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.
You mean with this the negative things you attribute LLMs? Limited understanding, function and risk, etc.?
Because what LLMs did is freeing the genie from the bottle. It showed what scaling and ML and Compute can do. It doesn't matter much if LLMs will be Frontier for one year or the next 10 years because VC to alternatives like World Models are available now thanks to LLMs.
The compute required and data required for any further progress through ML is also unblocked by LLM.
The economy is solving the memory wall issue today just because of AI.
I had so many issues with our build system because not a lot of people cared about scaling stateful workloads which need a lot of data shared between, now tx to AI y problems got solved.
> 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.
But LLMs dont prevent you from doing this? If it does it probably is an organisational issue.
It's always the new accounts like yours with 47 votes who write the most depressing, hopeless, despairing and anti-capitalist slogans around here. Day after day. Why is that?
Whichever totalitarian country your little troll army represents, it would be fun if you let your own citizens comment on here without fear of penalty. Or for that matter, open up your own social media so they can speak without fear of reprisal! Let's get going with that project, I can't wait to see the results!
I don't think that's a useful distinction anymore, in a world where the capital owner may be the person who built the software. The more useful distinction is whether someone works in the mines and knows how it works, versus not.
But these two things are essentially merging, which is the implicit thesis here. White collar being those who manage capital and blue collar as those who manage the delivery, service, product, or process. The latter having lower agency than the former, and generally perceived and measured as a liability by the former.
But AI is coming for capital allocators as well, too, so we are seeing more and more white collar people getting “blue collarized”.
Yes, I understood it when a dude said him and his dentist wife who makes a thousand dollar a day are working class because they make money on days they work. If we work to make money, we are working class. If our money works to make money, we are owning class.
By that measure nearly every job is white collar. Eg for any construction job you need to first get training and safe pass certification as well as purchase equipment such as good steel toe boots before you ever step foot in jobsite and start making money. What job do you not need to invest some amount of money into before you get your first paycheque?
You think holding 200 shares out of 13 billion is being owner of capital? If you own your house, you can paint its walls black, put up a painting, or remove all the doors, can you do anything at all with the shares you hold on your little pension fund? Share's market is not owning capital, is creating a system where workers have interest in maintaining the status quo, even when it goes against their own self interest in the long term.
Most workers neither have pension funds or "personal investments", what rose-tinted clouds you live on? Most workers are dirt poor and can barely survive the current month, some are lucky that the government forces them to build their pension, but it's such a tiny part it'd be unfair to call it "capital owning".
How many workers are exposed to the stock market does actually seem a genuinely interesting question. I'm not sure who would be keeping reliable statistics, but the English-speaking world might be hovering up at around 40%-50% households [0].
Seems a bit lopsided though; I wonder if they are only considering selected stock markets or something.
Someone working for a 40k a year payslip, or even a 200k a year payslip, is likely in group 1. Someone with 5 million net worth is comfortably in group 2 - even at 3% in a savings account gives them an income way above people earning from labor. Both of those groups are so divorced from those whose wealth increases 5 million a year, or 5 million a month that they're basically the same.
At some point it ceases to be about money and being able to afford the things you want, and becomes power to control others.
The person making $40k/yr and the person making $200k/yr likely have irreconcilable differences of opinion and are equally divorced from each other as they are some billionaire.
No they are not. The $40k guy wants the material plenty the $200k guy has. The $200k guy wants to scheme up some way to not have his position threatened by the $40k guy while simultaneously trying to become a "genuine rentier" the combined incentives of which results in a hell of a lot of punching down (usually with the government or some other obfuscating intermediary in the middle).
Collapsing all identities into labour and capitalists is a nice Marxist rhetorical move. But it makes no sense at all. People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners. There are managers who kinda fit in the middle. There are CEO's who have to answer to the Board.
Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.
In communist terms, these are part of the petit burgeois. They are technically capital owners but are as vulnerable as workers. Crucially, they don't own any relevant means of production.
> A top NBA player is a worker
Yes, and if he fails to turn his income into capital, thus becoming a capital owner, he'll be as vulnerable as all other workers or more since his working age is much more limited.
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.
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.
Completely agree. The analogy I’ve used is the difference between someone working at an oil change shop vs a mechanic on a Formula 1 team.
And that isn’t meant to denigrate the oil change person. There are millions of that person to every one person working for an F1 team, and it’s important work. But, obviously very different things.
Most likely 1 to 10000 or even 1 to 1 million. After all there it's the same in every field, the ratio of researchers to practitioners is massively in favor of people who do the actual building of things.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 was engaged in a rare bout of physical activity lately, doing odd chores around the house and one thing that struck me is how easy it was if I looked at it like an AI would. Physically annoying, yes, very much so, but I have a very easy time imagine a nimble robot with a decent model(s?) backing it being able to become productive relatively soon.
Painting, building sheds, drilling, repairs. I never encountered a situation in which I thought my awesome Logos was needed to engage productively with the environment. If a situation is cognitively challenging, say with electronics or motor parts or whatever, then that's not a robotics problem but a cognitive one and as we from dev that is actually the easy part now.
I have a suspicion we underestimate robots by a lot. It's slow going but once they get going it will be a madhouse.
Workers will be babysitting robots like we babysit AIs. They'll just walk alongside it and mentor it, guide it, smack it, like we do. The first few years they'll be stupid and rough and everyone will say it's hopeless but soon after people will start mentioning they only have to lightly monitor them..
There's an excess of GPU power and data centers right now and a lot of companies are buying that up to train physical robots to do physical jobs. This is the next wave of innovation.
Yeah, sure, but there have been attempts to build self-driving cars for much longer than the current wave of LLMs capable of doing knowledge work, and we're still not quite there yet. If you think of it, it's pretty obvious that it's easier for AI to manipulate bits and bytes rather than interacting with the physical world. So, while actually intelligent robots might be a good thing (doing jobs that you can't find enough people for, or jobs that currently are not realistic, like going through all the trash a city produces and sorting out the recyclable stuff), I'm not holding my breath waiting for them...
100% agree but there's a big difference happening today. Investors are seeing the huge payoff for NVDA, OpenAI, and Claude and want to pour their money in the next compute heavy idea. That just happens to be physical automation right now. Money plus competition usually equals leaps forward in innovation.
Self-driving cars and LLMs have a lot in common these days. The same wave is driving both forwards. I don't quite know what you mean there are not quite there yet. They are literally doing just that: driving customers autonomously around in large busy cities. Is perfection the bar to clear?
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?
I've remarked on this before: IT Departments seem practically designed to obfuscate the actual cost of development. The discourse online very rarely has numbers against it. My theory as to why this is is that firms really don't want devs to know how much they budget for a dev, and so they structure the organisation to hide that information.
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.
I think there is an interesting reflection here in that software itself is pretty general, if we talk about a tool that the whole industry can use, then actually a general intelligence is to software engineers as the loom is to weavers is maybe actually an apt comparison?
Im speaking specifically of pre AGI general intelligence, little g general if you will.
> 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!
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?
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. 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.
> 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.
> 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.
The article makes no real attempt to explain how software developers are different from sales people or paralegals or graphic designers or journalists.
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?
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.
Bill Gates certainly programmed at the start. At a point early on in Microsoft history he had to stop doing that and concentrate on actual business problems.
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.
Not sure if i get your take.
"on that path with this garbage"
You mean with this the negative things you attribute LLMs? Limited understanding, function and risk, etc.?
Because what LLMs did is freeing the genie from the bottle. It showed what scaling and ML and Compute can do. It doesn't matter much if LLMs will be Frontier for one year or the next 10 years because VC to alternatives like World Models are available now thanks to LLMs.
The compute required and data required for any further progress through ML is also unblocked by LLM.
The economy is solving the memory wall issue today just because of AI.
I had so many issues with our build system because not a lot of people cared about scaling stateful workloads which need a lot of data shared between, now tx to AI y problems got solved.
> 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.
But LLMs dont prevent you from doing this? If it does it probably is an organisational issue.
Is white vs blue collar ever a useful distinction? I think worker versus capital owner is a more important one.
Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them
It's always the new accounts like yours with 47 votes who write the most depressing, hopeless, despairing and anti-capitalist slogans around here. Day after day. Why is that?
Whichever totalitarian country your little troll army represents, it would be fun if you let your own citizens comment on here without fear of penalty. Or for that matter, open up your own social media so they can speak without fear of reprisal! Let's get going with that project, I can't wait to see the results!
Communists always want to de-individualize humans into a single group with a coherent identity so it's easier to ideologize and agitate them.
In capitalism, man exploits man. In communism, it's just the opposite.
I don't think that's a useful distinction anymore, in a world where the capital owner may be the person who built the software. The more useful distinction is whether someone works in the mines and knows how it works, versus not.
Yea, some ties or jackets clash with a blue collar. White is generally a bit more versatile IMO.
White needs money and means to wash and doesn't hide dirt / grease / filth which blue covers up well (blue collar was heavy cotton / denim / canvas)
But these two things are essentially merging, which is the implicit thesis here. White collar being those who manage capital and blue collar as those who manage the delivery, service, product, or process. The latter having lower agency than the former, and generally perceived and measured as a liability by the former.
But AI is coming for capital allocators as well, too, so we are seeing more and more white collar people getting “blue collarized”.
Parent speaks of capital owners, not capital managers.
At what size of pension / investment fund invested in stocks does one become a capital owner? 1mil? 10mil? 100mil?
Yes, I understood it when a dude said him and his dentist wife who makes a thousand dollar a day are working class because they make money on days they work. If we work to make money, we are working class. If our money works to make money, we are owning class.
A big part of a dentist's income is yield from educational investment. The education and training is the capital.
By that measure nearly every job is white collar. Eg for any construction job you need to first get training and safe pass certification as well as purchase equipment such as good steel toe boots before you ever step foot in jobsite and start making money. What job do you not need to invest some amount of money into before you get your first paycheque?
And a bricklayer's income is dependent on their investment in food they eat every day. Not a terribly useful distinction though.
Could the dentist just stop working and continue to make that part of their income?
Most workers are also shareholders, either through their pension funds and/or their personal investments.
You think holding 200 shares out of 13 billion is being owner of capital? If you own your house, you can paint its walls black, put up a painting, or remove all the doors, can you do anything at all with the shares you hold on your little pension fund? Share's market is not owning capital, is creating a system where workers have interest in maintaining the status quo, even when it goes against their own self interest in the long term.
Most workers neither have pension funds or "personal investments", what rose-tinted clouds you live on? Most workers are dirt poor and can barely survive the current month, some are lucky that the government forces them to build their pension, but it's such a tiny part it'd be unfair to call it "capital owning".
How many workers are exposed to the stock market does actually seem a genuinely interesting question. I'm not sure who would be keeping reliable statistics, but the English-speaking world might be hovering up at around 40%-50% households [0].
Seems a bit lopsided though; I wonder if they are only considering selected stock markets or something.
[0] https://hellosafe.ca/en/investing/broker/stock-ownership
And so we've arrived broadly back at white and blue collars after all.
Part of divide and conquer from the owning class
There's three types of people
1) You rely on a paycheck to live
2) Your passive income is enough to live
3) You are so wealthy you can influence the world
Someone working for a 40k a year payslip, or even a 200k a year payslip, is likely in group 1. Someone with 5 million net worth is comfortably in group 2 - even at 3% in a savings account gives them an income way above people earning from labor. Both of those groups are so divorced from those whose wealth increases 5 million a year, or 5 million a month that they're basically the same.
At some point it ceases to be about money and being able to afford the things you want, and becomes power to control others.
The person making $40k/yr and the person making $200k/yr likely have irreconcilable differences of opinion and are equally divorced from each other as they are some billionaire.
Regardless of ideology their material interests are much closer to each-other than they are to genuine rentiers.
No they are not. The $40k guy wants the material plenty the $200k guy has. The $200k guy wants to scheme up some way to not have his position threatened by the $40k guy while simultaneously trying to become a "genuine rentier" the combined incentives of which results in a hell of a lot of punching down (usually with the government or some other obfuscating intermediary in the middle).
Collapsing all identities into labour and capitalists is a nice Marxist rhetorical move. But it makes no sense at all. People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners. There are managers who kinda fit in the middle. There are CEO's who have to answer to the Board.
Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.
> People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners.
Really? How would that happen? Maybe with a small loan of a million dollars...
> worker versus capital owner is a more important one.
Is that ever a useful distinction?
A bakery/bodega owner is a "capital owner"
A top NBA player is a worker
But I know who gets more money, has a good retirement margin and sleeps better at night
> A bakery/bodega owner is a "capital owner"
In communist terms, these are part of the petit burgeois. They are technically capital owners but are as vulnerable as workers. Crucially, they don't own any relevant means of production.
> A top NBA player is a worker
Yes, and if he fails to turn his income into capital, thus becoming a capital owner, he'll be as vulnerable as all other workers or more since his working age is much more limited.
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.
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.
Completely agree. The analogy I’ve used is the difference between someone working at an oil change shop vs a mechanic on a Formula 1 team.
And that isn’t meant to denigrate the oil change person. There are millions of that person to every one person working for an F1 team, and it’s important work. But, obviously very different things.
Which one is which along the blue collar white collar spectrum?
What is the proportion between them?
Most likely 1 to 10000 or even 1 to 1 million. After all there it's the same in every field, the ratio of researchers to practitioners is massively in favor of people who do the actual building of things.
There are like 5 million SWEs in the US and less than 100 million total.
"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.
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.
agreed. checking in to pull some tickets and grind out code? finished.
everything else? if anything we're just getting started :D
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.
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.
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
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.
I never see myself as a white collar worker, rather a galley slave
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 was engaged in a rare bout of physical activity lately, doing odd chores around the house and one thing that struck me is how easy it was if I looked at it like an AI would. Physically annoying, yes, very much so, but I have a very easy time imagine a nimble robot with a decent model(s?) backing it being able to become productive relatively soon.
Painting, building sheds, drilling, repairs. I never encountered a situation in which I thought my awesome Logos was needed to engage productively with the environment. If a situation is cognitively challenging, say with electronics or motor parts or whatever, then that's not a robotics problem but a cognitive one and as we from dev that is actually the easy part now.
I have a suspicion we underestimate robots by a lot. It's slow going but once they get going it will be a madhouse.
Workers will be babysitting robots like we babysit AIs. They'll just walk alongside it and mentor it, guide it, smack it, like we do. The first few years they'll be stupid and rough and everyone will say it's hopeless but soon after people will start mentioning they only have to lightly monitor them..
I have a suspicion you underestimate how much goes in to casually doing house chores.
There's an excess of GPU power and data centers right now and a lot of companies are buying that up to train physical robots to do physical jobs. This is the next wave of innovation.
Yeah, sure, but there have been attempts to build self-driving cars for much longer than the current wave of LLMs capable of doing knowledge work, and we're still not quite there yet. If you think of it, it's pretty obvious that it's easier for AI to manipulate bits and bytes rather than interacting with the physical world. So, while actually intelligent robots might be a good thing (doing jobs that you can't find enough people for, or jobs that currently are not realistic, like going through all the trash a city produces and sorting out the recyclable stuff), I'm not holding my breath waiting for them...
100% agree but there's a big difference happening today. Investors are seeing the huge payoff for NVDA, OpenAI, and Claude and want to pour their money in the next compute heavy idea. That just happens to be physical automation right now. Money plus competition usually equals leaps forward in innovation.
Self-driving cars and LLMs have a lot in common these days. The same wave is driving both forwards. I don't quite know what you mean there are not quite there yet. They are literally doing just that: driving customers autonomously around in large busy cities. Is perfection the bar to clear?
https://waymo.com/intl/zh-cn/blog/2025/06/scaling-laws-in-au...
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?
I've remarked on this before: IT Departments seem practically designed to obfuscate the actual cost of development. The discourse online very rarely has numbers against it. My theory as to why this is is that firms really don't want devs to know how much they budget for a dev, and so they structure the organisation to hide that information.
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.
> 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.
I think there is an interesting reflection here in that software itself is pretty general, if we talk about a tool that the whole industry can use, then actually a general intelligence is to software engineers as the loom is to weavers is maybe actually an apt comparison?
Im speaking specifically of pre AGI general intelligence, little g general if you will.
AGI is an ill defined, unscientific concept you shouldn't be basing your predictions on...
My European programmer colleagues that went the apprentice/trade education route are quite good.
> 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!
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?
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.
You have been promoted to proletariat
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. 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.
No.
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.
Yes
Workers of the internet.
Welcome to the proletariat puzzle solvers.
Nice to meet you, fellow workers!
Yes, at least in most countries outside the Silicon Valley dream, we are office workers like everyone else, even on wages.
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.
no the uniform is hoodies
> 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.
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.
Perhaps quickbooks is the better analogy?
The article makes no real attempt to explain how software developers are different from sales people or paralegals or graphic designers or journalists.
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?
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.
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.
The part about founders not coding is totally untrue. But I’ll see myself out off your porch
Bill Gates certainly programmed at the start. At a point early on in Microsoft history he had to stop doing that and concentrate on actual business problems.