> Also the "skills" required aren't that high I hear this a lot and in my experience, I tend to disagree. Learning how to sew a shirt is much harder than say

> Also the "skills" required aren't that high I hear this a lot and in my experience, I tend to disagree. Learning how to sew a shirt is much harder than say making a solid timber table or welding something together. It's certainly harder than any desk job/IT role I've had. Having spent 30yrs in professional development, I'd say that programming is about as hard as making a table: once you know the libraries inside and out is the same as knowing chisels inside and out. After that it's just design and then implementation of said design. (Yes, I got bored with professional programming: c++ games -> automation -> finance & web). I've looked at a huge range of skills since winding down my programming life. Making clothes is actually challenging ... For me at least. No piece of cloth is perfect, like a program can (almost) be: it moves as you measure it and cut it. It reacts to heat/cold and humidity. Then there's style (a thing I'm seriously lacking in). It goes on. Such as how a complex flat plane shape, combined with other flat plane shapes, when sewn can generate a 3d image -- but you put it together inside out! It's pure mathematics made real. So, to say that it's unskilled, since having tried to learn it... Is simply not true. I'd say it's only a few notches easier than trying to visualise the curvature of space time when you're studying the theory of general relativity (yes, I dabbled in that too) So, I'd say that appreciation for the skill set has disappeared, and that is due to a managerial thing: metrics. Once your job is analysed in terms of metrics, then it can be analysed in a clinical way. It's what almost completely happened in our industry: hence the migration of a lot of development to India/Indonesia, and manufacturing to the cheapest country. Edit: typos/readability