As a person who repaired quite a few toilets in their life

As for the current career programmers, maybe we should unionize before our jobs are being taken by kids coming out of 2 week bootcamps (who have been taking programming classes since kindergarten).

I've seen such people(well, they started learning in primary school, not in kindergarten, but nevertheless) and two things stand in the way of this scenario:

1. Barely anybody likes this line of work. I've had people who would really use some extra cash outright refuse to learn our trade because they found it boring. Apparently Our unique skill in the job market is an immunity to boredom.

2. There's more to this job than programming. There's also working in teams which, despite the focus of pretty much every western education system on this, is something that people seem to learn only after a good few years of full-time work.

Also people fresh out of college/bootcamps tend to fall for the typical "nerd traps" like trying to build beautiful abstractions where there is no time nor need for that.

This is about right IMO. Most of the work is seriously boring. I was in meetings talking with software developers about API interfaces of legacy systems (with monologues about the intriguing question: "Why is the <insert stupid decision> a thing we have to stick with?" - answer is always backwards support, btw) and I couldn't understand why are they sitting here and why do they think their life is well spent doing that? Anything is better - and they earn €3500-4500/month, so it isn't even that much for their 5-10 y/o careers.

Everything is better than this. I love programming, I've started when I was 10-11y/o, but I hate most things in the software industry. I love to program my own little tools, but I've become so fast building CRUD applications and apps that I have 200-300% efficiency (and thus a very high hourly rate) but I'm simultaneously so seriously bored that I have a hard time focussing on work because it's always the same.

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> I've seen such people

Me too: I've seen a kid (maybe 15-16) that has no A-level and dropped out of the 9th grade to work in a startup. Without any shares. I think he makes €10/hour maximum. I was 2 years older than him at that time and worked as a freelancer and had much more experience. Even 2 years earlier I had more skill than him. And I would never have considered to drop out of school back then because it's hilariously naïve. I can't understand how the startup could support it without any moral conflicts. Exploiting 15y/o and encouraging them to drop out is something I don't want to be involved in. But I guess this will happen a lot more in the next few years which is sad.

> Maybe it makes sense to encourage your kids to go into blue collar jobs.

Yeah, don't expect anything like a developer salary. Not even half of it.

My grandfather and my uncle have a blue collar company. They're operating with a 10% profit margin - sounds good, right? Wrong - if one of their employees is sick, they get into money problems really quick. Normally every employee needs to earn the company 2-3x of his salary to compensate for random events. They can't do that because the market doesn't allow them to - other people would do it for less than them and the quality is the same. Supply and demand will eventually lead to diminishing returns in all sectors. And if plumbing is too damn expensive, we have better incentives to automate the whole job.