Programming: A Millennial’s Blue Collar Job?
As a young, hopeful and passionate software engineer, I feel extremely lucky to be in a job that excites me and takes the work out of work. Recently when browsing my Linkedin feed, I stumbled across an article which was entitled The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding. I was shocked to see my beloved and nerdy obsession turned profession even being associated with the label blue collar. For me, as a 23 year old blindly voyaging into my professional adulthood, I began to doubt my perception of what programming as a profession is.
The article in question, in fact, makes for a very good read and talks about some of the stereotypes surrounding programmers and how we are perceived by politicians and leaders of large corporations. After reading the article I began to ponder whether the next generation would look back on us and read of these massive programming warehouses which fueled the technology age, just like we do about the factory workers mass producing motor vehicles in the early 20th century. Thankfully, after composing myself and leaving the (millennial) dramatic thoughts behind, I started to analyse what makes something blue collar and why I cared so much.
The definition of blue collar is ‘relating to manual work or workers, particularly in industry’. That kind of automatically rules out programming, as although practical, it isn’t exactly manual work. Programming isn’t a job which people endure (most of the time). Generally, it is something which you have had a passion for, whether it started with maths in school or an unhealthy relationship with Rubix cubes and this bled into your career choice. I don’t necessarily agree, however, that blue collar professions can’t involve a certain amount of passion, and this is the grey area in this debate. The question becomes very philosophical very quickly because programming is a strange profession as it is often regarded as heavily academic, even though some of the best programmers have never started, let alone completed a degree in computer science. This leads to said grey area, which you don’t find in careers such as medicine or law. We don’t have a prefix before our names and we’re not registered in some database (ironic) of programming scholars, we just float there and solve problems. For me, that is actually super exciting and I’ll explain why.
Unlike being a doctor or a lawyer, I am just a big malleable problem solving heap of logic. I can jump from project to project, adapting and building really cool things that every day people get to use. I don’t even need a certificate to tell me I can do it. This type of freedom is what I have found inside said grey area between blue collar and scholar (blue scholar?), and I love it!
I had already established that programming doesn’t fit the blue collar definition, and what I really cared about was would I look back on my career (wherever that may go) and think, “Wow, that was boring”. The answer to that is personal and sometimes doesn’t really lie in how you feel about your particular position but more the pressures from society to go the direction which makes you the most money, the coolest or even just to stand out. I think the great thing about working where I work now is that I’m surrounded by like-minded people who are programmers for the sheer challenge of it. No matter what other people might think of being a programmer, I think it’s cool and I get challenged every day. The ‘grow up and get a steady job in something that everybody at a party thinks is cool’ mindset shouldn’t matter.
So, is programming a scary blue collar profession? The answer is probably yes. However, the point is that if you’re happy, surrounded by like-minded colleagues and challenged everyday then you should wash all of those silly worries away and just write the codez and enjoy it before machines take all our jobs -_-. If blue collar means freedom to build whatever I want, then I’m cool with that.
// Eoin Falconer, Frontend Developer at Norigin Media
