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The next big blue collar job is coding

wired.com

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Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#21

Post by mathgeek »

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…

This is a very excellent point. Blue collar means manual labor, while white color jobs are anything professional.

Heck, most of the developers I know rarely even wear a collared shirt to begin with.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#22

Post by flukus »

vinceguidry wrote: post #3
flukus wrote: post #2

Considering the quality of the code I see currently and the costs created by that technical debt I'm not sure if becoming less elitist will be a good thing. Instead of all these code camps, I can't help but wonder if we could get 90% of the value and 10% of the problems if we taught people shell scripting instead of programming. It looks like wireds ad-blocker blocker has been circumvented now at least.

The nice thing about software projects is that they're easily replaceable. They can be treated as any other business asset in that you can hire a shop to develop them or do it in-house. So long as you have enough business eyes on the process then it works. Expensive, but it works. Businesses are used to expensive. The real value of good code is way, way less than developers would like to believe. This is coming from…

I've never seen management buy in for a rewrite, especially when the code is so bad that the company starts circling the drain. The only time I've seen it is when there's been a fundamental technology shift, like from VB6/C++ to java/.net.

Network effects also make it hard. Sometimes you can't upgrade X because A, B and C feed into it and D, E and F feed out of it and they're all tightly coupled (another thing that's even worse with less skilled programmers). Replacing a single component can mean rewriting the software stack of the whole company.

> If coding wasn't the thing I could make the most money with at this point in time, I'd do something else and code free software as a hobby. At least free software really benefits from great code practice.

Completely agree here. The money is the only thing keeping me in the industry, if that went away I'd do something much more blue collar.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#23

Post by nether »

mywittyname wrote: post #15

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…

Mechanical engineering is not being a "mechanic." They rarely build or install anything with their hands. Usually we sit in cubes running software to analyze physical systems (like air flowing over a wing) and write up the results. We use a lot of math. Technicians, who usually don't have 4-year degrees, handle the actual fabrication and maintenance.

(In case you've forgotten, mechanics is a branch of physics dealing with force, acceleration, mass, that sort of thing.)

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#24

Post by gtvwill »

mywittyname wrote: post #15

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…

>> 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.

Mate I thought this was the case until over the last 2 years I have met a number of mum and dad "coding" companies that literally make their bread and butter from building websites using these platforms and shit like wordpress. I was actually blown away that a few of them had managed to make enough to maintain/pay off houses in Sydney (and in nice parts of the city too) and still have enough to buy a bimmer and a audi to boot. Like considering over the last few years I have been trying to get myself out of the laboring market and into I.T, I had to actually stop my jaw dropping in obvious exclamation when I found out these people support their lavish lifestyles providing products that are literally DRAG AND DROP forms of production and not exclaim "you get paid for doing that shit?!" its been a real eye opener...there are plenty of luddite's out there willing to pay for crap.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#25

Post by flukus »

jasonmp85 wrote: post #4
flukus wrote: post #2

Considering the quality of the code I see currently and the costs created by that technical debt I'm not sure if becoming less elitist will be a good thing. Instead of all these code camps, I can't help but wonder if we could get 90% of the value and 10% of the problems if we taught people shell scripting instead of programming. It looks like wireds ad-blocker blocker has been circumvented now at least.

Also: shell scripting is programming.

Technically true, but it is also very different to what most programmers do.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#26

Post by flukus »

elliotec wrote: post #20
flukus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always advise young people to become good public speakers (top 25%). Anyone can do it with practice. Wasn't he suffering from word soup around this time?

What do you mean? That made perfect sense.

Word salad was the term I was thinking of (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophasia), for a while he couldn't speak publicly because he would just say random words instead.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#27

Post by flukus »

sandworm101 wrote: post #19
flukus wrote: post #2

Considering the quality of the code I see currently and the costs created by that technical debt I'm not sure if becoming less elitist will be a good thing. Instead of all these code camps, I can't help but wonder if we could get 90% of the value and 10% of the problems if we taught people shell scripting instead of programming. It looks like wireds ad-blocker blocker has been circumvented now at least.

>> 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…

I always love these stories. I'm pretty sure half of the over engineered apps where I'm working could be replaced by a handful of shell scripts. One particular one recently had us adding a whole lot of tables to the database with the accompanying sql and code so we could monitor performance in real time. The information could have easily been generated from our log files with a sed script or a flex program.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#29

Post by codecamps »

While I'm all for coding literacy and job retraining, I think the hype around code schools misses the fact that the field requires extremely deep knowledge along with curiosity. A few months of an intensive code bootcamp can get you the basics of writing some JavaScript, basic git workflows, and maybe some API development on top of a database, but it does nothing to develop the intuition a lot of us developed over years and years of tinkering.

I've seen lots of code bootcamp grads get completely lost when deploying an application to a Linux environment. Or when they have to figure out what's going on with a malfunctioning system. Or when they have to think about networks. Or when they encounter performance issues in their code.

Then I realize that a lot of my peers that I pair with were like me. They broke the school computer and fixed it when they were 12. They spent their summer job money to build a computer from parts because they were curious at 15. They taught themselves to code, then got better at college or through continued self-study. They ran Linux as their desktop for fun.

Now I'm not saying that bootcamp coders can't get there, but it's hard to compare to someone that at 21 had 10 years of autodidactic learning experiences, maybe with a college degree on top of it. I'm all for being more inclusive and we really should be making efforts to get more people involved, but I think we forget how broad of a domain we work in and how long it took us to get to our skill level.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#30

Post by solidsnack9000 »

I wonder where this fits on the continuum to end-user programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_development

One can see Rails and the later enthusiasm around Node driven by the idea that people could come to be programmers, not necessarily through a dedicated process of education in computer science.

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