There’s a common idea among economists that you can broadly split employees into two categories. “White-collar” workers are typically people who work in offices doing service-based, knowledge-based, managerial, or administrative work; “blue-collar” workers generally do manual labour or perform skilled trades.
Since at least the start of my career, software engineers have been considered white-collar. We work in offices at computers, and we deal with knowledge. Our work requires advanced training or education.
But what if that assumption has been incorrect? What if we were actually blue-collar, skilled tradespeople all along?
Typically, when we think of blue-collar workers, we think of people who do the hands-on labour of making or fixing stuff. Builders, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, miners, maintenance engineers, warehouse workers etc. Software developers have typically separated themselves from this category, but I’m not entirely sure why. We do the same thing — that is, we make or fix stuff — except we work in bits rather than atoms.
