Do you honestly believe that? They could be as good, but I would wager that they wouldn't on average. There is fair amount self sorting based on aptitudes.
Having known a large number of manual labor professionals my whole life, there is no difference between the good-at-heavy-equipment and the good-at-writing-a-crud-app crowd. You do get a wider variety of intellectual capacity on the blue collar side depending on the trade, but electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, etc are all just as good at problem solving on average as any group of developers I know.
"Blue collar", "the trades" are just so broad in scope it's an unfair comparison. It becomes much easier when you look at specific manual labor professions and specific developer professions.
I totally agree that most good tradesmen are great problem solvers. I'm just not convinced that the types of problems and the aptitudes required to solve them are interchangeable.
"Blue collar", "the trades" are just so broad in scope it's an unfair comparison. It becomes much easier when you look at specific manual labor professions and specific developer professions.