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Discussion on: Will software ever become "blue collar" work?

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Scott Yeatts

What Percy hit and stereobooster completely missed is the division between skilled and unskilled trades. I mention it briefly in my most recent post while talking about the anti-academia bias in engineering today (Sorry for the self-promotion).

I don't think coding will ever be an unskilled job someone can walk-on and do. Some of the newer no code "build-a-site" work might qualify, but I think it will be an additional duty for an office worker... maybe some companies make it a position of its own, but probably not common.

That said, custom code will always be in at least a skilled trade arena, and I would argue it rides that line now. The difference is that there is also the concept of a "knowledge worker" which software DEFINITELY falls into. It's right beside Doctors, Lawyers and Scientists in that regard.

Just because there's never been a "blue collar" knowledge worker in the past, doesn't preclude it in the future. The fact that many people consider blue collar to require physical labor might slow it down, but eventually there will need to be an established difference between the person who implements a static marketing site vs the web application builder vs the native app creator vs the compiler coder vs the machine code specialist vs the medical technologist vs whatever you call the person responsible for life support software on a spacecraft.

I don't know which goes where or who is what... I just don't think it's necessarily a bad thing either.