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The next big blue collar job is coding

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Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#61

Post by xiaoma »

thyroxo wrote: post #32

Other advice from Scott Adams: "The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tel…

This is a flame-war inducing comment if I've ever seen one.

The commenter you were replying to quoted specific, apolitical career advice from Adams and you're answering with highly polarizing politically-motivated comments Adams made elsewhere. If the article itself were related to wage gaps or the past election it would be on topic. It wasn't though.

It's possible to find value in a successful entrepreneur's career advice without agreeing with (or wading into) their political commentary. Would you mind saving these quotes for an article where they won't derail the discussion?

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#62

Post by dang »

thyroxo wrote: post #32

Other advice from Scott Adams: "The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tel…

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13604684 and marked it off-topic.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#63

Post by xiaoma »

hackuser wrote: post #39
orasis wrote: post #8

From Scott Adams: "If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in th…

> If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. I wonder why so few manage it then? Perhaps it was easy for Scott Adams, but most people have different experiences. What if you can't afford college, for example?

I think by "average successful" he means something like being able to pay rent and raise children (if that's a goal) and living to retirement age.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#64

Post by flukus »

hackuser wrote: post #53
StClaire wrote: post #5

I've had this thought before. What's software development if not a trade? I don't want to say that work gets dumbed down, but one hundred years ago a store clerk was a solidly middle-class job, now it's not. Maybe a more relevant example. My grandfather was an accountant. What he did for most of his career, bookkeepers do now. What he did at the end of his career was basically law and banking. The electronic spreadsh…

What's the difference between a system administrator and a plumber? I don't mean it as the first line in a joke.

The plumber can't execute change-washer.sh and have his job done in 1 second. The plumber can't use "down time" to proactively solve future issues. A sysadmin does have a higher level of abstraction available to them.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#65

Post by flukus »

ggggtez wrote: post #28

>But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for their local bank. Yeah, that sounds dangerous.

Do you have any idea how many billions of dollars are moved around everyday by excel and VBA scripts? Sometimes I've replaced these with real code and they complain it doesn't replicate the VBA errors.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#66

Post by srslack »

hackuser wrote: post #51
general_ai wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's got a point though. The 70 cents on the dollar thing has been debunked pretty thoroughly by now, and yet people just keep mindlessly parroting it. Maybe arguing about it is not, in fact, a sensible thing to do.

> The 70 cents on the dollar thing has been debunked pretty thoroughly by now Not to my knowledge. Can you provide some reliable source that explains it? > yet people just keep mindlessly parroting it ... or are people mindlessly parroting that it's been debunked? Let's try to treat each other with respect.

>reliable source that explains it

You're going to have to elaborate on "reliable source."

From an NPR interview concerning a report from the Association of University Women, a feminist organization: "After controlling for several relevant factors, they found that the wage gap narrowed to only 6.6 cents."

http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2012/10/24/28990/study-...

The study: http://www.aauw.org/GraduatetoaPayGap/upload/AAUWGraduatingt...

"How much of that is attributable to discrimination?" "We're still trying to figure that out." Do tell.

In fact, according to data from Census Bureau, "unmarried women who've never had a child earn more than unmarried men"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870442110457546...

From "An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women" prepared for the U.S. Department of Labor in '09: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...

>This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.

So, as with many good talking points, this is a game of statistics lacking important control factors. It's not exactly surprising that men are going to work on oil rigs, which is why the "77 cents" talking point is a brilliant piece of omission and great example of how statistics can be misused.

The purported "women's wage gap" virtually vanishes, and in fact it's a male wage gap in certain demographics, when you have proper controls for career decisions.

In summary: there is no wage gap when you compare apples to apples. If you are talking about women's career choices, then by all means encourage your daughter to be a professional in a high paying sector, as opposed to the low-paying education and health care sectors.

Or you could encourage her to join the lucrative fields of logging, piloting, construction or roofing, steel mill work, trash collection, mining, etc. where there is a very clear and distinct gap. They pay well.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#67

Post by xiaoma »

orasis wrote: post #8

From Scott Adams: "If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in th…

I saw this same advice on Marc Andresen's blog a long time ago: http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html

One third strategy I've seen but unfortunately don't quite have the temperament for is:

3. Become the best at one very specific thing. Unlike becoming the best at something hugely popular, there's a lot less competition once you niche down far enough. I've seen people do this with as youtuber analysts of a specific video game, as creators of art using an unusual medium, as bloggers with freemium content focused on a specific niche and with marketers who specialize in both an acquisition channel and an industry.

What's appealing about this is that after becoming #1 in a niche, it's often possible to use the success there to springboard into a larger territory, learn new skills and then enter either path #1 or path #2 with a significant advantage.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#69

Post by mgc092 »

gtvwill wrote: post #17

Ok this article actually gripes me quite a lot due to its wrongful interpretation of what a blue and white collar job is. TBH I read it whilst I was on the toilet so I'm going to go as far as to say it gave me the shits. Unless we are going to start referring to or reclassifying typing on a keyboard for 8 hours a day as strenuous physical activity (which it is not), coding will never be a blue collar job. Blue collar…

Thank you for writing this. I was about to write it myself to stop this madness. It seems to me that most people don't even have a clue about what software development is about. That's the only possible explanation for this classification as a blue collar job.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#70

Post by superplussed »

jjcm wrote: post #43
orasis wrote: post #8

From Scott Adams: "If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in th…

Becoming moderately good at two things is how I ended up where I am. Before I went to college I did freelance graphic design. In college I ended up studying computer science, simply because that's what my brother majored in. The two combined meant I was getting job offers in my sophomore year. I can't stress just how much it helps when I'm applying for jobs - not only do I have a wider selection (design and programmi…

I have a similar skill set combining graphic design and programming, but I find those niche jobs of prototyping to be in very short demand, where are you seeing the opposite?

The lack of opportunity to flex my creative muscles actually drives me to create my own startups because it's the only type of project where I feel I can utilize all of my strengths instead of being pigeonholed into a developer role.

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