This has come up in a few past posts
But with every passing month or year, we gain more perspective. What do you think the outlook is for our work in these terms?
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This has come up in a few past posts
But with every passing month or year, we gain more perspective. What do you think the outlook is for our work in these terms?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Latest comments (44)
Some probably will, before they are outmoded altogether, but I think a lot will stick around and be better for those that have left.
I think what you're asking is if coding will ever become "low skilled" or rather less valued. Short answer is it already is in some places. It is also worthwhile looking at other highly valued white-collar sectors, e.g. journalism and game development, where the workers operate under horrendous and abusive conditions. Meanwhile, there are electricians, sanitation workers etc... who make nice salaries.
Globally, many software engineers work in very precarious, and poorly valued environments whether it's in China or Bulgaria. I think with advances/acceptance of remote work, there will be even more outsourcing of labor than there already is right now.
Journalists in the US have been organizing like hell, and the tech industry is slowly becoming more organized as well. Have a look at organizations like Tech Workers Coalition and Game Workers Union
Full disclosure, I am a founding member of the Berlin chapter of Tech Workers Coalition.
I think that in a lot of ways it already has and this is totally fine by me. I've always had a lot more fun coding as a mechanic, getting lots of different pieces to fit together and work in together, than an "engineer" per say. The reason I know this has not been embraced is coding interviews are still horribly theoretical and catered to those with a classical education by and large. Most organizations need to be honest with themselves and decide are we just going to use google/amazon/ibm/microsoft services to get to our goal or are we going to be writing our own algorithms and forging new pathways in computing. In my experience everyone interviews as though they are building image recognition but what they really want is someone that understands API's, protocols, performance, UI tooling, etc.
Case in point a lot more of us use React, rails, typescript, webpack, django etc. than contribute to it and that is totally OK. There are craftsman and there are engineers, we shouldn't be ashamed of that dichotomy. Soul of a New Machine has an amazing quote for this I just can't recall it at the moment.
I think some of the resistance comes from people thinking salaries are going to drop if this happens as well and I don't think that is necessarily true either. There are plenty of carpenters that make as much money as the person designing and constructing the table saw (probably even more in most cases). In fact oftentimes the craftsman are better at using the tool than those that built it.
Depends on what you mean by "blue collar". Typically, that precludes knowledge-work (aka work that requires domain-specific and/or generalized problem-solving skills). Once the knowledge/problem-solving component goes out of programming, there's really no point for programmers to exist at all let alone become blue collar: at that point, you're wholly in the realm of "replaceable by machines".
I love development. It doesn't matter if it's going to be blue, white, or a rainbow of colors, I'd always do it ☺️ Wouldn't you?
So I found at least 3 comments which are like this:
I defined blue collar in my article like this:
@ben it would be nice if you can provide a definition
Hmmm, I really feel like the words blue collar / white collar work does both disservices, as it was initially used for simple jobs versus jobs that employers required a degree for. In today's age, while not all dev work requires a degree, they all are skilled jobs. So maybe we should just focus on the skilled laborer moniker instead?
Software development is its own thing. You can’t directly compare it to any other one profession or trade, it’s a profession unto itself.
I see. I was perhaps a little confused by the wording. In my mind (to use your example) both coding and using a saw would be jobs. In that scenario, the code and the saw are the tools. Actions are not typically tools in that context.
That aside, I certainly see and understand your points. I can't help but feel it also raises another question: Do you foresee white-collar / blue-collar coders becoming a thing? Your reasoning seems to suggest this.
I am also intrigued by your choice of the phrase "trade tools." This seems to imply that trades are blue-collar, unless I am again misinterpreting.
I'm not sure what the definition of 'blue collar' is....I think coding/software development will continue to get more and more accessible. But I fear anything standardized enough to create a blue collar position will be automated away pretty quickly.
In my article I gave following definition: