is a different definition of "professional" that is often used however; it's a co-opting of your proper meaning that is often used by large corporations to support the status quo and discourage innovation.

That definition is this: "Professionalism" is the recognized respect that should be given to those individuals, processes and companies labeled as such due to their earned credentials in a particular field.

It's a definition created specifically with the intent of preventing the questioning of the status quo; an overdeveloped argument to authority, basically.

This whole thing is a strawman. The author sets up a false dichotomy - either passionate amateur, or indifferent professional - and goes from there.

Here's a thought - how about someone who's a passionate professional?

"passionate professional" -- nailed it.

Sounds like the author is confusing professionalism with 'conventional wisdom'.

I never use the term "professional" in the context of computing - it pretty much means nothing as far as I am concerned as to various people it can mean:

- Wearing a suit, shirt and tie

- Writing lots of documents that nobody reads

- Having source control, automated build process and unit tests

- Always saying yes to a customer

I also know quite a few "real" professionals (doctors, lawyers, professionally qualified engineers) - using those standards I'm quite happy to state that I'm not a professional if anyone asks.

[Edit: Obviously I do think one of those points above is important!]

First, "professional" and "amateur" should be defined to better make his point. Also, the examples are anecdotal.

"First, "professional" and "amateur" should be defined to better make his point."

I think that the whole article is the definition, if not explicit than at least inferred from the examples. Not that I think that the only proper definition of 'professional' is: boring, limited, uninspiring (the author seems to suggest that).

On the contrary - there are some things that discern professional software development from unorganized mess and I'd rather have them in place: source control, automatic and repeatable build and deployment, regression tests etc.

Professionals do what they do for a living, amateurs don't.

"Professionals do what they do for a living..."

So do tradesmen.

How can you separate the two?

At first glance, I can easily agree with "professionalism is for amateurs," but the explanation is severely lacking. There's confusion between acting and behaving professional (professionalism) and being a professional (vs. an amateur).

You can act and behave like a pro and maintain the personality that the author's looking for. Being professional doesn't mean you're only subscribe to the conventional thought processes big business types may subscribe to.

@jk215: This is junk. Did you consult your dictionary before you wrote this? It makes it look like you do not know what you are talking about. Here is a definition:

professional standards: the skill, competence, or character expected of a member of a highly trained profession

use of professionals: the use of professionals instead of amateurs

Maybe you mean "beaureaucrats", or some other word; but not "professionals"

He most definitely means bureaucrats, and I bet he owns a dictionary. But that would have been a reasonable title, and not a link bait. And if it is not link bait who will read it!

Which is why I read the comments for linkbait-y titles before giving them the clicks. I just wish HN made this possible to do from RSS.

The author is definitely conflating skill with original thinking. When talking about professional vs. amateur it's about skill. The skill comes about through experience and purposeful learning. If we take skill to be a spectrum from high to low, the median for professionals is higher. (Of course, I'm strictly using anecdotal evidence.) But, there are still unskilled professionals as well as highly skilled amateurs.

Original thinking is a bit trickier to understand. Both examples in the post use companies with vested interests in supporting their existing business models. Having a vested interest tends to "color" views towards ideas that disrupt the model. Of course, this provides opportunity for someone with at least a moderate skill level and a lot of ambition to branch a market.

Philip Greenspun's old article on professionalism, from 2000: http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-...

> Curious to know what his definition of software engineering professionalism was after four years of MIT education, we probed a bit deeper and established that the way that he thought about professionalism did not differ from the thinking of a Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman: wear nice clothes, drive a clean car, and don't say anything that might offend anyone.

Philip may be hard to work with, but he's a great writer.

Professionalism makes the difference between bad quality and reasonable quality. For creating something amazing professionalism is not enough. Following the rules just leads you to a certain level, after that you have to break some of them.

Professional: doing the same work many times with the same result.

Amateur: comes from a French word meaning: "lover of".

Professional : comes from a french verb meaning, among other things, "to teach".

Etymology's very deceptive. It's generally not a good idea to use it to discover the "true" meaning of a word, whatever quality that "true" meaning would have over the common acceptation.

I think what the author is really getting at is 'amateurs' tend to be people who are in it for the love and excitement of what they do and 'professionals' tend to see what they are doing just as a job.

Ham radio operators are "amateurs" but they're a lot more "professional" in how they use two radios than the average person who uses 2-way radios for their work.

Reminds me of an old pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html

Loading that page required an absurd number of HTTP requests for the amount of actual content.

Ambition is the last refuge of failure. or Professionalism is the last refuge of the uninspired.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com