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You might expect that a person invited to contribute a foreword to a book on the 1 subject of professionalism would himself be a professional of exemplary standing. I am gladdened by that thought, but also disquieted. The disquieting part of it is that if I am a professional, I must be a professional something, but what? As someone who has tried his best for the last thirty years to avoid doing anything twice, I lack one of the most important characteristics of a professional, the dedicated and persistent pursuit of a single direction. For the purposes of this foreword, it would be handy if I could think of myself as a professional abstractor. That would allow me to offer up a few useful abstractions about professionalism, patterns that might illuminate the essays that follow. I shall try to do this by proposing three successively more complex models of professionalism, ending up with one that is discomfortingly soft, but still, the best approximation I can make of what the word means to me. The first of these models I shall designate Model Zero. I intend a pejorative sense to this name, since the attitude represented by Model Zero is retrograde and offensive ... but nonetheless common. In this model, the word "professionalism" is a simple surrogate for compliant uniformity.
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Table of contents (34 chapters)
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Back Matter
Editors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Responsible Software Engineer
Book Subtitle: Selected Readings in IT Professionalism
Editors: Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0923-5
Publisher: Springer London
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eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag London Limited 1997
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-540-76041-2Published: 15 November 1996
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4471-0923-5Published: 06 December 2012
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 360
Number of Illustrations: 11 b/w illustrations
Topics: Software Engineering
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