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Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

You are right. Programming is a blue collar trade.

A) That's not what the post above says, and b) it's not accurate.

Blue collar refers to jobs that involve physical labor. The term arose when people on the factory floor would wear blue coveralls, and people that worked in the offices off the floor would wear white button down shirts.

Why exactly every job needs to have a clear path to CEO or be considered a dead end or blue collar job is a mystery to me.

because unless you can work 40 hours a week and spend another 20 learning new techs as they come out for the entirety of your life, you will become obsolete unless you can move onto other roles. If management is not an option, then chances are very likely that person will be unemployable somewhere between ages 40-50.

and that's only one problem. you may reach (or ever want to) the top, but if there is a low ceiling that is going to put so many pressures on your career.

"Unemployable beyond 40" has been dead for years in the software industry. Probably for decades. There's nothing in current industry that requires you to be under 30 (actually, there are tons of positions which require extensive experience) and technologies don't die that fast - C programming market is still alive, C++ is over 30 and not going anywhere, Java would be 20 years old next year and not disappearing any time soon. The time where experience from 10 years ago was completely irrelevant is past, now you could have been writing in Java 10 years ago and still be doing it today and continue doing it 10 years from now if you'd like so. Of course, you have to keep current, but any trade has that, especially trade which deals with advanced technologies.

you cherry picked the most successful languages, and also ignored how much they changed. you also doubled the amount of time c++ was actually used. 30 years ago COBOL was all the rage I'm sure. And lets face it, knowing just those is not going to get you very many jobs, maybe for a few hundred people in the entire united states.

and people have to look ahead and see the trend. newer stuff is coming out faster and faster. The 'hard' stuff is paying more and more and requires less and less people to do it, while the easy stuff is consistently either being outsourced or made so easy 'anyone' can do it.

and unemployed beyond 40 dead in the industry? are you kidding me? we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s. Where do you think those people went, they just up and died? they had to pick a new industry

You quite underestimate the number of COBOL jobs. E.g. simple search [1] reveals thousands of COBOL jobs just on one site, and most of these jobs I imagine would not be even advertised on generic job-search sites since these go through consulting firms which already know who they can hire. Deeper research shows there are millions of COBOL programmers now [2] and massive numbers of COBOL applications still in business. Actually, as traditional COBOL programmers start retiring and banks and hedge funds still being in business, programming COBOL may become very very lucrative market, paying very much better than your average Ruby or Java gig.

>>> newer stuff is coming out faster and faster.

I see no indication of this. Actually, most of the things that were with us 10 years ago are still around, and introduction of paradigm-shifting concepts massively slowed down due to massive size of the market which would not allow quick change and incurs massive legacy costs. You could maybe introduce new HTML version in a year in the 90s, but now you're stuck with HTML 4 for decades because literally millions of applications depend on it and they are not going to change, and HTML 5 is rolling out in baby steps, despite all the cool stuff it proposes. Looks what happens to XP - they have a massive install base and now Microsoft can not get rid of it, however hard it tries. Market size is enormous now, and so the pace of adoption of any paradigm-shifting concepts is much slower than before.

>>> we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s.

Could you back this up with some data? I haven't found the data that support this conclusion. The programming jobs are shifting around and moving, but I don't see IT being smaller now that it is in the 90s, even accounting for the dotcom bust. Where is that "less programming jobs" coming from?

[1] http://www.indeed.com/q-Cobol-jobs.html

[2] http://cis.hfcc.edu/faq/cobol

Edit: removed wrong data.

yes there are a few COBOL 'jobs' scattered throughout the country, but that really doesnt matter. a person can stick with learning one language and hoping it remains relevant for their 40-50 year career, but outliers do not make a rule. theres lots of people doing really well playing the lottery.

making a web page today in 'html' is NOTHING like it was 5 years ago, let alone 10. you're simplifying it way too much.

if you were a web designer, and just stuck with what you taught yourself back in 2005, you would be out of a job. you constantly have to learn new libraries, new languages because no software operates on an island. yes, every field must adapt and add changes, but none so much as like with tech.

all of this is COMPLETELY irreverent anyways. IF you want to be a programmer, and not look ahead to your future to find out what you will need to grow into, BY ALL MEANS. And if you think people will still find your skills valuable even though you don't plan on updating them constantly, good luck.

the point is, if you read the article and dont want to gamble with your future, a programmer is a dead end job in the sense that if you are not moving into some sort of managerial position, there is no where to go.

Nobody says "don't learn anything for 10 years". That would get you in trouble in almost any profession but maybe burger flipping. What I am saying that what you learned in 2005 about HTML is still useful, you just add stuff to it bit by bit, becoming more experienced - and your value actually raises, not declines. Nobody says "do not update your skills". What I am saying is "don't discount the skills you already have". This is additive, not zero-sum - if you know both COBOL and Ruby, it's better than just one of them, and your expertise should cost more even if you don't write COBOL on current project - because you have wider experience and thus probably can see solutions or aspects somebody with narrower experience can not. That's why I think "unhireable by 40" is a nonsense that is long gone from any shop that is interested in hiring actually good programmers and not cheapest coders to generate KLOCs for some contracts where it won't work anyway but it's OK because it means more contracts.

>>> IF you want to be a programmer, and not look ahead to your future to find out what you will need to grow into, BY ALL MEANS.

This is a false dichotomy. I want to be a programmer AND look into my future, and I do, thankyouverymuch. I do not want to be a CEO, it's not a job for me, I'd suck at it. But I don't suck at programming, and that's what I want to do. And I think there are lots of opportunities around to earn your bread and butter on it.

>>> that if you are not moving into some sort of managerial position, there is no where to go.

That's plain wrong - there's everywhere to go, and you confirm it yourself by noticing new things appearing all the time. That's where you go - doing new things! You don't have to have a 'C' in your title to live a fulfilling professional (or personal) life. Of course, if your goal is to have that 'C', go ahead - but there could be many more goals than that.

we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s.

This site seems to disagree with you: http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/careers-in-growing-fiel... . I work with numerous people over 40 actually.

Also, I beg to differ that learning a new programming language is a big deal. We've yet to see a single complete disruption in the way we program... It's still editors, compilers and debuggers in the end.

By the article's definition, neurosurgery is a blue collar trade as well.

If you consider blue collar work as "manual labor" and white collar work as "knowledge work", then there likely is a middle-category that is a mix of both - "knowledge work that require you to use your hands to deliver results".

Peter Drucker called these folks "knowledge technologists": http://www.economist.com/node/770819 ... And believed probably will be the majority of workers in a developed countries over the next century.

That is a bit of a reach to call it blue collar.

I have blue collar friends from high school who envy what programmers do and make and I do what I can to try and persuade/teach them to learn to code and make a better life for themselves.

Blue collar workers can make a lot of money these days, especially if their trade required significant theoretical learning and practical training.

Electricians, mechanics, heavy machinery operators in Alberta can make $150,000 in the oil sands before overtime, plus fly-in/fly-out costs; in the major urban centers, upwards of $100,000. If you're young, add in overtime and you're looking at $150-200k+. Foremen and supervisors can make up to double.

A programmer in the Bay Area will top out around $200k as a senior member of technical staff.

whoosh

Edit: I thought the original "blue collar" remark was sarcastic. Am I wrong?

Most everyone has forgotten the 2000 dot com crash, when all the computer jobs disappeared. This "learn to code" is just how it was then.

I would bet money that in less than five years, a lot of software people will be unemployed -- again. (If I win, good. If not, good. :-) )

I'm curious - how much money would you be willing to bet on that? At which odds?

I've been through the dotcom crash and minor disturbances after, and the jobs never "disappeared". Yes, there were layoffs, pay cuts and hiring freezes. But not all jobs disappeared, and most of the people who lost their jobs found new ones after a while. I'm not diminishing the pain and suffering of those who got caught in bad situations there, but it's not like the whole IT disappeared and people went back to abacuses and wired telegraph.

>>But not all jobs disappeared

I wrote "all jobs" in one place and in another "a lot of software people [...] again".

Since you were also there, what I meant should be obvious...?

In my Swedish job market, there was also something similar around a decade earlier. But it was not only for software people.

"This "learn to code" is just how it was then." - really? I don't remember it that way. Sure there was lots of people who wanted to get in, and lots of books printed but nothing like the sustained push that there is now.

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