The Case For the Blue Collar Coder

theodp writes "U.S. tech talent shortage discussions tend to focus on getting more young people to go to college to become CS grads. Nothing wrong with that, writes Anil Dash, but let's not forget about education which teaches mid-level programming as a skilled trade, suitable for apprenticeship and advancement in a way that parallels traditional trade skills like HVAC or welding. Dash encourages less of a focus on 'the next Zuckerberg' in favor of encouraging solid middle-class tech jobs that are primarily focused on creating and maintaining tech infrastructure in non-tech companies. Dash also suggests 'changing the conversation about recruiting technologists from the existing narrow priesthood of highly-skilled experts constantly chasing new technologies to productive workers getting the most out of widely-deployed platforms and frameworks.'"

Comments

Re:Coding is a skill, not a profession

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all well and good until you find out they've been using floating point for currency calculations, and they can't figure out why their bubble sorts are so slow.

I've worked with programmers with associates degrees. Some bad; some good. I'm not entirely against them, but I would not want an entire team made up of them. They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.

I am a blue collar coder

[Big Hairy Ian]

Been in the business for over 20 years now. The only issue I have makes getting jobs difficult as too many companies wont touch you without a degree.

BTW The closest my school had to Computer Science was a couple of Commodore Pets and a maths teacher who thought all that was involved with CS was logic. Ah well where there's a geek there's a way :)

Of-course

[udachny]

I have been arguing this for quite a while, there should be more apprentices and fewer university graduates with insurmountable debt, however this is not going to happen given the labour regulations, tax incentives, even inflation. All of these prevent jobs from appearing. A businessman doesn't need an incentive to hire people, his incentive is to make more money, it exists already. What he needs is not to have incentives to do things that are not actually useful to him. A business could have a bunch of apprentices, if it was possible to pay them a very low wage. As things stand (never mind the inflation, which kills savings and jobs), the labour law makes it illegal to hire people below minimum wage while still allowing to have students as 'apprentices' who have to work for free. All this does is incentivizes the kids to go to higher education, where they don't actually need to, while working for free as apprentices, while getting deeper and deeper into debt. Instead the kids must be able to skip school entirely and learn the trade at work making a little bit of money, that would give them an incentive to show up and do the work, while not getting into debt and learning the skills. This is something that businesses have always done before governments screwed this up.

The Case for the "Blue Collar" Coder

[Anonymous Coward]

"U.S. tech talent shortage discussions tend to focus on getting more young people to go to college to become CS grads"

THERE IS NO TECH TALENT SHORTAGE. What there is, is disinformation about what one needs to really
know to really program. Plenty of unemployed and students out there who have figured this out.
But they are blocked out of the market by both employers, employment agencies and state unemployment offices
who don't have a CLUE as to the nature of the skills needed and have created a ridiculous artificial set
of evaluative criteria.

In addition, there are brilliant programmers out there with no degrees or associate's degrees or liberal arts degrees.

Also, you do NOT need calculus to program or be a software engineer.
You do NOT need Dykstra.
You do NOT need to know how to write a compiler.

There is no "Blue Collar".... there are competent skilled programmers, reasonably skilled ones, screw-ups, and Ivy League graduates with big degrees who would not last a 10th of a second in real world programming. I know, I've worked with all of them.

There is one key JOB REQUIREMENT in this field. The ability to deal with the unknown, to learn and to adjust. Period.

Reading and communication skills are paramount too. Above all else.

From a retired Software Engineer of 32 years experience

Same old whine

[0xdeadbeef]

Beware anyone who calls your profession a "priesthood", because he operates under the assumption that he is entitled to more than you, is either jealous or contemptuous of your market salary and wants to put you in your place. For whatever reason our culture regards doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and CEOs as deserving the benefits of scarcity, but it is a huge problem when you can't you hire a computer nerd for less than six figures. If you aren't an extrovert, you don't deserve to be on top of the status hierarchy.

We already have vocational technology education, but it's widely regarded as a joke. Putting it in high school isn't going to change that. And if you have the knack for it, learning programming or learning computer maintenance is easy. After all, every time the subject of college degrees come up, there are always people very adamant that they didn't need one, and that "the best people I know didn't go to college". So if it is unnecessary, why are they arguing for "blue collar" programmers? These people argue "nature" in one breath and then "nurture" in the next. Dash is actually saying that the self-educated or non-degreed don't deserve to be considered "white collar" professionals.

Dash also makes the mistake of conflating programming with "IT", something the Slashdot peanut gallery is also apt to do. I'll leave that stupidity for a different flame war.

Blue collar coder - it's redundant

[blind biker]

All developers, programmers, researchers - we're all blue collar. People working in administration and accounting are considered white collar.

As a scientist, I don't feel insulted to be "blue collar". I'm fine with that.