The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)

<i>&quot;But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for their local bank. &quot;</i><p>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?<p>I&#x27;m not sure I buy the &quot;blue collar coder&quot; prediction. At least not in the US. That type of work is currently outsourced to India and parts of Eastern Europe. There&#x27;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?<p>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.

It&#x27;s going to take a generation for this to be the case because the basic everyday skills that we don&#x27;t even think about are just not a part of the core daily activities for most people.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s using computers, she&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>I think it&#x27;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.<p>As a community we don&#x27;t particularly care to work on that, and we seem to like to gatekeep when it comes to our &quot;special skills&quot; and &quot;special thinking.&quot; If we really care about communities and our economies it&#x27;s up to us to help grow the developer base and transition the labor force because we&#x27;re the ones building the tools and systems.

Doubt it.<p>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 <i>write programs</i>, 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.

Bootcamps I swear train cargo cult programmers. It may work for some, but in my experience they lack the understanding of <i>why</i> they are typing what they are typing. They can go through the motions of what they&#x27;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.<p>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...

Blue collar jobs aren&#x27;t low paying due to lack of skill or value, it&#x27;s due to excess supply. In the bay area we have plumbers who charge $150&#x2F;hr, the same rate I charge for coding, due to a low supply of plumbers.<p>The catch is that plumbing and other trades haven&#x27;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.<p>You might be seeing blue collar rates with HTML which is ubiquitous and changing relatively slowly.

This topic recycles on HN pretty frequently. I don&#x27;t believe it. I have many friends that aren&#x27;t coders and it helps me remember how big the skill gap is.<p>Unless you&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Programming isn&#x27;t as old as most fields of engineering, but it&#x27;s older than a generation of workers. If coding was going to be commoditised it would have happened decades ago

The article presents the idea of a future mass pool of novice coders who don&#x27;t (or don&#x27;t need to) level up, that can take care of simple things like &quot;manage the login page&quot;. 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&#x27;s possible for every healthy human to learn how to code and increase their skills over time. I don&#x27;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.

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&#x2F;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.

I buy it.<p>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.<p>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.

After reading the article I’m not so sure.<p>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.<p>That’s all well and good. I’ve worked at a bank that refused to interview boot camp grads. Anecdotal I realise.<p>I worry that these kinds of articles wrongly portray how hard programming&#x2F;soft eng&#x2F;comp sci really is to the average person.

This article is from Dec 2016, and Anil Dash wrote about this in 2012: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anildash.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;the_blue_collar_coder&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anildash.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;the_blue_collar_coder&#x2F;</a>

Always the journalists coming up with these ideas.

I&#x27;ve seen this same thought expressed quite a bit through my ~20 year career. I think the earliest expression of this that I&#x27;ve found was a quote from the 1980s. So, people have been saying this for a long time.<p>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.<p>I was wrong.<p>Looking at modern tech stacks, none have productivity tools that are contextually equivalent to VB6 and .NET&#x27;s WinForms. So, I think we&#x27;re still wrong about this prognosis.

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 &quot;blue collar&quot; can make for a better title.

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.

I think anyone who wants to explore the world of programming should do so, but I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t enjoyable and he dropped the course. I&#x27;ve also had many students that have assumptions about the attainability of this stuff that make my jaw drop. I&#x27;ve worked with online bootcamps that treat students soley as customers and instructors as pseudo-guru&#x27;s that are expected to keep the student &quot;happy&quot;. 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.

Tons of people in denial here.<p>If you put up a job post for a software developer in NYC, you&#x27;ll get 90% bootcamp graduates with less than 1 year of experience coding and no real passion for it.

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.

Lots of people who don&#x27;t know how to code talking about how easy it will be for others to learn.<p>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&#x27;d say at most 10% of the population will ever be equipped to write code.

No, it really super isn&#x27;t. Look, I&#x27;m all for teaching CS&#x2F;programming to toddlers through people in their 90s - but the blunt, brutal reality is that <i>not everyone can do this work</i>. Full stop.<p>That does not make programming a good candidate for widespread, blue-collar work.

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 <i>little</i> less accessible or familiar to most people. Being a programmer might be comparable to being a plumber or electrician, which are &quot;blue collar&quot; but also very respectable and often profitable professions worth aspiring to, but it&#x27;s never going to be like the kind of unskilled labor that people line up at Home Depot - or Wired - to do.

Maybe this forum isn&#x27;t quite situated to appreciate how dismal coding is for the average coder. Folks here tend to have interesting jobs making new things.<p>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 &#x27;unit test&#x27; for an &#x27;if&#x27; statement buried in some spaghetti code that you yearn to replace but no, your Agile board says change this if and retest.<p>They outnumber us probably 100-to-1. And they&#x27;re definitely, totally, blue-collar folks.

1. This is an article from Dec 2016. It should have a (2016) in the title.<p>2. Those jobs are already getting eaten up by more flexible products and tooling. This will accelerate, because the hiring firms aren&#x27;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.<p>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.

The next blue collar job is journalism.<p>And entertainment.

I think the notion that coding is &#x27;blue collar&#x27; is extremely dangerous. The closest &#x27;traditional&#x27; job to software engineering is legal drafting -- anything but blue collar.

The meaning of coding has changed a lot. It somehow changed from cpu, algorithm, data structure, relational model, programming language, http&#x2F;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&#x2F;SaaS that solves 50% of the problem, and bending the remaining problem at hand to fit the framework&#x2F;SaaS they chose

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&#x27;t require a degree. Something that can be done for a company or as a freelance gig. Something that pays well relatively speaking.

&quot;But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for their local bank.&quot;<p>I stopped reading there.

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

I get that there&#x27;s a lot of people here who don&#x27;t want to think about the work they do becoming commoditized, and I get why. But I&#x27;ve been in the same line of work for twenty years now, and the reality is that it really just isn&#x27;t that hard or that special.<p>The only part of it that&#x27;s uniquely difficult is dealing with complexity, and complexity is something that a skilled senior can largely manage for juniors while they&#x27;re working their way up the learning curve. In that sense and most others, it&#x27;s the same as any other skilled trade; it&#x27;s just a trade that happens to be in very high demand lately.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Blue-collar_worker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Blue-collar_worker</a>

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

&quot;But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for their local bank.&quot;<p>And any idiot is plenty qualified to write articles for Wired.

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.