On higher education, programmers and blue-collar jobs | Hacker News Reader

On higher education, programmers and blue-collar jobs

habr.com

50 pointsatomlib82 comments

> On the other hand, blue-collars do non-creative jobs, they usually do not make decisions and do not solve problems; if they follow the instructions, they do their work very well.

This is a fairly elitist sort of attitude that belays the likely fact that the author doesn't actually know any builders. If they did, they'd know that rarely do engineering plans line up 100% with reality, and plenty of decision-making and creativity is needed on behalf of the skilled worker as they best try to execute the plans of the engineers.

Agreed - there are tons of work that is creative. Heck, I think the best workers of any kind are the ones that take pride in their work and try to do it effectively - which even for jobs like cooking food or janitorial work consist of plenty of creativity, decision making, and problem solving.

I think it's better to say there are lots of jobs that don't appeal to the workers doing them.

What better way to refute elitism by mentioning “even janitorial work”; the job so derided by ostensibly successful people that it is the stand-in trope for “low-status employment”.

I was looking for a job commonly believed to not have creativity, so the stereotypicalness makes sense, but if you want me to confess to elitism, sure...I have plenty of bad biases. The point is not to say I'm free of them but to say they are bad.

Yeah, the whole point of Kaizen and a lot of process improvement is to involve all levels of the production line to make decisions and suggest adjustments.

Sounds like the conventional wisdom of a post-communist society. The kind of society where bike mechanics don't invent flying machines.

I really like this comment. I think it's a great demonstration, with actually historical example in how society undervalues some areas of the economy and certain jobs, and that inventiveness comes from everywhere.

I know some car mechanics that can take apart an engine in their sleep, and definitely have a knack for mechanics that many mechanical engineers would envy, even with their lack of mathematical training.

That's a real problem with the development of the society with "professional" and "managerial" classes. They try to protect their position by disempowering others. It used to be priests that protected their knowledge, now it's managers, engineers and other professionals.

I see the same in the IT department of my company. Some years ago the local techs could make a lot of changes but slowly corporate IT has taken away power from them and every little thing has to go through architects who then do exactly what the techs would have done anyway. Ford also had to pay more money because the assembly line jobs were so mindnumbingly boring that nobody wanted to do them.

A recurring theme of my career development discussions with my various managers throughout the years has been their gatekeeping. Everything is about them keeping their position at the top and pulling the ladder up behind them. “Oh you don’t really want to be a manager! People-management is a pain, and it’s so much less stress to just stay an individual contributor! Anyway you don’t have the background or pedigree for management...” Pretty much quoting Huxley’s alpha/beta class conditioning phrases.

Is this supposed to make sense?

The Wright brothers wee bicycle mechanics.

I meant more the post-communism part.

I didn’t get the post communist part either. But I connected with the idea that we are moving to a world where people think that innovation can only be produced by certain classes of people.

The Wright brothers lived at the same time that Kafka and Weber were writing about bureaucracies. It was the time of positivism; the belief that social sciences could usher in scientific societies led by technocrats. Bourgeois professionals of the less progressive inclination thought that people could be managed in a mechanical fashion (now only certain kinds of less socially aware engineers dare to admit to their self-serving professional biases in public).

I don’t think the turn of the 20th century was more egalitarian in the sense that you speak of.

I don’t think that time was more egalitarian. The Wright brothers are just an excellent example of innovation coming from people nobody expects it to come from. Even their methods were top notch.

Back then they had classes of people who thought innovation was theirs solely and we have that now too.

No, I don't think it makes any sense. It seems to be saying that a "post-communist society" is a place "where bike mechanics don't invent flying machines". This seems to imply that a communist society is the kind of place where bike mechanics do invent flying machines, which, historically, is laughably far from the truth. Those bike mechanics, first, had the money to be able to invest some of it in experimenting with flying, and second, did so in the hope of further profit. They were very much capitalists, not just in the society they lived in, but also in behavior and motivation.

Child’s play. True capitalists (1) hire wage labor to do the actual work, and (2) enlist the aid of the state to do all R&D and later use any technology that comes out of the research (socialize the costs (risks), privatize the profits).

Yeah, but the 90% does line up, any major changes still have to signed off by an engineer.

> This is a fairly elitist sort of attitude

"fairly elitist" is a very charitable interpretation of that. Sounds more like taking a class construct (blue-collar) and using it to undersell a huge spectrum of workers, while also ignoring the fact that a lot of white collar jobs also involve just following instructions.

The reverse is also true.. many IT jobs are procedure following and brainless.

I remember a story on reddit or SO about a plumber going into programming without a degree. He had no trouble thinking through most of the logic required saying it's just like its old job.

I'm a programmer and as I told my auto mechanic, my job and his job are incredibly similar most of the time: take the thing, use experience and references to figure out why the thing isn't working, then use tools and resources to make it less broken, and spend a lot of time complaining about the quality of the work done on the thing before you got access to it.

Actually many of the younger developers I have worked with treat their jobs like a blue collar technician rather than a creative engineer. It is clear they achieved a CS degree they confused for a trade school. It is pretty clear these developers want all the vanity of being called a developer at a major brand without any responsibility to make independent decisions.

Proof: Have them produce results without the OOP patterns they learned in school or without their favorite framework.

I see that too. In the 90s a lot of developers were self taught and were self motivated to solve problems. With recent hires I see a lot of people who probably did CS for a good career but don’t really care about the craft. If something doesn’t work exactly as it should they just give up.

Remember back in <good old days> when people were authentic and real and not opportunistic fakers?

Load up the resentful pioneer module, Billy.

I am not resentful. It's a pretty normal thing when a profession gets more professional and is considered highly paid. It attracts people who aren't naturally attracted to the job. From observation a lot of doctors aren't that enthusiastic about their profession either but do it for the reputation and money.

There is definitely a division between people who are attracted to the profession because they have an intrinsic interest and those looking for extrinsic rewards.

I bet asking what age someone started programming is as good an interview question as any other.

I would fail that interrogation. :-)

I'd fail that too. I didn't have the money to get a computer. But I am mechanical engineer and in my first job I quickly was the guy who wrote macros for our CAD system instead of doing designs with it. I never liked using the CAD system but I loved writing code for it. That would indicate a natural attraction to writing code.

I wasn't a developer in the 90s, but generally speaking, the legacy code that still exists from that era is absolute garbage.

Most of the code we are writing now will be garbage in 20 years too. Guaranteed. You do your best with the tools and knowledge you have at the moment. That's all you can do.

Not mine, maxxxxx, nope, my code is TIMELESS. ;-D

Can they be wholly blamed? Managers and other people who have more power than young developers want developers to be replaceable cogs.

I mostly agree. I see this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When a unicorn with 20 years experience cannot be found I feel like companies settle on junior developers they don't have confidence in. Because of the low confidence the standard for exceptionalism is set very low. This is extremely problematic because it directly produces entitlement (unearned praise) in a generation already stereotyped 9perhaps falsely) as exceptionally entitled.

In a healthy environment organizations would hire junior developers into environments that are social inviting, but technically not at all friendly. Without challenges developers won't grow, so challenge the shit out of the juniors.

"Can they be wholly blamed? Managers and other people who have more power than young developers want developers to be replaceable cogs."

I don't envy a lot of young guys whose first professional experience is to be micromanaged daily in scrum and JIRA.

My job would probably be considered a blue collar job. I program and operate machines, solve problems that occur with them on a regular basis, have pretty much total autonomy in the decisions I make about how to do my work, I get to be creative every single day, most of the time my boss asks me how to do things rather than telling me what to do. Or may tell me that a customer has asked for something, asks me if we can do it, I, for the most part, will say yes, then somehow find a way to do it and I learn new things and skills all the time.

Honestly if my job wasn't like that, I would've left long ago despite the decent pay.

> The universities do not know whom you see yourself as in the future, and even you often do not know that at the age of your enrolment. It is believed that it is better to teach you all the basics, than to miss something important.

Definitely agreed. Unpopular opinion: I'm a strong proponent of a CS university education, as opposed to something like a bootcamp, for this very reason. An understanding of how OSes work; basic discrete math, etc - those are fundamentals that shouldn't be ignored just because an engineer doesn't work on them on a daily basis. (Unless if the job description is for front-end development only, in which I'm less qualified to say whether a CS education is needed or not.)

And, most importantly: a university CS education gives you knowledge on what you don't know about CS. Otherwise, ignorance of your own ignorance just feeds upon itself.

Isn't this mistaking the path for the goal?

I think it is more accurate to say that the knowledge of how OSes work, basic discrete math, etc. is important regardless of how that knowledge is gained.

A university education is only one way of achieving this knowledge. Even your last point of gaining knowledge about what you don't know about CS is achievable through other means (mentorship, online classes, study groups, etc.)

I think it is perfectly fair to suggest that a CS university education is a great way of achieving this knowledge, and it makes perfect sense to recommend that method if you followed that path yourself.

Personally, as someone who developed that knowledge outside the university system, I suspect that university is probably an excellent approach for most people, but I tend to encourage people to find the hunger for knowledge inside themselves and develop a passion for learning in whatever form it comes.

Ah yes, I see your point. I meant any education that reaches the depth of a CS university education. 3 month bootcamps don’t cut it, but there are of course ways to achieve that yourself. I commend the individual who goes above and beyond to achieve that education for themselves - it’s not easy to achieve the same depth of knowledge by themselves as opposed to being guided by a teacher.

Sorry, but I'll point out a bit of elitism in this post.

> (Unless if the job description is for front-end development only, in which I'm less qualified to say whether a CS education is needed or not.)

The browser is an extremely complex platform, at least rivaling an operating system. If you're going to argue that advanced knowledge of a platform is required for non-frontend work, you should be comfortable making the argument for frontend.

Except people generally don't make that argument. Frontend devs (I am not one) are looked down on. But it's a double standard.

I'm sure that wasn't your intention, but it's a constant expression I see - that web developers are a class separate from the rest of us. The truth is that OS knowledge is not critical and the general sentiment that frontend devs can do their job without understand the complexities of a browser only reveals this.

More to your point, I taught myself about OS's and x86 outside of class because I wanted to learn how to exploit memory safety issues. I never made a career out of it, but I learned a lot, and it was a matter of buying a few books and talking to people on IRC. I found tons of excellent talks by Herb Sutter and Scott Meyer about CPU architecture and how code maps to it.

There's a ton of resources out there for those who choose to self-teach.

This is true only because there's a huge range of people who consider themselves front end devs. The barriers to entry are next to zero, but it's a very difficult thing to master.

>> (Unless if the job description is for front-end development only, in which I'm less qualified to say whether a CS education is needed or not.)

> The browser is an extremely complex platform, at least rivaling an operating system. If you're going to argue that advanced knowledge of a platform is required for non-frontend work, you should be comfortable making the argument for frontend.

I didn't read the quoted statement as a position against front-end devs needing CS knowledge, but rather a lack of position in the matter due to the author's ignorance. FWIW as someone working in both the front- and back-end, the front-end stuff can definitely have the same amount of complexity.

I also did not read it that way. I read it as an off-hand remark that unwittingly implied that frontend devs were 'others' with different requirements.

The commenter below (andreareina) is correct, I said I'm less qualified to say whether a CS education is needed or not for FE development because I’ve never done it myself, so I can’t authoritatively make such a statement. It was the opposite of an elitist attack.

I didn't intend to characterize it as an attack. I read it as an assumption, or an unwitting implication, which I don't blame you for because the issue (of treating frontend devs as lesser) is systemic.

No attacking on either side.

> I'm a strong proponent of a CS university education, as opposed to something like a bootcamp, for this very reason.

The value proposition of a university education is something of a moving goalpost for most people. It's not even about what you learned but how exclusive and prestigious the institution was. Or how uncomfortable and sleep deprived your experience was. If the value of a university degree were based on a skillset that could be proven, then the need for exclusive accreditation could be replaced with a simple unit test - and education would be called "training" and everyone would feel much less smug about not being "blue collar". Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I actually do strongly agree with you on abolishing a degree as a requirement and replacing degrees with a simple test to prove your competence. I only used “CS university education” as a proxy for an in-depth education that can be difficult (but not impossible) to achieve with self-teaching.

And the contents of a CS university education, specifically the subjects you mentioned, can easily be obtained by watching YouTube.

Watching videos passively cannot get you the same depth of knowledge as implementing it, applying it, and discussing it with others.

But the price can't be beat.

I had a longer post. I've deleted it. What I'll say is that I did not find the article convincing at all.

I'm quite biased, as I found it incredibly insulting throughout the article, as I myself dropped out of college.

I believe that college is a viable path with many benefits. I believe self taught is another viable path with many benefits.

I am a programmer, and I dislike an article saying that I am not because I chose to exit my university early and join the work force.

I also found the tone pretty condescending, but I wasn't sure if that was a result of being translated from another language. I agree that both paths are viable.

I think it is definitely beyond language. The condescension of 'you don't have to be humiliated to be a blue collar worker' is absurd in any language - the assumption that workers are embarrassed to not be one of the Elite Engineers.

The statement that you are not to call yourself a programmer, you haven't earned it, you're not a real programmer.

The justification against being self taught amounts to - 'well you can't work for NASA, and uh, something about learning to be a professional'? I found it particularly ironic that they pointing out how many big projects started in academia - and how many of the largest companies were started by dropouts?

The author acts as if they're exploring the idea, but it's not an exploration, it's an argument that they clearly already had made their mind up on.

It's even more condescending in Russian, if anything.

I was actually about to write a response to your previous post before you deleted it.

I found the tone pretty obnoxious as well. I dropped out, but I managed to find a job as a University research scientist for awhile. I have a strong love of theory, and probably have most of the same textbooks that many math majors would have as a result.

I will admit that the average graduate is smarter than the average dropout, but who the hell cares? There are plenty of smart autodidacts, and I feel like if you can learn a lot of the theory on your own without being forced to by a professor, that speaks well of your character.

Most programmers are closer to skilled tradesmen, which doesn't fit into the author's dichotomy of mindless blue-collar workers and university-educated engineers. And the trades' apprenticeship model would probably work better for most programmers than the alternatives.

“And the trades' apprenticeship model would probably work better for most programmers than the alternatives.”

Make the bootcamps longer and more rigorous and you are there.

So... college?

It seems colleges don't focus on teaching practical skills. I am always surprised that a lot of fresh CS graduates barely know how to write code.

That's because the authors' understanding of what blue collar workers are, are largely defined by his stereotypes. And those stereotypes are even worse in Russia than they are in US, because it had a strong class divide around that in the USSR (ironically). I grew up there, and coming from a "white collar" family, the idea of going into trade school was unthinkable, precisely because it was stereotyped as that dirty place full of brainless brutes. And such stereotypes, once they become popular, tend to be self-fulfilling, at least when it comes to "dirty" (lack of funding etc).

Such a rare opportunity it is to use the word fatuous to describe someones ideas.

The article states, "Programmers who have studied programming languages, development tools, various technologies and patterns, but have not mastered the mathematical foundations, look like artists, who have a perfect understanding of the paints and brushes, learned a lot of tricks, but do not know the colour theory, composition, perspective, human anatomy, and other basics. They may have a lot of brilliant ideas, but they will not be able to express them. And all they can do is to work as assistants or repaint other’s pictures."

Backfitting theory to practice and then trying to persuade practitioners and others that they are somehow subject to the abstractions and shibboleths of these gatekeepers, and that we do not understand our own craft, is dishonest. Nassim Taleb calls this "teaching birds how to fly."

University education is valuable when it refines and differentiates students. Outside of maths and maybe divinity degrees, most of them have become managerialist diploma mills. I don't think the article was elitist, since one of the first rules of being an actual member of an elite that you don't go on about it like that. Provocative, anyway.

I aspire to be a Scientist (currently a self-educated software engineer & UX designer).

I love education, learning, and teaching myself.

I strive to be around like-minded individuals who think logically or visually.

I have yet to find an education system (in the USA) that provides a learning style that works for me. Or, I feel forced to conform my way of thinking to a style that I consider to be inferior.

At a young age I was diagnosed with auditory hearing dyslexia. But little was understood about the relationship it had with Autism. My parents, teachers and schools did not have the resources, understanding or time to assist in my difficulties. So I resulted to teach myself most of the required subjects. I excelled with hands-on activities, problem solving, and critical thinking but struggled with testing and language based subjects. Something I'm proud of is that in elementary school I was already programming, building computers, and volunteering in the School District’s IT Department as a "junior system administrator."

Now that I have a family and responsibilities. I do worry that at some point in the future my opportunities could be restricted by not having a degree. My preference is to have the right education over a degree. But, the more that these conversations around higher education and having a degree comes up, the more I doubt my logic.

I want to attend a university where I can thrive, learn, and be challenged. But I have yet to find the right one. Until then, I continue to read books, teach myself new subjects, learn from mentors, take the occasional credited class, and seek as many learning opportunities that I can find.

I'm not sure why I'm sharing this, but this topic has been something that I've been thinking a lot about lately. It does help me to share my thoughts with people.

> I do worry that at some point in the future my opportunities could be restricted by not having a degree.

The longer you've been actually doing the work, the less people care about your degree. Don't worry about the conversations around you. Worry about the hiring - and in hiring, having a proven track record beats having a piece of paper. (At least, for most employers. The employers where it doesn't are thinking that the degree matters more than the real-world experience. You don't want to work at those places, whether or not you have a degree.)

Thank you, for sharing that perspective. I agree with you, and the people/companies that I want to work with do value who I am, my experience, and my background.

So far, the only challenge that I've encountered in my current situation is with having to obtain documentation for immigration that provides a history of my work experience, responsibilities, and qualifications in a way that is equivalent to a degree or vocational training.

The university gives you fundamental knowledge, which will not become obsolete when you finish your education.

The university in it's modern form has a effective history of several hundred years. That puts it far ahead of specialized engineering school but naturally hardly eternal.

What's interesting about this generally appallingly snobby and shallow article is the way the division between intellectual and manual labor has remained a constant even as this society evolved quite a distance from the time when universities mainly produced priests. The division between skills requiring a university education and those not requiring one has in the US become fuzzier and fuzzier. But division still remains a fundamental prestige point simply because no other division has replaced it (things are complicated now to create alternate division).

Moreover, it's also testament to how far programming has fallen away from other engineering fields whose on prestige guarantees them a place in the university.

> The university in it's modern form has a effective history of several hundred years.

I'm not sure what you mean by "modern form", but Oxford University is nearly a thousand years old. It's older than the printing press and the founding of the Aztec civilization.

I assumed he was talking about the Humboldtian university with undergraduate teaching institutions and graduate research institutions. That model is from the late 19th century.

Unrelated to the article, I'm seeing a lot of material from habr.com making it to the front page. Most of these articles are direct translation from posts from the main Russian-language site, which I've found to be an excellent-quality blog aggregator with really interesting long-form articles. Many articles are posted directly to Habr by large Russian tech firms (Yandex, Vkontakte) or firms with a lot of Russian-speaking developers (Badoo). There are also translations of many popular blog posts that make it to the top of Hacker News, and high quality discussion in general. I read Russian with difficulty, but Google-translating or finding the original linked article in the case of translations works very well. I don't know of a similar tech-focused English-language platform (Medium focuses on all sorts of topics, and is getting scummy, and Slashdot/Hacker News/Reddit are not platforms for long-form content). I wish there were an English language equivalent. Maybe habr.com will accomplish it, but with it's mostly-in-translation articles, I don't know.

I am a little annoyed that habr.com now directs to the English site for me by inferring my geo/browser language, but the Russian language content is accessible at https://habr.com/ru/

They have an interesting article about how they localized to English: https://habr.com/en/company/tm/blog/435764/

I love it. But can't stop subvocalizing the text in Russian accent.

I've heard programmers described as plumbers. I've heard orthopedic surgeons described as body mechanics.

There is a certain type of person who considers any endeavour that is tactile, applied, or practical to be "blue collar". When I encounter such people I can't help but wish I were rather in the company of a plumber or a mechanic.

Tangential, but the Lec quote at the beginning made me smile. Thank you, author, for the token of appreciation to a great aphorist.

> There is the matter is that blue collar professions slowly become extinct because they are replaced by robots and automatic machines. Now whole factories are ruled by a few engineers and skilled technicians. This is good because no industrial work should be done by hands more than once. And that is especially true in programming, because in programming non-creative work can be automated very easily. The present world does not need more blue-collars, because machines do their work very well, it needs more scientists and engineers who will invent our future. Likewise, the world does not need more low-skilled programmers (even though they are not blue-collars in any sense) because they will be replaced very quickly by smart machines and programs. Instead, the world needs more high-skilled programmers, true engineers, who will change our life, making it better, safer and longer.

Engineers can be idealists, too.

> Only one thing, please do not call yourself a programmer, because a programmer is an engineer.

No, programmers are not engineers, generally, even if it became trendy around the late-90s dotcom boom to give every programming and programming-adjacent job in private industry (government didn't really join this trend) an “engineer” title.

Maybe the appropriate title is missing since the concept is so new.

I think an appropriate name might convey a mix of the concepts: problem solving, design, creative, abstract, structure.

If you add "rigor" to this, you have a good general, multidisciplinary, description of an "engineer". I think this slight, but important, difference is why people want to use "engineer" for non rigorous software.

In reality, you probably have some gradient between "software designer" (the ever fluid art and design of software) and "software engineer" (proven critical systems).

> I think an appropriate name might convey a mix of the concepts: problem solving, design, creative, abstract, structure

Hmm, something like (now hear me out), I dunno, “developer?”

I suppose that would go flat in the middle, but I believe it's too broad to cover the range. There are engineers, and there are people in software who I wouldn't consider "developers".

"They may have a lot of brilliant ideas, but they will not be able to express them."

Part of me thinks this is true...but the amazing thing about programming is how many high-quality tools encapsulate the hard bits so that you can do pretty brilliant things.

Yeah, maybe you won't be a pioneer in computer vision or perception engineering, but you'll certainly be able to build useful products with robust libraries and frameworks.

> The present world does not need more blue-collars, because machines do their work very well, it needs more scientists and engineers who will invent our future.

I don't know... plumbing, welder, underwater welding, glass blower for scientific glasses, etc.. are in need iirc.

I've read this thing as well (wish I'd be able to link it) how this guy was like "nono, we might have got it wrong" — it's clearly the high-thinking non-creative (non-artful) jobs that are going to be lost first due to the advent of AGI

Reminds me of when I did an accountancy course and the instructor was talking about engineers being blue collar job as it was very practical and you could work without being a member of an official professional society. Kinda true.

True for most probably, the only engineers I've met who actually studied for and passed the PE are civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers (the ones who work for the government).

... blah blah petty self-serving bourgeois rambling blah blah

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