One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. They probably had more intense study and testing in 3 months than most people do in a 4 year undergraduate program, SWE included.
-Those tests are no joke, but saying they are more intense than a 4 year CS degree is ridiculous. Also the major airlines you can compare to FAANG, and many people study for 6+ months to pass those interviews - Airlines are union jobs. If you get them you aren't getting fired unless you try to do something really stupid. - There isn't any wondering if you are doing a good job or not , and you don't take any work home. - Regulations change or you can switch planes, but the career is leaps and bounds more static then SWE.
Net net is that they are very different jobs. SWE is a great gig overall but I take issues with people saying how much harder or easier it is than other jobs. "It depends" is the answer.
That is a completely different kind of thing than the kind of thinking that we do in programming. One isn't better or easier than the other, just different.
An airline pilot is "grey collar".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-colla...
It breaks the original metaphor, and nobody knows it or the confusing borders of the definition - bad for communicating.
Most people seem prideful to self-identify into blue-collar or white-collar.
What's the meaning of the obviously next step pink-collar or black-collar?
Yah. Profusion of terminology is confusing.
There are many blue collar jobs that require a lot of education and the consequences of errors is loss of life.
I would have been incredibly rude to tell them "No, your job isn't _really_ white collar, and you haven't changed your social standing as much as you thought."
On the contrary you can absolutely be a white collar worker with low social standing in the US. It's not hard, I'd even argue most white collar workers fit that description. Think of a customer support representative working in a call center for wages. Their job is definitely white collar but it does not pay well and is the type of job you typically associate with someone struggling financially. Not someone of high "social standing".
In the US blue collar/white collar does not directly correlate to low/high social status. While it is probably true that white collar work is correlated with higher wages or salaries, it's the money that drives social status, not the color of your collar.
A friend of mine is a construction foreman. He lives in a mansion in a suburb of a suburb, is a member of a highly regarded country club and makes more money than me. He’s blue collar.
Being proud of that is like being proud of a six figure salary in California.
Out of 10 people off the top of my head, most of them have been laid off in the past 5 years. For the ones that found new jobs (that I know) they are not satisfied with their pay.
I've talked my pay vs theirs and am shocked. Almost a decade worth of experience, making what I was making 4 years into engineering, in non management positions, and worse job security.
I could be mixing up programmer vs SWE. I just call them techies.
Seems shocking that a SV swe would make what a mech eng makes after 4 years.
Industries with difficult certifications tend to protect those when awarded. It’s a grind to get in but then the employment is easy and lucrative.
This is the promise of a career as a pilot or doctor. (Inb4 doctors do hard things)
In contrast, industries that are lucrative but have a low barrier to entry (sales, real estate, etc) tend to have direct performance competition.
In software by the time you finish your 3 months course the tech is considered obsolete.
Not just Frontend. Backend can change on a dime.
Elastic/MySQL/CockroachDB is using different license that's incompatible to AWS. We have to switch our stack!
Kafka is out. It's all about Iggy! What do you mean it's different language? Learn it!
Things can be hard in different ways. After coding for whole week doing garden work can almost come as a relief.
This is a meme that’s just not true. Nobody outside of the most junior applicant or most transient contractor is paid for the skills they learned this year.
The most important skills last forever. Getting a good CS or EE degree is still the best way to get started.
That's a made up fantasy. They wouldn't get hired at all in real life. Ask me how I know. Where I live recruiters only check that your recent experience and stack match the ones on the job, otherwise your resume goes in the bin.
Like Ygg2 said below, employers don't want generalists with generic CS knowledge, they want people they can immediately slot in and start crushing Jira tickets.
That's not true. Like I said, this is more of a problem if you are trying to break in.
> people they can immediately slot in and start crushing Jira tickets.
This is representative of the only the most precarious software contracts.
> They wouldn't get hired at all in real life.
I have hiring capability and I would hire them.
The poster said their skills would be out of date. I think you're confusing a sales problem for a skill problem.
It's the case wherever I applied, which makes it true for me.
>This is representative of the only the most precarious software contracts.
Same argument as above.
>I have hiring capability and I would hire them.
Where are you located? Do you hire fully remote?
I think this may be the real problem you are facing.
Ten years isn't enough time to standardize something and make it a job requirement.
I still write a lot of Python and shell. I still use Linux, mostly systemd. (I did have to use initscripts early on and do not miss them at all. systemd's way easier.) The entire networking stack has changed only minimally, with only early versions of SSL/TLS becoming obsolete. All the software I use to do my job is the same (A terminal, Vim, Firefox, GNU coreutils, and a smattering of other tools). I still use the same cloud services and databases. The skills I learned in school are equally as useful today as they were then, especially math and CS theory.
The only major shift during my career has been migrating from Linux VMs to containers on clusters (first on Mesos, then Kubernetes). Having administered both at scale, Kubernetes is a lot easier.
All of those listed things have changed. Python went from 2 to 3, number of shells has multiplied like rabbits. Linux changed in leaps and bounds. It got async, BPF, different tech stacks, and window environments.
> Do you want the list of things that haven't changed since I started programming as a kid?
Sure basic principles have remained the same, but huge chunks of ecosystem have been transformed. Perhaps we are looking at it from different perspectives.
It's kinda like ecosystems. Amazon tropical rainforest looks the same now as it did 1000 years ago from birds eye view. But on the ground entire species came and went, and the species living there changed dramatically, in quality and quantity.
My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge, they want an easily slottable asset. You need to know their tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are so in demand.
The number of shells that are relevant to any workplace I have worked in have been two, possibly three if you're working somewhere heavily Apple-based. All three of these shells are POSIX-compatible. Other shells exist, but are entirely optional and rarely used (I say this as someone using one of those other shells).
Linux has changed more, and is probably the biggest source of change in the list that the previous poster described, but as they point out, most of these changes make managing Linux systems simpler, and shouldn't really cause significant problems.
I think you're strongly exaggerating the scale of changes here.
> My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge, they want an easily slottable asset. You need to know their tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are so in demand.
I'm a frontend developer. Every job I've had, I was not familiar with the specific framework they were using when I went in for that job. In every case, that's not been a problem at all, because I've been able to clearly demonstrate that I understand the foundation of frontend development, which is far more important than the precise technologies used in the company's framework of choice. My experiences in general are the complete opposite of what you describe here: every single employer that I've worked for has wanted primarily deeper general knowledge rather than specific knowledge of their specific stack.
Maybe this is a market thing — maybe things really are that different here in Europe — but your descriptions do not ring true at all for me.
Are people really using Iggy/hyping it already? TIL it's now an Apache project[0], that's awesome, it looks impressive!
Sure, most reasonable people are definitely not ripping out Kafka for Iggy yet, but I'm certainly happy to hear it getting more usage/at least being considered.