Personally I believe that software development is closer to a blue collar profession than a white collar one. Like blue collar professions we have standard outp

Personally I believe that software development is closer to a blue collar profession than a white collar one. Like blue collar professions we have standard outputs from our jobs -- we fix things and manufacture them, however ephemeral or abstract those things might be. It's more than just the "thinking" that groups together "knowledge work" -- our jobs depend very much on our level of output. There's a certain tediousness about both development and blue collar jobs as well. Our high pay is a simple result of market forces (and might be a historical anomaly in the long run), not of any kind of professional standing. I think this is also part of the reason that we have so few women in our profession (a quick google puts the amount of women plumbers at 1.5%) -- which is to say, whatever is keeping women from becoming plumbers is likely to be a big factor in women becoming programmers. It's easy to think that development is just another office job, but I think there is definitely a case to be made that it is not.