I used to be an actor, but programming jobs are easier to come by. I've been doing this now for 11 years. I focus on pixels and experience, especially on iOS and the web.
My own point of view on this is the one that both these article hint at up front, and then attempt to work around. First and foremost, that blue collar work is primarily done in person, using your body to work at building or breaking down physical objects.
Building houses, connecting wires and pipes, tearing down abandoned buildings, and planting fields are all work that bears strong metaphorical similarity to work we do in software engineering currently. Those similarities are, though, limited to metaphor and so I strongly disagree with the idea that the public will ever think of a SWE at a tech company as a "blue collar worker".
Where things get really interesting, though, is thinking about what "blue collar" work will look like in 10 years. Already, we're seeing firmware in farm tractors as a key battleground on the Right To Repair arguments worldwide, and I suspect this is the beginning of a trend that will continue. Because of this, I think it's blue collar work that will start to incorporate bits of software engineering, not the other way around. Though the public will never mistake an SWE-1 at Google for a blue collar worker, I think we're guaranteed to see blue collar workers who might be mistaken for SWEs because their fields come to demand technical skills. From the farmer who starts customizing their tractor firmware, to the factory worker tasked with controlling and maintaining the routines of the industrial robots, I think that blending is the way in which we'll start to see more overlap between these concepts.
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My own point of view on this is the one that both these article hint at up front, and then attempt to work around. First and foremost, that blue collar work is primarily done in person, using your body to work at building or breaking down physical objects.
Building houses, connecting wires and pipes, tearing down abandoned buildings, and planting fields are all work that bears strong metaphorical similarity to work we do in software engineering currently. Those similarities are, though, limited to metaphor and so I strongly disagree with the idea that the public will ever think of a SWE at a tech company as a "blue collar worker".
Where things get really interesting, though, is thinking about what "blue collar" work will look like in 10 years. Already, we're seeing firmware in farm tractors as a key battleground on the Right To Repair arguments worldwide, and I suspect this is the beginning of a trend that will continue. Because of this, I think it's blue collar work that will start to incorporate bits of software engineering, not the other way around. Though the public will never mistake an SWE-1 at Google for a blue collar worker, I think we're guaranteed to see blue collar workers who might be mistaken for SWEs because their fields come to demand technical skills. From the farmer who starts customizing their tractor firmware, to the factory worker tasked with controlling and maintaining the routines of the industrial robots, I think that blending is the way in which we'll start to see more overlap between these concepts.