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Comment by bigmario | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people make this claim with no evidence. It's understandable to feel insecure about future career prospects in our fast-changing industry, but honestly I'll believe it when I see it.

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I bet a lot of the frontend guys will have problems when someone comes out with something like Visual Basic for the web. It's harder now to develop a LOB app than when it was twenty years ago and I think this will change at some point. Same for a lot of "data scientists". Unless you are on the forefront of development there will be more and more tools that make the data accessible to regular people instead of having to go to data scientists.

Yes, software developers will always be in demand. The profession stays but the people in it get quickly marked as obsolete and replaced by new people.

As someone who got into frontend as a more specific discipline from more generalized design/dev, I can say that my experience does comport. I don't know if I'd call it "blue collar" necessarily, but I'm looking for a job and it's tough to find the inspiration.

We had that for frontend for many years

It's called Adobe Muse.

Demand is still high as ever.

The promise of visual designers has existed for the past 30 years and it has always blown up spectacularly because everything that can be made to conform to canned design principles is already there, and everything else actually requires non-trivial knowledge that is not easily automated.

Design guidelines change too, and accommodating existing software to new designs is not automatable either.

And for data science? Simple correlations are trivial, but doing useful data science requires domain understanding of the business and products and factors such as seasonality, markets and so on.

> when someone comes out with something like Visual Basic for the web

Obligatory plug: Check out https://anvil.works - it is exactly that! Drag and drop UI, Python front-end and back-end, database integration...the whole deal.

This looks pretty good. I can see it work for a lot of in-house applications.

Apply for a job as a PHP programmer and see what you're offered.

Are you suggesting the fact that there is not much PHP work around means that the career prospects of the field are in decline? One language is not indicative of the whole, this comment is not evidence either. And besides you seem to be assuming both that legacy work does not happen and that people can't adapt. I know both a fresh out of school person who does cobol and a mid 50s JavaScript UX person who started on punch cards.

Not at Facebook.

Actually, there is a quite a bit of jobs that require PHP considering the plethora of sites built on Drupal and WordPress. I guess it depends where you live.

I actually intepreted that as the jobs require a very low level of skill and provide low compensation—exactly what you’d expect from making a job “blue collar”.

You can make very good money as a consultant in the PHP/Joomla/Drupal world if you are professional, reliable, and write solid, bug free code.

Nothing you make will be particularly interesting, but you will make an excellent living for yourself.

That is true, but you’re focusing on the php part rather than the median php position part, which is the relevant point to the discussion.

Most of the skill in that area is not working with the CMS but doing the crazy complex integrations that clients ask of them. (And of saving the work of not-as-skilled/too-skilled-for-their-own-good crowd.)

Maybe more of a light blue collar.

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