Coders Could Become The Blue Collar Workforce Of The Future

People may not want to face the truth, but it’s simply a fact that automation is going to become the norm in the future. With that in mind, the loss of hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs is only to be expected. At that point, however, laborers may no longer be categorized as such because there will be a new breed of blue-collar employees. That would be the coders.

Blue collar work is traditionally thought of as those manual labor types in plants or office grunts in big companies. However, with the advancement of technology, Wired recently asked if it’s perhaps time to shift people’s perspective. What if, instead of looking factory jobs and the like as blue collar work, coders could become the backbone of middle-class society?

It’s a good bet that most people think of tech figures like Mark Zuckerberg when the topic of coders is brought up, or perhaps hacker groups like Anonymous. However, this is simply not the case. In fact, even looking at the coders that are working in Silicon Valley right now, they only represent about 8 percent of the whole workforce employed all throughout the country.

Most coders are actually employed by companies to maintain their servers, protect their assets from cyber threats, and just every day, run of the mill IT work. With automation and artificial intelligence becoming more and more common, it’s predicted that businesses are going to need the skills of programmers more than laborers in the future.

This is where the blue collar work comparison comes in. Once programming job opportunities expand, coders are likely to become the most common employees in the country. In a sense, they will occupy a place in the economy that is still reserved for miners, constructions workers, and factory grunts that politicians simply love to crow about. It’s just a matter of getting used to the idea, Futurism reports.