There’s a common idea among economists that you can broadly split employees into two categories. “White-collar” workers are typically people who work in offices doing service-based, knowledge-based, managerial, or administrative work; “blue-collar” workers generally do manual labour or perform skilled trades.
Since at least the start of my career, software engineers have been considered white-collar. We work in offices at computers, and we deal with knowledge. Our work requires advanced training or education.
But what if that assumption has been incorrect? What if we were actually blue-collar, skilled tradespeople all along?
Typically, when we think of blue-collar workers, we think of people who do the hands-on labour of making or fixing stuff. Builders, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, miners, maintenance engineers, warehouse workers etc. Software developers have typically separated themselves from this category, but I’m not entirely sure why. We do the same thing — that is, we make or fix stuff — except we work in bits rather than atoms.
This is absolutely not to say that software developers aren’t as skilled as we thought we were. If anything, I’d say categorising development as a skilled trade gives more credit to the work we do. Just like electricians or carpenters, software developers must spend years practicing their craft in order to become skilled and sought-after. It doesn’t necessarily require a formal education, but it certainly takes time and practice to master.
I wonder whether this incorrect assumption is fuelling, at least in part, the current AI identity crisis that software developers are facing. 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.
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.
I’m afraid that this is the end of a very long honeymoon for software developers. We have spent the past 30 years being treated like rock stars in our companies. Our time and attention is protected at all costs; we have been able to demand salaries which far outpace our peers; non-technical colleagues believe everything we say about how long things take or how hard it’s going to be to write features. But the honeymoon is over, and we’re all freaking out because, among other things, we are no longer the most important person in the company.
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.
But if we learn how to use the looms, the spreadsheets, and the chainsaws, we might just be okay. And the good news is that there are still people sewing and chopping wood by hand, because they want to. It may no longer be something you can get paid for, but it’s certainly something you can continue to enjoy.