But this Silicon Valley stereotype isn't even geographically accurate. The Valley employs only 8 percent of the nation's coders. All the other millions? They're more like Devon, a programmer I met who helps maintain a ­security-software service in Portland, Oregon. He isn't going to get fabulously rich, but his job is stable and rewarding: It's 40 hours a week, well paid, and intellectually challenging. "My dad was a blue-­collar guy," he tells me—and in many ways, Devon is too.

Politicians routinely bemoan the loss of good blue-collar jobs. Work like that is correctly seen as a pillar of civil middle-class society. And it may yet be again. What if the next big blue-collar job category is already here—and it's programming? What if we regarded code not as a high-stakes, sexy affair, but the equivalent of skilled work at a Chrysler plant?