Industry needs IT specialists and coders, and it is rapidly becoming clear they will need many more of them in the future. They are desperate for this kind of expertise, but in their eyes, these are very narrow, specialized jobs, not wide-ranging, creative skills, like their own managerial and executive knowledge. To them, these DP specialties are like welders and carpenters, or janitors. They require training, but no real intelligence, are not the truly intellectual activities that they see themselves as excelling at.

Its the classic business major mentality. THEY are the ones who take the risks, make the decisions, show TRUE creativity--what's the latest buzzword?---Innovation. They see themselves as true generalists, renaissance men, commanders, entrepreneurs, Captains of Industry. People who actually know how to do something are simple minded, narrow, limited--workers. The rest of us are just worker bees, employees. Our skills are interchangeable, plug-in, disposable and replaceable, and we are by nature lazy, greedy, larcenous, and not too bright. They can always acquire more of that commodity on the open market, or import them from overseas, or subcontract or outsource the work, even reconfigure the workplace itself so they don't have to depend on the rest of us, so they can deal with the real intellectual work; sitting around an office, shuffling paper spreadsheets and making lofty executive decisions.

These people forget that human labor means using human brains and hands to turn the resources of the earth into useful goods and services, everything else is just overhead. Sure, organizational and administrative skills, management and leadership activities are all a vital part of this, but they are not the only part, they aren't even the main part. Work cannot be divided into manual labor (shop)and intellectual brilliance (office). There is a very gradual and shifting boundary between the two. We have developed a managerial/executive class that has nothing but contempt for the vast majority of people that work for them. They just lump them all into "the 47%".

The sad thing is that these people (I call them "the business majors", but not all of them are in business, and there are many businessmen who are genuinely talented and committed) are so ignorant in how the world works that they can make that kind of absurd statement about coding and trigonometry. Trig is not like an ancient language we must learn merely to maintain an academic tradition. It is a vital part of the technology that has given us the Digital Age. Mathematics isn't something we have to suffer through in high school so we can take our first coding classes. These folks are so clueless that they don't understand that an education in mathematics has made the modern world of science, engineering and technology possible. Coding is a narrow skill with a short shelf life you should be able to pick up on the job.

It used to be that people worked themselves up to leadership positions in their industries by struggling up from the bottom, by learning the most basic skills in the factory and then undergoing a stern apprenticeship and stiff competition to make it to the executive suite. If you ran a railroad, you could do every job on that railroad. Today, we see management, or business administration, as an abstract frame of mind, an attitude you can pick up in college, or that you inherit from your parents or social class, or pick up at feelgood management seminars or read in inspirational executive hygiene manuals. Once you have it, you can operate any kind of business, at any level. So if you can run a railroad, you must be qualified to run a chain of supermarkets. Is it any wonder these people have nothing but contempt for the employees who work for them, that they see them as, at best, spare parts? They see themselves as the Makers, the Job Creators, the folks that matter, the people that make things happen. They imagine themselves a noble elite, those of us who just work here don't matter all that much--in fact, we're potentially dangerous.

We're in deep shit.