This is a good sentiment, and we should have the pride to create quality at all times...
But the appeal of the quote comes from that magic word "professional," and the respect, autonomy, and pay associated with it. Promising that the Respect and Pay Fairy will anoint you a Professional once you become the very best FactoryBeanListenerObject builder in the bowels of Enterprise doesn't tell the whole story.
The word has suffered the same fate C.S. Lewis ascribed to "gentlemen" and "Christian"
"When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. (A ‘nice’ meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word."
For more on this topic, I highly recommend michaelochurch's November essay on what a true profession of programming might look like.
that special Java/C# + ORM / (N)Hibernate + XML + SQL kind of development hell.
There isn't necessarily anything inherently wrong with Java, C#, ORMs, XML, or SQL. All are pretty useful ways to solve certain classes of problems, taken on their own.
That said, there are definitely "development hell" projects that feature all of those things, but I believe you can have "development hell" in any language, using any libraries, and any persistence technology.
And anyway, if you think writing C# or Java code is bad, trying writing RPG/400[1] using SEU[2] on an AS/400[3] sometime. That stuff'll leave you shuddering and sweating in your sleep, and walking around with a blank stare on your face, drooling and mumblng "Ia! Cthulhu Fthagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, %!@ ^^&!@(, (#!^H NOCARRIER".
Oh, yeah, no doubt. It's fun to make fun of mainframes, and IBM, etc., but the reality is that they invented a ton of ideas that are only just now migrating into the commodity hardware/software world, and/or consumer devices.
Developers in general would probably be well served to do a better job of acknowledging our own history and maintaining more awareness/context regarding what has come before.
Interesting... then why are there entire systems of thought in management theory centered around motivating people to work?
It's a warm and fuzzy quote, but humans don't work this way. If we're not sufficiently motivated, no force on earth is going to allow us to do our "best job".
A good manager knows this situation and can help their team through it. Sadly, there really aren't many good managers out there at all.
+1 nice sentiment. I'll have to get "A professional is someone who can do his best job even when he doesn't feel like it" laser etched on the top of my screen
The one quote to deal with that is simple: "A professional is someone who can do his best job even when he doesn't feel like it"
That's what I keep in mind when I have to work in that special Java/C# + ORM / (N)Hibernate + XML + SQL kind of development hell.
:-/