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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

#91

Post by colefichter »

cableshaft wrote: post #84
xiaoma wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So being able to get through life with your basic needs and propagate is the definition of success now? I mean I guess that's certainly true to a certain extent, but that bar seems damn low. It does feel like it's a difficult bar for so many people to clear nowadays, though.

> So being able to get through life with your basic needs and propagate is the definition of success now?

For a lot of people... yeah, that's true. When people say that HN is a bubble, they mean it.

I don't know anything about your background, but have any of your friends ever said something like "my biggest dream in life is to be a mom"? Here in Canada, I've heard that from several friends. For a lot of us on HN that might sound trivial, but we're a strange bunch in our own special ways :)

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#92

Post by hackuser »

srslack wrote: post #66
hackuser wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/u…

Is that copied and pasted from somewhere? consad.com is a parked domain at GoDaddy (or gives me a 404 testing from another route). That and the exaggerated, sarcastic tone make me wonder whether I'm going to gain much from reading and responding to that comment, and whether it's an attempt to inform or attack. Life is too short.

For those interested in learning about the subject, here's a passable summary, though it relies too much on partisan sources:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/jul/15/...

There is a pay gap in some places and not in others; there even is a reverse pay gap in places, but of course if you get into the weeds of any data then it's always a mess. For example, the pay gap in Hollywood between actors and actresses is well publicized (though not mentioned in the article).

One argument they don't mention is that society and the economy are still structured around males working; that those are the norms we inherited and, like almost all norms, we accept them so fully we don't see them - like we are born and live underwater and don't realize that there is air and land. Think of the norm of a career: Get your first job at 18-24, steadily build your career, retire at 65-75. Taking a break to raise children is still a violation of the norm. But if women were the employed gender for centuries, then the expectations and norms for careers would be different; maybe we'd expect to have two careers, for example. That also may apply to the norms of what jobs are paid more highly; certainly in the past, men were paid more or given the better paying jobs because it was expected and necessary for their status as breadwinners; this was explicit. It may not be coincidence that we pay so poorly, for example, for teachers, a high-skill and high-value job to society but 'women's work'; they weren't the breadwinners.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#93

Post by Arizhel »

gtvwill wrote: post #24
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…

This just shows that it's not technical ability that translates to money, it's salesmanship. These people aren't gifted programmers, obviously; what they are good at is doing something that's "good enough" (and beyond the abilities of regular people still, mainly because the regular people haven't even bothered trying to DIY), and then selling it to them. There's countless examples of technical salespeople selling utter crap to clients for huge amounts of money; just look at "enterprise software". Much of it is utter junk, yet costs a fortune because some salesperson can convince some corporate exec that it's great.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#94

Post by antisthenes »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #73
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…

Perhaps coders should fall under the gray-collar classification. We don't do heavy lifting (or laundry). Maybe wrinkled-collar? (I'm so going to get downvoted for this, I know.)

How about beard-collar?

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#95

Post by collyw »

braveo wrote: post #87
vinceguidry wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

> The real value of good code is way, way less than developers would like to believe Soooo much this. But it's also important to note the difference between code and system design. The vast majority of code that's written is solving problems where system design doesn't tend to make a huge amount of difference. It's only when you get to a certain scale and/or in certain domains that the system design starts to matter,…

Then with shit code and even more for shit system design you just spend far longer maintaining the technical debt rather than adding genuine value. Every feature takes 4 times longer to implement because of it. It costs more, and ships later. And there are always bugs to fix. Its obvious to anyone capable of writing decent code that it does have value.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#96

Post by collyw »

dozzie wrote: post #78
flukus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends on the scale of the shell script. And SQL is also very different from what most programmers usually do, especially the ones that use ORM.

I use both.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#97

Post by sjg007 »

xiaoma wrote: post #67
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 analy…

This can explain the C level of a company. Typically, these people are good speakers and good at something else: finance, sales, technology ... also SV typically has looked down on MBAs but that is probably a mistake. They're good at networking, speaking and probably have some other technical skills.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#98

Post by Arizhel »

srslack wrote: post #66
hackuser wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/u…

>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.

WTF? I agree with the general idea here of encouraging your kids to pursue more lucrative fields where feasible, but where'd you get the idea that healthcare is low-paying? Surgeons make a fortune, other doctors generally do very well (there are some exceptions, and GPs do the worst on average but still are not "low paid" by any means), and even nursing is a very solid decent-paying profession.

But yeah, education really sucks as a career choice, both in pre-college and in college too these days.

>Or you could encourage her to join the lucrative fields of logging, piloting,

Piloting is a terrible career. The pay is generally horrible and the conditions dangerous until you get to the "big leagues". There's way more people who dream of flying aircraft for a living than there are places to employ them at good wages. Last I heard, a copilot for a big place like Fedex gets paid $18k. On top of all that, the training costs are enormous, because you're paying for private tutoring and high fuel/maintenance costs. It used to be possible to get aviation loans 10 years ago during the bubble, but it's not any more because the field collapsed and there's a glut of pilots.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#99

Post by vinceguidry »

collyw wrote: post #95
braveo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real value of good code is way, way less than developers would like to believe Soooo much this. But it's also important to note the difference between code and system design. The vast majority of code that's written is solving problems where system design doesn't tend to make a huge amount of difference. It's only when you get to a certain scale and/or in certain domains that the system design starts to matter,…

Then with shit code and even more for shit system design you just spend far longer maintaining the technical debt rather than adding genuine value. Every feature takes 4 times longer to implement because of it. It costs more, and ships later. And there are always bugs to fix. Its obvious to anyone capable of writing decent code that it does have value.

> Its obvious to anyone capable of writing decent code that it does have value.

Business users are the ones that have to make the value decisions, and they can't write any code, much less decent code.

Re: The next big blue collar job is coding

#100

Post by cableshaft »

colefichter wrote: post #91
cableshaft wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So being able to get through life with your basic needs and propagate is the definition of success now? I mean I guess that's certainly true to a certain extent, but that bar seems damn low. It does feel like it's a difficult bar for so many people to clear nowadays, though.

> So being able to get through life with your basic needs and propagate is the definition of success now? For a lot of people... yeah, that's true. When people say that HN is a bubble, they mean it. I don't know anything about your background, but have any of your friends ever said something like "my biggest dream in life is to be a mom"? Here in Canada, I've heard that from several friends. For a lot of us on HN tha…

I'm from the Midwestern US, so yeah, I've certainly heard that quite a few times (dated a couple women like that, even). But I never saw that as something unachievable by most people, which I know isn't the strict definition of success, but to me, success is when you've managed to do something that a lot of people can't do.

A lot of people won't reach it, or won't bother to try to achieve it, but you have. Winning the state spelling bee could meet that criteria. Publishing a book, saving people's lives, etc.

But going to a grocery store and buying food, and finding someone willing to have sex with you until you or they get pregnant and then not totally fucking up when raising the kids is not really something that 'most people can't or won't achieve'.

People manage it all the time. Sure it's not easy, especially with the way health care, housing, education, and daycare costs have skyrocketed and made it much more difficult and stressful, but most people who want to do it still somehow manage it.

I guess I just have a different perception on what it means to be successful. I'm pretty much just arguing semantics, really, and I'm sorry for that. I'm just surprised that's considered to be successful.

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