Are IT Workers Blue Collar?
Posted by Felix Enescu on November 9th, 2006
I found an intriguing article from The Tech Zone via Business Innovation Insider.
I will just quote from the article:
IT people (e.g. analysts and programmers) exhibit a lot of blue collar characteristics, e.g., repetition in types of work performed, they do not dress or act like professionals, and regularly punch in and out of work with little interest in going above and beyond the call of duty. […] Blue collar workers can perform technical tasks as well as manual tasks, such as those found in manufacturing and assembly; and although they are classified as exempt workers paid a salary, they tend to behave like hourly workers instead. Further, there are plenty of blue collar workers who were just as educated, if not more so, than a lot of the programmers and analysts on their staffs. One executive even went so far as to tell me about a couple of craftsman machinists he had with MBA degrees…
What do you think? How do you feel?
November 10th, 2006 at 3:45 am
Hmm… No programmer worth his/her salt ever does anything repetitive. The whole shtick about programming is to spot the repetitive, boring, tasks in a process, and make the _computer_ do them
November 10th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
If one IT worker is just programmer ( not analyst at all ), yes he is just blue collar. I think this is not possible usually ( read more in Romanian: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/onofreiciuc?p=353 )
But a good analyst can’t be a blue collar, a good analyst should be the leader of the enterprise where he works.
The difference between the analyst and the programmer is the same as between the blue collars in constructions and the architect ( or the civil-engineer ).