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

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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...

OP gives electricians as a typical example of blue-collar work and argues SW engineers are the same.

There is a real and big difference between an Electrician and an Electrical Engineer. I have an EE degree yet I am not legally allowed to install wires or electrical equipment in the field. Electricians are not allowed to do some engineering tasks. Even an engineer requires additional license (Professional Engineer) in order to sign off building designs.

This is a strict division between white-collar and blue-collar work. Same logic applies to other engineering disciplines.

I remember people argued the same logic should apply to SW as well, in as late as early 2000s. They wanted to make a distinction between a SW Architect and a programmer/coder. The industry preferred to go another way. This was mainly because designing and manufacturing was the same thing for SW. You wouldn’t do much without writing the code yourself.

Now this is kind of haunting us back. There is no law saying licensed SW Engineers have to inspect and sign off every SW system. Doctors, lawyers and other engineers are legally protected from AI doing their jobs more efficiently. We’re not.

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

Some folks don't believe that so-called "tech" workers are "engineers". For example,

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikewarot

http://web.archive.org/web/20260912211713/https://news.ycomb...

Is it true that Micro-Soft began to let employees call themselves "engineers" in the 1970's

If yes, why did they do that

Worry is what happens to all the human readable code that humans were supposed to write? Is it going to be AI readable code that AI is going to write? Will humans see code in future? Do we need to? Because LLMs are trained on English does code stands as it's there now?

I cannot feel for the graduates. What are they thinking? I remember a phase in my life finals in my school(2014), teachers were advising against joining computer science because of 2007 job losses because of Great Recession.

Fast farward to now I feel it's going to be same here as most IT jobs are all replaced, if not changed. And people will pickup different industry. But what about the entry level people who are trying to get a job now? [entry level software jobs are already going at a slower pace](https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Artificial_Intelligence...), in this new job market they might need to have different kind of exposure and knowledge.

Always have been, for higher-level languages.

James Gosling, 1997:

> The feel of Java

> Java is a blue collar language. It’s not PhD thesis material but a language for a job. Java feels very familiar to many different programmers because we preferred tried-and-tested things.

https://horstmann.com/corejava/feel-of-java.pdf

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?

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.

From gazing over the job offers I think in Europe developers have always been machine operators.

Now that the days in the ivory tower are over I'm rather disappointed with the lack of effort people made changing the status quo. If anything they made things dramatically worse. Software can be incredibly liberating and empowering but in stead we got portable prisons that seemingly primarily exist so that the man can keep an eye on everyone. We did get some cool stuff of course but things like amazon, linkedin, twitter, facebook, whatsapp and even youtube should simply have been protocols.

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.

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.

This distinction between blue collar and white collar is mostly a symptom of the united states' attempts to erase all concept of class and propagandize american workers into thinking they are all one, giant "middle class", including those who make $30k and those who make $300k.

Blue collar vs. White collar is mostly a useless distinction since both are working class and have shared interests against the owning class, or to put it another way, those who (have to) work for a living vs. those who merely own for a living.

Also:

"Blue-collar workers, in general, have successfully ridden the waves of technological change. If you can manage a crew of manual carpenters, you can also manage a warehouse full of woodworking robots. It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations."

WHAT! This author has apparently never visited a rust belt city nor ever worked in manufacturing anywhere in north america. Absolutely insane statement to make.

Yes, we have been. Writing software was always the 21st century equivalent of being a skilled factory worker. Nothing at all like law, medicine, or real engineering, all of which require real credentials, licenses, and meaningful accountability for the practitioner if their work breaks something.

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.

I always said to people, even before AI back in the 2010s, that I am a mere modern bricklayer. Most of us software "engineers" don't engineer anything, we're just gluing code, at least 95% of the time. These engineers than prove their worth by arguing whose code is the most clean/concise/pure etc etc when it really doesn't make much of a difference.

Chinese programmers have acknowledged this for a long time, they refer to themselves as 码农, literally code farmer.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

You have been promoted to proletariat

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.

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?

Why does this supposed distinction matter? Just learn the tools of the trade to solve bigger problems.

Peter Bryant is a blue collar worker who needs LLMs to write sloppy propaganda.

The rest of us are fine.

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

I dont understand the point the OP is trying to make. And the distinction between white and blue collars is unclear in this context. Are mathematicians also blue collar since it seems they are being replaced as well? Are electricians white collars then since they are not? Is knowledge work the hallmark of the white collar? It doesn't seem to stand to scrutiny: being an electrician seems to require a lot of knowledge, whereas some managerial roles do not in some cases. All in all this seems like a pretty pointless discussion to be having. One of those language games people like to play (are we stochastic parrots as well?) and that dont bring anything of substance to the debate of ideas.

Html = framers Css = trim carp Javascript = electrical/plumbing Backend work = archictect/engineer...?

Yeah its similar

Nice to meet you, fellow workers!

> 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!

Workers of the internet.

I always called myself a software mechanic.

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.

No, because blue collars are smart and unionised.

> Blue-collar workers, in general, have successfully ridden the waves of technological change. If you can manage a crew of manual carpenters, you can also manage a warehouse full of woodworking robots.

Uh, what? This hypothetical is literally an example of an entire crew of manual carpenters being fired and replaced by robots, leaving only the manager. That sure doesn't sound like successfully riding the waves of technological change.

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

Citation needed. This is not the prevailing wisdom I have heard, and certainly not the experience of e.g. longshoremen replaced by shipping container technology in the 1960s and 1970s.

the most provocative comparison which I've heard a couple of times was "elevator operators".

"... non-technical colleagues believe everything we say about how long things take or how hard it’s going to be to write features."

Oh you sweet summer child. That's not how things are, maybe where you're so protected like you say, but that's not true across the board.

Yes, now start unionizing: https://techworkerscoalition.org/

It's not whether we were blue collar, the question is were we ever really creative? And as a software engineer, it's been a little dumbfounding, but I think the answer is "no".

I mean, I guess I always knew the code I wrote was pretty derivative - a little Googling here, a little Stack Overflow there; but for it to only take 18 months or so for the machines to take 90% of my job was a real eye opener.

Yes

It will be interesting if in time as the skill itself fades instead of secret society forms around enlightened thinking amongst its practitioners. Instead of apprentices it will be new initiates. After all this is presumably what led to the rise of the Freemasons.

Imagine if the San Francisco equivalent of centuries hence has a major thoroughfare called Developer Avenue instead of Masonic.

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.

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.

No.

no the uniform is hoodies

Meh.

What will software engineers do? What will mathematicians do? What will artists do?

Why are we pretending that the LLMs aren't coming for every job?

What are the humans going to do?

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

All of these distinctions like blue collar vs white collar and lower class vs middle class are manufactured constructs to divide people. This is a woeful lack of understanding of class consciousness. There are only two classes. They have multiple names. The way Marx described them is:

2. The Bourgeois or capital-owning class. Also called billionaires and the ultra-wealthy. These are people who derive their income from owning things, from capital; and

1. The Proletariat. Also called the working class or workers. This is everybody else. The working class derive their income from their labor. You stop working and you die, basically.

As little as 4-5 years ago you had many software engineers and other people in tech showing a distinct lack of empathy from people whose jobs were automated away or people who just couldn't survive on their incomes. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) view was "well, you should've gotten better jobs" or even "you should've got a CS degree".

That was never a serious argument because, well, not everybody can be a software engineer. There simply isn't the demand for it. Also, some people need to be teachers, care for the sick, work at the airport, work in agriculture, collect the trash and so on. Society, at least for now, can't survive without them.

I, for one, saw the writing on the wall with the opportunistic rise of permanent layoff culture with the pandemic as employers sought to claw back all the compensation gains of the 2010s. AI is just the golden bullet for wage suppression through labor displacement.

So what's happening now is that a handful of people will in the short term make a ton of money riding the AI wave until they too are expended. Many of the rest are discovering that they have more in common with the guy who picks up their trash than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. More importantly, they will never be Bezos or Musk. Well, that's the beginning of class consciousness.

I sure hope it's not too late for society to figure that out before the entire thing unravels, which is rapidly occurring.

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.

Welcome to the proletariat puzzle solvers.

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