The future of the computing profession

This essay marks the tenth anniversary of the monthly column, The Profession " that the author has been editing over the last decade. The essay outlines early writings by the author on the computing profession argues for the establishment of progam coding as a trade because of the need for computing professionals to focus on the social effects of exploiting digital technology brings up the professional problems of focusing on a machine rather than its use and the increasing use of that machine by all learned professions suggests that this is the reason for the lack of growth in the membership of computing societies points out that computing is necessarily a second level profession and comments on how the computing profession might be reformed effectively."