Tom DeMarco: "On Professionalism"

(The following is Tom DeMarco's foreword to the book The Responsible Software Engineer, edited by Colin Myers, Tracy Hall and Dave Pitt [Springer-Verlag, 1996]. The text was extracted by the author from his keynote address to the PASE96 Conference in London, January, 1996.)

by Tom DeMarco

You might expect that a person invited to give a keynote for a conference on professionalism, or to contribute a foreword to a book on the subject, 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 abstracter. 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. In Model Zero organizations, you may be considered unprofessional because of the way you dress, or wear your hair (either longer than God intended for males, or shorter than God intended for females), or because of what you post on your walls. You can definitely be thought unprofessional for questioning authority or contradicting Revealed Truth. Popping popcorn in the microwave is unprofessional in Models Zero companies, presumably because it gives the workplace an unprofessional odor. Professionalism seems to have to do with almost anything except getting quality work done.

The Model Zero manager is demonstrating a compulsive need for uniformity, something that we encounter from time to time in gardeners. Here I refer to that meticulous kind of gardener who would pluck and throw away a perfect carrot (perhaps the healthiest one in the garden) just because it is growing an inch or two outside the row. Such a gardener seems to have forgotten what the purpose of a garden is: to grow plants that are as big and succulent and as healthy as they can be. Or perhaps he/she has a variant purpose for the garden: to be a living demonstration of the Gardener's dominion over the land. So too the Model Zero manager.

One Model Zero company I know declared all facial hair unprofessional. This was in the 1970s, a time when beards and mustaches were largely out of favor. Well, that's not entirely true. Beards and mustaches were out of favor among white men. Among black men, they were ubiquitous. And so the proscription against facial hair seemed (to me at least) to be implying that blackness was unprofessional. Of course, nothing of the sort was ever said by that company's management.

It is tempting to laugh at Model Zero management, since today we have mostly moved beyond these trivial obsessions with surface uniformity. But Model Zero is still alive and well, still requiring compliant uniformity of employees, and still calling it 'professionalism' As you read these words, I speculate there is some poor soul receiving a managerial dressing down at a company near yours for asking a question about some kind of toxin that is being voided by the company into the local waters each morning at 4AM. "Yes," the manager acknowledges, "we do release rather minute quantities of Strontium-90 before dawn each day. It would however be EXTREMELY unprofessional of you to mention this to local authorities, or, worst of all, to the press."

In most organizations there is still a bit of residual Model Zero thinking about professionalism. Before letting your own company off the hook, try taking the following test: Would you or your management be at all inclined to think it unprofessional to cry in the workplace? Crying, of course, is an extremely unnatural act for about half the human race. For the other half it is the most natural thing in the world. The idea that crying might be an example of unprofessional behavior is little more than Model Zero's hidden assertion that being female is also unprofessional. Model Zero, common as it is, must be an aberration: The word 'professionalism' has to mean something more than knuckling under and not making waves.

A substantially more satisfying notion of professionalism is embodied in the next model. In this view, professionalism is made up of three characteristics. Since the words describing these characteristics all begin with the letter P, I refer to this as a 3-P model. The three characteristics are:

Proficient: Whatever it is that a professional does, he/she must do it with deftness and agility, with skill born of long practice.
Permanent: The long practice comes from the permanence of the professional's calling. We've all encountered actors who waited tables while waiting for a part to come along. They may be professional actors, but they are certainly not professional waiters (there are such things), since they aren't permanently dedicated to that endeavor.
Professing: Finally there must be some act of involvement by which the professional declares his/her intention to be, now and forever, a part of one chosen calling. The act may be a public ceremony or it may be a simple, private resolution of the form:

<name of profession> EQUALS me.

Some years ago I came across a very beautiful example of a professing. It was the statement carved by a Scottish fisherman over the hearth of his storm-tossed seaside home. The words he carved were these:

It is no will-o-the-wisp that I have followed here.

It was intention, not chance, that led him where he went. This is the declarative act of a professional.

The 3-P Model still lacks something, an ethical dimension. People we think of as professionals are governed by some kind of code. They know their profession gives them opportunities for wrong-doing, and they know what they will and will not do for ethical reasons. I propose to embody this idea in a fourth P-term:

Promise-keeping: Professionals make certain promises to themselves (sometimes to the public at large) about what they will and won't do. Professionals keep those promises.

I have separated promise-keeping in this fashion, making it the distinguishing characteristic of true professionalism as embodied by the 4-P model, because it is promise-keeping that, most of all, divides professionalism in our field from its opposite. Even in the traditional professions like medicine and law and clergy, promise-keeping is the most complex of the trappings of a professional. It is the one where most lapses of professionalism occur. Consider a typical lapse in each of these traditional callings:

a doctor blabs about Mr. So-and-So's incredible venereal wart

a lawyer tells a woman that she has been left out of her uncle's will

a minister gives away the identity of a man who has confessed to lusting after his

neighbor's teenage daughter

Note first of all that each of these is a violation of an implicit promise. When you go to your doctor, legal advisor or cleric, you generally impart some private information that might conceivably be used against your interest. You almost never think to exact an explicit promise from such a professional not to violate your confidentiality. You take the professional's promise-keeping for granted. This is potentially dangerous ground, because the very basis of your transaction is tied up in soft perceptions of correct behavior. You and your consulting professional may well understand the root matter in the same way, but that leaves nearly infinite possibility for misunderstandings about borderline cases. Yet, in spite of this, implicit promises are rarely broken by professional people, and almost never by casual error. The reason for this is that professionals take their promises very seriously; they are in a constant state of ethical introspection. I shall come back to this idea.

A second observation about the three example lapses I cited above is that each one has to do with a failure to keep confidential information confidential. I find this rather troubling, because the ugliest Model Zero example I related , the one about the employee being enjoined not to leak sensitive information to authorities or to the press, is also about keeping confidential information confidential. If you draw the general rule that a professional's promise- keeping obligation is as simple as 'don't blab what you learned in confidence,' then you condone the employee's silence about toxic pollution at the same time you celebrate doctors and lawyers and clergy and their firm resolve not to compromise those who confide in them.

There are no simple, general rules in ethics; ethics is about values and value conflict, philosophy and morality, and a willingness and capability to confront intricate and convoluted conundrums. The Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule may get you to Heaven, but they won't (all by themselves) make you an ethical promise-keeper. The only thing that will do that is to keep yourself in a permanent state of ethical introspection.

In order to make it clear what I mean by this introspection, consider its opposite. The most familiar form of this opposite is what I call:

THE FATAL PREMISE: Evil is done by evil people; I am not an evil person

and therefore . . . I cannot do evil.

The Fatal Premise gives you an ethical blank check: If you did it, it must be OK.

It is my opinionated opinion that about half the world's population believes the Fatal Premise. One who is governed by this premise is neither ethical nor unethical, but a non-participant. Such a person can never be a true professional, because his or her introspection mechanism is disarmed. The Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offers a counter to the Fatal Premise in the following quote:

The line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between classes nor between parties [individuals] either, but through the middle of every human heart.

To be an ethical human being you need to be aware of your capacity to be evil, your dark side. To the extent that it is our business to foster professionalism, we need to focus mostly on helping people get past the Fatal Premise so they can deal with the possibility of their own evil. Most meaningful evil on earth is done by good people, not by evil people. The capacity to do evil is in each one of us.

I assert that the 4-P Model, as I have described it, defines professionalism at its best. It describes ideal behavior not just of doctors and lawyers and clerics, but of all the true professionals of this era and eras past. It embraces nurses and therapists, carpenters and farmers and bricklayers. It makes room for the Knights of Malta, the Engineers who built the Roman viaducts, Renaissance artists like Michelangelo and Bernini, and the Egyptian doctors who invented the first science of medicine. They were all professionals to the extent that they passed the four P-tests: they were proficient at what they did, they were permanent in their involvement, they professed their dedication and they had a code of promises arbitrated by a permanent ethical sense.

Since the vocations I've mentioned all have a certain cachet, I might mention that professionalism need not be limited to those who practice some sophisticated or highly respectable trade. Consider a man at bottom of any conceivable hierarchy: P.G. Wodehouse's marvelous character, Jeeves. He too passes the four P-tests. His permanence is legendary (unthinkable that he might take up a position in retailing, for example), he is deft at each of the tasks he undertakes, he has a code of conduct that is his constant concern, and he has solemnly declared his dedication to his calling. The man even belongs to a professional society, the Ganymede Club. There can be no doubt that Jeeves is a professional.

I end by asking you to consider a final candidate class for professionalism: If there is room in the professional ranks for butlers, why not managers? Since I have been fortunate enough to work under seven great managers in my days, I know that there is such a thing as a professional manager. There are certainly many managers who satisfy three of the four P-tests: they are proficient, permanent and good promise keepers. Curiously, in management, the most conspicuous missing element is one that we almost take for granted among software professionals at the lower levels: the professing act. Many managers can't bring themselves to profess to be managers. One who manages a group of engineers, tends to think of himself or herself as an engineer; one who manages a group of physicians tends to think of himself or herself as a physician.

This unwillingness to profess is a sad consequence of our persistent and ignorant derogation of the management role. The constant assertion that management is mere 'overhead,' potential fat for the next trimming, has had its effect on managers themselves. We are breeding a generation of managers that dares not manage. A manager who manages might get downsized; better instead to pitch in and do some of the work of the people being managed. There is (so this line of thinking goes) nobility in the work, but no nobility in management of that work.

This is pure poppycock. If the work is noble, the catalytic function that is management of that work is even more noble. We need to assert and re-assert the essential respectability of what managers do. It is not a far-fetched contention that management is a noble calling. What could be more admirable, more professional, than the manager's most essential tasks: guiding, forming, coaching, and inspiring people, building healthy corporate culture and safe and productive teams? We will never succeed in building professional awareness among programmers and analysts and designers and testers and integrators, unless we also succeed in fostering a professional awareness among their managers.

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