I found one of his best insights to be that the factory model has been shifting out of blue-collar work, where factories are automated and many people now work essentially as craftsman, into white-collar work, where much office work has become rote. (I would put programmers into the craftsman category.)

"Yet there is evidence to suggest that the new frontier of capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements. Paradoxically, educators who would steer students toward cognitively rich work might do this best by rehabilitating the manual trades, based on a firmer grasp of what such work is really like."

On the office environment: "Either you can bend conduit or you can’t, and this is plain. So there is less reason to manage appearances. There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outward and sustains a wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn’t quite so fragile."

On learning a hands-on trade: "Occupations based on universal, propositional knowledge are more prestigious, but they are also the kind that face competition from the whole world as book learning becomes more widely disseminated in the global economy. Practical know-how, on the other hand, is always tied to the experience of a particular person. It can’t be downloaded, it can only be lived."

There has been a lot of effort to try to shift programming into a clerical work mindset, a process to be Taylorized rather than a craft to be mastered. But given the nature of the work, there's a fairly narrow gap between "This kind of code can be Taylorized" versus "This kind of code can be automated out of human hands altogether".