Paul’s expe­ri­ence reflects changes in the Amer­i­can econ­o­my that will have the t‑shirt-wear­ing coder with a com­put­er replace the blue-col­lar wear­ing machine assem­bler with a wrench as the arche­typ­al indus­tri­al work­er. Indus­try groups pre­dict the demand for coders will cre­ate one mil­lion new cod­ing jobs by 2020 .

Paul, which is not his real name, had hoped to stick with the job until the end of his first year. Then he’d quit and use his expe­ri­ence to find some­thing better.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly in the begin­ning of his time there, Paul worked long hours, some­times round the clock, to meet dead­lines, but the com­pa­ny pro­vid­ed cof­fee and ener­gy drinks to keep him up so he could work and beer to bring him down so he could relax when he was done. He had no fam­i­ly in the town — an old­er, Mid­west­ern indus­tri­al city try­ing to find the next big thing to replace its lost man­u­fac­tur­ing base — and few friends, so he did­n’t have any oth­er com­mit­ments that might con­flict with the long hours. Once a month, he par­tic­i­pat­ed in an all-night week­end hackathon to fur­ther devel­op his cod­ing skills.

After grad­u­at­ing from col­lege and mov­ing away from his fam­i­ly and his home­town for the first time, Paul found his way into Launch­Code, a train­ing and recruit­ing pro­gram for future coders. An artist, he dived enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly into using code to alter and cre­ate images. After he com­plet­ed the four-month class, Launch­Code placed him in a job at a mar­ket­ing com­pa­ny that uses tem­plates to build web pages for clients.

The changes now spread­ing through the econ­o­my are sim­i­lar in many ways to the shifts that swept through the Amer­i­can econ­o­my in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. The econ­o­my then was becom­ing pro­gres­sive­ly more machine based, and the peo­ple who designed, fab­ri­cat­ed and assem­bled machine parts were becom­ing more specialized.

Machine builders were replac­ing machine ten­ders as the back­bone of the indus­tri­al econ­o­my. Peo­ple who fab­ri­cat­ed, assem­bled, and repaired machine parts kept com­merce mov­ing. They were respon­si­ble for trans­porta­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, water, elec­tric­i­ty, and all of the machines that made mod­ern life easier.

Cod­ing is increas­ing­ly occu­py­ing the same cen­tral place in the 21st cen­tu­ry econ­o­my that machines held in the 20th. Respon­si­ble for telling com­put­ers and com­put­er-con­trolled machines what to do, coders are increas­ing­ly writ­ing the com­mands that con­trol the oper­a­tions of trans­porta­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, water, elec­tric­i­ty and manufacturing.

And, just as in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the indi­vid­ual design and craft­ing of each new elec­tri­cal switch, lamp or auto­mo­bile gave way to the mass pro­duc­tion of com­mon parts pre­assem­bled into stan­dard­ized switch­es, lamps and cars, pre­assem­bled pack­ets of code increas­ing­ly are being used for com­mon purposes.

Along with the stan­dard­iza­tion of mechan­i­cal and elec­tri­cal designs and parts in the 20th cen­tu­ry, the craft of the all-around mechan­ic or engi­neer even­tu­al­ly pro­duced a range of more spe­cial­ized occu­pa­tions: design engi­neers, tool and die mak­ers, machin­ists, assem­bly work­ers. Even assem­bly work­ers, how­ev­er, need­ed to know some­thing about fab­ri­ca­tion and how to use tools designed for build­ing machines in order for the whole sys­tem to work.

Today, a sim­i­lar divi­sion and spe­cial­iza­tion is hap­pen­ing in the craft of writ­ing soft­ware. Increas­ing­ly, soft­ware engi­neers design what the code should do, and in what order, and coders assem­ble the prewrit­ten pieces to make the design.

Open source hubs such as GitHub and Bit­buck­et make it eas­i­er to find stan­dard­ized and prewrit­ten code in the pub­lic domain that can be used in oth­er projects. IDEs (inte­grat­ed devel­op­ment envi­ron­ments) for soft­ware devel­op­ment, such as PHP­Storm or Intel­liJ, are get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter at fin­ish­ing com­mon lines of code for coders as they begin to type. And com­pa­nies often have their own vir­tu­al store­hous­es of pro­pri­etary code that they use repeat­ed­ly in one project after anoth­er as well.

As part of the tran­si­tion to a machine cod­ing econ­o­my, ini­tia­tives to make edu­ca­tion in cod­ing arts wide­ly avail­able or part of the sec­ondary school cur­ricu­lum gain trac­tion, as with Made with Code and Cod​ing​.org. This mim­ics the push for edu­ca­tion in indus­tri­al arts, from the estab­lish­ment of the first schools to offer indus­tri­al edu­ca­tion in the 1880s to the birth of the indus­tri­al arts move­ment in 1904 and the pas­sage in 1917 of the Smith-Hugh­es Voca­tion­al Edu­ca­tion Act. The Smith-Hugh­es Act pro­vid­ed the first fed­er­al funds for indus­tri­al arts class­es in high schools.

Col­leges, of course, already teach pro­gram­ming and soft­ware devel­op­ment, but to a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of stu­dents. Buck­ing the ​“col­lege for all” trend, there is a grow­ing opin­ion in indus­try that col­lege isn’t nec­es­sary for cod­ing. As a first short­cut, mod­ern indus­try pro­duced for-prof­it schools to offer voca­tion­al cours­es in cod­ing. ​“Hack schools” such as Gen­er­al Assem­bly, Dev Boot­camp, or Mobile Mak­ers charge stu­dents $10,000 to $18,000 for four months of voca­tion­al train­ing to turn them into coders. Such fees may prove stu­dents’ earnest­ness in apply­ing, but they also restrict the pro­grams’ abil­i­ty to pro­vide the mil­lion coders that indus­try says it needs.

Mass edu­ca­tion is nec­es­sary. So the city of Port­land teamed with Tree­house, a sub­scrip­tion online cod­ing course, to launch Code Ore­gon to give unem­ployed and dis­placed work­ers train­ing in coding.

“We want to start the Code-to-Work move­ment, which will take some­one from no expe­ri­ence, to job-ready, to a reward­ing career — all with­out a degree and zero expe­ri­ence. … You just don’t need a com­put­er sci­ence degree any­more to get an amaz­ing job in the tech indus­try,” Tree­house CEO Ryan Car­son stat­ed.

The big­ger step, how­ev­er, is to make cod­ing a part of every school’s cur­ricu­lum, and that push has just start­ed. Code​.org, for exam­ple, was launched in 2013 with the ​“vision” that ​“every stu­dent in every school should have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn com­put­er science.

In the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, machine work­ers often were part of the sweep of mechan­i­cal inno­va­tion that pro­duced cars, new machine tools, and elec­tri­cal appli­ances. They earned rel­a­tive­ly high pay and worked long hours due to the short­age of peo­ple able to fill the demand, expect­ed to be devot­ed to their jobs, much like pro­gram­mers now.

Ear­ly this year, the CEO of one St. Louis-based tech com­pa­ny bragged that his work­ers were so ded­i­cat­ed, his com­pa­ny had to start serv­ing break­fast and install bunkbeds to make sure that employ­ees got some­thing to eat and grabbed a lit­tle sleep. The CEO, Gabe Lozano, said when peo­ple inter­view for a job, ​“I tell them up front that if your goal is to have a 9‑to‑5 job and get the best bang for your buck … this is a ter­ri­ble place to be. But, if your goal is to be in the right side of his­to­ry, you have made the right choice.”

Tech com­pa­nies depend on such appeals to mis­sion and pas­sion, and to social iso­la­tion, to keep employ­ees sat­is­fied at work. That’s typ­i­cal of a craft indus­try where life and work are inter­twined and the work­er con­trols the pace of work. As machine indus­tries matured, how­ev­er, and machine work moved from a craft to a mass indus­try, work­ers rebelled against exces­sive work. They orga­nized to pro­tect their fam­i­lies, homes, and social lives from the all-con­sum­ing demands of employers.

For the first third of the 20th cen­tu­ry, the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Labor (AFL) had trou­ble appeal­ing to the new indus­tri­al work­er. Soon, how­ev­er, union­ists dis­sat­is­fied with the lack of progress in orga­niz­ing indus­tri­al work­ers formed the Con­gress of Indus­tri­al Orga­ni­za­tions (CIO), and union­iza­tion swept through the machine industries.

Recent efforts to orga­nize pro­gram­mers and coders, such the Wash­ing­ton Alliance of Tech­ni­cal Work­ers spon­sored by the AFL-CIO or the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Com­put­er, and Soft­ware Work­ers Indus­tri­al Union spon­sored by the IWW (Indus­tri­al Work­ers of the World), like­wise have met with lit­tle suc­cess. As cod­ing becomes a mass indus­try, how­ev­er, will coders even­tu­al­ly rebel as did indus­tri­al workers?

Paul did­n’t stay with his job for a year. He last­ed nine months before quit­ting and mov­ing back to his home town.