I wish I could just manage a login page all day, sheesh
The next big blue collar job is coding
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding
#32Other 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 tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."
"If there are no sponsored terror attacks before Election Day, it means ISIS prefers Clinton. They have the means. Think about it. #Trump"
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding
#33The big problem with this is that we're already competing to some extent with outsourcing shops in China and India and this trend is more likely to grow than not. While I believe there will always be an incentive to keep these jobs in-house and local, there is no reason to think it will grow to the extent that middle class blue collar work did through the industrial revolution.
I work in China as a programmer and the local outsourcing shops tend to throw tons of very cheap labour at anything. Unless you're building critical or sensitive systems this model can work (even for physical products and civil engineering if "QA'd" enough through brute force). It's a complete pain in the ass for the in-house team who have to pick up the pieces and maintain the code, though.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding
#34Why 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 They have been replaced by Shopify, WIX and even Amazon.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…
Yeah but you need to understand it's not the actual coding they sell, it's the 'online business consulting' which brings in the moolah
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sometimes I wonder if the money is the only thing that keeps me coding. It seems too hard to do well otherwise.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding
#36Ok 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.
So there are three classes of work: white collar, blue collar and no collar.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding
#37Why 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…
I understand. I was more getting at the fact that, for example, an HVAC technician would develop an understanding of basic engineering principals by virtue of their job. But nobody would come out and say that they should be retrained to be MEs.
Those same people would learn basically nothing about CS in their job, yet they should be developers.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding
#38Ok 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 making this point clear! I'd like to also add that white collar often means management positions to most real blue collar workers in the factories Ive worked in.
Additional note: I remember a 'blue collar' robotics technician at an aluminum casting foundry that knew the actual machine code instructions for programming a legacy robot. Not assembly, binary op codes. He performed this type of work daily, while also turning a wrench, driving forklifts, sweeping the floor, etc. Id say there are 100s of hardcore, real blue collar programmers out there, but few white collars realize it.
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding
#39From 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?
Re: The next big blue collar job is coding
#40Why 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…
Developers need to get out of their bubble and realize that even a basic website is sorcery for 99% of the population. I'm thankful that I started off in online marketing and then learned to code because I remember what it was like to know nothing and can see opportunities that people like yourself overlook.
This post reminds me of the infamous HN dropbox comment in terms of how out of touch it is.