The amateur and the professional

What makes you a professional? Or an amateur? I don’t think it’s a black and white thing, but it’s not an analog scale either. To me there are several key elements that discern between being an amateur and being a pro - and I’m not talking about getting paid.



There is absolutely nothing wrong about being an amateur, nor is there anything right about being a professional. I think that you are what you choose to be and that there is only something wrong with being what you don’t want to be.

Also, these are just my two cents. I am no authority whatsoever; these are just things I noticed along the way. I guess that says a lot about where I am at... There are probably a lot more criteria, but these stood out for me. If you would like to share your thoughts, please leave a message or contact me.

Knowledge, skills and experience

This is not a big deal to me, because enthusiasts can pick up skills quickly. Still, the professional will probably have more skills and will probably have greater proficiency at any given skill. More time spent around technology, more problems solved, generally more experienced. As an amateur you may lower your price to compensate for the bigger productivity of a professional, but you’re not going to achieve the same quality.

Commitment

If you cannot commit to your field or your clients, you are definitely not a professional. Commitment is key to your clients – would you visit a restaurant that may or may not take your order and then will bring your food in the next week, maybe?

Communication and attitude

In both manner and frequency, communication is a difficult thing to really get. Can you explain to your digilliterate neighbors’ cousin what a class is? Do you give your clients regular status updates? Do you call them after the project is done, to see if everything is in order?

If communication proves difficult, how will you cope? How do you deal with frustration and anger? A professional will never act out, but also won’t hold back what needs to be said. A balanced attitude and consistent and regular communication distinguish the professional from the amateur.

What about working with other programmers? How are your communication and attitude when you’re part of a team? Do you play nice, or are you a lone gunman? Do you document, follow styles & guidelines and do you adhere to constraints?

I’m not saying the professional you should always ‘democratically’ give in, but instead you should be clear upfront about what you expect and what others can expect of you, if you want to be professional.

Repeat performance

‘Hey that is a nice trick. Can you do it again’? Or; taking luck out of the equation. A professional may lose out to an amateur any one time, but the professional achieves results consistently.

My employer sells custom websites. We have a standardized set of steps by which we achieve a product; a project. These steps ensure that we get the same quality product every time.

When we finish a project, we evaluate it. We look back on the steps and decide if they were executed well and if the step itself was good. We modify the steps where needed. This is our process. This process ensures that we increase the quality of our project where possible and a better project leads to a better product.

Finally, we regularly meet with each other to discuss how things are going. Are they running smooth, or are we running into problems? Did we intervene early enough in that project, or were we too soon? In other words; is our process in order? Our business form ensures that we have the best process we can have and so the best project and finally the best product.

A well-known metric for assessing the quality of a software organization is the Capability Maturity Model (not to be confused with the CIMM).

Testing

Acceptance testing, integration testing, unit testing… Testing means: getting certainty about claims you can make about your software. You say everything works? Fine. Prove it.

Testing is definitely not trying. Updating your software and then trying out if your changes compile, run and produce the right results is excellent, but it’s not testing. Testing means:

1. Forming a hypothesis
2. Defining a methodology to validate this hypothesis
3. Executing this method
4. Interpreting the results
5. Concluding, based on the results, if the hypothesis was valid

There are various means of testing for which these steps have already been worked out for you and where you are mostly concerned with defining the content of the test.

I have a nice little metric of my own. The more questions about your product, project, process and business you can answer, the more professional you are.

Conclusion

Concluding, what seems to be my take on professionalism is: How much do you care about being a professional? Professionalism is more a state of mind than a state of affairs. It is attention to detail, rather than things falling into place. It is being prepared over being lucky (read: talented).

Professionalism is not success, but a tool for success. An extremely talented, hugely successful programmer may be an unprofessional asshole and an extremely untalented and marginally successful programmer may be the most professional guy in the world. The untalented programmer is still achieving all he can and getting everything out of his career, but the talented programmer is not.

What does it matter?

Nothing at all, really. As I said, it’s all about what you want, what your environment expects of you and what you want to provide to your environment. If you can add some professionalism, you might find your time being in more esteem than before. Or, you may find that you clash with your peers, who can’t or won’t join you in your quest for glory.