The issue is that producers have no bar at all for the role, and the role is not well defined, unlike software engineers that typically have a 4 year degree, 2 year degree, or at the very least a code camp, before being hired. Would you hire someone for software engineering who had no engineering training or experience just because they can talk lucidly and in detail about what software they like?
Maybe a better software analogy here would be to compare producers to product managers. Great PMs are truly gold, but the PM role’s technical requirements are nebulous, and there are plenty of PMs who don’t know how to write code, and don’t know how to craft a good product, and don’t know how to communicate with customers effectively, essentially having no skills required for the job, but able to talk convincingly to enough of the right people to get hired and keep their jobs.
> unlike software engineers that typically have a 4 year degree, 2 year degree...
they do NOW. Back when a lot of us started getting involved with this, most 'engineers' had physics, engineering, mathematics, and other various backgrounds because software engineering degrees were too freaking new.
In the near-future (10 5? years? possibly sooner?) kids are gonna graduate with specialized PM degrees having gone to highschool thinking about being "product manager" when they grow up. When I was in highscool i wanted to be a Webmaster! now a webmaster is 15 people between desiginers, PMs, backend, frontend, QA, testers, blah blah blha
It’s a good point that things have changed a bit, but in 1993 when this article was written you couldn’t get a web job based on code camps, neither really existed. There was no role called webmaster yet. Webmaster today is a team only if you’re managing a large site, but not for small sites, and it doesn’t require many specific skills for small sites. Like you said, most engineers had degrees of some sort. For the purposes of comparing to a producer job (which has existed in film, tv, radio, and music for ~100 years) engineering has always had higher skill & technical requirements.
Back when a lot of us started getting involved with this, most 'engineers' had physics, engineering, mathematics, and other various backgrounds because software engineering degrees were too freaking new
Or in some cases, humanities backgrounds (Medieval Lit, philosophy, etc).
Maybe a better software analogy here would be to compare producers to product managers. Great PMs are truly gold, but the PM role’s technical requirements are nebulous, and there are plenty of PMs who don’t know how to write code, and don’t know how to craft a good product, and don’t know how to communicate with customers effectively, essentially having no skills required for the job, but able to talk convincingly to enough of the right people to get hired and keep their jobs.