
The next big blue collar job is coding (2017) - monsieurpng
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/programming-is-the-new-blue-collar-job/
======
alistairSH
_" But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for
their local bank. "_

Even highly trained software engineers can barely get security correct. What
makes this journalist think somebody with a few years of high school
programming can do any better?

I'm not sure I buy the "blue collar coder" prediction. At least not in the US.
That type of work is currently outsourced to India and parts of Eastern
Europe. There's an entire industry of code factories that already exists - are
these US-based blue-collar coders going to be any more effective than off-
shoring?

And within the US, code already permeates other professional roles. Staff
accountants and data analysts do lightweight (and sometimes heavyweight)
programming in Excel and other business tools. And hobbyists program things
like home automation in Lua.

~~~
talltimtom
“Even highly trained software engineers can barely get security correct. What
makes this journalist think somebody with a few years of high school
programming can do any better?”

Why would they have to be better? You just made very point here. Some high
schooler with a boot camp can do just as well as many “highly trained software
engineers”.

~~~
brlewis
First, why don't we fix the cost of medical care by letting vocational schools
train doctors? After all, there are high-profile medical errors and the world
goes on.

(In case the sarcasm isn't obvious, my point is that the existence of errors
by professionals doesn't mean the entire system would be just as good if
staffed by non-professionals.)

~~~
throwanem
Actually, we kind of do, in physician assistants. Having in recent years
received most of my medical care, including emergency care, from PAs, and only
rarely seen an MD, I have to say, I'm not sure you're doing a great job
supporting your case - the care I've received from PAs has in no respect been
below the standard I'd expect to receive from MDs.

~~~
brlewis
I don't think the "blue collar" label applies to physician assistants.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=physician+assistant+training](https://www.google.com/search?q=physician+assistant+training)

~~~
throwanem
No, but it doesn't matter. The comparison between a doctor and a physician
assistant is quite closely parallel with that between a "conventional" and a
boot-camp-trained SDE. Especially since our field has no certification
requirements, minimum necessary training, or indeed any qualifications
whatsoever beyond simply demonstrating the ability to do the work!

------
AndrewKemendo
It's going to take a generation for this to be the case because the basic
everyday skills that we don't even think about are just not a part of the core
daily activities for most people.

Consider the most basic skill you need to write code: Writing with the
Keyboard. The majority of kids have never used a non-software keyboard.
Technology isn't helping this either as autocomplete, swype, speech to text
input etc... pushes new and basic users further away. My daughter has iPads in
her school, not computers with keyboards. So although she's using computers,
she's not using keyboards. Maybe IDE input schemes will adapt to this, or
eliminate it completely but nothing so far has beaten writing with the
keyboard.

The second most basic skill is also very rare today: OS navigation. Almost to
a person, every developer I know including myself started playing around with
computers at a young age literally just poking around to see what was inside.
This means simple things like installing programs, configuring applictions,
installing drivers, searching for folders, moving files, modifying text based
program files and on and on. Now imagine not knowing how file structures work
and trying to grok ls or mkdir in your bootcamp classes.

I think it's a solvable problem and I think we can get to where the entry
level requirements for developers is low enough for the general population,
but that means our tools (IDE, frameworks, installs) and structures need to
adapt to support that.

As a community we don't particularly care to work on that, and we seem to like
to gatekeep when it comes to our "special skills" and "special thinking." If
we really care about communities and our economies it's up to us to help grow
the developer base and transition the labor force because we're the ones
building the tools and systems.

~~~
gota
> Consider the most basic skill you need to write code: Writing with the
> Keyboard. The majority of kids have never used a non-software keyboard.

Anecdotally, I just tested this. Kids aged 5 and 7: neither has used a
keyboard 'that they can remember'.

Are we going back to 'Typing classes' (like this one:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCpZ3CP7IAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCpZ3CP7IAs))
in the future?

------
shhehebehdh
Doubt it.

For whatever reason, it seems like the way of thinking required for even
simple programming doesn’t come naturally to most people. I saw this with a
bunch of kids I went through nearly CS classes with. People who could not wrap
their heads around pointers or reference semantics. People who didn’t get
polymorphism and seemingly couldn’t no matter how many times you went through
it with them. People who couldn’t seem to _write programs_ , even very simple
ones, despite being clever in most other ways that can be measured by academe.
To be sure, it could be the slice I saw was not representative of typical
people, but that would require typical people to be better suited to
programming than those admitted to a high tier university. Maybe they are, but
it doesn’t seem especially likely.

~~~
eismcc
Also, I’ve seen smart people just not have the patience required to work on
programs. There’s a level of pain tolerance required for debugging, for
example, that some people just can’t handle - or don’t want to.

~~~
matwood
Agreed. The patience comes from actual interest. Few people if any just sit
down and code a whole program from start to finish without hitting any bumps.
A person's tolerance for dealing with those bumps will determine if they can
be a programmer or not. No matter how smart someone might be, there comes a
point where they will have to grind out a solution to a problem. That means
sitting in the front of the compute for hours with seemingly no progress. That
is challenging for many people.

------
umvi
Bootcamps I swear train cargo cult programmers. It may work for some, but in
my experience they lack the understanding of _why_ they are typing what they
are typing. They can go through the motions of what they've been trained to
do, but they get stuck extremely easily and have no idea how to help
themselves. So then when you start explaining why their program does not work,
their eyes glaze over when you start talking about the stack, heap, etc.

They are like cargo cultists. They go through the motions, imitating what the
boot camp taught them, but without real understanding of what the computer is
doing...

~~~
notus
This is actually just how I learn. I never understand anything abstract the
first time I read about it or use it. In fact there were many things in
software that I just did because it was "best practices" without understanding
why. I could read about the Why all day long but until I experience the Why it
will never really click for me. I eventually understood why because I kept
trying things out, asking questions, and didn't give up. I don't think you can
expect most juniors to understand the Why to a lot of the things they are
doing and one could argue that there isn't much value in ensuring they
understand it right away. What matters is that you have processes in place to
allow juniors to slowly learn why we do things the way we do. Seniors need to
also understand that not everyone comes from a CS background nor is it
necessary to come from one and be an effective worker. The work that 90% of
programmers do out there is not complicated and anyone with a rudimentary
understanding of algebra could do it.

~~~
umvi
I think you need a particular type of personality for the bootcamps to be
effective. Like you said, you need to thrive on curiosity and have a thirst
for knowledge. Not everyone is like that. I have a few friends who think
programming is like learning how to solve a rubik's cube: you go to the
training, learn how to do it, and bam, you are now trained and can solve any
rubik's cube.

------
everdev
Blue collar jobs aren't low paying due to lack of skill or value, it's due to
excess supply. In the bay area we have plumbers who charge $150/hr, the same
rate I charge for coding, due to a low supply of plumbers.

The catch is that plumbing and other trades haven't changed much in the last
100 years. Coding is changing constantly. Therefore the supply of coders who
can professionally use the latest technology is always small, hence a high
paying rate. Only once coding itself stops progressing and innovating will
supply be able to catch up to demand.

You might be seeing blue collar rates with HTML which is ubiquitous and
changing relatively slowly.

~~~
galfarragem
'Blue collar jobs aren't low paying due to lack of skill or value, it's due to
excess supply.'

When told to children, this sentence can save lives.

By the other hand, the anachronic maxim, "who knows more, earns more" is
poisonous.

------
spricket
This topic recycles on HN pretty frequently. I don't believe it. I have many
friends that aren't coders and it helps me remember how big the skill gap is.

Unless you've done substantial training, code seems just as opaque as
medicine, or law, or most fields of engineering. Any job that requires
substantial training and trust not to royally screw everything up pays well.

Perhaps 30% of the population has the creativity and analytical skills to make
a decent programmer. And maybe 10% of those find a job largely comparable to
doing math homework enjoyable.

Programming isn't as old as most fields of engineering, but it's older than a
generation of workers. If coding was going to be commoditised it would have
happened decades ago

~~~
libertine
> If coding was going to be commoditised it would have happened decades ago

I don't understand how coding would have been commoditised literally decades
ago... when the reality is that not so long ago the demand has increased
exponentially. Plus only now the supply is starting to pick up - remember you
have countries (like China or India) pumping millions of programmers per year,
and these numbers will increase - due to internet, free access to information,
and of course the demand.

~~~
spricket
I learned my first few languages through the acid inpired O'Reilly tomes of
early/mid 90's. Since then things are far more accessible but this effect is
throughout society, not just programming.

You can teach yourself law or medicine these days online as well as
engineering but it doesn't seem to have a commodity effect on any of these
professions.

The main barrier remains. It's not easy to learn and requires a person with
the "type". I believe the biggest barrier to highly skilled jobs isn't
necessarily the skill but skill combined with interest.

Most people simply don't want these kinds of jobs regardless of the pay. Make
2-3x as much to do a job that requires endless learning and a lot of tedium,
that only attracts a couple percent of the population that naturally enjoys
this type of work or wants the money bad enough to put up with it

------
menzoic
The article presents the idea of a future mass pool of novice coders who don't
(or don't need to) level up, that can take care of simple things like "manage
the login page". I think that underestimates the complexity of code. A lot of
things could go wrong if you have the majority of your codebase being worked
on by novices, no matter how simple the feature. The simplest feature can also
be: a single point of failure for the entire application, bottleneck hurting
user experience, huge security risk, evolve into an unmanageable mess of
brittle code. I personally (without evidence) believe it's possible for every
healthy human to learn how to code and increase their skills over time. I
don't think a factory line approach works for building software. For that to
happen there would need to be more advanced tooling that leaves developers
with work more similar to configuration management than coding.

~~~
throwanem
> I don't think a factory line approach works for building software.

Kanban is a factory-line approach, and also the basis of every commonly
accepted best practice in software engineering today. I reserve comment on
whether that argues for or against the point of yours that I've quoted, but
certainly you'll understand why I note that point is likely to be a
controversial one.

------
talltimtom
Programmers overestimate how complex coding to solve problems actually is.
Look at data science, you have tons of people with years worth of domain
specific knowledge picking up enough python/ML on a weekend course to
outperform those with PhDs in computerscience. And sure those people won’t be
able to write their own implementation of lisp in C, but they don’t have to,
that’s not as valuable. I feel like we have English lit majors complaining
that programmers can’t write books because “they didn’t study literature for 8
years” and we all know that to just be ridiculesly off. Yet here we have
software developers saying that highschoolers can’t program because they
didn’t spend 8 years studying algorthms and cryptography.

~~~
Forge36
I believe coding is easy when it's to assist in your own work. Programming at
scale is a different problem. I'm not certain, however CS jobs appear to
reflect this on the two different pay scales (my work has two different
programming roles with one compensated at almost twice the rate)

------
red_hare
I buy it.

Two of my most blue collar friends just made the jump. One a mechanic the
other a deli worker, via bootcamps in their late-20s. Neither hated their
jobs, but they also couldn’t afford to move out of their parents houses on
those incomes.

For now, they seem to be doing “blue collar” programming work. Mostly
freelance basic front-end and rails development. The question to me is if they
broaden their scope into other specialties and how quickly that happens.
That’ll be my indicator to how long my own overpaid salary might last.

~~~
throwanem
The people I know who've done the same are broadening pretty quick. Makes me
glad I've been putting so much of my own overpaid salary into savings: 'Gather
ye rosebuds while ye may.'

------
brad0
After reading the article I’m not so sure.

It suggests that instead of doing a course at university we should be teaching
programming in school (great!) and also do more boot camp style education for
your local bank’s JS stack.

That’s all well and good. I’ve worked at a bank that refused to interview boot
camp grads. Anecdotal I realise.

I worry that these kinds of articles wrongly portray how hard programming/soft
eng/comp sci really is to the average person.

------
seltzered_
This article is from Dec 2016, and Anil Dash wrote about this in 2012:
[https://anildash.com/2012/10/05/the_blue_collar_coder/](https://anildash.com/2012/10/05/the_blue_collar_coder/)

------
marsrover
Always the journalists coming up with these ideas.

~~~
yowlingcat
I'm going to go on a rant, as I know this is an old piece. But, I feel like
it's really sad to see the devolution on journalism quality as it has become
digitized. Yes, it's always been easier to do an incendiary, low quality
hatchet job on a tough subject that you don't know anything about than to do a
well researched long-form think piece. But, it seems that all I see more and
more of (exacerbated by social media) is low information fluff pieces that
make grand, controversial assertions.

The problem is, there's no cultural penalty for being wrong, so there's no
skin in the game from the authors. Right now, there's little stop the market
from being saturated with trash. I had a lot of problems with the Gawker media
properties, but I liked how cutting they could be, and how their snark could
(at their best) act as a natural check against the cancerous growth of smarmy
clickbait. Company ending lawsuit aside, they also did a fantastic job at
capitalizing on their snark. Of course, even they had their biases and blind
spots, but nowadays, I feel as if we really don't have too much.

One of my bosses at a former company used to quip "I love HBR articles. They
usually follow the formula of a 2x2 identity matrix of the form of 'You're
probably thinking A. Here's why B, which you weren't thinking about, is true
while A is wrong.'" But it's really sadly true, and we don't do a great job of
exercising the sociolinguistic tools to critique poor choices of A or B. I
don't know whether this is a chicken or the egg situation that comes as a
result of the factory oriented American education system, but it makes me
pretty sad and disappointed.

------
christophilus
I've seen this same thought expressed quite a bit through my ~20 year career.
I think the earliest expression of this that I've found was a quote from the
1980s. So, people have been saying this for a long time.

In the early 2000s, I thought they were probably right, because a half-drunk
baboon could put together a working application using VB6 (and later, if he
sobered up, he could do the same with .NET WinForms). RAD was a real thing,
and I thought it signaled the end of the high-salary programmer.

I was wrong.

Looking at modern tech stacks, none have productivity tools that are
contextually equivalent to VB6 and .NET's WinForms. So, I think we're still
wrong about this prognosis.

------
danmaz74
Even if a lot of programming gets commoditised, I think that would still be a
white collar job, not a blue collar one. But, of course, calling it "blue
collar" can make for a better title.

------
Aeolun
While I agree with the assessment that it might be the new blue collar job, I
don’t think it’ll ever be understood very well by people without formal
education, either through experience or study.

~~~
buttscicles
What about formal education is teaching it so well then?

And what do you mean by "it"? Coding, software development, computer science?

~~~
Aeolun
All of the above.

You either get a head start with formal study, or you spend years developing a
decent level of skill.

You may be effective after just a year or a boot camp and think yourself
amazing, but your knowledge is really shallow.

------
wturner
I think anyone who wants to explore the world of programming should do so, but
I don't agree with this article. I fit the demographic that this article is
talking about. I taught myself JavaScript for years, taught it to others and I
currently work part time at a cloud technology start up and part time teaching
online with another company. The reality is that contrary to the hype the
truth is that it takes a long time for your mind to adapt to thinking in code.
Learning programming is not something that most people can do in a year or
even two. Basic programming? Yes, maybe. Basic Wordpress development? Maybe.
But keep in mind for modern front-end development you are also talking about
the DOM, async, frameworks like React and a hodge podge of things that can
easily drown developers who have been working in the field for decades. I once
had a bio-chem student who was extremely smart and had A's in his advanced
math classes. No matter how much we tried to work through it he could not get
his head around DOM programming. I went out of my way to try an help him but
eventually he decided it just wasn't enjoyable and he dropped the course. I've
also had many students that have assumptions about the attainability of this
stuff that make my jaw drop. I've worked with online bootcamps that treat
students soley as customers and instructors as pseudo-guru's that are expected
to keep the student "happy". If the student complains because the instructor
gave them a reality check - the onus is on the instructor. I do believe that
most people can do more than what they perceive, but this article is not
promoting a perception that I think is beneficial.

------
vilijou
Tons of people in denial here.

If you put up a job post for a software developer in NYC, you'll get 90%
bootcamp graduates with less than 1 year of experience coding and no real
passion for it.

~~~
asdkfjasl
The article is about workers, not applicants. Nobody is disputing that a lot
of people have been bamboozled into going to these code bootcamps.

------
thegabez
Yes, anyone can learn to code and get a job with no formal training. However,
this does not make it blue collar work or culture. There are similarities but
they are distinct.

------
malvosenior
Lots of people who don't know how to code talking about how easy it will be
for others to learn.

Coding is a creative endeavor, as such very few people will ever be qualified
to do it and even fewer will be good at it. If I had to wager a guess, I'd say
at most 10% of the population will ever be equipped to write code.

~~~
bitrrrate
I have to agree with this. If everyone can code then it would no longer be a
commodity skill set of sorts.

------
king_magic
No, it really super isn't. Look, I'm all for teaching CS/programming to
toddlers through people in their 90s - but the blunt, brutal reality is that
_not everyone can do this work_. Full stop.

That does not make programming a good candidate for widespread, blue-collar
work.

~~~
vinceguidry
Frameworks will eventually turn most jobs we do now into low-skill office
jobs. Maybe not WordPress 6.0, but WordPress 10.0 certainly will be easy
enough for just about anybody to use. We won't call them programmers, but
they'll be doing all the jobs we used to do, if we're lucky enough to have
moved up.

Just how like tasks that used to be done by doctors are now done by nurses,
and tasks that used to be done by lawyers are now done by increasingly large
staffs of paralegals and secretaries, coding will eventually be stratified
like everything else. I would argue it's more inevitable in this one than it
ever was in those fields.

~~~
king_magic
No, they won't. Frameworks often introduce new layers of complexity and
abstract away important details to the point where either entirely new
frameworks are eventually needed, or you need an army of "framework
specialists" who understand the subtleties of particular frameworks - and who
end up needing to re-specialize on shiny new frameworks when old ones are
discarded in an endless cycle of framework insanity.

In my 25 years of programming, I've never seen the ever-progressing march of
new frameworks really solve the underlying technical difficulty of engineering
software. Sometimes they help, more often than not they hurt, and are more
often than not ephemeral in the grand scheme of things.

~~~
vinceguidry
25 years is the blink of an eye.

~~~
king_magic
My point is: frameworks _(when they work)_ simply unlock the next level of
complex problems for general "tackle-ability", and those problems require hard
engineering to solve. We certainly haven't run out of complex
computing/software engineering problems to tackle yet, and I simply do not see
that slowing down.

~~~
vinceguidry
The process of stratification is not driven by inherent complexity. You're
absolutely right in that we still have, and will always have, hard problems to
solve in software.

What I'm referring to is the fact that businesses do not have to solve all of
these problems. And businesses are what ultimately drive the field. Think of
all the other really complicated fields out there. Music, law, medicine. Still
hard problems to solve in all of them.

Let's take music as the example at hand. We'll never reach the end of what's
possible to accomplish with music. Yet there is an entire industry around it
that commodifies musical services. You can spend an entire career focused on
something exceedingly arcane like mid-sized arena acoustical materials.

We haven't gotten that way _yet_ with information technology, not because we
_can 't_ get there, but because the field is still so very very young. Music
has been an industry for thousands of years. The modern arena builds on
technologies developed for theatre in _ancient Greece_.

You're right, each advance makes for new problems to solve. But unless you can
make a credible claim that this time it's different, the field we inhabit and
make a good living exploiting will move the same way every single other
engineering field throughout history has always moved.

------
notacoward
I think the author is projecting a bit. After all, the skills needed to write
an opinion piece for Wired are darn near universal, and supply has exceeded
demand by so much for so long that such writing is practically blue-collar. I
contend that the skills needed to make a career out of programming are just a
_little_ less accessible or familiar to most people. Being a programmer might
be comparable to being a plumber or electrician, which are "blue collar" but
also very respectable and often profitable professions worth aspiring to, but
it's never going to be like the kind of unskilled labor that people line up at
Home Depot - or Wired - to do.

------
JoeAltmaier
Maybe this forum isn't quite situated to appreciate how dismal coding is for
the average coder. Folks here tend to have interesting jobs making new things.

Imagine being one of the masses of coders slaving away at some dinosaur code
base in a large company. Working with ghastly C++ code, 1M lines of cruft,
moving from one platform to another for the Nth time. Writing a 'unit test'
for an 'if' statement buried in some spaghetti code that you yearn to replace
but no, your Agile board says change this if and retest.

They outnumber us probably 100-to-1. And they're definitely, totally, blue-
collar folks.

------
lallysingh
1\. This is an article from Dec 2016. It should have a (2016) in the title.

2\. Those jobs are already getting eaten up by more flexible products and
tooling. This will accelerate, because the hiring firms aren't trying to
innovate here, just keep up with their industries. As the requirements are
relatively stable, some shops will spin off their internal products into
separate businesses and others will buy those instead of building their own.

3\. The underlying analogy of a blue collar programmer is closer to a plumber
or electrician. The difference is that our tools are way smarter and getting
smarter than wire or pipe.

------
clavalle
The next blue collar job is journalism.

And entertainment.

------
w_t_payne
I think the notion that coding is 'blue collar' is extremely dangerous. The
closest 'traditional' job to software engineering is legal drafting --
anything but blue collar.

------
a_c
The meaning of coding has changed a lot. It somehow changed from cpu,
algorithm, data structure, relational model, programming language, http/tcp-ip
to whatever latest js frameworks, whatever aws provides, NoSQL-ing everything
and neuro-networking everything. And I feel like the way programmer solve
problems seems to be evolving into finding whatever framework/SaaS that solves
50% of the problem, and bending the remaining problem at hand to fit the
framework/SaaS they chose

------
Im_Unlucky
I really think the comparison here is apt. Although a more direct comparison
would be that coding is a trade. Something that can be self-taught or learned
through apprenticeship. Something that doesn't require a degree. Something
that can be done for a company or as a freelance gig. Something that pays well
relatively speaking.

------
markvdb
"But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for
their local bank."

I stopped reading there.

------
d--b
The article talks about highly skilled “blue collar” job. It compares
programming to mining, saying mining requires teamwork, engineering abilities
to solve complex problems etc.

If that’s your definition of “blue collar” then yes that makes sense. Coding
just won’t be the next low-skilled job.

------
throwanem
I get that there's a lot of people here who don't want to think about the work
they do becoming commoditized, and I get why. But I've been in the same line
of work for twenty years now, and the reality is that it really just isn't
that hard or that special.

The only part of it that's uniquely difficult is dealing with complexity, and
complexity is something that a skilled senior can largely manage for juniors
while they're working their way up the learning curve. In that sense and most
others, it's the same as any other skilled trade; it's just a trade that
happens to be in very high demand lately.

~~~
paulie_a
There seems to be a lot of elitism. Most coding is nothing special or
particularly hard. Within a short period of time most people could get up to
speed to fill a lot of the roles. You don't even need a college degree of any
kind.

Senior level is different but that takes at least ten years in my opinion. And
senior requires a lot of mentoring of juniors. Again this is only my opinion,
if you aren't actively mentoring. You are a mid

------
rodrigosetti
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-
collar_worker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker)

------
Skunkleton
Probably not. Software has a very low producer to consumer ratio.

------
simplecomplex
"But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for
their local bank."

And any idiot is plenty qualified to write articles for Wired.

------
matte_black
Frontend javascript programming is already blue collar. Very little science
left in most tasks, most of the time you are just smashing together packages
and declaratively building interfaces to the point that most of the hard work
has been done for you.

~~~
faissaloo
I'd say CRUD type stuff is moving in that direction too.

~~~
rmah
That's what they said in 1988 when I started my career. Seriously, the same
sort as the article writer were saying the exact same thing in the 1990's.
Nothing has changed. They were wrong then and are wrong now.

Someday, they may be right, but that doesn't make their "analysis" any more
valid. Broken clock and all that, don't ya know.

