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Comment by burger_moon | Hacker News Reader

I went the other way into programming from the trades.

Sometimes, especially when I read about people leaving this industry to go work in the trades it makes me nostalgic and miss working with my hands and building real things.

But I also have enough bad memories of shitty work conditions and waking up sore day after day to give me a gut check to stay put for a little longer.

> I don't think programming is the probkem. Anything you do 40 hours a week for other people will get to you just the same. Programming is a pretty sweet gig, all things considered.

Turning my hobbies in jobs killed off a lot of fun I used to have. I think it's pretty universal and why it should probably be more common to switch industries a couple times at least through your career to keep things fun and not stay in a burned out mentality forever.

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I also went from residential/commercial framing and remodeling into systems engineering/sysadmin. There are moments that really stand out on both sides, as you said. I distinctly remember packing the tools up one day and thinking about how the second floor of that house wasn't there that morning. It was a good feeling that has stuck with me for 15 years. But I also remember the days our crew was trying to eke out a few hours of work with a hurricane coming in because we needed the money. We had the walls and roof mostly up on a beach house so we could do some interior work without being directly in the rain. However, the end of one of our extension cords, the one running the skil saw, was sitting in a puddle of water that completely encircled the cutting bench. I remember being told to unplug it to pack up and having to move it out of the puddle with the handle of my hammer since it bit me a couple times.

I think what it boils down to is that, generally, software engineers/coders/sysadmins like to build things. When we don't get to build the things we want, the way we want to, it leads to a desire to get into woodworking. It's building things; its success is purely merit-based; and it's building the things that you want to build. I wouldn't recommend anyone go into construction (especially not commercial construction a la Office Space) from coding. It's joy is fleeting and infrequent and it ruins your body.

Framing seems a bit like a race to the bottom, because it's invisible to most people. Lots of software gigs are the same. Furniture is the opposite, and maybe some software is too

Yeah I did the same. I went from being an avionics/aviation electrician to college and then to being a software engineer. I hated being in the elements all the time so I wanted to have an officer job. Overall it's been good for me but I do miss working with my hands more.

> Turning my hobbies in jobs killed off a lot of fun I used to have.

Yep. I haven't really worked on any of my hobby projects like I had before.

> Turning my hobbies in jobs killed off a lot of fun I used to have.

Thank you. I have nothing else to add. I just needed to read that today.

> I think it's pretty universal and why it should probably be more common to switch industries a couple times at least through your career to keep things fun and not stay in a burned out mentality forever.

Isn't that years of education and work to start at the bottom again? If one has a family to support doesn't seem terribly feasible.

I've done over 10 years in the trades, and now 10 years in dev and am coming to the close of this chapter. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do, but I've been looking at a few projects that would be an intersection of the two.

I'd like to have another couple careers before I retire. The best part of a career is learning, getting it, then doing something as a journeyman and looking at your work and thinking, 'I got it'.

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