Were software engineers blue-collar workers all along?
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The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, then whispers in the ear of the blue-collar worker "Hey, I think he wants your cookie."
Do we somehow think the blue collar guy and the immigrant are dumb? Do they not see the theft of the 11 cookies to start?
They should both go home to their wives who surely have their cookies ready along with a pair of slippers and a backrub.
Now that women are back out of the workforce, there's enough money for the blue collar worker and the immigrant. I hear the 2050s are gonna be a 1950s paradise but with better technology. Here's hoping.
> Do we somehow think the blue collar guy and the immigrant are dumb?
The country that's so loud about their second amendment that the average English-speaking person, not citizen, knows what it is, still hasn't executed Jeff Bezos; one of the richest men in the world who treats his employees so inhumanely that they have to pee in bottles.
Let me know when Americans as a whole boycott Amazon instead of buying from them, and maybe we can move on to "beat[ing] the CEO to death" from there. I've heard the country might be going back to live executions, but I hesitate to call that a step in the right direction.
Eg to carry out the holocaust, the Nazis first instituted gun control so that the local population couldn’t fight back.
Amazon pays considerably more than other warehouses and Amazon has been absolutely revolutionary to both retail and computing. You’re insane to suggest we should just shoot people.
If having guns protects against government overreach how come there hasn't been an armed uprising against the Orange Dictator and his cronies?
In which case, yes, owning a plumbing business is closer to capital than working at one, which is in turn closer than doing unskilled manual labour on a job site. And on the other end, maybe owning an Airbnb which you clean yourself is closer to labour than owning a portfolio of ETFs.
Something I always intend to do and regularly find myself falling short of! Thank you, your interpretation makes sense (as most interpretations seeking nuance do)
> You're a plumber with years of training? Face the wall, capitalist pig.
There's three types of people
1) You rely on a paycheck to live
2) Your passive income is enough to live
3) You are so wealthy you can influence the world
Someone working for a 40k a year payslip, or even a 200k a year payslip, is likely in group 1. Someone with 5 million net worth is comfortably in group 2 - even at 3% in a savings account gives them an income way above people earning from labor. Both of those groups are so divorced from those whose wealth increases 5 million a year, or 5 million a month that they're basically the same.
At some point it ceases to be about money and being able to afford the things you want, and becomes power to control others.
This is level -1 of class consciousness and that's exactly how the top 0.x% keeps us down.
The eventual conclusion was that the interests of the upper middle class did not align with those of the working class. Anyone with substantial non-labor income, such as a small business owner with permanent employees or a professional with enough wealth to have a rental property or other investments of similar value, would not want to have their wealth taken away. That made them class enemies of the working class.
It can be instructive to read what happened to kulaks (wealthy independent peasants) in the early USSR.
You don't have to be marxists or revolutionist to notice that you're getting the short end and that a smaller and smaller part of the population is profiting more and more. Wealth inequalities weren't anywhere as bad between the 1930s and 1990s for example, it was still capitalism, still largely the same societal organization, etc.
We're asking that we perhaps should consider doing something about the 0.1%... and people like you are misrepresenting it as "they want to literally kill anyone owning anything". Nobody gives a shit about the local baker, farmer or ice cream shop.
"Your passive income is enough to live"
The communists confiscated everything of value from the majority of the population and in theory all that became "common property of all the people".
In reality, every valuable property was controlled by a small class of privileged people, who even if they were not the owners on paper, in reality they used and benefited from those properties exactly like or even more than "capitalist" millionaires and billionaires. All the communist revolutions just replaced a few privileged people with other few privileged people and the majority of the people typically became even poorer after the revolution, though frequently some minorities received some advantages after the revolutions, because those in power needed faithful people in some lower jobs, to be able to control the majority.
The only difference between the "capitalist" oligarchs and the "communist" oligarchs is that for the former the amount of money recorded in their bank accounts is important for their power, while for the latter money is of little importance but what is important is their network of allies with which they are connected by family relationships, complete obedience when subordinates, bribes or barter of various favors.
During the civil war, communists saw kulaks as enemies, as their loyalties were at best unclear. And because they were convenient scapegoats. Most Russians were peasants, and kulaks were the neighbors who were better off than you. When things were bad, you could blame kulaks for your misery, because they had more than you.
Later kulaks were tolerated as a necessary evil in market socialism. Then Stalin started his "dekulakization" campaign. Millions of kulaks were deported (mostly to Siberia and Kazakhstan), which was a major contributing factor to the famine in the early 1930s. And when Stalin's purges started, most of the victims were from former kulak families.
A million seconds is a couple of weeks, a billion seconds three decades. Comparing a worker at any salary to that singular concentration of socioeconomic power just doesn't make any sense to me, the key distinction of the rentier is that he can avoid the domination non-rentiers must suffer almost by definition when rentiers exist - they are subject to the arbitrary whim of someone who cannot be voted out of power through democratic efforts. In my view liberty is the freedom from domination, and any private individual with the power to dominate in their own right is inherently hazardous to a democratic society. It is in the interests of both workers that the billionaire is prevented from gaining a position of political influence.
Is this some cultural aspect I'm missing here? Eg lower social cohesion between income levels in the US?
Or maybe it's just a life stage thing. I'm still in my 20s, and none of my friends or myself have children. As time passes and savings mount and people start having families maybe the problems emerge...
"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." as it was eloquently posited by Paulo Freire.
But AI is coming for capital allocators as well, too, so we are seeing more and more white collar people getting “blue collarized”.
As AI marches through various institutions, fundamentally shorting their utility, and as these crumble and morph (including law-enforcement & military), I suspect many people will be surprised how little they actually "own".
That includes much of the "capital ownership" class.
Good luck with your squirrelled bank accounts and brokerage accounts!
Seems a bit lopsided though; I wonder if they are only considering selected stock markets or something.
[0] https://hellosafe.ca/en/investing/broker/stock-ownership
If you have enough excess income that you can build wealth in assets/investments until you become financially independent and no longer dependent on selling your labour, you're white collar.
If you don't, so you're condemned to work forever (apart from state support), you're blue collar.
It has never been about how much money you make.
The overwhelming majority of self employed professionals I know (electricians, mechanics, plumbers) make way more than the average white collar worker (southern Europe).
Just to make it clearer: my SO, which works in governance of a major italian bank, makes way less than her brother painting walls.
Is that ever a useful distinction?
A bakery/bodega owner is a "capital owner"
A top NBA player is a worker
But I know who gets more money, has a good retirement margin and sleeps better at night
In communist terms, these are part of the petit burgeois. They are technically capital owners but are as vulnerable as workers. Crucially, they don't own any relevant means of production.
> A top NBA player is a worker
Yes, and if he fails to turn his income into capital, thus becoming a capital owner, he'll be as vulnerable as all other workers or more since his working age is much more limited.
It's the "circenses" in "Panem et circenses"
Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.
Really? How would that happen? Maybe with a small loan of a million dollars...
[1] https://www.kauffman.org/reports/the-anatomy-of-an-entrepren...
I can easily melt ice into water, but for most solids, that's very hard for me to do. It still makes sense for me to categorize ice as a solid though, rather than saying that there's no reason to categorize it separately from other liquids.
Their original complaint wasn't about defining these groups (one can debate that classes are supposed to be more rigid than this), but the "collapse of all indenties" into these two buckets - which material dialectics calls for. It's a criticism specific towards Marxism and its notion of "no war but class war".
That wouldn't make you a billionaire or anything, but it would make you someone who primarily relies on capital rather than labor for income. Your economic interests would align much closer to a billionaire than to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck.
What? How do I freely become a capital owner? Do people just... give you large amounts of capital? That sure sounds nice and good for you, but for the rest of us, your post is kind of nonsensical.
> Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.
I don't think you know what "collapse" means. If anything, "separate" would be the word here?
Depending of how you define some words, one could say that. Loans aren't particularly easy to get, have string attached, but they are available and can come from just about anywhere. Or you can just be lucky and have made a series of good investments. Unlikely, but possible. You don't need the party's approval to control capital so, for some, that counts as "freely".
> I don't think you know what "collapse" means. If anything, "separate" would be the word here?
They probably meant "collapse" in similar sense to wave collapse: collapsing the indeterminate sets of identities into two discrete and reduced ones.
However, as we have seen, even high paying jobs like software engineering where I and most of my colleagues long assumed we don't need to organize can get exploited almost over night.
Clearly there is a useful distinction to make here, as clearly some jobs are disportionately robust to technological innovation. Clearly doctors and lawyers have not expected the same amount of replacement as software engineer. Maybe blue or white collar does quite capture it but captial and labour framing provides no explanation for any heterogeneous effects on different trades within the labour force.
Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).
The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.
Is it because women through out the 1960s-2000s had a seat at the table, which men didn't?
Obviously not, they often faced workplace discrimination and their choice of job was limited to what was socially acceptable for a woman to work in and often those were jobs men weren't interested in the 1940-1960s, but they were working in what we now call the service industry and they didn't experience the displacement which came with global trade at the same rate men did.
> Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).
This just is not an informative framing here for why software engineers are more impacted than doctors
> The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.
This simply isn't informative, the blog post is clearly focusing on a definite industry and your fixating on a general class (which the impacts are not being felt equally across).
Ideologically, I'm speaking from personal experience. When your career is disrupted by technology, power is the first thing to go. You don't have any of it, and nothing you can do will bring it back. You have to bust a move, pivot, or something.
But don't take my word for it, Cory Doctorow has wrote a book and is on a lecture tour about it. He's not an economist, but does distill the complexity of modern culture and technology into compelling stories. A bit like Mark Twain.
"All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business." (https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-03-13...)
He's also used his experience as a writer supporting the Hollywood writers strike to comment directly about software engineers. Not long ago engineers had massive power in the workforce. Their labor cost was like a 10x for their employers revenue. But SWE failed to use that power for collective organization when they had that power, and now it's too late. Though, the best time to organize was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.
It has more to do with the demand for the specific skills. Jobs in Western countries had more demand for workers in the service industry, but had less demand for labourers, as globalisation took place. And here we have less demand for software engineer labour because an alternative is available here to an otherwise expensive hire.
We all speak from experience, I’ve had shitty bosses and had shitty workplaces. By all means we should validate the shit people go through, but it doesn’t provide an explanation of the underlying forces
My suggestion of power at the table is not an “explanation” as you say. I don’t care about tidy explanations. I care about agency. I care about models of relationships that you can grasp and strategize your way back to a “place at the table”.
And the first step is to realize why anyone gives you power and responsibility in the first place.
In the first instance it’s not personal, it’s just business (and not economics).
I think that's post-hoc. A few years ago, you could have reasonably written "clearly software engineers have not expected the same amount of replacement as factory workers."
The only distinction that matters is worker vs. capitalist. And the jobs that seem "disproportionately robust to technological innovation," only haven't been subjected to it yet. And it's not even that hard to see: the AI companies are gunning for doctor and lawyer work. The main difference between those professions and software engineers, is that they have some level or worker-organization and regulatory protection.
Software engineers as a whole, were really, really dumb not embrace unionization before 2022, when we had a lot of economic power. Instead we got confused by our high salaries, and embraced libertarian propaganda like we were temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
It's kind of interesting that some of the people below are identifying "the CEO" as a capital owner, when in fact, all of his actions which are of relevance to the rest of the workers, are as a worker - as an employee of the enterprise he makes hiring/firing decisions, etc. He may well have acquired his position by virtue of holding a lot of stock and thereby influencing the board of directors, but this is not necessary, and there are a lot of big companies where it's not the case.
Marxists had to come up with "labor aristocracy" as a concept relatively quickly, for what it's worth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy
They are small shareholders with vanishingly small shares, they are not the capital owner with power.
White collar workers will tend to place blame on a poor person's character before their situation. To accommodate a worldview that understands most working conditions, white collar workers would need divorce their economic standing from their sense of implicit value. (ie: I deserve 120k a year because I work really hard. Of course you do, but MOST people do.)
I assume I'll get pushback for saying this, but whatever. The fact of the matter, is that nobody seems interested in taking the risks involved with owning more than "their own private slice of problems"
I can assure you that it's a very different crowd from what I see at my day job. We're very used to a being among a self-selected group where something like an EE degree is assumed. Physics/Math majors are not uncommon including some PhDs.
And I don't mean just credentials. It's noticeable in how intellectually curious people are, how they digest information, how comfortable they are with basic school level math (e.g. complex numbers). Not to mention that textbooks at that level are a little watered down in comparison with your first year college textbooks.
We also don't know how this approach will pan out and the extent of its final functionality. Some people think it'll just get better, but nothing in the world scales linearly forever, why would this?
We will likely construct a general solution machine one day and help us create resource abundance, and with that lead to a world where we can work on a completely new foundation of a human philosophy and social structure to live in, but there's no guarantee we're on that path with this garbage, and it's a moral failure to just accept that we are and deem ourselves replaced prematurely.
"on that path with this garbage"
You mean with this the negative things you attribute LLMs? Limited understanding, function and risk, etc.?
Because what LLMs did is freeing the genie from the bottle. It showed what scaling and ML and Compute can do. It doesn't matter much if LLMs will be Frontier for one year or the next 10 years because VC to alternatives like World Models are available now thanks to LLMs.
The compute required and data required for any further progress through ML is also unblocked by LLM.
The economy is solving the memory wall issue today just because of AI.
I had so many issues with our build system because not a lot of people cared about scaling stateful workloads which need a lot of data shared between, now tx to AI y problems got solved.
But LLMs dont prevent you from doing this? If it does it probably is an organisational issue.
They had jobs and reputations and self-images about being "good" at what they did and psychological needs. And further, they had the same incentives as me to not ship bugs when they could avoid it. And I could see, in general, the conversations humans were having, first on usenet and listservs and then on all the little situations on the larger internet.
I didn't trust them blindly, but if a bunch of us all seemed to be okay with the software for the mysql database or the apache webserver. And while I certainly have no idea who those specific folks were I do know how human communities work. When folks found malicious things in, say, a ruby yaml parser or a node package, it was loud.
And like all human scale things, the pacing was much slower so that things like a person's situation in a community and the human trust associated with that trust were things we could evaluate.
I can't evaluate the output of an LLM in the same way. It does not have the same incentives or needs. And it's not deterministic- if you recall comparing checksums between what you downloaded and what the folks putting the software published, then you understand what I mean here when I note that we could trust-but-verify a lot of things.
With the output of an LLM, it actually is important to check over, much of the human-level surface of how we review software is stripped out.
Few people are thrown into a codebase that they understand because they wrote it. Not every developer is issued their own greenfield project and said go have fun.
It’s not hard to swap “LLM” speak and make it sound like arguments made about ever higher-level language.
We are all operating at a couple of layers up the stack and 99% of us would be lost at N-1 let alone N-2/N-3 but we don’t bemoan that. I really don’t see how LLMs are different.
Output from compilers is already verified - after all they have an extensive suite of tests.
With LLMs you're getting into the role of someone who keeps validating the compiler over and over, because its output is not deterministic.
Coding with an LLM could be at most compared with some kind of non-deterministic and non-documented compiler, where you could not predict in any way how it will generate assembly code, so every time when you compile a program you have to also list the generated assembly code and then you must read carefully the assembly code and think hard to determine if it really does what you want.
Of course that does not mean that an LLM is useless for coding or that there are no tasks that can be vibe-coded without worries.
But for anything of long-term importance, like a product delivered to a customer, reviewing carefully a lot of LLM-generated code is not guaranteed to be a simpler task than writing that code yourself. In some cases it may be more productive to partition the new code into code generated by an LLM according to your instructions and code that you write yourself.
In the end, my immediate productivity with LLM is a lot lower than before. But I assume that quality is a bit higher, at least in the long run, because issues fixed early saves a lot of time later.
I guess I don't use LLMs like a lot of other people. In fact I continue to write most code myself and I just use LLM to aid me or to generate something that's very similar to existing entity and just requires careful copy&paste&replace. My only fear is that this approach to work is not very popular and I might be asked one day to switch to wipe code, which I don't enjoy at all.
You may caveat what type of software you are talking about, like complex or out-of-the-ordinary, and say that llms are still bad at that. Fine. But LLMs are actively being used for developing thousands of websites all the time - you can see several examples of them on hackernews every week.
Amount of lines is irrelevant when talking about a landing page or a huge number of internal tools that people are building at the moment. At least until a certain point.
When pouring concrete, I'm not going to use expensive hardwood to frame the concrete base, I'm gonna use stuff that's just strong enough. It's going down the bin anyway.
A lot of internal tools are fine if they are just good enough, they don't really need to be that maintainable if 2 people are gonna use it every once in a while
Any programmer should be able to hack one up. LLMs are good at _programming_, but I haven't seen evidence they are good at engineering yet. But then again, many people with the title "software engineer" are not great at it either.
Engineering normally requires thinking long term and if you want to use LLMs it needs to be way more structured. For this use-case LLMs are on way more shaky ground.
Or like the internal tool I whipped up in a few days to try out how we can structure some specific data we have internally in our company.
And that isn’t meant to denigrate the oil change person. There are millions of that person to every one person working for an F1 team, and it’s important work. But, obviously very different things.
Maybe this is true for FAANG engineers in America. In my country over here in Europe, salaries for software devs have never been that different from other STEM / business fields requiring similar education level.
Back in the day, blue-collar literally referred to workers whose clothes get dirty due to their work- construction work etc. Everyone else is white-collar. That doesn't mean a blue collar work is much harder than white collar, this it was assumed. I saw workers simply sleeping on mine floor that is full of coal dust, mud and dirty water around. They just had their lunch, shared some jokes and having a nap. While the supervisor was running around in panic to ensure the target output.
Software Engineering is in this weird limbo where a whole subsection of the industry thinks it can be a blue-collar "I just code" type of contributor... those types are going to slowly be eliminated.
But for the majority of us, the job always was more involved than just code. And that's white-collar work, through and through.
Civil engineers never could scale to pouring concrete themselves, thus the blue/white collar split. Software doesn't have that problem.
everything else? if anything we're just getting started :D
Isn't that sentiment pretty much true for almost everything, though? If I hire someone to relocate my water heater, there's a lot more that goes into that besides laying pipes. The pipes are the easy part.
Er, no. That's the thing about general intelligence, it's general.
Im speaking specifically of pre AGI general intelligence, little g general if you will.
Ultimately all jobs are subject to supply and demand driven and SWE's world is getting rocked by 3 sharp turning points at once - a trillion bootcamp "just learn to code" people entered the market leading to oversupply, ZIRP ended cutting demand and AI turns out to be good at code creating a substitution effect.
That's one hell of a storm that inevitably is going to lead to some shipwrecks
https://waymo.com/intl/zh-cn/blog/2025/06/scaling-laws-in-au...
Painting, building sheds, drilling, repairs. I never encountered a situation in which I thought my awesome Logos was needed to engage productively with the environment. If a situation is cognitively challenging, say with electronics or motor parts or whatever, then that's not a robotics problem but a cognitive one and as we from dev that is actually the easy part now.
I have a suspicion we underestimate robots by a lot. It's slow going but once they get going it will be a madhouse.
Workers will be babysitting robots like we babysit AIs. They'll just walk alongside it and mentor it, guide it, smack it, like we do. The first few years they'll be stupid and rough and everyone will say it's hopeless but soon after people will start mentioning they only have to lightly monitor them..
There is a real and big difference between an Electrician and an Electrical Engineer. I have an EE degree yet I am not legally allowed to install wires or electrical equipment in the field. Electricians are not allowed to do some engineering tasks. Even an engineer requires additional license (Professional Engineer) in order to sign off building designs.
This is a strict division between white-collar and blue-collar work. Same logic applies to other engineering disciplines.
I remember people argued the same logic should apply to SW as well, in as late as early 2000s. They wanted to make a distinction between a SW Architect and a programmer/coder. The industry preferred to go another way. This was mainly because designing and manufacturing was the same thing for SW. You wouldn’t do much without writing the code yourself.
Now this is kind of haunting us back. There is no law saying licensed SW Engineers have to inspect and sign off every SW system. Doctors, lawyers and other engineers are legally protected from AI doing their jobs more efficiently. We’re not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikewarot
http://web.archive.org/web/20260912211713/https://news.ycomb...
Is it true that Micro-Soft began to let employees call themselves "engineers" in the 1970's
If yes, why did they do that
I cannot feel for the graduates. What are they thinking? I remember a phase in my life finals in my school(2014), teachers were advising against joining computer science because of 2007 job losses because of Great Recession.
Fast farward to now I feel it's going to be same here as most IT jobs are all replaced, if not changed. And people will pickup different industry. But what about the entry level people who are trying to get a job now? [entry level software jobs are already going at a slower pace](https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Artificial_Intelligence...), in this new job market they might need to have different kind of exposure and knowledge.
James Gosling, 1997:
> The feel of Java
> Java is a blue collar language. It’s not PhD thesis material but a language for a job. Java feels very familiar to many different programmers because we preferred tried-and-tested things.
The other issue I’ve been mulling over is two part. What in the hell have all these SWEs been actually doing? (As in, what software were the vast majority contributing to?) By extension, were many of these projects critical to the bottom line?
I guess what I’m getting at is if you can have a robot do a sloppy job of what you were doing before, and have that still be ok for the organization, maybe what you were doing in the first place wasn’t critical.
I’m not saying it’s not short sighted (I think many orgs are subjugating themselves to external entities, and are going to be violently bit in the ass when suddenly no one left in the firm has any comprehension of how all of their systems work), but, and I don’t say this lightly, maybe the SWE “profession” has a bit of bloat it can afford to shed?
It’s something like a cargo cult. We have this system because of course we need this system and it “insists upon itself”.
The further development is removed from the final “product” of the company the more this crap piles up.
So, I agree that in some instances it’s intentionally obfuscated, but there are others where the bloat simply cannot be calculated.
So despite being able to build anything even faster than before, the most valuable folks are the ones that say "no" to a lot of potential work.
We're all just cogs in a massive economic machine. The only people that aren't blue collar are the wealthy who do not need a salary to survive.
Now that the days in the ivory tower are over I'm rather disappointed with the lack of effort people made changing the status quo. If anything they made things dramatically worse. Software can be incredibly liberating and empowering but in stead we got portable prisons that seemingly primarily exist so that the man can keep an eye on everyone. We did get some cool stuff of course but things like amazon, linkedin, twitter, facebook, whatsapp and even youtube should simply have been protocols.
This type of work has long been the white collar work.
Blue collar vs. White collar is mostly a useless distinction since both are working class and have shared interests against the owning class, or to put it another way, those who (have to) work for a living vs. those who merely own for a living.
Also:
"Blue-collar workers, in general, have successfully ridden the waves of technological change. If you can manage a crew of manual carpenters, you can also manage a warehouse full of woodworking robots. It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations."
WHAT! This author has apparently never visited a rust belt city nor ever worked in manufacturing anywhere in north america. Absolutely insane statement to make.
Yeah this is two different things
The blue collar workers are the manual carpenters, not the dude managing them
The rust belt cities are not victims of technical change. They are victims of political whim. It was decided decades ago that a steel mill in the far east is superior to one a few miles outside of Cincinnati.
The current evidence of spiralling by the community indicates they are not as graceful as this article implies.
If that's blue collar, then so is every other white collar profession and no distinction can exist. I do not agree.
Yeah its similar
The rest of us are fine.
That seems like a very poor take. If it feels like white-collar workers are most disrupted in recent times, its because the labouring workforce in the western worlds has been absolutely gutted by technological innovations (and the economics of globalisation).
Factory workers seem less affected because there's hardly any factory workers left!
Uh, what? This hypothetical is literally an example of an entire crew of manual carpenters being fired and replaced by robots, leaving only the manager. That sure doesn't sound like successfully riding the waves of technological change.
> It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations.
Citation needed. This is not the prevailing wisdom I have heard, and certainly not the experience of e.g. longshoremen replaced by shipping container technology in the 1960s and 1970s.
I mean, I guess I always knew the code I wrote was pretty derivative - a little Googling here, a little Stack Overflow there; but for it to only take 18 months or so for the machines to take 90% of my job was a real eye opener.
Imagine if the San Francisco equivalent of centuries hence has a major thoroughfare called Developer Avenue instead of Masonic.
Is this even a question?
We're not the capitalists, who own the companies.
We're not professionals, like the real engineers, who belong to professional organizations and adhere to a code of practice.
What does that leave?
We are no different than bank tellers or ultrasound technicians. We work indoors and make the machines do what our bosses need them to do.
Oh you sweet summer child. That's not how things are, maybe where you're so protected like you say, but that's not true across the board.
> We are the seamstresses lamenting the introduction of the loom. We are the lumberjacks worrying about chainsaws. We’re the accountants panicking about being replaced by Excel
Accountants absolutely loved Excel. They couldn’t hand over the money fast enough.
Bad take.
2. The Bourgeois or capital-owning class. Also called billionaires and the ultra-wealthy. These are people who derive their income from owning things, from capital; and
1. The Proletariat. Also called the working class or workers. This is everybody else. The working class derive their income from their labor. You stop working and you die, basically.
As little as 4-5 years ago you had many software engineers and other people in tech showing a distinct lack of empathy from people whose jobs were automated away or people who just couldn't survive on their incomes. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) view was "well, you should've gotten better jobs" or even "you should've got a CS degree".
That was never a serious argument because, well, not everybody can be a software engineer. There simply isn't the demand for it. Also, some people need to be teachers, care for the sick, work at the airport, work in agriculture, collect the trash and so on. Society, at least for now, can't survive without them.
I, for one, saw the writing on the wall with the opportunistic rise of permanent layoff culture with the pandemic as employers sought to claw back all the compensation gains of the 2010s. AI is just the golden bullet for wage suppression through labor displacement.
So what's happening now is that a handful of people will in the short term make a ton of money riding the AI wave until they too are expended. Many of the rest are discovering that they have more in common with the guy who picks up their trash than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. More importantly, they will never be Bezos or Musk. Well, that's the beginning of class consciousness.
I sure hope it's not too late for society to figure that out before the entire thing unravels, which is rapidly occurring.
Nothing about code is not blue collar if you actually code for a living. Unless you have visions of grandeur. And the truth is, no founder actually codes for very long. They never did. The managers and the business school graduates don't, either. Their job is to fool people into giving them money, and tell other people what to do; not to know how to make anything. They're white collar; they're parasites.
Three decades of those dumb fucks have gone by, plus the wave of idiots trading NFTs, plus the wave of idiots using AI. Craft code, use your brain, make it right, and it will be a representation of your thought process. In the service of a business. And it is a good job, and it is a blue collar job. Because to the business you're working for? If you're doing your job right, you're a plumber, or a general contractor.
TL;DR, coding has always been a blue collar job, to those who code as mechanics to make and fix things. But long live us: We make things, and the business class is basically helpless without us. LLMs or not; they're pathetically incapable of doing anything technical for themselves.
What will software engineers do? What will mathematicians do? What will artists do?
Why are we pretending that the LLMs aren't coming for every job?
What are the humans going to do?