
Difference Between a Professional and an Amateur - tc7
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/the-difference-between-a-professional-and-an-amateur
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eesmith
I do not like this analysis.

"A professional always does everything necessary to complete a job. An amateur
sometimes chooses only the fun parts."

My problem is, what is "a job"?

Most people work on a team in order to work on "the fun parts" and let someone
else deal with the other parts. I'm lousy at marketing and sales. I cannot do
graphical design. Don't trust me at all to handle the bookkeeping.

Those are all parts of of the job of releasing a software product. But I only
find the programming-related parts to be fun.

That's why I'm a professional programmer, but not a professional in the other
fields.

I also don't like this:

"An amateur golfer, for example, may thrill at the crack of hitting a 300-yard
drive but hate putting. And so that amateur may frequently choose to pick up
the ball once it's “close enough” to the hole."

Golfing has amateur championships. When Tiger Woods competed in the United
States Amateur Championship in the mid-1990s, he did not "choose to pick up
the ball". He did all of the parts, and did them well.

The USGAs rules about amateur status include things like a limit of $750 max
prize money for the tournament. [http://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-
page/rules-hub/amateur...](http://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/rules-
hub/amateur-status.html) It's "amateur" because the golfers aren't making a
living from golfing.

~~~
tc7
Hmm, I think I'm reading this differently.

There are fun and less-fun parts of programming -- building a new feature?
Fun. Analyzing requirements, or doing code review, or spelunking through a
crappy and undocumented 3rd party API? Less fun. But all can be part of the
same 'job' of developing a feature.

The article is saying the amateur is the one who skims off the fun parts, and
avoids the others, whereas the professional does the entire job -- gets to
done-done, vs just 'it works'.

On golf: You are correct that Tiger Woods did not pick up the ball on the
putting green when playing amateur tournaments. I don't think the article's
making a point about the official USGA definition of 'amateur'.

~~~
eesmith
My complaint is that the author appears to be using the term "amateur" as a
slur.

There are professionals - people who get paid to work on projects for a living
- who shirk the less-fun parts. The author seems to want to call those people
"amateurs".

There are amateurs - people who are not paid to work on projects - who are
very serious about their work and do the less-fun parts. Should we call these
people "professionals?"

We need only look at volunteer organizations to see non-professionals doing
hard and often thankless work. We see people work hard to excel in amateur
sports all the time, even if only to make a personal record. It therefore
doesn't seem right to associate "amateur" with the qualities that the author
is trying to describe.

I pointed out the USGA example precisely because the author seems to think
that those terms and definitions can be applied to golf. Since they can't,
they likely can't be applied to other fields either.

Wouldn't "lazy worker" and "good worker" be more appropriate terms than
"amateur" and "professional"?

