I've done everything from digging ditches, to being a mechanic, to corpse/biohazard cleanup, along with literally around 70 other manual labor jobs. Before finally after getting my back hurt and laid up for a year I spent that time learning Linux and system administration and on to programming eventually becoming systems administrator and as the job continued to change and evolve (though really the main difference is it's not a hair ball of PERL anymore) senior devops engineer, ended up as a team lead leading a team of devops engineers, moved on to owning my own succesful consulting agency providing devops ci-cd pipeline design implementation and maintenance. So you could say I'm part of the "laptop crowd".

My dad was a heavy equipment mechnanic in El-Paso repairing the hydraulics on earth movers and everything else any of the big equipment needed.

I appreciate that hard work as only someone who has done it can do, but the angst over supposed derision reminds me of the rhetoric that comes from that think tank owned, walking, talking piece of propaganda Mike Rowe (such a shame I liked his show). No one is deriding anyone. If you want the truth, most coders, and system admins love anyone who can work with their hands and spend a bunch of time on projects of their own, getting grease under their fingernails, or wood shaving in their beard, or welding sparks in their hair. Most of them day dream of a job where they make things they can hold in their hands. I still restore and build period correct choppers and hot rods, my friends in the industry weld, or blow glass, or work with wood. Working with our hands is a way to get away from computer work.

The truth is people in tech just don't think about these jobs because they haven't come in contact with the people working them.

With that said, the dumb and dirty finger nailed trope didn't leap into existence out of thin air, you may not like to hear this but, a hell of a lot of people working those jobs ARE dumb as hell and would work any other kind of job if they could learn how to do so. I worked with them, and many could not do anything else. Being able to hang parts, or being clever about aspects of their trade does not mean someone is smart, or knowledgeable it means they are good at what they do for 40 to 60 hours a week. Racism, addiction to stupid vices like dip, violence at home to their wife or children, DUIs, were common at practically every place I worked, and I would get shit for reading during my lunch breaks. If I had known I could use my ability to research, remember, and learn complex ideas to get out of doing manual labor sooner I would have, and I would probably still have functioning l3, and l4, discs.

Conversely there are plenty of smart and driven men who just can't stomach being cooped up inside all day, in my experience they ended up running their own work crews as a general contractor, or becoming a foreman, or like yourself drifting to the technical end of things, working on complex equipment that requires problem solving skills rather than just hanging parts. Either way I guess the point of my reply was to try to let you know you probably have the wrong idea about the laptop crowd in exactly the same way some of them have it wrong about people who work with their hands.

Apologies for any grammar or spelling mistakes, while I can do anything computer related, I started working at 15 as a roofer and never returned to formal schooling, so writing well is a weakness of mine.