> Computer programming is, according to Wired’s Clive Thompson, “The Big Blue Collar Job.” In countries like Australia and Estonia, coding has become a central part of school curricula. If programming is the wave of the future in employment, prisons in several American states may be cutting incarcerated people off from gaining important skills by preventing them from possessing or receiving books about computer programming.

Journalists clearly have a problem with the fact that the asocial nerds and geeks from high school are making much more money than them. That's why we see so many articles referring to us as "coders" (like the people that do medical data entry) instead of "software engineers," and why we see people like Clive Thompson classifying us as blue collar workers--unlike journalists, who presumably are white collar. Considering that to the average reader, rightly or wrongly, one of the central distinctions between blue and white collar workers is intelligence, with blue collar workers stereotyped as being less intelligent, Thompson's classification is a rather obvious slight.