The next big blue collar job is coding

Being less "elitist" does not mean that standards are any lower. For example, electrician is not an elite or elitist profession, but the quality of electrical work is very high, because there are strict standards, developed carefully, that all electricians adhere to. It is because electricians do not improvise on the job that their work output is high quality. Experts develop a standard toolkit to deal with 99% of the electrical work out there, and electricians deploy those toolkits with a much greater focus on standardization, conscientiousness, and correctness rather than creativity or novelty.

absolutely. but even today there are master craftsmen, as respected as ever. i think software developers will see the same thing- lots of jobs will become menial, but the best will still be highly sought after.

Why coding and not mechanical engineering? MEs often have jobs that could be considered blue collar if not for their degree: designing, installing, & building the same equipment that many blue collar workers use or maintain.

It's because coding is seen as a trivial job despite requiring the same amount of education as an ME. Society has this imagine of 14 year old hackers that can do it with minimal training. So it's easy to convince them that some mechanic that lost his job can retrain to become a coder, because, if a 14 year old could do it...

Computer Science is poised to get more difficult in the future, not easier. New companies/technologies will come along offering products that eliminate the need for low-skilled programmers, leaving the more difficult, high-skilled jobs. The tasks that get easier will no longer require a specialized developer, they can instead be done by a person with an understanding of that specific domain. Leaving the rest of the programming jobs a little bit more difficult. (I think the skewed ratio of senior to entry level programming positions is evidence of this phenomenon in action)

I got my start as a teenager doing small e-commerce sites for people, but I'm not sure the "dedicated developer for a small e-commerce site" job exists much anymore. They have been replaced by Shopify, WIX and even Amazon. And once these companies out-grow their platforms, they need more experienced people to build something more robust.

I think we are doing society a disservice by convincing people that anyone can A) learn to sling some JS, and B) make $80k a year doing it. Easy jobs that anyone could do are not jobs that pay 2-3 times the median salary of a region.

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 jobs by definition are classed so by the large amounts and types of physical exertion required to perform them along with the location in which that job is undertaken (mostly outside or in workshops). White collar jobs on the other hand refers to work that is generally of a cognitive nature and doesn't require much in the way of physical labor and are generally done in offices(don't get me wrong blue collar jobs require cognitive processes too but they also involve PHYSICAL LABOR as a KEY component).

The article would be better if it had said "blue collar work is going to be replaced by white collar work as the pillar of civil middle-class society". The title of the article currently is just plain wrong unless they are incorrectly referring to white and blue collar as some form of reference to a class system/exclusivity system based upon how many workers perform a certain type of task (e.g white collar jobs only employ a small high earning portion of the population whilst blue collar jobs employs the masses on average incomes).

>> shell scripting instead of programming.

I was at a discovery conference (lawyers) listening to a vendor pitching the cost of writing some ediscovery syntax to delve through a 50gb database of emails. While he was talking I performed a grep search on my ubuntu netbook, with the database on an encrypted thumbdrive. In a matter of minutes I convinced the client that he didn't need coders to do much of anything, that an idiot lawyer with a laptop could do it from his hotel room that night (which I then did). The vendor left the room very angry with me.

The downside was that rather than the 100k I saved the client, all I could ethically charge was my rate for 6hours of overtime.