this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
94 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
3169 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Spoilers!
It's not just that software and internet has been so lucrative, it's also that there are fringe benefits of being a white collar software worker versus a blue collar factory worker. The biggest is absolutely that the blue collar work will fucking ruin your body over time. All my blue collar friends have a plethora of health problems related to doing manual labor their whole lives. Injuries that will never really heal and leave them in chronic pain until they die. None of my white collar working friends in the software sector have any health problems similar to that which were triggered by their job. A few of them have some serious health issues, but nothing caused by the work they did.
Millennials and Gen Z are some of the most educated generations in history, and we're surprised they've recognized this and made the choice to not suffer physically in their old age?
It’s also easier to be a software developer now than 10 years ago. Modern languages do a lot more of the work for you.
Well, the barrier to entry is lower anyway.
Software also seems to be more complex than it was 10 years ago
Yeah software is definitely more complex. But modern languages are easier and have more syntactic sugar. And being a junior dev is mostly boiler plating or copy and pasting. A lot of devs don’t even get into the real complicated stuff. I’m a mediocre dev with no degree and I’m constantly surprised at the terminology people who’ve been doing for years don’t understand.
I'd wager it's a combo of all of those things, plus we've just lost the innovations that come with running that of wider sector since so many things are done in other countries now. Manufacturing jobs in the US are also considered blue collar, and blue collar is not looked at as an enviable job.
I'd argue that is not the case at all since manufacturing innovation is a commodity sold to the global market. See manufacturing trade shows. The tech is available, the skilled labor doesn't exist in plentiful numbers to exploit such tech readily.