[rebeccaskinner]

I've been saying the same thing about a lot of development being blue collar work for years now, and I have mixed feelings about it. I think it's great that there's at least another skilled labor job out there that's well paying (for now) and accessible to people, but the way it's manifesting itself is also reenforcing the same sort of gatekeeping, double standards, and shibboleths that have kept people from moving up the ladder for a long time.

In particular, for those of us who came up through development 10+ years ago but didn't get formal CS training, we're often being shuffled into these blue collar jobs even though we've put the time and effort into developing all of the CS skills that we'd need for the more sophisticated jobs. I went to a trade school for a non-CS degree, then spent over a decade writing everything from kernel code and device drivers to novel software exploits to designing and implementing video codecs, compiler toolchains, type systems, and large scale distributed systems. With the rising tide of bootcamps, all of that still matters, and there are still some good opportunities out there, but the pool of opportunities for interesting and fulfilling work is shrinking rapidly as the volume of jobs doing devops, mobile and web frontends, or menial node.js crud applications has been growing exponentially.