Internet engineering, Guilds and Craftmanship

• Guild on wikipdeia
  ... Guilds are groups of self-employed skilled craftsmen with ownership and control over the materials and tools required to produce their goods. Historically they were small business associations, since each crafter was a self-employed individual artisan or part of a small craft shop or co-operative....
  ... The appearance of the European guilds is believed to be tied to the emergent money economy, and the urbanization. Before this time it was not possible to run a money-driven organization, as commodity money was the normal way of doing business. ...
  ... Two of the most outspoken critics of the guild system were Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith ...

• concepts of a traditional Guild progression
  • Apprentice
    Apprenticeships form a traditional method of training a new generation of skilled crafts practitioners. Apprentices (popularly "prentices") built their careers from apprenticeships.
  • Journeyman
    The word 'journeyman' comes from the French word 'journée', meaning the period of one day; this refers to his right to charge a fee for each day's work. He would normally be self-employed, and could not employ others. In contrast, an apprentice would be bound to a master, usually for a fixed term of seven years.
  • Craftsman
    The term arts and crafts refers to a whole host of activities and hobbies that are related to making things with one's own hands and skill. These can be sub-divided into handicrafts or "traditional crafts" (doing things the old way) and the rest. Some arts and crafts have been practised for centuries, while others are modern inventions, or popularisations of crafts which were originally practiced in a very small geographic area.
  • Master craftsman
    An aspiring master would have to pass through the career chain from apprentice to journeyman before he could be elected to become a master craftsman. He would often have to produce a sum of money and a masterpiece before he could actually join the guild. Becoming a master was often very hard.

• Craft on Wikipedia
  Here are some possible official crafts for n'gineers
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• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Craftsmanship.html
  ... It comes down to an attribute of software that most people think of as craftsmanship. When software is built by a true craftsman, all the screws line up. When you do something rare, the application behaves intelligently. More effort went into getting rare cases exactly right than getting the main code working. Even if it took an extra 500% effort to handle 1% of the cases...