{"product_id":"programmers-and-managers-the-routinization-of-computer-programming-in-the-united-states-9780387902487","title":"Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): P. Kraft\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Springer\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Springer\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: General\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNorbert 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Springer","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":45280416563351,"sku":"9780387902487","price":3672.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9780387902487.webp?v=1769296259","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/programmers-and-managers-the-routinization-of-computer-programming-in-the-united-states-9780387902487","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}