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The next big blue collar job is coding (2017)

78 points by monsieurpng 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
marsrover 8y ago
Always the journalists coming up with these ideas.
- bobjordan 8y ago
  To be fair, at least he has a github account. That said, his most complex contribution to open source seems to be a script that prints a stream of freak out words, created the day after Donald Trump was elected. var wordToPrint = ["oh god", "no", "please", "no", "no", "no", "no", "no", "oh crap", "oh crap", "oh lord", "oh no", "no", "help", "no", "no", "oh crap", "oh god", "please", "oh man", "no", "oh f-", "oh wow", "oh wow", "wtf", "no", "i can't", "i can't", "i can't even", "oh fuck", "i -- oh no", "shit no", "oh man", "oh man", "oh please", "i can't even", "no no no", "no no no", "no no no", "ugh ugh", "ugh", "ugh ugh crap", "it ... can't", "i can't", "it can't no i can't", "make it stop", "i'm ...", "i'm ...", "it's ...", "oh oh oh oh", "oh oh oh oh oh", "nnnonnnnooo", "nnnonnnonnoo", "ugh", "gnnnaah", "gnaaaah", "gaaah", "wtaf", "wt actual f", "what what what", "it ... no", "no ... i ...", "...", "..."]; https://github.com/pomeranian99/election-night/blob/master/js/index.js https://github.com/pomeranian99/election-night/blob/master/j...
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  Yet they never seem to get programming jobs when they're inevitably made redundant.
- yowlingcat 8y ago
  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.
shhehebehdh 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
- spamizbad 8y ago
  I think when you get started coding earlier, your existing knowledge about the world doesn't disrupt the seemingly idiosyncratic way languages and computers operate and describe operations. But one issue that definitely is a killer is just that some people, even if they have a "knack" for it, just don't enjoy programming and find the whole thing tedious and frustrating and/or the attitude of "I'm done with school. I'm done learning new things. Just put me to work". Those two traits greatly limit the pool of people who are willing to work as a software developer, despite being fully capable of doing the work.
brad0 8y ago
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.
malvosenior 8y ago
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 8y ago
  I have to agree with this. If everyone can code then it would no longer be a commodity skill set of sorts.
rodrigosetti 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker
umvi 8y ago
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...
- fromthestart 8y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me. They cram a ton of material into a handful of greuling rushed weeks. Then again apparently many if not most devs leave college with a four year CS degree and can't code either, so maybe it's just a reflection of typical ability.
  - mb389 8y ago
    The point of a CS degree isn't to teach you to code. Also the amount of time spent in class is roughly equivalent between a 4 year CS degree and a rigorous, full-time bootcamp. 2 hrs of class, 4 days/week, 28 weeks/year in most universities vs. ~10 hrs/day, 6 days/week over 13-17 weeks in bootcamps.
    - faissaloo 8y ago
      The point of a CS degree is to make you give them money. That's it.
    - bdcravens 8y ago
      Personally, I'm anti-bootcamp, but I'd argue that many bootcampers are more employable in a junior role on day 0 than many CS grads. (Perhaps the solution is a bootcampish "finishing school" for CS grads where they are taught an in-demand framework or 2?)
    - zerohp 8y ago
matte_black 8y ago
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 8y ago
  I'd say CRUD type stuff is moving in that direction too.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    Yes, the more standardized something is the more it just becomes an assembly line with very little room for discovering creative solutions.
  - rmah 8y ago
    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.
red_hare 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.'
- InGodsName 8y ago
  My girlfriend who is nurse basically by training, took bootcamp and now she makes react frontend + Prototype in Sketch which is what she really enjoys. She told me this area of work is really good as you can learn from YouTube and put it to practise right away without worrying about that you'd screw up.
alistairSH 8y ago
"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 8y ago
  “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”.
  - alistairSH 8y ago
    But would they do just as well? The state of data protection and security in the industry may seem abysmal because of several well publicized breaches, but in some of those cases (Equifax comes to mind), it was a lack of experts that caused the problem.
    - osdiab 8y ago
      I think what he’s saying is that the industry’s still working despite the fact that such experts are generally not present, and that this can continue. Separately, I think that people consistently haven’t actually penalized most companies for security breaches, anyway. Big brands get hacked, everybody collectively moans for a week, and then they go back to using the exact same products. People publically get mad, but they don’t vote with their wallets, revealing how they really feel about security.
king_magic 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      25 years is the blink of an eye.
      - king_magic 8y ago
everdev 8y ago
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 8y ago
  '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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
seltzered_ 8y ago
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/
menzoic 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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.
Aeolun 8y ago
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 8y ago
  What about formal education is teaching it so well then? And what do you mean by "it"? Coding, software development, computer science?
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    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.
thegabez 8y ago
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.
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
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.
- thegabez 8y ago
  Neither of these are serious barriers for entering the field. I would argue it's the continuously changing landscape of skills which necessitates continuous learning that creates an ebb and flow of supply in the field. If Java had their way and it was used everywhere for everything, and everyone started to master Java, sure all these fears that float around HN would be justified. But that's not reality.
- gota 8y ago
  > 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?
throwanem 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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
talltimtom 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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)
spricket 8y ago
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
- lallysingh 8y ago
  That should be the first interview question. "Did you enjoy your math homework?". I find myself jealous of those who have some to do.
  - spricket 8y ago
    Yes. It should be "did you enjoy math homework or do you think it's worth getting paid 3x your salary to do math homework all day". Programming is mostly simple math but we've all been in the situation where SQL, data, and bugs combine into some unholy quagmire. The kind of thing that most humans honestly have no desire to deal with
- libertine 8y ago
  > 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.
  - alexisohanlon 8y ago
    The training materials and methods continues to evolve. How many remember those thick programming books that weighed 5 pounds. Chances are those who started learning in the past 5-10 years have never seen one. All of those learn programming websites and code challenge sites are a recent invention. The internet only really hit mainstream adoption a short while ago. Decades ago the internet was twinkle in the eyes of hardcore nerds. A fad to everyone else.
a_c 8y ago
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
clavalle 8y ago
The next blue collar job is journalism. And entertainment.
w_t_payne 8y ago
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.
Im_Unlucky 8y ago
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.
vilijou 8y ago
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 8y ago
  The article is about workers, not applicants. Nobody is disputing that a lot of people have been bamboozled into going to these code bootcamps.
danmaz74 8y ago
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.
markvdb 8y ago
"But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling JavaScript for their local bank." I stopped reading there.
lallysingh 8y ago
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.
simplecomplex 8y ago
"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.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
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.
d--b 8y ago
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.
Skunkleton 8y ago
Probably not. Software has a very low producer to consumer ratio.
notacoward 8y ago
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.
wturner 8y ago
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.
christophilus 8y ago
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.
foolzcrow 8y ago
It's a white collar job and always will be. Intellectual jobs are white collar by definition.

78 points by monsieurpng 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

marsrover 8y ago

Always the journalists coming up with these ideas.

bobjordan 8y ago
To be fair, at least he has a github account. That said, his most complex contribution to open source seems to be a script that prints a stream of freak out words, created the day after Donald Trump was elected. var wordToPrint = ["oh god", "no", "please", "no", "no", "no", "no", "no", "oh crap", "oh crap", "oh lord", "oh no", "no", "help", "no", "no", "oh crap", "oh god", "please", "oh man", "no", "oh f-", "oh wow", "oh wow", "wtf", "no", "i can't", "i can't", "i can't even", "oh fuck", "i -- oh no", "shit no", "oh man", "oh man", "oh please", "i can't even", "no no no", "no no no", "no no no", "ugh ugh", "ugh", "ugh ugh crap", "it ... can't", "i can't", "it can't no i can't", "make it stop", "i'm ...", "i'm ...", "it's ...", "oh oh oh oh", "oh oh oh oh oh", "nnnonnnnooo", "nnnonnnonnoo", "ugh", "gnnnaah", "gnaaaah", "gaaah", "wtaf", "wt actual f", "what what what", "it ... no", "no ... i ...", "...", "..."]; https://github.com/pomeranian99/election-night/blob/master/js/index.js https://github.com/pomeranian99/election-night/blob/master/j...
scottlocklin 8y ago
Yet they never seem to get programming jobs when they're inevitably made redundant.
yowlingcat 8y ago
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.

shhehebehdh 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
spamizbad 8y ago
I think when you get started coding earlier, your existing knowledge about the world doesn't disrupt the seemingly idiosyncratic way languages and computers operate and describe operations. But one issue that definitely is a killer is just that some people, even if they have a "knack" for it, just don't enjoy programming and find the whole thing tedious and frustrating and/or the attitude of "I'm done with school. I'm done learning new things. Just put me to work". Those two traits greatly limit the pool of people who are willing to work as a software developer, despite being fully capable of doing the work.

brad0 8y ago

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.

malvosenior 8y ago

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 8y ago
I have to agree with this. If everyone can code then it would no longer be a commodity skill set of sorts.

rodrigosetti 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-collar_worker

umvi 8y ago

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...

fromthestart 8y ago
It wouldn't surprise me. They cram a ton of material into a handful of greuling rushed weeks. Then again apparently many if not most devs leave college with a four year CS degree and can't code either, so maybe it's just a reflection of typical ability.
- mb389 8y ago
  The point of a CS degree isn't to teach you to code. Also the amount of time spent in class is roughly equivalent between a 4 year CS degree and a rigorous, full-time bootcamp. 2 hrs of class, 4 days/week, 28 weeks/year in most universities vs. ~10 hrs/day, 6 days/week over 13-17 weeks in bootcamps.
  - faissaloo 8y ago
    The point of a CS degree is to make you give them money. That's it.
  - bdcravens 8y ago
    Personally, I'm anti-bootcamp, but I'd argue that many bootcampers are more employable in a junior role on day 0 than many CS grads. (Perhaps the solution is a bootcampish "finishing school" for CS grads where they are taught an in-demand framework or 2?)
  - zerohp 8y ago

matte_black 8y ago

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 8y ago
I'd say CRUD type stuff is moving in that direction too.
- matte_black 8y ago
  Yes, the more standardized something is the more it just becomes an assembly line with very little room for discovering creative solutions.
- rmah 8y ago
  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.

red_hare 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.'
InGodsName 8y ago
My girlfriend who is nurse basically by training, took bootcamp and now she makes react frontend + Prototype in Sketch which is what she really enjoys. She told me this area of work is really good as you can learn from YouTube and put it to practise right away without worrying about that you'd screw up.

alistairSH 8y ago

"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 8y ago
“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”.
- alistairSH 8y ago
  But would they do just as well? The state of data protection and security in the industry may seem abysmal because of several well publicized breaches, but in some of those cases (Equifax comes to mind), it was a lack of experts that caused the problem.
  - osdiab 8y ago
    I think what he’s saying is that the industry’s still working despite the fact that such experts are generally not present, and that this can continue. Separately, I think that people consistently haven’t actually penalized most companies for security breaches, anyway. Big brands get hacked, everybody collectively moans for a week, and then they go back to using the exact same products. People publically get mad, but they don’t vote with their wallets, revealing how they really feel about security.

king_magic 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    25 years is the blink of an eye.
    - king_magic 8y ago

everdev 8y ago

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 8y ago
'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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

seltzered_ 8y ago

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/

menzoic 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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.

Aeolun 8y ago

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 8y ago
What about formal education is teaching it so well then? And what do you mean by "it"? Coding, software development, computer science?
- Aeolun 8y ago
  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.

thegabez 8y ago

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.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

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.

thegabez 8y ago
Neither of these are serious barriers for entering the field. I would argue it's the continuously changing landscape of skills which necessitates continuous learning that creates an ebb and flow of supply in the field. If Java had their way and it was used everywhere for everything, and everyone started to master Java, sure all these fears that float around HN would be justified. But that's not reality.
gota 8y ago
> 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?

throwanem 8y ago

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 8y ago
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

talltimtom 8y ago

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 8y ago
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)

spricket 8y ago

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

lallysingh 8y ago
That should be the first interview question. "Did you enjoy your math homework?". I find myself jealous of those who have some to do.
- spricket 8y ago
  Yes. It should be "did you enjoy math homework or do you think it's worth getting paid 3x your salary to do math homework all day". Programming is mostly simple math but we've all been in the situation where SQL, data, and bugs combine into some unholy quagmire. The kind of thing that most humans honestly have no desire to deal with
libertine 8y ago
> 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.
- alexisohanlon 8y ago
  The training materials and methods continues to evolve. How many remember those thick programming books that weighed 5 pounds. Chances are those who started learning in the past 5-10 years have never seen one. All of those learn programming websites and code challenge sites are a recent invention. The internet only really hit mainstream adoption a short while ago. Decades ago the internet was twinkle in the eyes of hardcore nerds. A fad to everyone else.

a_c 8y ago

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

clavalle 8y ago

The next blue collar job is journalism. And entertainment.

w_t_payne 8y ago

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.

Im_Unlucky 8y ago

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.

vilijou 8y ago

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 8y ago
The article is about workers, not applicants. Nobody is disputing that a lot of people have been bamboozled into going to these code bootcamps.

danmaz74 8y ago

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.

markvdb 8y ago

"But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling JavaScript for their local bank." I stopped reading there.

lallysingh 8y ago

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.

simplecomplex 8y ago

"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.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

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.

d--b 8y ago

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.

Skunkleton 8y ago

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

notacoward 8y ago

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.

wturner 8y ago

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.

christophilus 8y ago

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.

foolzcrow 8y ago

It's a white collar job and always will be. Intellectual jobs are white collar by definition.