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04.11

In Praise of a Job Well Done

By Donald Christiansen

It seems to me that the craftsman once was, and hopefully remains, an important adjunct to the engineer.

When I was a young engineering intern assigned to a laboratory involved in a developmental airborne radar project, specialized microwave hardware was frequently required. In one corner of the lab were the lathes and other power tools required to produce it. These fine machine tools were under the jurisdiction of a master machinist, a true craftsman, much respected by all of the engineers. His equipment — indeed, the area itself — was sacrosanct, off limits to the engineering staff. If we had a job requiring lesser skills, as for example, bending up a breadboard chassis or punching holes to accept tube sockets (remember them?), we could walk down the hall to the machine shop reserved exclusively for engineers. It was also equipped with power tools, similar in purpose to those of our master machinist, but of older vintage and inferior accuracy, appropriately worthy of our modest skills.

In another corner of the lab, a team of engineering technicians would be at work designing and skillfully organizing the intricate cabling and wiring harness for a prototype system. Many of the engineers who tried their hand at this were quickly frustrated by the patience and dexterity required. I considered these cabling teams to be craftsmen, too.

Then there were the plug-in circuit modules, predating integrated circuits. A skilled technician would arrange the discrete circuit components for assembly into a fixed-dimension module. Not exactly a Rubik’s cube challenge, but a geometric puzzle of a sort, requiring patience and attention to issues like feedback, stray capacitance, heat dissipation, shock, vibration and mechanical integrity. A true craftsman’s challenge, the solution to which would be appreciated by the designer of the circuit.

Classic Craftsmanship

The original definition of a craftsman referred only to manual occupations. It included artisans in fields like ornamental metalwork, glass sculpture, engraving, and furniture and woodcraft, many of which still exist. The output of such master artisans was almost always unique, one-of-a-kind objects suggesting that they might become bored if required to produce an identical product over and over. If reluctantly assigned to an assembly-line task, the craftsman would likely consider how the operation he was performing could be altered to improve quality and productivity and avoid rejects. He would pass these ideas along to the foreman or manufacturing engineer.

In this discontent with the routine, the craftsman shares a characteristic of the engineer. Their successes may sometimes work to “put them out of business,” or at least tend to make their current skills obsolete.

Fortunately, the skills of both the engineer and the craftsman are adaptive, and while the engineer moves on to a higher level of abstraction in design, the craftsman develops and uses new tools to produce physical objects impossible to make by hand (consider our master machinist cited earlier, and today’s sophisticated packaging skills required as a consequence of Moore’s Law).

Contemporary Craftsmanship

The favorable reputation of the classic craftsman as one who pursues excellence in his work and enjoys doing so has encouraged the term craftsmanship to be applied to expertise in less physical occupations, such as writing, photography, and playwriting, and even to business management and government. Regarding the latter, while “craftsmanship” may be appropriately applied in the case of certain statesmen, “crafty” may be a better appellation for many politicians and government bureaucrats.

Software Craftsmanship

A movement to define software development as a craft gained impetus as we entered the current millennium. To those who questioned identifying coding skills of software developers as a craft, its proponents asked why not. A craft requires a medium (classically, wood, metal, etc.) and software is the medium for useful computer programs. Freeman Dyson wrote that “because of the enormous variety of specialized applications, there will always be room for individuals to write software based on their unique knowledge . . . . The craft of writing software will not become obsolete.” In his 2008 book, The Craftsman, Richard Sennett agreed that experienced, highly skilled software craftsmen are needed, noting that in the 1970s and 1980s a few dominant software firms “seemed to churn out ever more mediocre works.”

In 2009 the first International Software Craftsmanship Conference was held in England, and repeated again in 2010. Similarly, the first and second North American Software Conferences were held in Chicago, also in 2009 and 2010.

Purists say that software craftsmanship is a misnomer because software is intangible — it cannot be viewed and touched as can our master machinist’s finished piece of hardware. Maybe we need a new term. Perhaps we should call it “virtual craftsmanship.”

References

Sennett, R., The Craftsman, Yale University Press, 2008.

McCullough, M., Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, MIT Press, 1998.

McBreen, P., Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative, Addison Wesley, 2001.

Perkins, W. B., Getting Agencies to Work Together: The Practice and Theory of Management Craftsmanship, Brookings Institute Press, 1998.

North American Software Craftsmanship conferences, Chicago, 2009/2010
(http://scna.softwarecraftsmanship.org)

Software Craftsmanship Conference, London, 2009).
(http://www.softwarecraftsmanship.org.uk)

Software Craftsmanship Conference, Bletchley Park, 2010.
(http://parlezuml.com/softwarecraftsmanship)

Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He can be reached at donchristiansen@ieee.org.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.