Ask HN: Career in trades for possible ex-programmers
Heya HN, I was wondering. What trades jobs would best fit someone with 10 years of experience in software engineering, mainly fullstack web.
Look for jobs where your background gives you more of a leg up, and are done indoors, with a stronger emphasis on health and safety.
Things like:
Industrial Electrical
Automation Technician
Machine Operator
Millwright
Avoid jobs done for small crews with a more cowboy attitude, like most residential trades.
Trades work can absolutely destroy you. It’s also not really avoidable with good ergonomics - there are no good ergonomics. Some situations are just going to require you to do really physically awkward uncomfortable things to get the job done. There’s also the general slow erosion of health. Exposure to chemicals, saw dust, metal shavings, things getting in your eyes, getting poked by random nails, rolling over onto a bit of glass, tweaking your back trying to prevent a piece of lumber sliding off the roof, being constantly dehydrated and sunburned, etc. There is a reason tradesmen look like tradesmen. It’s the toll they pay.
I say this with lots of experience. I do a lot of trades work as a hobby, but the reality is in most cases it is labor of love. I'd be more efficient with my time and money by hiring it out.
This kind of work has turned out, in almost all cases, to be far more difficult and time consuming than I expected.
If you are burnt out. This is a good way to recharge. But the work is hard and it doesn't get easier.
Did this a few years ago and I it helped me get back to software engineering.
Turns out I'm a terrible farmer, but electrical engineering is actually a pretty good fit for me. Finished up my degree easily when I went back to school.
That said, I'll proudly wear my "off-topic" downvotes to nitpick that "find a spare house" sounds to me as affordable as "find a spare Ferrari".
Sent from my balcony-less apartment
you are in an apartment without a balcony, it is a relatively safe assumption that you are in a high cost of living area. at least relatively. your bike anecdote near confirms it.
if you were to look for a “spare house,” or rather a somewhat rundown but plausibly restorable house, without leaving your current location, you would likely be hard-pressed to do so.
if you were to expand your search, look in less valued areas, more rural, less desirable, you might be surprised the “finds” that are out there. for some, touring such a find may be enough to convince them that this is not actually their path.
a year without a job, by choice, is much more the measure of privilege here.
I agree, low paying hard work is not a good solution for boredom or a midlife/existential crisis.
Not quite 2 months ago I launched a residential handyman business (no website yet). My day job is in software engineering, but I also have the handyman work as a part-time thing. So far, it's working out pretty good. My weekend work is completely different from my M-F day job. One of the things I like about handyman work is that it's not all the same. It's a bit of carpentry, plumbing, and electrical combined in various ways. I'm not a licensed plumber or electrician (nor a contractor), so I steer clear of jobs that require them.
This is effectively what the OP is asking.
And honestly, I haven't met many things that I can't do when I put my mind to it. The real difficulty is doing them quickly.
The answers would be bad I guess, which I believe is your point :)
(New installation work is maybe less interesting, but if you're the sort of developer who enjoys logic-ing their way through understanding why a complicated, undocumented system is behaving the way it's behaving, and why did the last guy decide to connect this to that, a hundred year old house that's been gradually updated from knob-and-tube might be just the thing.)
But I won’t judge and I think I can help! I would recommend HVAC or electrical work for a programmer. I manage the software team of a relatively large trade company which specializes in these fields. Many of our electricians are hobbyist programmers. Having done field work with both electricians and HVAC technicians I can say that both fields will provide you with challenging problems, and a familiar diagnostic and repair process to fixing software. I think HVAC is much easier to jump in to compared to electrical work (and you will still work on low voltage electrical components) so I would recommend looking for work in that space.
HOWEVER this is extremely hard work. I would not willingly trade places with any of our electricians. While it can be very fulfilling and enjoyable for the right type of person, what you’re talking about is essentially taking less pay to do more and harder work. And in that sense I would urge you to reconsider. But if it’s something that truly truly interests you, HVAC should be really easy to get into as long as it’s an active industry in your area.
There's nothing quite as soul-draining as staring at a computer screen for 8 hours a day doing pointless, easy, busy work that actively makes the world worse and feels like being a slug.
IMO working with nature is a lot like programming. The genetic material (seeds) are like packages, the soil cycle is like memory management, and the water and sun are like your system's resources.
You get the satisfaction of building something beautiful (and eating it).
You are constantly learning about genetics, variants, processes and the language of plants.
There are role models and teachers creating new processes and testing theories (just like programming).
You are involving your entire body, puts you outside, and is amazing on your mind.
If you're looking to make money doing it, you could pick a high-value product like mushrooms, sprouts, or hot sauce and bring it to the farmer's market.
One thing I love about software is that I write it then run it and see the result. My turnaround time is often measured in seconds.
My garden? Weeks, at minimum, before I begin to see what results my work has wrought. Iteration takes months, if not years, depending on your climate.
However, it does feel very rewarding, doing something with your hands that results in something very tangible. Bringing in a bowl of lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes that you can immediately toss into a salad feels great.
If you're interested in a job in embedded you could learn it on the side. Buy a dev board (from one of the main vendors - ST, NXP or TI) and write an application for it. Learn the detail of developing for microcontrollers - setting up peripherals and clocks, debugging over JTAG, handling interrupts etc.
If you manage to get in front of a hiring manager with a couple of well executed open source low level projects along side experience in higher level languages, you'd have a good chance of getting the job.
Unit testing - and the modularisation that it forces you to do. It's great to unit test C not just because it tests your code well before it runs on hardware, but also because it's basically impossible without embracing dependency injection and modular "object oriented" C. Personally, working with a bunch of higher level languages - Rust, C#, Scala, Python - and the tooling that they have gave me a much better understanding of how things can be done. I'm a big fan of Ceedling - http://www.throwtheswitch.org/#download-section
Writing firmware which can target a desktop environment. The hardware dependencies should be a small part of the project, and easily replaced with fakes or simulators.
Having a CI pipeline which runs tests/linters/builds for you.
Those aren't necessarily easy to insert into an existing project though. Honestly I think the most useful thing is just building projects using other languages, and taking the best parts back into the low level code. It depends a bit what kind of projects you're working on - if it's mostly just glue between peripherals then these approaches are a lot less useful than if you're doing complicated maths or json parsing or higher level stuff.
The embedded world refuses to pay through.
The embedded world requires VERY specialized skills, and pays significantly less than enterprise webshit (let alone FAANG webshit).
I'd LOVE to get into embedded, but I can't afford to make 2/3 to half of what I make now.
The parallel here to "enterprise development" is the small companies that have one guy who knows C# or VB. Pay's also about the same, as is the (non-existent) level of process automation.
I agree with your point, but I don't want compare apples to oranges. The "embedded world" that's "crying out for people experienced in modern software teams" is the one that's doing large projects with teams of 5-20 developers, not the ones with one or two. If you want to find those teams you'll need to look at the projects that require lots of people like Defense or complex medical devices, etc.
I've been doing embedded systems for my entire career and TBH, I don't much care if a candidate has ever seen a dev board or used a logic analyzer. It's a nice to have, don't get me wrong, but I care a lot more that they understand SOLID, version control, unit testing, can speak intelligently about why they love or hate TDD, etc. We typically already have people with enough low-level experience to build hardware abstractions that the "enterprise people" can program to.
These days, someone who understands software security on interconnected systems is a much more interesting candidate than one who can bit-twiddle on an 8051.
(This assumes you aren’t currently at the very bottom tier of companies)
Most electricians easily work into their 60s so age should not be a factor. You will need to start off as an apprentice but given your demonstrated technical ability, I would hope you’ll be able to identify niche jobs within the profession that you will give you leg up for more rapid advancement.
And that comes after years of ditch digging and other labor intensive apprentice tasks.
About to start working on a personal project involving cement: making planters for small fruit trees.
The reason: to learn more about cement, since my plan is to set up concrete piers for a future cabin. And, to eventually learn masonry for making a concrete + rock house.
I do have a bit of back pain already from a desk IT job. However I am relatively fit and I think with more calisthenics I'll improve my back & ab muscles to reduce my back pain.
The troubleshooting and diagnosis, as well as a combination of tech skills and curiosity is intriguing.
However, like most trades it is gated on years being an apprentice and being an apprentice at an older age is not easy because of the tasks given to apprentices.
How does this help someone today?