Is software engineering is becoming a blue collar job
Why do people say that software engineering is becoming a blue collar job?
Howard Kang · May 11, 2020 Studied Accounting (college major) at Santa Monica College
The dirty secret to software engineering is that most tasks are either extremely easy or extremely difficult, and there isn’t very much in between. There are lots of software engineering jobs that pay six figures or more that involve nothing more than writing procedural business logic within a framework. Knowing loops, conditional logic, and knowing how to define classes is really all there is to it. 50% of the job will be copying and pasting solutions from Stackoverflow and then making a few changes.
But there are other software engineering jobs that are extremely complex.
- How do you create a program that assembles an interactive 3D model of the world using satellite images obtained from multiple sources (Google Earth)?
- How do you create a mobile application development platform that allows you to target both Android and iOS with the same codebase (React Native)?
- How do you create an app that can recognize a song by listening to it for a few seconds?
- How do you create a chess program that can consistently outplay the highest rated human player in the world?
These are all problems that a team of very intelligent software engineers struggled with and then solved. There are companies that are trying to solve problems of similar and even greater complexity right now.
If you think these problems are “blue collar” problems, either your definition of blue collar is very different from the typical one or you don’t understand how challenging software problems can get.
That’s the beauty of software engineering. There’s a barrier to entry but it’s purely technical. If you can solve the problem, and you can communicate that you can solve the problem, you can get the job.
If you want to work on incredibly difficult problems and you are qualified to do so, you can. If you want to work on really easy stuff where you’re just filling in function bodies in a framework, you can do that too. And the great thing is, you’ll still get paid a lot to do so.