When IT Was Blue Collar
Has the upper-middle class been taking jobs from the lower-middle class? Yes.
When I first started working in the software world, I had a cube in a sprawling suburban office building filled with cubes as far as the eye could see. I was a programmer in an Information Technology department for a legacy telecom company. Fresh out of college with a liberal arts background and a few computer courses under my belt, I was — it goes without saying — incredibly naive.
To my surprise I discovered you didn’t need to go to a fancy four-year university (as I had) to work in the exciting world of IT. Some of my teammates had learned tech during their military stints, others picked it up at local colleges or smaller community colleges. At the time, IT was actually a subset of vocational or business training.
It made perfect sense.
It was the age of large mainframe computers. Much of the code written was for accounting purposes or pulling information from a screen and doing a lookup from — what was then hi-tech — a database. You spent most of your time going through a tedious administrative process of getting your program into the system — this was the non-interactive IBM world — and then hours later received your output on paper from a printer.
