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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

I’ve done both kinds of work on my own home. Calling it back breaking is pure hyperbole. Is it physical, certainly. But it’s something you can easily do until you’re 50 without issue and between 40 to 50, you can start taking apprentices that do the taxes that benefit from youth. Of the plumbers and carpenters I’ve hired, they are all in no worse shape than other adults their age.

I sit at a computer all day and it’s not good for my body either as I’m more sedentary than is healthy. I would say that my work is equally unhealthy but in different ways.

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Doing one-off projects on your own home is not equivalent to being a full time roofer or tile-layer, or even plumber or auto tech where you are constantly working on your back, hands, and knees.

I have my own home too and the times I’ve done my own plumbing work were hard. And that’s one of the physically-speaking easier jobs, never mind Roofing, I wouldn’t last a week.

My uncles a roofer and did it into his 40s but eventually started his own company when he wanted to stop carrying slate around on roofs in the miserable British winters. I think that's the usual progression - you're not literally laying tiles till you're 67.

Is starting a roofing company a viable career path for _every_ young roofer that wants to make roofing their career?

If not I think that still hits the "knees give out by 55" issue.

No, but supervising/managing is pretty viable. Also these aren’t FTSE100 companies, these are small groups of like 3/4 people who spin off and have a few commercial clients.

Relying on entrepreneurship for your livelihood and retirement as you age sounds like it'll only work for a select few

Unless there is massive population growth. Single older person can employ only so many juniors. Or other older people have to exit the market.

It's like a MLM spread across generations of workers. You recruit two workers and they recruit two workers each and then they recruit two workers each.... You even get to be your own {Personal Pronoun}Boss!

If you spend 2/3 of your career as one of the 2 underlings it's not MLM. Body is dunzo by say 50 for trades, which means you get 30 years as a tradesman and 15 years employing two tradesman. Retire at 65.

Or there's an increase in new buildings, or the number of buildings needing repairs increase over time, etc... With trades the number of self-employed or owners is quite high - you can either do Job A by yourself for $X for company Foo, or be self-employed and do Job A by yourself for $X++. Same number of jobs exist, just less monopolized by larger companies. I don't know why, but this is what I found in the south-west of England when I lived there. I think the experienced people tend to start those orgs to charge more then get older and need to hire apprentices to do the work for them, and so the cycle continues.

But not everyone in that business can build their own company unless every single one is an individual contractor. What about the other 80% of those trade workers who are laying tiles until retirement or their body fails them?

Working on something at your house is very different from doing it day in and day out, year after year. I have worked many manual labor jobs over the years and after just a few years started having constant pain in my knees, feet, and lower back. My father has been in a trade his entire life and in his late 50s, he was already having many physical issues from it. Not everyone can just take on an apprentice - especially since this article is stating that nobody wants to do these jobs.

I grew up in a family of laborers and this feels very far from my experience. Can you do this through your 50s? Yes, if you avoid a major injury (your risk of this is high in these jobs). Even if you do avoid injury, your ability to do the jobs starts to rapidly decline because doing a job like this day in and day out does take a toll on your body, even if a single day of work isn't back breaking.

More than 10% of tradespeople are addicted to painkillers. I suspect your weekend warrior projects do not qualify you to understand why.

How do you explain all the back, leg, joint problems of tradespeople? I hope you aren’t really basing this on sone work you did in your home. Surely, you know that is not representative of the day-to-day work of plumbers, etc?

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