> But if we learn how to use the looms, the spreadsheets, and the chainsaws, we might just be okay.

Er, no. That's the thing about general intelligence, it's general.

Workers of the internet.

No.

> We are the seamstresses lamenting the introduction of the loom. We are the lumberjacks worrying about chainsaws. We’re the accountants panicking about being replaced by Excel

Accountants absolutely loved Excel. They couldn’t hand over the money fast enough.

Bad take.

Is white vs blue collar ever a useful distinction? I think worker versus capital owner is a more important one.

It depends on what level of control you have. I don't count blue and white collar as dirty or clean hands, but more task doer or task master.

The article makes no real attempt to explain how software developers are different from sales people or paralegals or graphic designers or journalists.

It depends on the type of work you do. Majority of SWE just recently needed to write 100 lines of code per day and they'll do fine in their jobs. Then there are people designing new systems, new methodologies, discovering bleeding edge tech. This is completely different type of job. If speaking in car analogy, there are people doing repairs or assembling ready made parts and then there are people inventing new cars.

Yeah, dude. In the 30 years I've spent writing code and building shit from scratch, I've always described myself as a mechanic or a plumber. Not a "founder" or a "SWE" like most of the dumbfucks around here. (Last I checked, engineering was a white collar job requiring a degree, while writing React was closer to using your hand to unclog a toilet -- so don't fucking call yourself an engineer). Knowing how to make shit and fix it is a blue collar job, whether that's rebuilding a motor or writing a SQL query, and if there's a bit of creative artisanship in what you're tasked with, then you're lucky. Even if part of my job was to create actual art or UX to go along with the code I was writing, I'm, at best, the kind of mechanic who takes the wheels off, takes the dash off, strips the paint off, takes your car down to bare metal, and puts it back together with a new motor looking brand new. With a good bit of pride.

Nothing about code is not blue collar if you actually code for a living. Unless you have visions of grandeur. And the truth is, no founder actually codes for very long. They never did. The managers and the business school graduates don't, either. Their job is to fool people into giving them money, and tell other people what to do; not to know how to make anything. They're white collar; they're parasites.

Three decades of those dumb fucks have gone by, plus the wave of idiots trading NFTs, plus the wave of idiots using AI. Craft code, use your brain, make it right, and it will be a representation of your thought process. In the service of a business. And it is a good job, and it is a blue collar job. Because to the business you're working for? If you're doing your job right, you're a plumber, or a general contractor.

TL;DR, coding has always been a blue collar job, to those who code as mechanics to make and fix things. But long live us: We make things, and the business class is basically helpless without us. LLMs or not; they're pathetically incapable of doing anything technical for themselves.

Since wearing white shirts vs blue overalls is somewhat outdated, let me phrase it another way: do you sit at a desk or at a workbench? If it's the former, you're a white-collar worker, and AI ain't gonna change that. Actually, the fact that AI is (allegedly) replacing your job confirms that: it's better at white-collar jobs. I don't see AI fixing my car or my washing machine anytime soon...

I never see myself as a white collar worker, rather a galley slave

I think it is more likely SWE thought they were not replaceable where any function in a company is replaceable with enough motivation (whether wise or not).

The other issue I’ve been mulling over is two part. What in the hell have all these SWEs been actually doing? (As in, what software were the vast majority contributing to?) By extension, were many of these projects critical to the bottom line?

I guess what I’m getting at is if you can have a robot do a sloppy job of what you were doing before, and have that still be ok for the organization, maybe what you were doing in the first place wasn’t critical.

I’m not saying it’s not short sighted (I think many orgs are subjugating themselves to external entities, and are going to be violently bit in the ass when suddenly no one left in the firm has any comprehension of how all of their systems work), but, and I don’t say this lightly, maybe the SWE “profession” has a bit of bloat it can afford to shed?

> Software engineers are discovering that, just like anyone else in a skilled trade, they actually can be outpaced by technology. So we do what other skilled traders have done: figure out how to use the new technology to do the jobs we used to do by hand.

The current evidence of spiralling by the community indicates they are not as graceful as this article implies.

Nice to meet you, fellow workers!

You have been promoted to proletariat

Yes and no (but mainly no).

Software Engineering is in this weird limbo where a whole subsection of the industry thinks it can be a blue-collar "I just code" type of contributor... those types are going to slowly be eliminated.

But for the majority of us, the job always was more involved than just code. And that's white-collar work, through and through.

Civil engineers never could scale to pouring concrete themselves, thus the blue/white collar split. Software doesn't have that problem.

I always remember that site "Software Carpentry". It's definitely artisanal. Not that there can't be high-level practitioners. Are professional athletes blue-collar?

Yes. Started off cleaning school toilets. Went to a bootcamp 10 years ago, taught myself the rest, got to sit in fancy offices and drink coffee, but always felt outta place. "You can take the kid out of the ..." and so on. Guess I gotta pick up the broom again.

Lot of it has been and will be skilled but not that special work. Say something like electrical design work. Follow certain sets of thumb rules and you are fine. There have really been no regulation either. Basically people who decide where does your power and whatever cables go in building. Or plumbing or ventilation... Skilled work, but not actually anything special. Just comparatively productive as product is cheap to reproduce.

This type of work has long been the white collar work.

no the uniform is hoodies

It seems like a pretty arbitrary distinction these days, much like being a "professional".

Ultimately all jobs are subject to supply and demand driven and SWE's world is getting rocked by 3 sharp turning points at once - a trillion bootcamp "just learn to code" people entered the market leading to oversupply, ZIRP ended cutting demand and AI turns out to be good at code creating a substitution effect.

That's one hell of a storm that inevitably is going to lead to some shipwrecks

Yes

My European programmer colleagues that went the apprentice/trade education route are quite good.

So, accountants replaced by spreadsheets were blue collar workers all along then? What about all these consultants with MBA degrees being replaced right now at McKinsey? Are they blue collars too? I mean, this article just collapses on itself, because it fails to provide comprehensive premise for the thing it argues about.

Yes yes yes. Of course we are!

Is this even a question?

We're not the capitalists, who own the companies.

We're not professionals, like the real engineers, who belong to professional organizations and adhere to a code of practice.

What does that leave?

We are no different than bank tellers or ultrasound technicians. We work indoors and make the machines do what our bosses need them to do.

Everybody is blue collar really. White collar is just a term to create a pseudo hierarchy amongst the workers.

We're all just cogs in a massive economic machine. The only people that aren't blue collar are the wealthy who do not need a salary to survive.

We have had a period where the scarcity at the lowest level of the trade motivated the merger of all types of software developers into one (golden) pot. And yet we do have distinct trades level, engineering level and scientific level competencies. Here in Denmark there’s a real distinction between “datamatiker” (the skilled labor), software engineers (the professional white collar) and “dataloger”/computer scientists. I don’t see the scientific study of computation going anywhere, but the happy days of fat salaries to everyone programming may be over.

Software engineering is the reasoning behind the code, not a mere act of mechanically writing the code.

If that's blue collar, then so is every other white collar profession and no distinction can exist. I do not agree.

Yes, at least in most countries outside the Silicon Valley dream, we are office workers like everyone else, even on wages.

I code in a country that isn't the USA, in a part of that country that isn't its center. My coding was always physical labor where, if I failed, it felt like they would kill me. It was like gambling, where if I failed I had to pay a penalty amount large enough to go bankrupt. I was always curious what Silicon Valley, the current center of software, is like.

For me, coding is in fact mostly memorization, and even that is repeated mastery while tracing connection points and errors. The elegance of algorithms matters too, but most of it was the labor of bringing in libraries and frameworks and connecting them.

In that sense, I can feel like I am the same as a production-line worker. Coding React is in fact the same. When I don't use shadcn, I take other people's code; when I use shadcn, I take those buttons and assemble them. Rather than ownership of the code, it was more like I roughly stitched together code other people made and then put my name on it as my program.

I learn about architecture, the purity of a program, functional programming, and so on, but when I actually use it in the field I get scolded, and most of the time the first priority was just to make it work. And in reality, most of the completion was at the level of reading framework APIs and slightly modifying an example architecture made with that framework.

I always feel like a code plumber. As long as I don't have my own product, my own project, I think this label will never come off for the rest of my life. Someday I want to make my own project. But will my skills be enough?

"I’m afraid that this is the end of a very long honeymoon for software developers. We have spent the past 30 years being treated like rock stars in our companies. "

Maybe this is true for FAANG engineers in America. In my country over here in Europe, salaries for software devs have never been that different from other STEM / business fields requiring similar education level.

I don't lament LLM's because they are a better or automation of an approach to doing my tasks. I lament them because they are built on loose foundations, limited understanding, misunderstood function and risk, data theft, and shaky legal grounds. I'm an engineer, my job is to deal with and reduce complexity not accept it blindly without soberly weighing all the pros and cons after building a solid understanding.

We also don't know how this approach will pan out and the extent of its final functionality. Some people think it'll just get better, but nothing in the world scales linearly forever, why would this?

We will likely construct a general solution machine one day and help us create resource abundance, and with that lead to a world where we can work on a completely new foundation of a human philosophy and social structure to live in, but there's no guarantee we're on that path with this garbage, and it's a moral failure to just accept that we are and deem ourselves replaced prematurely.

There is no color for the collar. Companies have only 2 categories - managers and workers. Almost everyone is officially classed as worker in the records. You can see in the word "worker" in most formal communications.

Back in the day, blue-collar literally referred to workers whose clothes get dirty due to their work- construction work etc. Everyone else is white-collar. That doesn't mean a blue collar work is much harder than white collar, this it was assumed. I saw workers simply sleeping on mine floor that is full of coal dust, mud and dirty water around. They just had their lunch, shared some jokes and having a nap. While the supervisor was running around in panic to ensure the target output.

No.

> It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations

That seems like a very poor take. If it feels like white-collar workers are most disrupted in recent times, its because the labouring workforce in the western worlds has been absolutely gutted by technological innovations (and the economics of globalisation).

Factory workers seem less affected because there's hardly any factory workers left!

If you still judge people by what kubectl command gives you a precise output or which pandas method is better, and expect them to fill a LoC or PR count quota, then yes. If you ask them to use their judgement and use dependencies wisely to squeeze out performance, absolutely not.