I don't lament LLM's because they are a better or automation of an approach to doing my tasks. I lament them because they are built on loose foundations, limited understanding, misunderstood function and risk, data theft, and shaky legal grounds. I'm an engineer, my job is to deal with and reduce complexity not accept it blindly without soberly weighing all the pros and cons after building a solid understanding.
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.
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.
> I'm an engineer, my job is to deal with and reduce complexity not accept it blindly without soberly weighing all the pros and cons after building a solid understanding.
But LLMs dont prevent you from doing this? If it does it probably is an organisational issue.
But eventually, do you really care?
Are you using only software that you developed? For decades we outsourced software development to third parties, to place where people have never seen a line of code, without code review and dubious software development practice.
Whole F100 organizations were running on that type of software development.
That's a really good point that is often missed. We go through life using software which we don't know their code at all. Like... The vast majority of it, all people basically. We just trust the people who did it. Not saying that LLMs don't deserve oversight, but how different is that from what we've done previously?
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.
If you use a compiler instead of writing assembly by hand you’ll never understand the underlying assembly as deeply as if you’d wrote it.
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.
Correct, however, I'm a maintenance developer already. We rarely get to build whole brand new systems or programs. Most of work is maintaining crap from 20 years ago
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.
Agreed. LLMs are really bad at software engineering at the moment and those who disagree are those people who think more lines of code are good. The only argument against it is the unjustified guess that one day they’ll be better. My feeling is that they very fact they show us things we missed makes them liable to increase tech debt, and that they in general reduce human understanding of the code base. I don’t see how those things will ever not be true
I've found that LLM helps me to write good code. It essentially works like a colleague who can review my code. It spotted many issues which I wouldn't spotted before. It also helps to free me from some mundane work.
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.
This is just not true. LLMs are good at some development.
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.
Building a landing page is not something you require a software engineer for.
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.
Well you’re just saying here you don’t care about tech debt or software quality. Of course lines of code is relevant, it’s generally bad to add code and makes the software harder to maintain. I would agree that software development standards in web development can be poor though
That really doesn't speak to the usefulness of the distinction. To the extent that workers, as a whole, have common goals (like capturing a bigger share of the productivity gains, for instance), it probably make sense to organize as a single group to pursue those goals.
The right also organizes humans into us-vs-them: the natives versus the immigrants, the faithful versus the infidels, and so on. Whether those make sense depends only on the values, way of living or material conditions you want to protect and whether the other group is a menace to them.
the left books everyone according to socioeconomic status; your point about the right placing everyone into a whole set of "us vs them" categories stands, but, I'm hoping that you're trying to say something like human souls should not be categorized on the basis of... (x,y,x) where any of x,y or z are groups we assign to people. Right?
People always want to believe they’re special, and build systems to recognize their belief system. Religions, capitalism (just another religion), etc.
100 years from now, your birth date and death date, and the life lived in between, will be no different than any other human, lines on a headstone or rows in a database. Maybe you’ll have a Wikipedia page, for the historical ledger, but if not, nothing changes.
There is a vast darkness, eons of empty space around us, and no other known life in the universe.
Every lizard is special. Every crab and spider and snail is special. Every person is especially special.
Your attitude about that is, let's say, demented as a result of hating your own species and your inability to love yourself or the people around you, or even the people you hate.
I encourage you to believe this if it helps with the human condition. Remember, the sun will eventually expand, incinerate Earth, and all of this will exist only as light, rf, and other energy others might potentially observe billions of years from now. Enjoy the warmth from the sun on your face on a cool day for what it is.
Yes, yes, yes. Are you trying to sound jaded, cynical, intelligent?
Surely there can be no counterargument to your final analysis of the pointlessness, the end of life.
I'd posit something different that you might sleep on: That your existence is worthwhile and, in fact, unique once and only once in all the history of the universe. That your ability to observe phenomena actually solidifies and collapses indeterminate waveforms. That you're living in the one and only terrarium that we know of, and belong to the most intelligent species that we know of, and that you therefore:
Have an obligation to the universe be worth more than what you're saying you believe in the prior statement. Of course, you can be whatever you want to be, and if that's merely believing that the smartest-sounding thing to say in a chat forum is that we're all meaningless and that the earth will be swallowed by the sun in a few billion years, then have at it; you're no doubt still a credit to your species for realizing things like that. Dogs, for instance, have no idea. But still, it's very disappointing. I mean, you have a vast number of upvotes on HN. Surely you must have something more interesting to impart about Life, the Universe and Everything? Even if it's just about fish?
It's always the new accounts like yours with 47 votes who write the most depressing, hopeless, despairing and anti-capitalist slogans around here. Day after day. Why is that?
Whichever totalitarian country your little troll army represents, it would be fun if you let your own citizens comment on here without fear of penalty. I suspect they wouldn't mind being labeled white collar or blue collar, if they had an opportunity to speak freely. Or for that matter, why not open up your own country's social media so they can speak without fear of reprisal! Let's get going with that project, I can't wait to see the results!
Man, this is a stupid discussion. Everything gets taken at its most extreme. Humans see a token like "capitalism" and fire off their parroted responses, like "communism". At no point does anyone try to pin down to more specific details.
If you think all left-wing critiques of capitalism are in defence of totalitarianism, you should read George Orwell's political essays. I can assure you that Orwell of all people had no time for totalitarians.
I'd argue it's an accurate statement about power in general. The powerful have always sought to divide the powerless for political expediency regardless of the ideological framework used to do it, you could read that from Machiavelli as much as Marx. Divide and rule is about the oldest political trick in the book and it works pretty well, why wouldn't capital owners who represent the present elite do it?
Yeah, you're right, and that's a thoughtful way to put it which addresses the actual power dynamics and nuance: ANY system is going to have an incentive to divide and conquer. I'm looking at the above two statements:
>> @mgol94 Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them
>> @nkmnz Communists always want to de-individualize humans into a single group with a coherent identity so it's easier to ideologize and agitate them.
And I don't disagree with either of them per se, on the merits, but I see in both of them a major flaw in the way the point is argued.
Do you go around complaining when people post insufficiently thoughtful criticisms of communism as well? There are a lot of them out there, so it would presumably keep you quite busy.
Believing your system is beyond critique or question, or that anyone who dares must be the enemy, seems pretty commie to me tbh. Like not in the marx textbook theory sense, more in the actual soviet/chinese communist system sense.
I think it’s very obvious that the powers that be are keen to keep people divided and focused on anything but them. Ex: trans issues, trans people have been around for ever, but didn’t start dominating media and politics until about 10 years ago (not long after the global Wall Street protests.) Just mentioning this will send both sides of the issue into a rage (either I’m a genocidal maniac or I support litter boxes in schools, depending on your interpretation.)
I'm not sure I understand your point. I never said my system was beyond critique or question...
Not sure what to make of your note about transgenderism... I think that gender, sexuality, race, religion, ethnicity, borders, abortion, and inequality have all been deployed as boogeymen by parties on both the right and left to scare people into voting one way or another.
You helped me clarify my thinking in one way, though: "Divide and conquer", which has been a theme in this thread, implies that both left and right parties are working together simply to confuse the populace. Or to put it more plainly, "divide and rule" implies that there must be a conspiracy in which the people doing the ruling don't give a damn either way; they only use social and economic issues to keep people divided to prevent an uprising.
I don't really think that's how it works, and to tell you the truth, I think that believing in that sort of thing is not just juvenile and historically illiterate, it's actually harmful to a well-functioning society. And I'm seeing it all over the place, even just implicitly in half the comments in this thread. That's not how the world works. Fascists and socialists and centrists don't actually get together with industrialists and arms manufacturers and oil producers to think up things like "how can we distract the genpop with transgender stuff while we pump the atmosphere full of more carbon." The world is a much more complicated and subtle place; many actors are on the stage, each with their own agenda, and no one is pulling all the strings behind the curtain. In fact, that's what's even more terrifying than a cabal of sociopaths: No one is in control, no one at all. The train has no brakes; the ship is burning, but there is no captain; sixteen people are fighting for control in the cockpit of the plane. That's why I don't like those kinds of reductive assessments.
>> Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them
> It's always the new accounts like yours with 47 votes who write the most depressing, hopeless, despairing and anti-capitalist slogans around here. Day after day. Why is that?
It's probably time for you to let the scales fall from your eyes, and realize that you're a worker and the the shareholders aren't looking out for your well-being. They want you to be paid as little as possible, so they can keep more for themselves.
> Whichever totalitarian country your little troll army represents, it would be fun if you let your own citizens comment on here without fear of penalty. I suspect they wouldn't mind being labeled white collar or blue collar, if they had an opportunity to speak freely. Or for that matter, why not open up your own country's social media so they can speak without fear of reprisal! Let's get going with that project, I can't wait to see the results!
Where did that come from? Do you think the GP is a Soviet apparatchik time-warped into the present-day? I wouldn't be totally surprised, given a lot of libertarian tracts were written during the cold war, and would pound on the Soviet Union to tar far more reasonable and moderate ideas.
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).
> 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.
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...
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.
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”.
"Ownership" relies on institutions, which in turn rely on violence to enforce it.
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!
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.
By that measure nearly every job is white collar. Eg for any construction job you need to first get training and safe pass certification as well as purchase equipment such as good steel toe boots before you ever step foot in jobsite and start making money. What job do you not need to invest some amount of money into before you get your first paycheque?
If I were interpreting the statement charitably, I'd say there was a sliding spectrum of capital vs labour and most income sources sit between the two at varying positions.
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)
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.
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.
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.
The person making $40k/yr and the person making $200k/yr likely have irreconcilable differences of opinion and are equally divorced from each other as they are some billionaire.
No they are not. The $40k guy wants the material plenty the $200k guy has. The $200k guy wants to scheme up some way to not have his position threatened by the $40k guy while simultaneously trying to become a "genuine rentier" the combined incentives of which results in a hell of a lot of punching down (usually with the government or some other obfuscating intermediary in the middle).
Class consciousness is an interesting term. Not too long ago, people were trying to figure out what it would mean in practice to build a society based on that. It turned out that the answer was in class interests. In particular, whether it would be in someone's interests to support communist revolution and the subsequent abolition of private property.
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.
Maybe I'm too naive but I can imagine a whole bunch of scenarios between the current capitalismmaxxing and "ThE GuLAgS".
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.
Do both rely on a salary and being employed to have access to their material needs? If so, they're both from the same class, and being pitted against each other despite that is a mean for controlling both.
"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." as it was eloquently posited by Paulo Freire.
Right but compared to a billionaire the difference between the two workers is a rounding error, a distinction with an insignificant difference. You're claiming the pecking order of hens matters anything to the fox outside the henhouse.
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.
Do you really think so? A few years ago I was making ~40k euro a year, now making ~80k a year and my life and opinions are essentially identical, other than the fact I save slightly more and treat myself to a few more things. I would assume 180k euro (200k usd) would net me a slightly higher quality of life and an earlier retirement but otherwise not much else.
Amongst my friend group incomes vary from around 12k (dole) to about 150k and apart from some people having less money for leisure (resolved usually by having a night in as opposed to a night out) it doesn't really lead to any tension.
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...
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.
Most workers neither have pension funds or "personal investments", what rose-tinted clouds you live on? Most workers are dirt poor and can barely survive the current month, some are lucky that the government forces them to build their pension, but it's such a tiny part it'd be unfair to call it "capital owning".
Maybe that's a reasonable definition of white vs blue collar worker?
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.
White vs blue collar has always been about office/intellectual workers vs non-office/non-intellectual ones.
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.
How many workers are exposed to the stock market does actually seem a genuinely interesting question. I'm not sure who would be keeping reliable statistics, but the English-speaking world might be hovering up at around 40%-50% households [0].
Seems a bit lopsided though; I wonder if they are only considering selected stock markets or something.
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.
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 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.
Most likely 1 to 10000 or even 1 to 1 million. After all there it's the same in every field, the ratio of researchers to practitioners is massively in favor of people who do the actual building of things.
Worry is what happens to all the human readable code that humans were supposed to write? Is it going to be AI readable code that AI is going to write? Will humans see code in future? Do we need to? Because LLMs are trained on English does code stands as it's there now?
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.
There is no color for the collar. Companies have only 2 categories - managers and workers. Almost everyone is officially classed as worker in the records. You can see in the word "worker" in most formal communications.
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.
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.
"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. "
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.
His statement isn't even true for FAANG jobs inside the united states. Those FAANG companies often have nearly 50% contract workers who do the exact same work as the FTEs (Full Time Employees) while receiving maybe 1/3 the pay and benefits and also generally being treated like garbage, to the point that mistreating them socially is often codified into company rules.
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...
There's an excess of GPU power and data centers right now and a lot of companies are buying that up to train physical robots to do physical jobs. This is the next wave of innovation.
Yeah, sure, but there have been attempts to build self-driving cars for much longer than the current wave of LLMs capable of doing knowledge work, and we're still not quite there yet. If you think of it, it's pretty obvious that it's easier for AI to manipulate bits and bytes rather than interacting with the physical world. So, while actually intelligent robots might be a good thing (doing jobs that you can't find enough people for, or jobs that currently are not realistic, like going through all the trash a city produces and sorting out the recyclable stuff), I'm not holding my breath waiting for them...
100% agree but there's a big difference happening today. Investors are seeing the huge payoff for NVDA, OpenAI, and Claude and want to pour their money in the next compute heavy idea. That just happens to be physical automation right now. Money plus competition usually equals leaps forward in innovation.
Self-driving cars and LLMs have a lot in common these days. The same wave is driving both forwards. I don't quite know what you mean there are not quite there yet. They are literally doing just that: driving customers autonomously around in large busy cities. Is perfection the bar to clear?
Yeah, I know, autonomous cars are held to higher standards than human drivers, but still, I think a really autonomous car should not depend on Google painstakingly mapping out every street before being able to roll out Waymo in a certain city. It should be able to drive safely in unfamiliar environments too, same as humans can.
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 there is an interesting reflection here in that software itself is pretty general, if we talk about a tool that the whole industry can use, then actually a general intelligence is to software engineers as the loom is to weavers is maybe actually an apt comparison?
Im speaking specifically of pre AGI general intelligence, little g general if you will.
OP gives electricians as a typical example of blue-collar work and argues SW engineers are the same.
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.
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
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.
We have had a period where the scarcity at the lowest level of the trade motivated the merger of all types of software developers into one (golden) pot. And yet we do have distinct trades level, engineering level and scientific level competencies.
Here in Denmark there’s a real distinction between “datamatiker” (the skilled labor), software engineers (the professional white collar) and “dataloger”/computer scientists.
I don’t see the scientific study of computation going anywhere, but the happy days of fat salaries to everyone programming may be over.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 always said to people, even before AI back in the 2010s, that I am a mere modern bricklayer. Most of us software "engineers" don't engineer anything, we're just gluing code, at least 95% of the time. These engineers than prove their worth by arguing whose code is the most clean/concise/pure etc etc when it really doesn't make much of a difference.
If you still judge people by what kubectl command gives you a precise output or which pandas method is better, and expect them to fill a LoC or PR count quota, then yes. If you ask them to use their judgement and use dependencies wisely to squeeze out performance, absolutely not.
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.
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?
It's not whether we were blue collar, the question is were we ever really creative? And as a software engineer, it's been a little dumbfounding, but I think the answer is "no".
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.
This distinction between blue collar and white collar is mostly a symptom of the united states' attempts to erase all concept of class and propagandize american workers into thinking they are all one, giant "middle class", including those who make $30k and those who make $300k.
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.
>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.
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.
> "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
Yeah this is two different things
The blue collar workers are the manual carpenters, not the dude managing them
I dont understand the point the OP is trying to make. And the distinction between white and blue collars is unclear in this context.
Are mathematicians also blue collar since it seems they are being replaced as well? Are electricians white collars then since they are not?
Is knowledge work the hallmark of the white collar? It doesn't seem to stand to scrutiny: being an electrician seems to require a lot of knowledge, whereas some managerial roles do not in some cases.
All in all this seems like a pretty pointless discussion to be having. One of those language games people like to play (are we stochastic parrots as well?) and that dont bring anything of substance to the debate of ideas.
> It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations
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!
So, accountants replaced by spreadsheets were blue collar workers all along then? What about all these consultants with MBA degrees being replaced right now at McKinsey? Are they blue collars too?
I mean, this article just collapses on itself, because it fails to provide comprehensive premise for the thing it argues about.
> 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.
From gazing over the job offers I think in Europe developers have always been machine operators.
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.
> 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.
The article makes no real attempt to explain how software developers are different from sales people or paralegals or graphic designers or journalists.
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 requiring a degree, while writing React was closer to using your hand to unclog a toilet -- so don't fucking call yourself an engineer). 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 artisanship in what you're tasked with, then 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. With a good bit of pride.
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.
Bill Gates certainly programmed at the start. At a point early on in Microsoft history he had to stop doing that and concentrate on actual business problems.
All of these distinctions like blue collar vs white collar and lower class vs middle class are manufactured constructs to divide people. This is a woeful lack of understanding of class consciousness. There are only two classes. They have multiple names. The way Marx described them is:
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.
I don't lament LLM's because they are a better or automation of an approach to doing my tasks. I lament them because they are built on loose foundations, limited understanding, misunderstood function and risk, data theft, and shaky legal grounds. I'm an engineer, my job is to deal with and reduce complexity not accept it blindly without soberly weighing all the pros and cons after building a solid understanding.
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.
Not sure if i get your take.
"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.
> I'm an engineer, my job is to deal with and reduce complexity not accept it blindly without soberly weighing all the pros and cons after building a solid understanding.
But LLMs dont prevent you from doing this? If it does it probably is an organisational issue.
If you generate code you’ll never understand it as deeply as if you’d wrote it. Anyone who has done lots of code review knows this
But eventually, do you really care? Are you using only software that you developed? For decades we outsourced software development to third parties, to place where people have never seen a line of code, without code review and dubious software development practice. Whole F100 organizations were running on that type of software development.
That's a really good point that is often missed. We go through life using software which we don't know their code at all. Like... The vast majority of it, all people basically. We just trust the people who did it. Not saying that LLMs don't deserve oversight, but how different is that from what we've done previously?
I had faith in the people.
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.
If you use a compiler instead of writing assembly by hand you’ll never understand the underlying assembly as deeply as if you’d wrote it.
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.
> 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.
Correct, however, I'm a maintenance developer already. We rarely get to build whole brand new systems or programs. Most of work is maintaining crap from 20 years ago
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.
Agreed. LLMs are really bad at software engineering at the moment and those who disagree are those people who think more lines of code are good. The only argument against it is the unjustified guess that one day they’ll be better. My feeling is that they very fact they show us things we missed makes them liable to increase tech debt, and that they in general reduce human understanding of the code base. I don’t see how those things will ever not be true
I've found that LLM helps me to write good code. It essentially works like a colleague who can review my code. It spotted many issues which I wouldn't spotted before. It also helps to free me from some mundane work.
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.
This is just not true. LLMs are good at some development.
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.
Thousands of websites like Garry Tan's amateur pile of garbage?
Building a landing page is not something you require a software engineer for.
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.
Well you’re just saying here you don’t care about tech debt or software quality. Of course lines of code is relevant, it’s generally bad to add code and makes the software harder to maintain. I would agree that software development standards in web development can be poor though
Is white vs blue collar ever a useful distinction? I think worker versus capital owner is a more important one.
Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them
A CEO, blue-collar worker, and an immigrant sit down at a table together. In the middle of the table, there is a plate with a dozen cookies.
The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, then whispers in the ear of the blue-collar worker "Hey, I think he wants your cookie."
Communists always want to de-individualize humans into a single group with a coherent identity so it's easier to ideologize and agitate them.
That really doesn't speak to the usefulness of the distinction. To the extent that workers, as a whole, have common goals (like capturing a bigger share of the productivity gains, for instance), it probably make sense to organize as a single group to pursue those goals.
The right also organizes humans into us-vs-them: the natives versus the immigrants, the faithful versus the infidels, and so on. Whether those make sense depends only on the values, way of living or material conditions you want to protect and whether the other group is a menace to them.
the left books everyone according to socioeconomic status; your point about the right placing everyone into a whole set of "us vs them" categories stands, but, I'm hoping that you're trying to say something like human souls should not be categorized on the basis of... (x,y,x) where any of x,y or z are groups we assign to people. Right?
In capitalism, man exploits man. In communism, it's just the opposite.
Only in Islam and Mormonism can man truly exploit woman.
The conservative Christians enter the conversation.
I'm an atheist.
People always want to believe they’re special, and build systems to recognize their belief system. Religions, capitalism (just another religion), etc.
100 years from now, your birth date and death date, and the life lived in between, will be no different than any other human, lines on a headstone or rows in a database. Maybe you’ll have a Wikipedia page, for the historical ledger, but if not, nothing changes.
Unless you're Caesar. Or Elon Musk living in a tank. You're basically right.
But I have to argue with you about one thing: Everyone is special.
Elon will die eventually too. Everyone exists, no one is special. We’re just trying to exist until death. Your opinion may differ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
I'll repeat: Everyone is special.
There is a vast darkness, eons of empty space around us, and no other known life in the universe.
Every lizard is special. Every crab and spider and snail is special. Every person is especially special.
Your attitude about that is, let's say, demented as a result of hating your own species and your inability to love yourself or the people around you, or even the people you hate.
I encourage you to believe this if it helps with the human condition. Remember, the sun will eventually expand, incinerate Earth, and all of this will exist only as light, rf, and other energy others might potentially observe billions of years from now. Enjoy the warmth from the sun on your face on a cool day for what it is.
Yes, yes, yes. Are you trying to sound jaded, cynical, intelligent?
Surely there can be no counterargument to your final analysis of the pointlessness, the end of life.
I'd posit something different that you might sleep on: That your existence is worthwhile and, in fact, unique once and only once in all the history of the universe. That your ability to observe phenomena actually solidifies and collapses indeterminate waveforms. That you're living in the one and only terrarium that we know of, and belong to the most intelligent species that we know of, and that you therefore:
Have an obligation to the universe be worth more than what you're saying you believe in the prior statement. Of course, you can be whatever you want to be, and if that's merely believing that the smartest-sounding thing to say in a chat forum is that we're all meaningless and that the earth will be swallowed by the sun in a few billion years, then have at it; you're no doubt still a credit to your species for realizing things like that. Dogs, for instance, have no idea. But still, it's very disappointing. I mean, you have a vast number of upvotes on HN. Surely you must have something more interesting to impart about Life, the Universe and Everything? Even if it's just about fish?
> Remember, the sun will eventually expand, incinerate Earth, and all of this will exist only as light
You just proved we are all special.
Bravo!
It's always the new accounts like yours with 47 votes who write the most depressing, hopeless, despairing and anti-capitalist slogans around here. Day after day. Why is that?
Whichever totalitarian country your little troll army represents, it would be fun if you let your own citizens comment on here without fear of penalty. I suspect they wouldn't mind being labeled white collar or blue collar, if they had an opportunity to speak freely. Or for that matter, why not open up your own country's social media so they can speak without fear of reprisal! Let's get going with that project, I can't wait to see the results!
Man, this is a stupid discussion. Everything gets taken at its most extreme. Humans see a token like "capitalism" and fire off their parroted responses, like "communism". At no point does anyone try to pin down to more specific details.
If you think all left-wing critiques of capitalism are in defence of totalitarianism, you should read George Orwell's political essays. I can assure you that Orwell of all people had no time for totalitarians.
To quote the poster in full:
>> Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them
First of all, is that a profound left-wing critique of capitalism?
Secondly, I've read Orwell extensively. I don't think he would have had much truck with a troll posting Animal Farm style slogans.
Not all critiques need to be profound. Egregious issues should be called out even if wordsmithing is not your forte.
I'd argue it's an accurate statement about power in general. The powerful have always sought to divide the powerless for political expediency regardless of the ideological framework used to do it, you could read that from Machiavelli as much as Marx. Divide and rule is about the oldest political trick in the book and it works pretty well, why wouldn't capital owners who represent the present elite do it?
Yeah, you're right, and that's a thoughtful way to put it which addresses the actual power dynamics and nuance: ANY system is going to have an incentive to divide and conquer. I'm looking at the above two statements:
>> @mgol94 Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them
>> @nkmnz Communists always want to de-individualize humans into a single group with a coherent identity so it's easier to ideologize and agitate them.
And I don't disagree with either of them per se, on the merits, but I see in both of them a major flaw in the way the point is argued.
So you don’t disagree, but have no problems doing ad personam arguments citing my karma and assuming my socioeconomic background?
Do you go around complaining when people post insufficiently thoughtful criticisms of communism as well? There are a lot of them out there, so it would presumably keep you quite busy.
I have an old account and agree with the post you are replying to. But unlike you, I see capitalism as depressing, hopeless and despairing.
I am also not from a totalitarian country =)
I feel that this deserves a conversation over a beer, as opposed to a new account posting a one-line communist slogan.
Conversations over beer are always better than texting in online forums or social media =)
Believing your system is beyond critique or question, or that anyone who dares must be the enemy, seems pretty commie to me tbh. Like not in the marx textbook theory sense, more in the actual soviet/chinese communist system sense.
I think it’s very obvious that the powers that be are keen to keep people divided and focused on anything but them. Ex: trans issues, trans people have been around for ever, but didn’t start dominating media and politics until about 10 years ago (not long after the global Wall Street protests.) Just mentioning this will send both sides of the issue into a rage (either I’m a genocidal maniac or I support litter boxes in schools, depending on your interpretation.)
I'm not sure I understand your point. I never said my system was beyond critique or question...
Not sure what to make of your note about transgenderism... I think that gender, sexuality, race, religion, ethnicity, borders, abortion, and inequality have all been deployed as boogeymen by parties on both the right and left to scare people into voting one way or another.
You helped me clarify my thinking in one way, though: "Divide and conquer", which has been a theme in this thread, implies that both left and right parties are working together simply to confuse the populace. Or to put it more plainly, "divide and rule" implies that there must be a conspiracy in which the people doing the ruling don't give a damn either way; they only use social and economic issues to keep people divided to prevent an uprising.
I don't really think that's how it works, and to tell you the truth, I think that believing in that sort of thing is not just juvenile and historically illiterate, it's actually harmful to a well-functioning society. And I'm seeing it all over the place, even just implicitly in half the comments in this thread. That's not how the world works. Fascists and socialists and centrists don't actually get together with industrialists and arms manufacturers and oil producers to think up things like "how can we distract the genpop with transgender stuff while we pump the atmosphere full of more carbon." The world is a much more complicated and subtle place; many actors are on the stage, each with their own agenda, and no one is pulling all the strings behind the curtain. In fact, that's what's even more terrifying than a cabal of sociopaths: No one is in control, no one at all. The train has no brakes; the ship is burning, but there is no captain; sixteen people are fighting for control in the cockpit of the plane. That's why I don't like those kinds of reductive assessments.
>> Capital owners always want to split the workers to more and more groups so it’s easier to antagonize and manage them
> It's always the new accounts like yours with 47 votes who write the most depressing, hopeless, despairing and anti-capitalist slogans around here. Day after day. Why is that?
It's probably time for you to let the scales fall from your eyes, and realize that you're a worker and the the shareholders aren't looking out for your well-being. They want you to be paid as little as possible, so they can keep more for themselves.
> Whichever totalitarian country your little troll army represents, it would be fun if you let your own citizens comment on here without fear of penalty. I suspect they wouldn't mind being labeled white collar or blue collar, if they had an opportunity to speak freely. Or for that matter, why not open up your own country's social media so they can speak without fear of reprisal! Let's get going with that project, I can't wait to see the results!
Where did that come from? Do you think the GP is a Soviet apparatchik time-warped into the present-day? I wouldn't be totally surprised, given a lot of libertarian tracts were written during the cold war, and would pound on the Soviet Union to tar far more reasonable and moderate ideas.
[dead]
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.
> “…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.
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).
> 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.
Yea, some ties or jackets clash with a blue collar. White is generally a bit more versatile IMO.
White needs money and means to wash and doesn't hide dirt / grease / filth which blue covers up well (blue collar was heavy cotton / denim / canvas)
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...
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.
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”.
Parent speaks of capital owners, not capital managers.
At what size of pension / investment fund invested in stocks does one become a capital owner? 1mil? 10mil? 100mil?
"Ownership" relies on institutions, which in turn rely on violence to enforce it.
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!
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.
A big part of a dentist's income is yield from educational investment. The education and training is the capital.
By that measure nearly every job is white collar. Eg for any construction job you need to first get training and safe pass certification as well as purchase equipment such as good steel toe boots before you ever step foot in jobsite and start making money. What job do you not need to invest some amount of money into before you get your first paycheque?
If I were interpreting the statement charitably, I'd say there was a sliding spectrum of capital vs labour and most income sources sit between the two at varying positions.
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.
The license to practice is another type of capital. Kind of like a taxi medallion but less transferable.
> interpreting the statement charitably
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)
And a bricklayer's income is dependent on their investment in food they eat every day. Not a terribly useful distinction though.
Could the dentist just stop working and continue to make that part of their income?
[dead]
[dead]
If it's worker vs capital, I have always been compensated with capital.
You've only ever been compensated with shares and have never taken a cent for your time? It's possible, but also quite unusual.
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.
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.
Part of divide and conquer from the owning class
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.
The person making $40k/yr and the person making $200k/yr likely have irreconcilable differences of opinion and are equally divorced from each other as they are some billionaire.
Regardless of ideology their material interests are much closer to each-other than they are to genuine rentiers.
No they are not. The $40k guy wants the material plenty the $200k guy has. The $200k guy wants to scheme up some way to not have his position threatened by the $40k guy while simultaneously trying to become a "genuine rentier" the combined incentives of which results in a hell of a lot of punching down (usually with the government or some other obfuscating intermediary in the middle).
> The $40k guy wants the material plenty the $200k guy has.
This is level -1 of class consciousness and that's exactly how the top 0.x% keeps us down.
Class consciousness is an interesting term. Not too long ago, people were trying to figure out what it would mean in practice to build a society based on that. It turned out that the answer was in class interests. In particular, whether it would be in someone's interests to support communist revolution and the subsequent abolition of private property.
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.
That would be group 2, not group 1
"Your passive income is enough to live"
Maybe I'm too naive but I can imagine a whole bunch of scenarios between the current capitalismmaxxing and "ThE GuLAgS".
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.
Do both rely on a salary and being employed to have access to their material needs? If so, they're both from the same class, and being pitted against each other despite that is a mean for controlling both.
"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." as it was eloquently posited by Paulo Freire.
Right but compared to a billionaire the difference between the two workers is a rounding error, a distinction with an insignificant difference. You're claiming the pecking order of hens matters anything to the fox outside the henhouse.
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.
Do you really think so? A few years ago I was making ~40k euro a year, now making ~80k a year and my life and opinions are essentially identical, other than the fact I save slightly more and treat myself to a few more things. I would assume 180k euro (200k usd) would net me a slightly higher quality of life and an earlier retirement but otherwise not much else. Amongst my friend group incomes vary from around 12k (dole) to about 150k and apart from some people having less money for leisure (resolved usually by having a night in as opposed to a night out) it doesn't really lead to any tension.
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...
Most workers are also shareholders, either through their pension funds and/or their personal investments.
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.
Most workers neither have pension funds or "personal investments", what rose-tinted clouds you live on? Most workers are dirt poor and can barely survive the current month, some are lucky that the government forces them to build their pension, but it's such a tiny part it'd be unfair to call it "capital owning".
Maybe that's a reasonable definition of white vs blue collar worker?
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.
White vs blue collar has always been about office/intellectual workers vs non-office/non-intellectual ones.
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.
How many workers are exposed to the stock market does actually seem a genuinely interesting question. I'm not sure who would be keeping reliable statistics, but the English-speaking world might be hovering up at around 40%-50% households [0].
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
And so we've arrived broadly back at white and blue collars after all.
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.
Okay, I'd like to move into capital ownership, please. Can you point me in the direction of large enough quantities of capital I can freely obtain?
> People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners.
Really? How would that happen? Maybe with a small loan of a million dollars...
> Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets. People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners.
Says the labourer wage cuck working as a CRUD developer
> worker versus capital owner is a more important one.
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
> A bakery/bodega owner is a "capital owner"
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.
> A top NBA player is a worker
It's the "circenses" in "Panem et circenses"
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.
Which one is which along the blue collar white collar spectrum?
What is the proportion between them?
Most likely 1 to 10000 or even 1 to 1 million. After all there it's the same in every field, the ratio of researchers to practitioners is massively in favor of people who do the actual building of things.
There are like 5 million SWEs in the US and less than 100 million total.
Worry is what happens to all the human readable code that humans were supposed to write? Is it going to be AI readable code that AI is going to write? Will humans see code in future? Do we need to? Because LLMs are trained on English does code stands as it's there now?
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.
There is no color for the collar. Companies have only 2 categories - managers and workers. Almost everyone is officially classed as worker in the records. You can see in the word "worker" in most formal communications.
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.
Yes and no (but mainly no).
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.
agreed. checking in to pull some tickets and grind out code? finished.
everything else? if anything we're just getting started :D
"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. "
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.
His statement isn't even true for FAANG jobs inside the united states. Those FAANG companies often have nearly 50% contract workers who do the exact same work as the FTEs (Full Time Employees) while receiving maybe 1/3 the pay and benefits and also generally being treated like garbage, to the point that mistreating them socially is often codified into company rules.
Chinese programmers have acknowledged this for a long time, they refer to themselves as 码农, literally code farmer.
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...
There's an excess of GPU power and data centers right now and a lot of companies are buying that up to train physical robots to do physical jobs. This is the next wave of innovation.
Yeah, sure, but there have been attempts to build self-driving cars for much longer than the current wave of LLMs capable of doing knowledge work, and we're still not quite there yet. If you think of it, it's pretty obvious that it's easier for AI to manipulate bits and bytes rather than interacting with the physical world. So, while actually intelligent robots might be a good thing (doing jobs that you can't find enough people for, or jobs that currently are not realistic, like going through all the trash a city produces and sorting out the recyclable stuff), I'm not holding my breath waiting for them...
100% agree but there's a big difference happening today. Investors are seeing the huge payoff for NVDA, OpenAI, and Claude and want to pour their money in the next compute heavy idea. That just happens to be physical automation right now. Money plus competition usually equals leaps forward in innovation.
Self-driving cars and LLMs have a lot in common these days. The same wave is driving both forwards. I don't quite know what you mean there are not quite there yet. They are literally doing just that: driving customers autonomously around in large busy cities. Is perfection the bar to clear?
https://waymo.com/intl/zh-cn/blog/2025/06/scaling-laws-in-au...
Yeah, I know, autonomous cars are held to higher standards than human drivers, but still, I think a really autonomous car should not depend on Google painstakingly mapping out every street before being able to roll out Waymo in a certain city. It should be able to drive safely in unfamiliar environments too, same as humans can.
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 have a suspicion you underestimate how much goes in to casually doing house chores.
They also keep the masses busy with frequent, mundane, repetitive tasks.
> But if we learn how to use the looms, the spreadsheets, and the chainsaws, we might just be okay.
Er, no. That's the thing about general intelligence, it's general.
I think there is an interesting reflection here in that software itself is pretty general, if we talk about a tool that the whole industry can use, then actually a general intelligence is to software engineers as the loom is to weavers is maybe actually an apt comparison?
Im speaking specifically of pre AGI general intelligence, little g general if you will.
AGI is an ill defined, unscientific concept you shouldn't be basing your predictions on...
I never see myself as a white collar worker, rather a galley slave
OP gives electricians as a typical example of blue-collar work and argues SW engineers are the same.
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.
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
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.
We have had a period where the scarcity at the lowest level of the trade motivated the merger of all types of software developers into one (golden) pot. And yet we do have distinct trades level, engineering level and scientific level competencies. Here in Denmark there’s a real distinction between “datamatiker” (the skilled labor), software engineers (the professional white collar) and “dataloger”/computer scientists. I don’t see the scientific study of computation going anywhere, but the happy days of fat salaries to everyone programming may be over.
Always have been, for higher-level languages.
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.
https://horstmann.com/corejava/feel-of-java.pdf
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.
> 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.
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 always said to people, even before AI back in the 2010s, that I am a mere modern bricklayer. Most of us software "engineers" don't engineer anything, we're just gluing code, at least 95% of the time. These engineers than prove their worth by arguing whose code is the most clean/concise/pure etc etc when it really doesn't make much of a difference.
If you still judge people by what kubectl command gives you a precise output or which pandas method is better, and expect them to fill a LoC or PR count quota, then yes. If you ask them to use their judgement and use dependencies wisely to squeeze out performance, absolutely not.
No, because blue collars are smart and unionised.
My European programmer colleagues that went the apprentice/trade education route are quite good.
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.
You have been promoted to proletariat
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?
It's not whether we were blue collar, the question is were we ever really creative? And as a software engineer, it's been a little dumbfounding, but I think the answer is "no".
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.
This distinction between blue collar and white collar is mostly a symptom of the united states' attempts to erase all concept of class and propagandize american workers into thinking they are all one, giant "middle class", including those who make $30k and those who make $300k.
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.
>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.
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.
> "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
Yeah this is two different things
The blue collar workers are the manual carpenters, not the dude managing them
I dont understand the point the OP is trying to make. And the distinction between white and blue collars is unclear in this context. Are mathematicians also blue collar since it seems they are being replaced as well? Are electricians white collars then since they are not? Is knowledge work the hallmark of the white collar? It doesn't seem to stand to scrutiny: being an electrician seems to require a lot of knowledge, whereas some managerial roles do not in some cases. All in all this seems like a pretty pointless discussion to be having. One of those language games people like to play (are we stochastic parrots as well?) and that dont bring anything of substance to the debate of ideas.
> It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations
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!
Workers of the internet.
Software engineering is the reasoning behind the code, not a mere act of mechanically writing the code.
If that's blue collar, then so is every other white collar profession and no distinction can exist. I do not agree.
So, accountants replaced by spreadsheets were blue collar workers all along then? What about all these consultants with MBA degrees being replaced right now at McKinsey? Are they blue collars too? I mean, this article just collapses on itself, because it fails to provide comprehensive premise for the thing it argues about.
Html = framers Css = trim carp Javascript = electrical/plumbing Backend work = archictect/engineer...?
Yeah its similar
the most provocative comparison which I've heard a couple of times was "elevator operators".
Everybody is blue collar really. White collar is just a term to create a pseudo hierarchy amongst the workers.
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.
Yes
Nice to meet you, fellow workers!
It depends on what level of control you have. I don't count blue and white collar as dirty or clean hands, but more task doer or task master.
Yes, now start unionizing: https://techworkerscoalition.org/
No.
> 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.
Perhaps quickbooks is the better analogy?
From gazing over the job offers I think in Europe developers have always been machine operators.
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.
No.
> 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.
Meh.
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?
The article makes no real attempt to explain how software developers are different from sales people or paralegals or graphic designers or journalists.
no the uniform is hoodies
Yes, at least in most countries outside the Silicon Valley dream, we are office workers like everyone else, even on wages.
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 requiring a degree, while writing React was closer to using your hand to unclog a toilet -- so don't fucking call yourself an engineer). 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 artisanship in what you're tasked with, then 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. With a good bit of pride.
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.
The part about founders not coding is totally untrue. But I’ll see myself out off your porch
Bill Gates certainly programmed at the start. At a point early on in Microsoft history he had to stop doing that and concentrate on actual business problems.
Welcome to the proletariat puzzle solvers.
I like the title “puzzle solver,” but I think “slop assembler” is fine too!
Yes yes yes. Of course we are!
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.
All of these distinctions like blue collar vs white collar and lower class vs middle class are manufactured constructs to divide people. This is a woeful lack of understanding of class consciousness. There are only two classes. They have multiple names. The way Marx described them is:
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.
[flagged]