> 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.
Yes, I understood it when a dude said him and his dentist wife who makes a thousand dollar a day are working class because they make money on days they work. If we work to make money, we are working class. If our money works to make money, we are owning class.
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.
But these two things are essentially merging, which is the implicit thesis here. White collar being those who manage capital and blue collar as those who manage the delivery, service, product, or process. The latter having lower agency than the former, and generally perceived and measured as a liability by the former.
But AI is coming for capital allocators as well, too, so we are seeing more and more white collar people getting “blue collarized”.
You think holding 200 shares out of 13 billion is being owner of capital? If you own your house, you can paint its walls black, put up a painting, or remove all the doors, can you do anything at all with the shares you hold on your little pension fund? Share's market is not owning capital, is creating a system where workers have interest in maintaining the status quo, even when it goes against their own self interest in the long term.
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.
Collapsing all identities into labour and capitalists is a nice Marxist rhetorical move. But it makes no sense at all. People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners. There are managers who kinda fit in the middle. There are CEO's who have to answer to the Board.
Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.
>How would that happen? Maybe with a small loan of a million dollars...
The majority of business owners (aka "capital owners") were previously employees/workers in someone else's business.
E.g. a carpenter starts out working for a carpentry business owner on a crew to build houses. The carpenter eventually goes off on his own to find side jobs. He starts modestly with just one van but eventually gets enough business to hire a few helpers and another van. The ex-worker has thus become an new "owner of capital". Similar stories for plumbers, architects, chefs, software developers, etc switching from employees to running their own business. No million dollar loan from a bank required.
The founders of Apple were ex-workers. Steve Wozniak worked at HP. Steve Jobs worked at Atari. They also didn't need a million dollar loan because they started small with initial funding from selling an HP calculator and a Volkswagen.
The argument is that there isn't true class mobility because the theoretical ways to move upwards are in practice unattainable for most people. The way of getting capital you describe is essentially "have the existing capital owners subsidize you", which handwaves away the difficulty of getting that to happen. What portion of venture capital funding goes to people who aren't already from above average socioeconomic backgrounds?
Getting "the existing capital owners to subsidize you" isn't unattainable either, though, even if rare. If 90% comes from the middle or upper classes [1], 10% must come from the lower class, which isn't favorable to a "unattainable" goal, "just" hard.
I think you might have misinterpreted what I meant (which in fairness was phrased somewhat ambiguously). It's attainable for some people, but "most people" as a block can't do it; the amount of capital available for them is not large enough for a majority of people to become capital owners in any meaningful way. My point isn't that it's impossible for an individual, but that when there's a fairly low upper limit on how many people are allowed to move between being a worker and being a capital owner, it's at best misleading to refer to say "people freely move" between the two. A small subset of people do, but in general, no, people do not.
A better term might be "ambiguous". There are multiple ways of reading the expression "freely" here. Some may see it as "it's really trivial to do it", or "it's hard, but it's doable", or "it's legal to do it", for example. Some class systems don't have any legal way of moving up, at all.
They were explicitly saying that categorizing them separately "makes no sense". If it's hard but doable or legal to do it, that would not be a reasonable explanation for saying that the distinction doesn't make sense. Either it's trivial to do it, or there is some legitimate difference between the two groups, and having words for it makes perfect sense.
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".
A common but boring example: if you max out your 401k each year, it is likely that your investment returns will eventually be larger than your salary, allowing you to stop working if you want.
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.
"Common" is doing some heavy lifting there. You're still talking about the top 2-3% of earners (roughly, 10m 401k-maxers out of 350m Americans, based on data from Vanguard and napkin math).
> People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners
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?
> How do I freely become a capital owner? Do people just... give you large amounts of capital?
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.
I don't think that's a useful distinction anymore, in a world where the capital owner may be the person who built the software. The more useful distinction is whether someone works in the mines and knows how it works, versus not.
I agree that we need to change our typical understanding of "working class" to not only include "blue collar" jobs. In the sense of class warfare, it's more meaningful to distinguish between capital owners and dependent workers. But sure, there's a bit of a difference if you're a lawyer making 200 $ / hour vs. a minimum wage cashier at McDonalds.
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.
They will probably come back saying that cash earned from labour is capital, and by completely missing the point will have proven how effectively capital-owners can pit a worker against its own interests.
Replace the word "software engineer" from this essay with "medical doctor" and the message doesn't change a bit. Replace it instead with "lumberjack" and then you get an better idea what blue-collar work actually is...
We're not talking about capital/labour share, we're talking about which professions are destabilised by technological innovation which are not.
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.
During the transitionary period between WW2 and 2000 we saw massive unemployment in many typical blue collar jobs in the western developed world, yet women weren't impacted to the same degree, why is that?
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).
Your argument about gender inequality is hand wavy and unsubstantiated. But I'm not an economist, so maybe you can torture 60 years of cultural, economic and social change into a counterpoint to the last 40 years of software engineering employment facing massive change in less than 10 years--if we had the time and the inclination (a PHD in economics?).
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.
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.
My point was that there isn’t some kind of universal generalised way of explaining for these things like economic class, some jobs are just less resilient to certain kinds of change.
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
Everything is “supply and demand”. Tell that to a SWE who lost their job. You lost your job because a natural law of economics. (And you can’t fight city hall.)
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).
> 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.
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.
Is it a more useful one, especially in the context of modern America, where an enormous amount of workers are also capital owners through their 401(k)s?
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.
It is. If you mean electrician/tradesman maybe not a ton, but if you are implicitly opening that up to the majority of non-white collar work - White collar workers are often completely out of touch with the material reality of most people, while blue collar workers often lack the type of income that would provide a "more directed and intentional" sense of future.
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.
I started taking community college classes related to electricity/robotics as the only desperate measure I can think of to prepare for the new brave world of mass unemployment among software developers and Industry 4.0. Those are the very same classes required for Electrician Trainees by the great state of CA.
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.
The article makes no real attempt to explain how software developers are different from sales people or paralegals or graphic designers or journalists.
It depends on the type of work you do. Majority of SWE just recently needed to write 100 lines of code per day and they'll do fine in their jobs. Then there are people designing new systems, new methodologies, discovering bleeding edge tech. This is completely different type of job. If speaking in car analogy, there are people doing repairs or assembling ready made parts and then there are people inventing new cars.
Completely agree. The analogy I’ve used is the difference between someone working at an oil change shop vs a mechanic on a Formula 1 team.
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.
Yeah, dude. In the 30 years I've spent writing code and building shit from scratch, I've always described myself as a mechanic or a plumber. Not a "founder" or a "SWE" like most of the dumbfucks around here. (Last I checked, engineering was a white collar job, and writing React was closer to using your hand to unclog a toilet). Knowing how to make shit and fix it is a blue collar job, whether that's rebuilding a motor or writing a SQL query, and if there's a bit of creative ability in that you're lucky. Even if part of my job was to create actual art or UX to go along with the code I was writing. I'm, at best, the kind of mechanic who takes the wheels off, takes the dash off, strips the paint off, takes your car down to bare metal, and puts it back together with a new motor looking brand new.
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. Their job is to fool people into giving them money, not to know how to make anything.
TL;DR, coding has always been a blue collar job, to those who code as mechanics to make and fix things.
Since wearing white shirts vs blue overalls is somewhat outdated, let me phrase it another way: do you sit at a desk or at a workbench? If it's the former, you're a white-collar worker, and AI ain't gonna change that. Actually, the fact that AI is (allegedly) replacing your job confirms that: it's better at white-collar jobs. I don't see AI fixing my car or my washing machine anytime soon...
I was engaged in a rare bout of physical activity lately, doing odd chores around the house and one thing that struck me is how easy it was if I looked at it like an AI would. Physically annoying, yes, very much so, but I have a very easy time imagine a nimble robot with a decent model(s?) backing it being able to become productive relatively soon.
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..
I think it is more likely SWE thought they were not replaceable where any function in a company is replaceable with enough motivation (whether wise or not).
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?
I've remarked on this before: IT Departments seem practically designed to obfuscate the actual cost of development. The discourse online very rarely has numbers against it. My theory as to why this is is that firms really don't want devs to know how much they budget for a dev, and so they structure the organisation to hide that information.
Oh boy do I have opinions (mostly in line with your’s), but I actually think there’s another factor of “Devs left to the own devices will still write software.” It’s a “problem solving” skill set with a very low ceiling for implementation. That problem solving ends up as more internally developed (or newly integrated third party) applications that end up in the operational critical path, that now also need to be supported.
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.
> Software engineers are discovering that, just like anyone else in a skilled trade, they actually can be outpaced by technology. So we do what other skilled traders have done: figure out how to use the new technology to do the jobs we used to do by hand.
The current evidence of spiralling by the community indicates they are not as graceful as this article implies.
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.
The more senior I got the more I realized how much discovery play a big role in software engineering, one has to see the whole picture, discover the why behind th e whys tasks not only the hows.
> But for the majority of us, the job always was more involved than just code. And that's white-collar work, through and through.
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.
I always remember that site "Software Carpentry". It's definitely artisanal. Not that there can't be high-level practitioners. Are professional athletes blue-collar?
Yes. Started off cleaning school toilets. Went to a bootcamp 10 years ago, taught myself the rest, got to sit in fancy offices and drink coffee, but always felt outta place. "You can take the kid out of the ..." and so on. Guess I gotta pick up the broom again.
Lot of it has been and will be skilled but not that special work. Say something like electrical design work. Follow certain sets of thumb rules and you are fine. There have really been no regulation either. Basically people who decide where does your power and whatever cables go in building. Or plumbing or ventilation... Skilled work, but not actually anything special. Just comparatively productive as product is cheap to reproduce.
This type of work has long been the white collar work.
AI doesn’t care if you classify yourself as white or blue collar. It can do every job. There was no important person in the company. The important person was the customer.
It seems like a pretty arbitrary distinction these days, much like being a "professional".
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
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 15.9 ms ] threadEr, no. That's the thing about general intelligence, it's general.
> 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.
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.
But AI is coming for capital allocators as well, too, so we are seeing more and more white collar people getting “blue collarized”.
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...
The majority of business owners (aka "capital owners") were previously employees/workers in someone else's business.
E.g. a carpenter starts out working for a carpentry business owner on a crew to build houses. The carpenter eventually goes off on his own to find side jobs. He starts modestly with just one van but eventually gets enough business to hire a few helpers and another van. The ex-worker has thus become an new "owner of capital". Similar stories for plumbers, architects, chefs, software developers, etc switching from employees to running their own business. No million dollar loan from a bank required.
The founders of Apple were ex-workers. Steve Wozniak worked at HP. Steve Jobs worked at Atari. They also didn't need a million dollar loan because they started small with initial funding from selling an HP calculator and a Volkswagen.
Says the labourer wage cuck working as a CRUD developer
[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.
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.
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.
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. Their job is to fool people into giving them money, not to know how to make anything.
TL;DR, coding has always been a blue collar job, to those who code as mechanics to make and fix things.
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..
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.
The current evidence of spiralling by the community indicates they are not as graceful as this article implies.
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.
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.
This type of work has long been the white collar work.
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