The next big blue collar job is coding

Additional note: I remember a 'blue collar' robotics technician at an aluminum casting foundry that knew the actual machine code instructions for programming a legacy robot. Not assembly, binary op codes. He performed this type of work daily, while also turning a wrench, driving forklifts, sweeping the floor, etc. Id say there are 100s of hardcore, real blue collar programmers out there, but few white collars realize it.

We don't do heavy lifting (or laundry).

Maybe wrinkled-collar?

(I'm so going to get downvoted for this, I know.)

Heck, most of the developers I know rarely even wear a collared shirt to begin with.

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 analysts of a specific video game, as creators of art using an unusual medium, as bloggers with freemium content focused on a specific niche and with marketers who specialize in both an acquisition channel and an industry.

What's appealing about this is that after becoming #1 in a niche, it's often possible to use the success there to springboard into a larger territory, learn new skills and then enter either path #1 or path #2 with a significant advantage.

I wonder why so few manage it then? Perhaps it was easy for Scott Adams, but most people have different experiences. What if you can't afford college, for example?

Wasn't he suffering from word soup around this time?

Here's the problem - if you apply at a company that follows the standard "technical interview", you will be tested on one thing only - your coding ability at a whiteboard. Here's what can happen.

An employee at the 89%ile in writing, speaking, sales, and coding would be very valuable and rare.. However, this employee must interview with 5 people, all of whom filter out anyone who doesn't land in the top 10%ile.

Companies rarely create jobs for this sort of multifaceted worker who is top 25% in many areas but not quite top 10% in any of them. Truth is, they don't really understand what this is or why it would be valuable. A software developer might benefit tremendously from expertise in these other fields, but if you don't do really well in the whiteboard exercise, you're out. As a result, software interviews tend to filter out people who can present, write, or sell well. Those workers are still out there, of course, but I think companies reduce the probability that a developer will have these skills through the interview process - and I'm not sure they increase their probability of finding good developers appreciably, even when measured purely by coding skill.

Of course, every inefficiency contains an opportunity. My advice to companies is to look for paths to identify and hire people who can do more than one thing. My advice to individuals is this - first, get as good at the coding tests as you possibly can. But probably better is to try to enter a company through a path that doesn't go through software engineering. Trust me, they will fail you out if you can't find all permutations of a set at the whiteboard, even if you could do this quite easily given 15 minutes and stack overflow (and fully understand what you are doing).

So? Learn to code, and let that be your superpower. I know a few people who had a cs/math background and worked as analysts when they started their careers, and have learned to do quantitative analysis, programming, database design, and so forth, and they are rock stars in their fields, highly valued and often invited to speak at conferences. However, when they interview, they don't go through five hours of whiteboard exams - their interviews are actual interviews, they way almost everyone outside tech understands them. Our interviews are more or less indistinguishable from exams (except without the conventions that make exams more fair for the student, such as feedback, consistent grading, a study path, and so forth). Every now and then, when you pop your head out of the tech bubble and talk to people in other fields, you'll see that they actually shudder when they hear about what our interviews are like. Most importantly, they don't get filtered out because they haven't reviewed their textbooks from whatever they studied their second year of college book and prepared for final exams (again). Seriously, anything you can do to leave a field that forces you to do that is worth considering as an option.

Like I said, this will take more personal initiative on your part. People don't really advertise these positions, you have to show the value and build your way into it. Another "problem" is that you probably won't get the pay grade for a software developer track right away - but you may build your way up, and when you get there, you'll be unusual, invaluable, and probably have a more enjoyable job.

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 of them had managed to make enough to maintain/pay off houses in Sydney (and in nice parts of the city too) and still have enough to buy a bimmer and a audi to boot. Like considering over the last few years I have been trying to get myself out of the laboring market and into I.T, I had to actually stop my jaw dropping in obvious exclamation when I found out these people support their lavish lifestyles providing products that are literally DRAG AND DROP forms of production and not exclaim "you get paid for doing that shit?!" its been a real eye opener...there are plenty of luddite's out there willing to pay for crap.

(In case you've forgotten, mechanics is a branch of physics dealing with force, acceleration, mass, that sort of thing.)

Mechanical engineering has become a form of coding. Creating a structured design in CAD strikes me as being similar to creating a software design in code.

I'm not an ME, but I work at a site that employs a number of engineers: Mechanical, electrical, embedded systems, software, manufacturing, etc. Granted, the kind of work done by engineers varies from one industry to another. At my site, most of the engineers do very little engineering per se. They spend most of their time creating parts and assemblies in CAD, dealing with suppliers, and engineering bureaucracy (sprints, JIRA, document control, etc.), and troubleshooting manufacturing problems. The software engineers are doing pretty much the same thing, with different tools (IDE instead of CAD).

Part of the issue is degree inflation: People who used to attend trade school and became draftsmen or designers, are now getting 4 year engineering degrees, but the work for draftsmen and designers is still the same, albeit with more efficient tools.

Not disagreeing with your overall point, put I'm fixing some terrible unit tests (that aren't really unit tests) right now that do nothing but add negative value. So many otherwise experienced programmers write terrible unit tests and/or untestable code that I don't think it could ever be silo'd like that.

Nearly nobody will hire them, because employers like you are expecting 100% domain knowledge on day 1. Because you are completely unwilling to give a person a chance to learn on the job, you are missing out on employees that tend to be low-cost and loyal. There is a cost to having employees regularly quit, and you are paying it because you refuse the sort who stick around.

I actually think you're right that it's elitist, but I don't think this "college is not for everyone" attitude is about money, but about intelligence and personality characteristics. These things happen to also correlate with "wealthy," for values of wealthy above "working class."

Some people just aren't going to be able to make it through college no matter how many resources you give them. And college as we do it now is not right for everyone either. For evidence of this, go to your local state run university and observe how many students are failing out of school because they prefer to smoke weed every day to studying. I think something like 70% of people I met in my freshman year failed out of school in this particular way. Free college wouldn't have helped them.

I would be careful here drawing conclusions like this. Voting for a candidate or party is an extremely imprecise way of determining public support for any one policy, because they're effectively an aggregation of various policy ideas and other issues. Those other things are usually not easily deconvolved from each other.

It's like going to a supermarket and only being able to pick from two baskets that were loaded for you by the staff, that you can't rifle through to find out exactly what the quality of the food is. Are you buying the cart on the left because it has sweet ice cream or because the one on the right smells like it's got rotten milk in it?

If a degree is free, then employers will demand a master's degree. (already starting) If we make that free, employers will demand a doctorate. If we make that free, employers will demand post-doctoral work.

Meanwhile, the actual education obtained for any given level declines. This is a race to the bottom because the customers demand it. Colleges are now teaching things that were once required for entering high school, particularly writing.

For an individual, it is usually beneficial to participate in the arms race. College expenses rise to take much of the benefit, but there is some benefit left for the student. For society, anything that encourages the arms race is harmful. An increasingly large portion of a person's life is spent being unproductive.

The real value of good code is way, way less than developers would like to believe. This is coming from someone who is damn near a perfectionist about code. I have to constantly check myself and ask whether whatever I'm demanding we spend time and effort on is really worth it from a business perspective. Occasionally it is, most of the time it's not.

If coding wasn't the thing I could make the most money with at this point in time, I'd do something else and code free software as a hobby. At least free software really benefits from great code practice.

From one perspective, this would be good because driving down barriers to entry will theoretically increase jobs and reduce costs. From another, it's obviously not great for web developers who are highly paid, though it could theoretically raise salaries even higher for the fewer highly trained engineers who actually require a computer science education.

Either way, I think the industry would need to substantially change before the less complex/more rote programming jobs could be subsumed into vocational training. It would require a pretty significant cultural shift.

I was at a discovery conference (lawyers) listening to a vendor pitching the cost of writing some ediscovery syntax to delve through a 50gb database of emails. While he was talking I performed a grep search on my ubuntu netbook, with the database on an encrypted thumbdrive. In a matter of minutes I convinced the client that he didn't need coders to do much of anything, that an idiot lawyer with a laptop could do it from his hotel room that night (which I then did). The vendor left the room very angry with me.

The downside was that rather than the 100k I saved the client, all I could ethically charge was my rate for 6hours of overtime.