I'm going to avoid the whole blue-collar vs. the economy argument on HN, for once, but I do want to refresh people's memories here: this has happened, in 2000. I lived through it; purely coincidentally I decided to leave the software industry almost exactly the night before the house of cards came down, and the funny thing was that having "programmer" on my resume got me turned down for retail jobs. They assumed I was overqualified and would leave as soon as a software opportunity presented itself. More than one potential employer said as much.
It really sucked and there was a lot of noise made about it on places like Slashdot. If you were an unemployed programmer then, you pretty much gave up after a couple of months and transferred to something entirely different. (Many seemed to move to law.)
Unfortunately the folks that experienced that don't speak up in these threads and everyone else on HN is too young to remember it.
But I had some savings, collected unemployment, and had the help and support of friends (who also worked in tech, and weathered the .com bubble's popping more fortunately than I did) and family.
Not all — if even many — of those things are true for most of the rest of this country.
I mean, seriously: the fact that such a large chunk of the tech workforce couldn't find work in ~2001-3, or whenever, ended up going to law school it became A Thing people noticed doesn't seem to me a particularly valid counter-argument to the economic wreckage that is the Rust Belt.
Yes, it's a wonderful prima facie demonstration of career mobility being a thing that actually exists in the world, but it, specifically, is also largely only available to people who already have the knowledge and skills (to say nothing of connections) such that they're almost necessarily going to be better positioned for these kinds of situations.
Usually I'm the one in these threads arguing the position you're arguing, but I've decided that it's a pretty big waste of time to do so on HN.
It's funny you mentioned that a lot of people moved to law. That industry should make it painfully clear that no one is immune to this. When I was a kid the societal message was "want to make money? Become a lawyer!". Enough kids listened to that message that the industry is in shambles today.
I wonder what's next?
It may take a couple more decades but it really does feel like today's Programmer will become yesteryear's factory worker.
A large chunk of what we're building is rebuilds, or maintenance, or minor upgrades. Every market is saturated. We keep ourselves busy building the same things, solving the same problems over and over, with the latest and greatest "stacks".
Post secondary education is churning out more and more programmers, and the available programming tasks continue to move towards mundane repetition.
I wonder if the new technological revolution you mention will simply be more globalization?
Manufacturing in China will eventually move to "cheaper" countries. Factory workers in today's established manufacturing centers around the world will want a better life for their children, and push them into STEM. We'll lose our jobs overseas. It happened here. It could happen there.
Perhaps it's already happening?
If us tech folk looked at it truly thoughtfully, we'd understand exactly how hard the world is for most people, and how easily it could turn that way for us.
Every industry is all about competition, consolidation, and maximizing profit. The older this one gets, the lower the wages are going to be for your run of the mill programmer. The societal message that "everyone should learn how to program!" is ultimately all about lowering wages.
As regular ol' programming tasks become cheaper and cheaper, we'll keep adapting and doing more specialized work, right? So what there's no one wanting to pay you 6 figs for making CRUD apps anymore. Just learn some machine learning and away you go! A year goes by and uh oh, Microsoft just added auto-ML to excel at the price of 20$ a month. How long can your job last? Better change specializations again!
Maybe it wont happen in our life times, but the wealth we're all capturing in this industry WILL dry up and get captured. And eventually there will be a new technological revolution that fills a new pond somewhere else. There will be a whole lot of callousness until a vast sum of us have to finally make that long horizontal migration. People who change from actionscript to rust are making tiny vertical migrations in career. It's not at all the same thing.