Were Developers Blue-Collar All Along?

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy 🌞 Tuesday,

Welcome to my opinionated newsletter. This week’s insights

• 🗣️ Talk So the Business Actually Listens
• 🎯 Why Interviews Are a Game of Darts
• 🧭 Good Advice Fits the Giver, Not You
• 📊 The AI Pilot Is Over, Now Deliver
• 🎨 Enjoying Programming Is Still Allowed
• 🔧 Were Developers Blue-Collar All Along?
• 🖌️ Is Programming Just Another Art Form?
• 🧩 What Programming Is Really About
• 📐 Mathematicians Push Back on OpenAI’s Proofs
• 🔒 400 Hidden Open Source Vulnerabilities Fixed
• 👾 Doom, Running Entirely in SQL
• 💡 Skip the Details, Tell Me What Changes
• 💸 JetBrains: Revenue Up, Profits Down

📅 Rare! I’ll be at LeadDev Berlin on November 9 and 10, and I love LeadDev. Meeting people today is more important than ever. With AI changing engineering, what stays is your brand and people knowing you. Use the code AMAZINGCTO for €200 off standard tickets, and say hi if you’re there, for a coffee, a beer, or your opportunity to tell me where I’m wrong. Disclosure: AmazingCTO is also a media partner of LeadDev Berlin.

Good reading, have a nice Tuesday ❤️ and a great week,

Stephan
CTO-Coach and CTO-veteran

If you only read one thing

Speak the language of the people you want to reach (3 minute read)

Daniel has been smashing it with his articles on Reflacto (-cto?). Including this one. I see so many engineering managers struggling to get what they want because they use engineering language talking to business, but they fail. “So I think about two things first. What does the other person need? And what are their goals? I always do this, whether I’m talking to the board or to a colleague on the team.” MUST READ just like many more articles on the website, e.g. “Making the decision is not enough.”

https://www.reflacto.com/blog/speak-the-language-of-the-people-you-want-to-reach

Stories I’ve enjoyed this week

The Last Technical Interview (18 minute read)

“The outcomes from interviewing are statistically terrible. Google did wave upon wave of analysis over the years, and all the results were incredibly depressing. To name just a few off the top of my head: interviewers barely agreed with each other. Put the same candidate in front of two of our sharpest people and you’d routinely get a confident “strong hire” from one and a flat “no” from the other.” and “Interviewing, it turns out, is a big game of darts. A “do I like you” dating round.” MUST READ

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-last-technical-interview-bc13ddcf4564

Most advice is right for the person giving it — Coached Weekly (6 minute read)

“Steve Jobs gave a famous speech at Stanford, where he told graduates that the only way to do great work is to love what you do, and that if you haven’t found your passion yet, you should keep looking. Interestingly, Mark Cuban says the opposite: don’t follow your passion, follow your effort, because you’ll end up loving whatever you get good at.”

https://coached.com/essays/most-advice-is-right-for-the-person-giving-it/

State of Developer Experience Report 2026 (2 minute read)

“The AI pilot is over, but the hard work of operationalizing it has just begun.” This is what I see with many CTOs, experimenting is over CEOs want to see results, and CTOs struggle with setting up a process where Marketing can deploy to production. AI is out of the bottle, everyone wants to code, it’s not going back, but how to do this? Engineering is becoming a supporting role from being the primary role in many tech companies. Also:

“Engineering is becoming more about judgment than code” and “Very few organizations have a clear AI strategy”. Et tu Brutus?

https://www.atlassian.com/teams/software-development/state-of-developer-experience-2026

It’s still OK to enjoy programming - Blogomatano (3 minute read)

It is! And it is also OK to enjoy writing Japanese calligraphy. I like to write poems and published a book with poems (which didn’t sell quite as well as my Amazing CTO book though, I guess case in point).

https://chriskiehl.com/article/it-is-still-ok-to-enjoy-programming

Were we blue-collar workers all along? - Peter Bryant (3 minute read)

“Since at least the start of my career, software engineers have been considered white-collar. We work in offices at computers [..] But what if that assumption has been incorrect? What if we were actually blue-collar, skilled tradespeople all along?” There are not too many new thoughts around, and I do quite some searching to unearth them, I think this is a new thought here. What if we are blue collar workers, what if we need to treat the AI tech disruption from a blue collar perspective, not a white collar one? “We are the seamstresses lamenting the introduction of the loom. We are the lumberjacks worrying about chainsaws. We’re the accountants panicking about being replaced by Excel.” - the article argues there is no need to worry, it was all an illusion (though many many accountants, most, have been replaced by ERPs and Excel - read some studies if you’re interested, they are out there).

https://ptrbrynt.com/posts/were-we-blue-collar-workers-all-along

Programming Isn’t Special (9 minute read)

“Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?” Another take from the previous article, we’re not white collar workers, we are not blue collar workers, we are artists (we are not ;-) A long treatment of “programming is art” and artists resist AI, so should programmers (doesn’t matter). But some deeper thoughts on the topic. “Programming isn’t special. It’s just Art, and Art is the most human — and thus, the most universal — thing that there is.” I wonder what artists would say, or blue collar workers (see above).

https://blog.glyph.im/2026/10/programming-isnt-special.html

Yes, and… (12 minute read)

Another take on what programming is (all that soul searching!) “Computer programming is, fundamentally, about two things: Problem-solving using computers [and] Learning to control complexity while solving these problems” What most people forget, for the majority of programmers it is not relevant if programming survives, but if it survives at the current numbers - jobs and salaries. So most of these discussions miss the point. BUT the article has some good points about senior developers, judgement (again!) and juniors.

https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/

Mathematicians (2 minute read)

“Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI [..] released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics. Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.” So? “The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy” I don’t think mathematics needs some kind of legitimacy, either it is correct or it isn’t. But many professions whose role in society diminished want to save themselves into a gatekeeper function. It never works in the long term. “We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.” - well my mathematical understanding ends with a CS master, so ‘human’ understanding might be stretched. Are engineers becoming gatekeepers? Though I fear with AI my accountant is just reselling his insurance for tax statements (which I can’t get), some kind of arbitrage.

https://www.ahmath.org/statements

IBM and Red Hat Remediate More Than 400 Previously Unknown Open Source Vulnerabilities (6 minute read)

What unknown vulnerabilities are in your code? Some of my clients now run 24/7 QA (an agent) looking for bugs and security problems.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-10-06-ibm-and-red-hat-remediate-more-than-400-previously-unknown-open-source-vulnerabilities

We ported the original Doom to SQL (26 minute read)

Amazing hack!

https://cedardb.com/blog/sqldoom/

I don’t want the details (4 minute read)

BAM insight! I don’t learn too many things after 25+ years as a manager and 8+ years as a coach, but here is a new thought:

“Michael, I don’t want the details [..] I know that if we get into the details, the reasons will be perfectly reasonable. You’ll explain what happened, I’ll understand why everyone made the decisions they made, and I’ll empathise with you. Then it’ll happen again. So I don’t want the details. I want to know what we’re changing.”

https://michaelheap.com/i-dont-want-the-details/

JetBrains: Revenue, Profit, Employees & Net Worth | Helgi Library (2 minute read)

Revenue up for JetBrains, profits massively down due to hiring more expensive AI experts and cost increased due to tokens. I am surprised though that revenue is up.

https://www.helgilibrary.com/companies/jetbrains

What is Stephan doing?

Working on the idea of a new architecture, AppOS architecture. Why do you run code from developers who you don’t know on your phone but not code from marketing in prod? How can we copy the app store model (review) and mobile OS model (permissions) to enable Marketing to ship to production, while at the same time as CTO I can calmly sleep? My experiments involve Rust WASM apps in a Rust shell with app permissions and WASM manifests that you review. You only need to review the manifests (what the code is allowed to do), not what the code does.