Origin of the Species: Programming Monkeys

The phrase Programming Monkeys has its origins in the most Dilbertesque moment of my 7-year career in IT.



Sometime last year I was sitting in a team meeting in my former organization, listening to the supervisor talk about how everyone should be consultants instead of programmers. Then he said it - "You could teach a monkey to program a computer." Some of the other people in the meeting were incensed by this statement, but I couldn't fail to see the humor in it.



Later that week I picked up a Barrel of Monkeys game at the dollar store. At the beginning of the next team meeting I set a plastic monkey in front of each person and said, "I've found some new additions to the team. A whole barrel of programmers."



My supervisor also frequently used the phrase "low-hanging fruit" to describe tasks he was assigning to us, which for me conjures images of bananas and mangoes. Despite the fun times we had in team meetings, eventually I left his group to become a software engineer. Now I'm just a programming monkey munching on the low-hanging fruit of the internet revolution.