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> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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