So you think you could be an electrician?
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They all carried serious risks of bodily injury, and some far more so than others - but this is what's crazy to consider: the difference in wages we are talking is no more than $3 per hour. Meaning, that grunt work where you could lose your hand to a steel injection mold was $9, the teflon coating job where someone working third shift on the machine I ran was struck in the skull with the peg-end of a steel 72+ inch roller pin holding a full 300 yard roll of coated fabric, nearly (millimeters from), resulting in her having a steel plate surgically placed - that position paid a whopping $12 in 2014.
I've worked as a line cook, over 5 years, and as a driver, 6 years. None of these paid well, and all are inherent of risks. It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
I've worked physical labor too, though never in a factory. More like lugging baggage and cleaning toilets. Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
It comes down to rarity of skill. Not to be to crass about it, but when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand.
For example, I spend a lot of time in hotels when I was young. Just finding people who were reliable and trustworthy and legal enough to drive the airport van without wrecking it were like 1 in 10 of the people who were potentially eligible to do it. If you were able to do rudimentary math and not steal from the till, you were one of the "lucky" few who got to work at the front desk. If you showed up regularly, well, the world was your oyster.
Good points, I figure it's interesting from both sides hearing the others' perspective.
Finding employees who were legal to drive, insurable, at least somewhat able to avoid accidents, and reliable enough to show up to work was a constant hassle.
Not a coincidence they are also known as the clients with the longest driveways.
The long driveway folks have mitigated these risks to the point companies will pay cover the time cost, not to mention travel costs and meals, overnight stays, and add to that the willingness to pay for professional limousine service to take them to and from the airports.
I say all this as observations, not even trying to bring bias into this. Would I like to see some balancing of the scales? sure, but it probably needs to start with constructive discussion around the topic. I don't see it talked about nearly enough.
The number of programmers I know with back issues like herniated discs is larger than those without. It's a different risk, no doubt, but it's real nevertheless.
Most if not all programmers certainly would have the time to do stretching, gymnastic, sport - develop and maintain the right muscles and take brakes when needed. Most are just too lazy.
A guy breaking his back on a construction site does not have this choice - if the job requires him to lift heavier things than he safely can carry - then his only real choice is to quit.
Most programming folks I know sit so long, it screws up their back and ability to exercise. Rinse, repeat.
It’s a common issue for drivers too.
Part of why I left the industry.
Same with truck drivers.
If your job is cool with it, good for you.
Sciatica screws up your ability to exercise.
And I luckily had not had so many company office jobs, but in those I had, I absolutely could stand up and walk around and do some stretching if I needed it. And even in the worst coding monkey enslavement camps, you can probably have toilet breaks.
Sure, if everyone did yoga before getting injured maybe they’d never get injured.
But if they’re injured, what exactly do you think their options are here?
You seem to be projecting a unrelated problem your ex had onto everyone. This isn’t bloody gums.
And notably, you could 90% tell the computer workers at the climbing gym by the anterior pelvic tilt - and yoga only did so much.
I have never said anything about my ex. And you seem not interested in the original argument - exercise before your body is messed up due to physical inactivity is usually possible. If it is too late, it is too late.
my point is, once someone is messed up, especially in the current job market, it’s too late to tell them that eh?
Or to build muscle to avoid the issues. I know it first hand, herniated disks and no working out while people who do work out turn out ok. Gene and other variance to be taken into account.
Heavy physical labor with no place for rest and stretches in between is however much better at messing you up, than a work when you can pause every 15 min and do 60s of stretching. + Do 5 min of yoga before and after work. + A standing desk to stand 15min per hour. + A HÅG Capisco style chair that forces you to change position every 10 minutes (it's somewhat uncomfortable), but due to its build, allows like 4-5 different positions out of the box.
R in RSI is for repetitive.
It's wild sometimes the level of man child bubble the average HN poster lives in.
In order to do everything needed so that no one calls you lazy, the day would need 80hous.
Otherwise said, if you called a hard working guy who also cooks and spends time with kids lazy, because they also did not do yet another optional activity on the regular, maybe you should not.
Those 15 min is actually quite a lot if you don't have the habit yet. But you're in a better situation than someone working at a slaughter line, with no time to scratch your nose for 2h15min in between brakes not long enough to eat, use bathroom and sharpen your knives for the next 2h15min run.
I still feel sorry for your herniated disk, I don't think it's just your laziness, but more ignorance and equally lazy ignorant surroundings normalizing unhealthy lifestyle.
But you can't say someone that can get up and stretch for 30s every 15 min has it as bad as people running to the toilet and eating by swallowing big bites just to make it in time before the next animal comes to their position in line.
So I could have probably made it more clear that my judgement was not absolute, but anecdotally. But I have seen many IT guys.
And I also know plenty of ripped folks who hardly ever cook. Granted, they don't only eat fast food, but quite a lot of it.
Civilised countries have laws prohibiting this. Here in Denmark it's arbejdsmiljøstyrelsen (bless you), and OSHA in USA.
The difference between office and construction workers is that the former probably have more control over the situation but the damage is so slow they only realize too late, while the latter have too little control most times even if they are acutely aware of the immediate risk. They are the people who can’t afford to protest, lose the job, go to court, etc. and usually the informal requirements are shaped in such a way that in the end it looks like their own decision to forego safety concerns.
But an office worker can be under similar pressure to deliver day after day, and ruin their muscles, spine, eyes, joints, psyche in the process. Just less abruptly.
And that was my point, a office worker can get stressed a lot - but when they make a misstake they have to compile again(and maybe consider quitting), not go to the graveyard, because they fell to death.
Otherwise sure, heart attacks can happen as well. And burn out is real, too. But the work itself is not physically dangerous.
I was the Health and Safety Representative at a previous job site, with a lot of different nationalities. Of course I can't generalise all of them, but I noticed that eastern europeans usually had way more disregard for job safety than Danes. There was one guy from Hungary especially who I had to reprimand at least weekly for doing stupid acrobatic shit on ladders. And we usually weren't even under time pressure, he just had barely any regard for his own safety. It was maddening. I would have fired him if I had authority to do so.
Worker in the US do not have substantial protection. It's limited to penalizing employers and even that almost never happens.
Atleast half of trade jobs in the US expect you to break OSHA and labor laws regularly as part of the job. If you don't there are enough other desperate people to replace you.
Five to ten minutes a few times a week, and I've not had a back problem in years.
It's a simple and easy way to keep a healthy baseline. Good for all sorts of physical and mental issues. I feel like shit if I've not done them for a while.
It helps, no doubt.
But it's not bullet proof either. A buddy of mine, very active guy, runner, cyclist, rower, tennis, swimmer, works out 10x a week, hikes 2 weeks in the rockies every summer. If anybody knows about warmup and stretching and all that, it's him. Has been a programmer for 20 years. Herniated disc took him out a year ago, still recovering.
What I'm saying is that stretching is going to give you a very good defence against back problems. Been totally life-changing for me.
I once had a coworker 24 years old but he barely ate and barely slept. In a few years he has injuries everywhere that didn't go away.
One guy I know fell down 10 meters onto his back then got up and went back to work. He looks exactly like someone like that.
I've met a surprising number of manual laborers who seemed to believe you can build or repair something without materials.
Much like office workers who think ergonomics is something that comes after ruining your body.
This doesn't even look real
A lot of tech is basically a treadmill. You’re never finished. It is no wonder people burn out mentally.
Something like cybersecurity? Great, we made it through today, tomorrow will be worse. Repeat until something bad happens.
My knees and back might last longer though.
Just like a construction worker should observe H&S to minimize accidents, the office worker should get up regularly and exercise but, again in both cases, ignorance, carelessness or a heavy handed boss are rampant.
I don't think anyone here is unaware of this, it's more that maybe, purely relying on supply and demand leads to unfair outcomes...
And I don't think anyone here is unaware of this either. Peoples abilities (actual or potential) will forever be variable and fall on some sort of standard distribution.
There will never be equality in outcomes.
No matter how many people are are able and willing to do some "low-skill high-risk" work, their salary should reflect the fact they are taking on a risk. Taking that risk should be valued and rewarded by society.
This is not about equal outcomes, it's about fair compensation. If someone risks their life and damages their body in a mine every day, it's absurd and insulting that I make more than them sitting in an air-conditioned desk typing on a keyboard.
What’s the point of this? Talking about fairness or how things should be doesn’t do anything. How do you actually accomplish it? Without some notion of what could be done, it’s akin to complaining about the weather.
But sure, if you want, there are plenty of ways. Mandatory bonuses for higher-risk or generally physical labour would be one easy start, although it likely wouldn't be as effective in practice as one would like it to be. Restructuring the way people are paid as a whole is a more effective solution, which could cover other aspects too, although it would obviously be less popular with The Shareholders™ and therefore more difficult to pass. It's all a matter of legislation - every sane country has a law that says what the salary may or may not be based on, various limits (e.g. minimum wage), bonuses and modifiers... Maybe take inspiration from some countries' public sectors and make salaries fully standardized with a big lookup table and a bunch of modifiers based on objective or at least measurable parameters?
You propose a legal requirement to pay these people more. That will indeed solve the problem of unfairly low pay for these jobs. It will also create a problem of reduced hiring for those jobs and reduced output, possibly substantially reduced depending on how much more they have to be paid.
In short, you can mandate that lumber mill workers must be paid more, but you have to accept that less lumber gets produced and fewer people get paid to work there.
But this isn't nearly as bad as you're making it sound. Lots of things used to be done by extremely low-wage workers or even slaves, and haven't gone away now that workers have to be paid better (or at all). Obviously many of those people are still paid very poorly and there's lots of work left to do there, but we improved things to a noticable extent and we didn't really suffer any bad effects. We can go further.
And no, not that much. Automation is of course a factor, but it came at different times for different things and don't forget that it often made things worse for workers, at least where or when they didn't have institutional support.
Having institutional support for workers (unions and a pro-labour government) is what ultimately matters. Even if some prices go up and some jobs are lost, such institutions help smooth out the transition and put pressure on businesses which would otherwise jump at the opportunity to also increase their margins.
My problem is that "it's unfair" turns it into a value judgment. Then when someone is skeptical that it can be improved without making things worse overall, or worse when someone is skeptical of a particular proposed solution, that gets turned into a moral failing.
If you perceive disagreement over the fairness of paying people badly for risky jobs, I think it's because it's so basic that people just skip over that. A small child can identify unfairness. The interesting and difficult part is what to do about it.
[0] actual number would vary by culture, nation and technological time period
It would be akin to saying its unfair humans can’t fly due to gravity
I'm not saying any of those specific examples would be better than the current, but they're definitely options that exist and they're just words on a page passed by parliament, just like the current system is.
Hell, some of those things already exist in the public sector [0]. My base salary is calculated based on my job title and level of education, automatically adjusted with cost-of-living inflation, with modifiers for years of experience, job performance, being on-call, mentoring, working non-standard hours or weekends, dangerous conditions...
[0] I'm only familiar with some EU countries, not sure how this is done in the US or wherever else
There was a massive famine I didn't know about in the mid-to-late 1990s in NK, and millions died. During this period, an underground capitalism took over, where people were producing food in various ways, often grown in their own gardens, and then buying and selling from each other, with barter rates / prices determined by availability.
While I agree with you that countries can make rules that fix prices (or do whatever they want), there is an underlying set of mechanisms to supply and demand that are not derived from law, but logic. If I have 5 cupcakes, and there are 100 people that want them, unless someone points a gun at me and says "Sell them each for 5 cents" (while the 100 people all fight over who gets to pay), the natural incentive structure would essentially be an auction to figure out who is willing to pay the most, and then sell it to them. That's not some legal theory or set of laws, but rather the human condition.
Of course, it doesn't play out this way in reality. In reality, it all comes down to power, and those with power take whatever they want, but my point here is that supply and demand exist outside of a legal structure, and if there's only one electrician, and there's enough work for 10 electricians, that one electrician can server the richest 1/10 of those in need (and charge accordingly to select that 1/10), and it is rational to do so independent of any laws made. So much so, in fact, that laws are advisory, but the fundamental incentives are inherent.
This is why I like incentives more than rules: they're less brittle.
I'm not saying I have the magic formula for how to codify such crimes and what punishment would be appropriate, but it took us hundreds of years to figure out how to effectively deal with even very basic crimes (and some countries still struggle with those).
Why does a kid in kindergarten that hoards all the crayons for himself get told off, but buying all the masks during a pandemic to sell at an insane profit was considered valid economic activity? We have arbitrarily decided that various tiers of "being an asshole" are somewhere between ssocially unacceptable and criminal, but if you're making money, being an asshole is fine. We can change that.
As far as I am concerned unskilled labour always has a lower value than skilled labour due to supply and demand.
Layering on laws and regulations does not change that.
But yeah, if "as far as you're concerned", what defines value is only the price under an unconstrained suppy-demand system, then this discussion won't go anywhere.
If by "supply and demand" you mean all supplies have positive and reasonably sized elasticity, and all demands have negative and reasonably sized elasticity, through all reasonable price ranges...
Some niche cases include any kind of labor, anything that comes out of a factory with economies of scale, and anything that involves land or extraction of natural resources.
There was a great tweet recently:
"There is a reason the babysitter that shows up 100% of time makes more than double the babysitter who only shows up 80% of time"
He'd call in sick about once a week, but because he wasn't an opioid addict, his boss considered him "the reliable one".
I worked in an engine-casting plant where a klaxon would warn before molten steel was dumped, covering walkways with spark-like droplets. Loud AF in that facility, BTW, so the klaxon was near-deafening.
Meanwhile, I met a programmer who insisted that a games area (ping pong, etc) was normal in a workplace, as he'd never worked anywhere without one (says he).
Many of us sitting with poor posture in our climate-controlled offices really don't touch earth with the wide range of job reality out there.
I remember reading about the life expectancy of people who have worked construction all their working lives. The life expectancy in this same was (IIRC) 59. The life expectancy of the guy who owns the construction company was over 80.
So who exactly is taking a risk here?
To your point, you can look at an awful lot of incredibly dirty and dangerous jobs in undesirable locations and they pay surprisingly bad. As an example, underwater welding on North Sea oil rigs pays $100-160k. That is an incredibly dangerous job that wrecks your health. Even if there isn't a risk of acute injury or death, often it wrecks your body. And this fact also gets lost every time the idea is resurrected of raising the retirement age. How exactly is a construction worker or an airport baggage handler meant to work until 68 instead of 65 exactly?
On top of all that, the people who are getting paid very little in a possibly dangerous job can often cost a fortune if they screw up. International shipping tends to use fairly low paid sailors from countries like The Phillipines. The cost of a screw up can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when they might be earning as little as $30.
I've known people who believed they would never live past 20. I've also known people who want to live to 200. The difference in mentality between the two as well as the different approach to life is large. IMHO, the difference is directly comparable to working for what you need for the day/week vs saving for when you are 80.
Frankly, if you had just enough money to simply retire, would you risk it on employing folks who drink themselves to death, wreck expensive equipment, take responsibility for as little as possible and generally don't care about your bottom line? ... or would you retire?
It's easy to frame the owners of capital as the bad guy when you act like they are the Monopoly man but most businesses are small businesses and sole proprietorships.
Contrary wise, most Capital is a problem for many because most of the capital (literal trillions) is tied up in the hands of a very few individuals and boards who are exerting an undue influence on hundreds of millions.
And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.
Frankly, too many people like to talk about risk taking in fairly low risk situations.
When you look at capital and risk, the risk are not that large. And economic policy favorwed capital over labor literally for decades on top of it.
> One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
The standard answer is: but the others could do the same thing. Well, if everybody tried to become a capitalist at all costs then we'd be in a pretty bad place.
> But nobody answers the question of why that would allow them to treat others like basically slaves.
That’s nuts. The industrial barons of 19th century America neither worked hard nor took amazing risks. They were lawyers and bankers who manipulated stocks and broke unions.
I live in neither the 19th century nor in America. The wealthy people I know all earned everything over the past three generations - three generations ago my people were completely devastated and many started off with no more than the single torn shirt they fled with.
The capital owner risks his status, the laborer risks his life.
But in the middle we do have an increasing problem of trust fund kids dominating industry. Hollywood is an obvious example. But even in the startup world, your education matters an awful lot. And you going to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale has a lot to do with elite private schooling and all of it has a ton to do with the luck of birth not merit.
I'm actually curious who you think risked their fortune? Is it anyone in particular or is it just some romanticized idea? Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Jeff Bezos's parents had a quarter million in retirement savings to lend him in the 1990s and he was playing with investor money after that.
Now wealth creation seems to be taking other people's money and buying up industries with inelastic demand to extract wealth from ordinary people. Housing, medical care, vets, utilities, that sort of thing.
And then there's slavery and its aftermath. How much generational wealth was created from slavery? Even a century after Emancipation, we had the government creating wealth for white people with the GI Bill post-WW2. Free college and cheap mortgages. Who was taking a risk there?
You get sufficiently wealthy and you aren't allowed to fail. The government will bail you out.
That’s the thing about pension schemes like American social security: they were originally set with a retirement age that matched mean mortality, so half of potential recipients would die before drawing on them. In other words, half of workers were not meant to retire, and the half that did would be protected by the contributions of all. Modern medicine completely changed those expectations, keeping the elderly alive twenty years longer and making twenty years of unproductive, publicly funded retirement an expectation and entitlement for everyone. It’s political suicide to discuss whether something should change about that.
The number of men who make it to 65 after having made it to 21 is about 20% higher than it was in 1940.
And the average remaining lifespan for men reaching 65 is about 3 years higher than in 1940.
These factors certainly change the calculations, but the size of the baby boomers is a much larger factor.
Anyone who advanced that ‘defense’ has a poor understanding of economics.
Risk is not an essential element of capitalism. Some investments are effectively risk free. ‘Disproportionate’ return seems to be something you’ve just made up. There’s no mention of the proportionality of returns in any economic treatise I’ve ever read.
Lastly, there’s nothing to defend. There’s simply the observation that if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital. Nobody has ever come up with a working alternative.
As for defences - capital is just political power by other means. If the capitalist is wasting money on yachts while workers can't afford food and housing, the return is morally disproportionate, and the usual outcome is socially catastrophic, in various possible ways.
Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences. That's a shockingly stupid way to run anything - as we're all about to find out.
It is people who ALWAYS reduce everything to personal opportunism (no matter capitalism or not). Capitalism is the smartest way to run anything exactly because it is build on concepts of broader consequences of that fact.
Untrue. Capital accumulates. People have desires for their world/society/community beyond their own wealth. They want to see certain things happen, and owning capital puts a person in a position to influence whether it does (or does not).
> Some investments are effectively risk free.
Yes, and the returns on those are close to inflation (that is: minimal). A high risk investment like an IPO might return 300% in its first quarter, but it is far more likely to falter or fail (-100%).
> There’s no mention of the proportionality of returns in any economic treatise I’ve ever read.
Time to read your first one, then.
If someone starts running a company at 20 years old and goes bankrupt at 40, they can't simply go back to working a regular job. They don't have a resume, they sacrificed 20 years of career progress. They'll be working at Walmart while their peers who got the same education and have the same intelligence are becoming partners at law firms or investment banks.
Capital has no special position here.
The capital class doesn't need you to defend them. You're embarrassing yourself.
That's power for ya. It comes with all kinds of perks.
What's crazy about it? Do you mean it's crazy that people chose to work a dangerous job when a safe job was available for not much less?
I find this worrying because the entire economy is built on the idea of cheap physical snd cheap unskilled labor. So if we do a good job educating, we’ll need to fill these jobs by paying more rather than preying on the desperate. And I don’t see the current world being willing to pay more.
During the restaurant years I was also going to college for computer science and ultimately dropped out halfway through to do remote R&D work for a silicon valley gig making a whopping 500 bucks a week (living in FL)...Than covid hit and the boss went back to Korea.
Now I make 12.50 an hour repairing and designing boutique tube amps in KS
This is my first composition (in the merrie melodies style). Inspired from getting drunk and watching my ferrets play around the house and "hunt" the cat and lose.
I don't know your experience but I wish I could have gone to a serious music school even if I never played professionally. I suppose you've heard that before. A cousin of mine did that for piano - they knew they weren't good enough for the very few performing jobs in their instrument, hadn't started young enough, etc., but they pursued it through the undergraduate level and lessons beyond that. (I wasn't nearly good enough for music school.)
I was shocked when I learned about the age thing. I thought my cousin was exaggerating and asked an accomplished professional musician and teacher at a leading music schol about it. They agreed with my friend absolutely - unless someone starts as a child, they couldn't advance far enough.
Luckily, I survived it all without serious injury. What I discovered affected me the most was business OVERHEAD, the cost of doing business. I had 8+ employees in the mail order business plus a lease space, numerous expenses, huge overhead. With the lake pump business I had day labor guy I paid only on days I needed him. I was quite able to be the chief salesman, website creator and manager, head diver, head electrician and plumber, etc. Lowest overhead of anything I ever got involved with, consequently the most successful. Huge savings for retirement, mortgage paid off, no debt, got a Rivian on order. Rec diving in Asia and the Caribbean with my son, kiteboarding in Costa Rica. Blue collar made me successful.
On the other hand, my son is a degreed comp. sci grad who got hired just before machine learning became a thing, his company gave him the title of "senior engineer" recently instead of a raise, in fact, his salary raises have stopped, luckily he still has a job.
This is a big part of the reason you see so many successful immigrant owned businesses. The owners (and family) work nonstop.
the high-paying jobs are for reliance under obscurity: part of a very big deal, and if you screw up you ruin everything, and it's hard to know if you screwed up. That's everything from CEO's to investors and researchers, teachers, and yes, some tradesmen.
If you want to reduce wages, increase transparency.
When I lived in Portland there was a bloke in my building who did this—cutting trees over the edges of cliffs to make way for construction of some sort—and got paid a grip for it. Then he'd come back and for two weeks blow his wad on weed, alcohol, and women—only to go out and do it all over again on the next job.
Invariably, the following happened:
- I was given grunt work as a I was the new/junior guy
- Did this for about 1.5 weeks
- After the above, someone (usually the owner's wife) would say something like: "Instead of Alex doing grunt work, why doesn't he helps us <fix technology thing>"
And that ranged from "order us a new computer" to "fix the North American Controls lumber sorter machine".
My point is: Being able to solve complex problems is a surprisingly transferable skill. It's so transferable that even in the trades, if you can solve those problems, people will identify it and rapidly move you to the most complex problems they have.
Edit: or more fun, if you twist the end of a flexible wire (so that you can stick it into a clamp easier) the little threads cut each other while tightening it and wiggling the cable breaks them. It's like a person can stand on your hand without pain but if you cross your fingers first....
You can split hairs on my metaphor here but don't miss the point. There's no scarcity of labor to correctly install safe wires, whether it is in datacenters or homes or electronics, nor scarcity of innovations in logistics or whatever to transfer that labor from places where it is cheap to places that need to build. It's all guild feuds.
There’s a lot more to it than laying wires, and the union has negotiating power for good reason.
The truth is I would rather choose from 100 varied vendors - if prefab were permitted in San Francisco, you would be able to buy it from anyone - than to be forced to endure the shitty alternative of simply unpermitted work, or the kind of work that my lunatic licensed electrician neighbor does, which has burned down just as many walls as in your total hypothetical that has never happened.
Somewhere in amongst those posts, his wife posted some selfies of them at their kids' Harvard graduation.
They very much want the Eloi and the Morlock, and are counting on law enforcement/military/ICE to keep the Morlock in check. "My kids need to go to college, yours need to learn how to fix their cars and build them new homes."
The exact formula will change depending on the scenario. Maybe it is a prompt email, maybe it is getting a beer and giving someone a pieceof your mind. Most important, it is knowing when to do which one.
You seem to believe it's all about pleasing people and you seem to assume that everyone has a much bigger ego than they really do.
I would instantly hate working with anyone who tries the shit you're thinking of. That's untrustworthy behavior.
I realize now that maybe you're speaking from inexperience or an unwillingness to judge people to tailor your message? Sorry, but there's no way to avoid the pain of that. The best communicators really are necessarily sociopaths. If you value your sanity, you need to find the level you're comfortable with without becoming that and know when to turn it off.
HARD disagree. Great communicators are empathic. Obama had tremendous speaking skills, and so was George W. Bush. Trump is sociopathic, and not a single speech he's ever made will be treated as seriously worthy of preservation.
With that, never having a reason to intrinsically develop that sense of solving complex problems is one of the biggest heartbreaks to come along with AI.
This is another good point:
being good at solving problems is different than being good at a specific technical skill.
e.g. there is a reason patio11 has his "don't call yourself a programmer" [0] post.
0 - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
There is the house wirer, the panel builder, automotive electrician, HV, marine, drilling, industrial, maintenance etc etc.
Some kinds pay better, others yield work almost wherever you go, others lend themselves to starting your own business better.
It is nowhere near as homogenous as often described.
A good many I've known have pulled cable and slogged for several years, invested in shitty old house after another (renovating and flipping), transitioned into running electrical subcontracting companies, and "retired" out of trades and into software careers (in GIS or other domains) in their mid thirties to early forties.
Neither trades nor university education are lifetime commitments or mutually exclusive.
look my brother is an electrician. I do this work too, but for a different reason: in my area they make as much or more than mid level software engineers, so when it's about adding a breaker box they want 8k and if it's not absolutely perfectly easy they might still drop the job. enough of them do and eventually you do it yourself.
obviously, it's quite different for the ones that gotta go daily for a lot less pay, like my brother, and while it doesn't tax your mind as much as tech companies, you do have a tax on the body. plus, they always do quite a bit more than just the electrical wor
If you’re in the US, the top 10% might. But the median residential electrician certainly does not.
Where's that? In the US the median annual wage for electricians was $63,190 in May 2025 whereas it's $135,980 for software engineers.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric...
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Larger organizations come with more specialization and greater resources, but you will never find a jack of all trades there.
Had a kitchen fire caused by an appliance in the middle of the night a couple of Januaries ago. Was a complete nightmare to deal with which basically ended up redoing much of my interior because of smoke. Insurance covered a lot, but it took a lot of time and something north of $50K out of pocket.
In other words, the customers are awful. I sell and run commercial and industrial electrical work, I’d rather go do something completely different as a career than deal with homeowners, flippers, and residential GCs. The work itself has zero challenge and requires almost no thinking, it’s not hard to pull and fish romex through finished walls.
Working for BigCo you never get that stuff because anyone who wants to screw you has to go through BigCo's legal team to do it.
The speed needed by a residential electrician is very different than the long-term outlook you hear from industrial electricians (“label that box because the next guy to service it could be you”).
Another recurring trope is the perceived hierarchy between the trades. I lose it when a plumber is described as a “turd herder.” And drywallers get no respect.
I find this especially unfortunate given that, in my experience, drywallers understand the rest of the trades far better than vice versa, since they're in the position of being able to see everyone else's completed work.
But you can probably tell the difference between it and a crappy version.
In my apprenticed ignornance, I figured I was "doing the gypsum guys a favor" (by not cutting large holes everywhere) but it turns out cutting larger holes made both trades' lives easier.
Making a large cut-out "disappear" is actually much easier to conceal than a smaller opening.
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That, and wet sanding (it's incredible how many people dry sand - all the dust!).
Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing contractors need to understand the most since their work goes all over the building and they’re on the project from start to finish.
Drywallers just come in and put up gypsum once walls have been framed and MEP has been roughed in, and then they leave.
Tapers and mudders command my respect, that’ a difficult trade to perfect. Holding up 4’ x 8’ sheets of gypsum and screwing it to studs might be hard work but it’s dead ass simple.
This is incorrect; they know what my hammer means. Not just anybody's, mine.
–(former data center) Electrician
“This is my hammer, it would do you well to remember it. If you don’t bury my boxes, you will not see my hammer again. If you bury my boxes, I guarantee you will see and feel my hammer. The decision is yours.”
Any attitude (or challenges e.g: "there's no j-box there meeeeester") and out comes my Dead-On™ clawhammer (it's over 2ft long) -- "there it is!"
It’s dead ass simple when 95% of the walls extend beyond the grid, there’s very little hardlid ceiling in most commercial spaces.
Professional drywallers have panel hoists that can lift drywall 12’ tall.
I became a licensed ship's electrician a decade and change after doing my MSc in RF design - turned out that in the line of work I stumbled into, doing control systems for heavy offshore equipment, it was a massive benefit to be able to work hands-on on the systems during commissioning, rather than pointing at the stuff which needed doing and trying to agree with some poor guy I more often than not did not share a language with as to what I meant.
The supervisor at the local trades office had a laugh at that when I called and asked if I could get to take the test(s) based on relevant work experience rather than by having served a conventional apprenticeship.
Most often, the ones asking to take that path had started working as cable pullers and helping hands at fifteen; having an MSc ask was... ...uncommon.
It was quite the experience learning HOW to do all the stuff I knew needed doing.
Anyway - I can now do all sorts of rather competent work on a ship.
I'd be utterly useless (as well as in violation of the law) if I ever attempted to do anything in a house.
The latter has been very helpful - seeing as I've been asked often whether I can help out friends and relatives with electrical installations at home, seeing as I'm an electrician and all.
Sorry. Against the law. Phew.
And the skill you learn, you can use it to build your own house and save money.
White collars usually aren’t that good at manual work, at least not to professional levels.
I think one problem is thinking of the trades as a place where you put people not (good|competent|intelligent) enough to go through college. (Some people's conception of the armed forces makes the same mistake.)
Go a generation or two back and in the UK, we had a much clearer separation between working and middle class, for example one got paid weekly or hourly wages, the other got paid a monthly salary. The trades themselves were divided into skilled and unskilled. While it made a huge cultural difference which class you were from, a good skilled trade could easily make you more money than a clerk job. (Bob Cratchit was middle class!) An unskilled day labourer such as a stevedore might live from hand to mouth, an engine mechanic could usually afford to raise a family and afford a place to live (in a working-class area).
The people I don't trust are the ROTC lot. They had everything they needed to get into college, and then still decided their skillset was best applied committing atrocities. They're vastly more likely to be some jingoistic nut than the average highschool-to-bootcamp pipeliner.
Federal Certificate of Vocational Training in Information and Communication Technology
It’s a 4 year high-school apprenticeship and you have to work under a licensed professional during your apprenticeship during those 4 years.
I had such apprentices on my team. It’s a good system.
Another guy I know started his career as a cabinetmaker but dropped out of his apprenticeship to go into software development. He didn't have what it takes for that and now he is unemployed.
Moral of these stories? Everything depends on your abilities and interests. Hitting the books and going after a white collar job works well if you're smart. But there a lot of frustrated white collar workers out there doing meaningless work or (with AI at the moment) getting laid off. Many would be better off doing a trade.
That part is very important. I have seen very smart people failed to understand how truly software developer works. They just do not care. They try, as it is a good profession, but deep inside they cannot care less.
They do well. It is not like they cannot do the job. But here is no passion, they know the basics, and were they shine is in solving business problems even if their code/architecture is not very good.
In Sweden companies sometimes forbid employees of doing passion projects. They kill that same drive from the inside, but their desire for controlling workers is bigger than to actually have a successful company.
Passion is hard to come by, enjoy it.
The demand will also drop through the floor because the people who previously had the well-paying white collar jobs who are a large amount of the non-corporate customers for trades people will be gone, so they can no longer afford to hire you. The corporate customers will have far less need for facilities other than data centers because they won't have nearly as many meat employees to house, so the demand craters there too.
And some amount of the other people fleeing to the trades will have taken up your specific trade, and why would they pay someone to do something they can do themselves.
So you'll have massively increased labor supply as everyone flees to these "AI safe" jobs and massively decreased demand due to a flattened low-wage economy where almost everyone is trying to scrape by on a trades job.
If the AI labor disruption is big enough to cause a serious problem for all knowledge workers, I don't see how it doesn't take everything else down with it. The entire economy as we know it just spirals into chaos leading to, probably, violent revolution.
I mean then they will start to sell their homes and situation for those who can buy them cheaply and renovate will become even better, no?
Also the COVID part is a false analogy / non sequitur. COVID was expected to end. Surviving COVID doesn't mean the economy can survive permanent shocks.
Not permanently. And, as sibling pointed, not at all in lots of areas.
That is pretty obvious and mostly correct idea. I don't understand why people who have even a little bit of common sense about how the economy works thinks that mass layoffs of programmers or office workers will destroy the economy.
The value of human labor is going to the price of electricity and raw materials outside of a few, small realms and people are not ready for that fact.
These can be trucked or flown into place.
Factory built simplifies full trade critical path, with pipeline schedule of custom variations moving through to be wired, plumbed, built out and finished.
Also opportunity for automation streamlining.
Simpler offerings of that market look like: https://modularwa.com.au/
That's why I differentiated between robots working on new construction sites, where I do think that a 15-20 year timeline is entirely feasible (not necessarily desirable, but feasible). That's an entirely different task than renovations in an existing building, which is much *much* harder even for humans.
Also note that there's another way of thinking about where technology will take housebuilding that already exists: more factory-assembled modular cosntruction. That's less popular in the USA, with its focus on single family "unique" homes, but is taking off elsewhere and is already highly automated.
For wiring/plumbing/ducting runs ... not so much.
The dynamics of blue collar employment would obviously be changed as a second order effect of white collar worker displacement
However the main point is: just pay attention to who is telling you to get a job in the trades instead of a knowledge one.
And the conclusion is...?
But now that you're asking:
It's the ones that need to make wild claims like that your brain is obsolete so they can continue operating at a huge loss.
It's the ones that have multi-year investments in data centers so would very much love a discount on the trades price tag.
It's the ones that want to monopolize and control the price and value of intellectual work.
It's the ones that have been claiming that engineers will be out of a job in 3 months for the past 3 years.
I can keep going but I think that's enough.
Perhaps the only thing to note is that you should pay attention to your long term health. You can definitely stay fit if you don't grind on when you shouldn't. No job and no amount of money is worth destroying your body.
Oh, and desk workers die from lack of activity. If you sit for more than an hour you gradually start dying.
However the risks compared to physical jobs are not even close, they're at two different levels.
There's many, many things that can kill you instantly in the trades. Then there's stuff that may ruin your body no matter how careful you are.
Example: doing roofing means you're walking in a sloped plan all day long, every day. After 20 or 30 years, you'd barely have usable knees.
I did the inverse, and while I don't enjoy poo and fibreglass, I do immensely enjoy the days I work outside in the spring and summer. Easily worth a bit of occasional poo. :)
For those people, trades are absolutely a better choice - it's not like becoming an HVAC dogs body prevents you from later going to school if you decide it's not for you.
First, regarding job safety and health. As an electrician, safety is the number one thought in my mind at all times. It is never routine. Looking at a set of bare copper wires, even knowing the power is off, even if I did it myself, even if I can see the breaker being off, I ALWAYS test it with my meter, no exceptions. Maybe the breaker is broken. Maybe the breaker isn't broken but the circuit tees off somewhere and gets backfed in some bizarre way. Maybe it doesn't get backfed, but this isn't the cable you think it is. And so on and so on. Point being, it's not dangerous if you use your head. I wouldn't do this if I thought I could die at any moment. It's scarier driving home from work.
Further regarding health, I will argue it's worse for you to sit on your ass working for 40 years. My step counter is usually around 12-15000 when I finish the workday.
And this is a very individual feeling, but the things I do and build are things that last. During my apprenticeship I built a lot of summer houses, and I'm sure they're still around. The work I do now includes major sport events, ensuring everything runs smoothly, from the beer and hotdog stands to the stadium flood light towers and PA systems. It gives me immense job satisfaction to see an event finish with no problems, and people probably didn't even know I was there. If I end up on TV, it's not a good day.
How many apps and websites last even 5 years? Imagine being the guy making parking apps? Everyone hates you.
Due to strong unions, the trades are paid well in Denmark. And if you do good work, and are smart enough to specialise deeply, you can earn a lot. Start your own company and you can potentially earn very very well.
In my city the pay scale for the first 5-7 years of a grad software engineer and grad electrician careers are comparable and I expect that to be the case in most of the world outside the handful of American bubbles. One thing I enjoy is that the minimum pay is regulated by a union so I don't have to hop job every year to make sure I'm not underpaid.
After that the salaries diverge quite quickly and the ceiling is much much lower as an electrician.
It's still pretty good money, though, so I don't think that's really a con to this career.
That’s the real comparison in my opinion
I get the whole apprenticeship route, but even that isn’t the same
Specifically what I mean is what if a teenager took 4 years to really home a skill before even looking for a job?
If you wanted to be an electrician and spent a couple years really learning from somewhat first principles up and keep yourself in good shape, you’d be set up for success
The article makes it seem like someone who would be smart enough to go to college and graduate wouldn’t be smart enough to navigate how to get an electrician job or pass those aptitude tests?
Also, a lot of trades people simply don’t take care of themselves. I’m not saying the job isn’t hard, because it is. My dad was a contractor and I worked on the sites every summer til I graduated college
But these dudes would eat like crap, skip ear protection, prove how manly they were by working to exhaustion - this only makes the “these hands” lectures worse
All in all the article felt scattered much like my own comment
The truth is, there are some people who go to college who should have gone into the trades in stead. I’d go on a limb and say I’m sure of it. (And the answer isn’t purely based on intelligence which the author touches on condescendingly)
Similarly, I’m sure a lot of kids who go into the trades would have been better off going to college
What’s missing imo is guidance
What kids imo need is guidance, someone to give them exposure to what’s out there in some way, lay out options, pros, cons and help kids make an informed decision
The real problem is that there are so many professions that people simply don’t know about - instead of telling people to go to college or scare them away from trades, I’d be pushing to introduce more of these resources to high schools. No kid at my high school would have ever known what a business systems analyst is or what firmware is.
I have a feeling the guys who could have gone to college but picked trades for some reason (like maybe a brush with the law), end up owning businesses. My friend dropped out of college after the first year and now he owns a thriving home renovation business, for example.
Personally I find a lack of curiosity to be prevalent among trades people, like asking a home builder about Spanish persianas, or why we don't put drains in bathroom floors in America like is prevalent in Asia, or trying to get an HVAC guy to install a split type heat pump, you often just get a sense of annoyance rather than a willingness to learn anything new. They just want to stamp out the job the same way they do every job so they can get to the next one. In some sense I understand it, but you have to think there's space for people who apply more thoughtfulness to the space.
You've touched on my pet peeve. I've believed ever since I bought my first and only house in 1983 that EVERY room or space that has running water should have a floor drain. Oh, the messes I've cleaned up because they don't....
Everything is going to be electric. The world is only at 23% electrification. The target is 35% by 2035, which many think is wildly optimistic.
The supply of electricians is limited by gatekeeping. A young kid in high school can get the training in school (less gatekeeping, career help), become a professional and quite possibly become a master electrician by 30. Then make big bucks forever.
Looks like kids and parents are coming to these conclusions on their own. The Hottest High Schools in Massachusetts Are Trade Schools: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/massachusetts-trade-hi...
[1] Can the World Hit 35% Electrification by 2035? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49904154 [2]Electrification Special Report, INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY: https://www.iea.org/reports/electrification https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/1c696cc3-e251-46a9-...
No.
Perhaps: the electrical contractor of a very large MSA would be having an indredible day if they made $5-10k per day
No resi sparky is making that, regularly, not even weekly (do your math, you estimate $1MM+?!).
Src: IBEW electrician, with decades of residential "side work" (including as a licensed electrical contractor)
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>The supply of electricians is limited by gatekeeping.
Yes and no.
Just show up. Then show up again. This is in such limited supply that if you can make yourself look presentable, on a regular basis, you can walk into many smaller shops (union and not, I've done both) and just ask for a job (it still works).
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For me, one of the best advantages of the jobsites is essentially no females on-site, which gives work the comeradery that my initial career into medicine was lacking (heavily female dominated). Perhaps an oft-dreampt "third place," albeit while at work.
I only share this gendered thought because being a tradesmen would be much more difficult for ANY woman (e.g. hazing, upper body strength)... the one female bricklayer I know (and respect, she is a haus!) agrees with me that "she wasn't built for good ole boys club, but it's all she knows how to do that isn't minimum wage" so she keeps slinging brick with her 99%+ male co-workers.
If you are a young single male, willing to travel around the country: get your union ticket (either indoor or outdoor) and follow storm season restorations for half the year, and make six figures "playing hero."
The hardware is already there waiting for the right model to direct it. If GPT 7 or Claude 6 is a true AGI we'll be months away from the same type of blue collar automation. The fact that the models are already building with blender demonstrates a growing understanding of the necessary spatial awareness and reasoning.
People with wrenches aren't being replaced any time in the next 50 years.
I mean they're basically the same job.
Either the plumber is replaced, or they aren't. I contest that they aren't.
Those people will spend their savings, sell their houses to live in the smaller ones, or find another jobs. They will probably gonna get poorer. But the majority of the people with wrenches definitely will get richer, that is how economy works.
There are two risks:
1. Humanoid robots learn to do everything. Perfectly plausible at current progress rates.
2. The skill is removed and AI acts as a leveler, same as in programming. You still need humans to point the nail gun and squeeze the trigger, but everything else is just instructions coming into their smart glasses from an AI. The tradesman is just a meat proxy.
The part about blue collar jobs being inherently more deadly doesn't feel right to me. For one, I want to believe we have collectively gotten better in avoiding "dumb" deaths and injuries, these, that could have been prevented by inventing and following safety procedures. The health risks certain profession implies is certainly to be considered when choosing one, white collars included. Desk job kills slowly, but surely.
So, answering to the title, which doesn't seem to be related to the article contents, I absolutely do. Qualified engineer knows enough to be able to double off as a technician, and missing monthly payments is much scarier than high voltage, so if my entire job field was to become obsolete due to AI or any other reason, I would absolutely consider getting out of desk and getting my hands dirty.
The expensive part is usually just showing up ready to work, with a marginal cost for each additional tree. If you had 15 trees taken down in one day, the cost per tree would work out to seem much more reasonable.
My neighbors were having a bunch of tree work done, and I asked the supervisor what it would cost to take a big dead one down on my property. I planned to do it myself, so I had a strong haggling position, and I got him to $400, which felt worth it to save me a day's worth of hard labor. If they weren't already onsite with all the gear, that would've been $2K+ easy.
better, yes, but there will always be inherent risk. even if you don't die, there will often be injuries from years of strain
I see this happening very soon- already, in some cases, for some applications. And I worry that it will be another way for capital to deskill and disempower labour; see Doctorow's "chickenized reverse centaurs" with Amazon drivers and warehouse workers being the classic example.
Punch cards & CRMs yesterday.
AI video monitoring today.
Little chip for "AI proof secure access" tomorrow.
…
That technology is now creeper Ray Bans serving ads.
He had to spelunk under the house to run new lines, cut concrete, dig trenches, and scuba (yes, SCUBA!) with tools to get everything done.
Maybe 5% of his time had to do with electricity. In my mind, I really paid him to dive into 55f degree water.
I have some electricians that work for me with rope access training and certifications, sometimes we bid a job using rope access instead of a hydraulic lift if it’s cheaper to do it that way. It all depends on the project and your competition.
Most of the work is opening walls, closing them, running cables, etc.
I'm an electrician in Canada and my favourite part of the job is actually this construction type work. I probably should have just been a carpenter but the job prospects aren't nearly as strong.
If you take good care of your body and health, it doesn’t have to be as bad as you think. But a lot of tradies think eating healthy, stretching, eye protection, gloves, etc. are “gayyyyy”.
Fortunately, the author says:
> The trades are more physical than working in an office, and some people find this — and working outdoors, where much trades work is performed — liberating. Some derive great pleasure from achieving a flow-like state of mind from performing specific physical tasks. Some people find it deeply rewarding to physically make things and to see progress and improvement in doing so over time. Some people derive a deep sense of camaraderie from physically toiling with other people. It could be that any of these, especially when combined with a low sensitivity toward financial compensation or status, makes the trades a better fit than white-collar employment.
On one hand it's been incredibly enriching and rewarding. I'll never look at a room the same again. Some areas, like woodworking, also surprisingly required much more deep thinking than I'd anticipated.
On the other hand, I couldn't imagine going through half the nonsense I went though for someone else, especially an ungrateful/fussy/penny-pinching customer.
You can do physically demanding jobs without embracing every stupid meme of blue collarism. You don’t need a mullet. You don’t need to waste your money on lifted trucks. You don’t need to hate liberals. You don’t need to claim electricians have “women’s hands”, etc
The trades are full of crabs in a bucket.
On the other hand, my handyman is 55+ and he has been working on this side gig (his day job is IT Analyst which pays very well) for quite a while. He is very interested in DIY and this led him into the gig. Me? I'd rather waste time (conceived by me as the biggest sin) than do DIY. I'm THAT uninterested.
What gloves? For 110V? Bah!
Unless you’re a complete idiot and try to cut both wires at once with a conductive cutter, nothing happens when you snip them one by one.
And selection bias means we don’t see those guys around for long.
2. You are thinking of survivorship bias, selection bias is a different thing.
Critical caveats: Residential 120V/15A, familiar wiring, dry wood frame buildings, proper equipment, and we knew what we were doing. If you can't tick all 5 of those boxes, my advice is that you hire an electrician to do the work.
But I really wouldn't recommend doing that. There's a wide and complex canyon of consequences between "that little blue arc won't hurt me" and "triggering a fault current will not damage anything, anywhere, either short- or long-term".
So far, I like it a lot. The work is physically demanding but the colleagues are nice, down to earth and come up with good jokes (I also see this a lot when I watch trades videos on YouTube). Also nice is the feeling of having made something at the end of the day and the lack of office politics. I didn’t do any extra education, they say I’m picking it up fast so it seems I can go without. I think that would hold for most programmers since it’s a very similar mindset that you use especially when you start troubleshooting.
Financially, it doesn’t matter that much. In the Netherlands salaries are much lower than compared to the US while taxation is very high. So I personally don’t care whether I get paid 5200 euro per month or 3200 per month since after correcting for taxes and government benefits the difference is a lot less. I also don’t need much anyway. I don’t mind living in a cheapish house with a cheap car and I also don’t like vacations (I don’t like change). Compared to programmer the salary isn’t that much lower anyway. I could go build my way through management positions in government or so for more bucks but then I would need to spend it on useless things to make me happy again so seems like a net loss too.
The confounding factor is lifestyle. Kicking back after a hard day of physical work with a huge meal and a few beers feels amazing, but that's going to wreck somebody's health if that turns into a lifestyle. And similarly, a gym rat who works a desk job is going to probably be in excellent shape.
*Edit : though/tough, not native
I know 5 people closely that have had long careers in the trades.
They are all physically damaged in ways I am not from sitting at a desk.
What I notice about the trades is that the conversation from the inside is mostly about retirement because the work is not fun the way I find my white collar work to be fun.
You also have to appreciate one other thing about health. 30-40 years ago digital work was a very small part of the labor force. Today it's a large part. So we're only starting to see the long-term consequences of sedentary work, on a large scale in relatively recent times. Then you also need to pair this with the emergence of endless entertainment of the internet to also create the possibility of sedentary work paired with sedentary lifestyles. I expect we'll find that the aggregate health outcomes of this are going to dwarf even smoking.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-02.pdf
> lack of office politics
Why is there any less?
> ship construction
Your story is interesting. I read articles by Gary Kim about Kim's theory of why the US has a shortage of workers for well-paying shipbuilding jobs - it's a dangerous job and the pay doesn't per Kim, compensate enough. [0] I wonder what your experience is?
https://garykim0505.substack.com/p/the-brutal-reality-of-bui...
Yes.
> Why is there any less?
Smaller company and down to earth attitude.
> I wonder what your experience is?
It's less safe than an office that's for sure. But the biggest accident in the company of 100 people has been due to arc flash and not due to walking across the shipyard. In general, the older colleagues seem physically as healthy if not healthier than average for their age; some having worked there for more than 20 years. I'm also surprised by this. The shipyard looks very dangerous but somehow not much happens to the electricians it seems from what I hear and see in the older colleagues.
Things have to get real, real, real bad before the state decides that it's better for the state to lower barriers to entry than keep them.
I’m not saying it should be that way, but people need to be clearheaded that a top blue collar job is not as easy as showing up. There are real performance differentiators - reliability, judgement, skill, etc - and the numbers touted often belong to the top performers.
And anyone who thinks office politics go away in a family owned shop is extremely naive. Nepotism is default (and frankly reasonable. Why wouldn’t someone leave their business to their daughter if they were interested?). Large places are like that, too. Someone on a union job asked me point blank who I knew, the implication being that I’d have to know someone to get hired on.
I loved the camaraderie, being on the move, and building something physical. But it wasn’t a nice relaxing stable existence, either.
This is quite obviously true whenever you hire trades people. I had a guy just cut into a pipe behind some dry wall. I’m uncertain how after looking at hole and the pipe.
I remain convinced that anyone enterprising could build a very lucrative trades business simply because so many trades people are bad.
Maybe we just live in world where every time when there is advantage gained from quality it is later destroyed to make slightly more for bit of time...
So you end up with a ton of unreliable reviewers online.
These days I take recommendations from people who are picky and when I can see the results myself.
Those who can, will, those who can't won't - and in response to the question posed, those who can no longer afford will either have to learn how or put up with decay creep.
Obviously there are practical limitations to how fast things can rearrange but there's no reason in principle you couldn't have an economy where everyone retrained into blue collar work, and all white collar job needs were handled by the magic internet box.
Anecdotally, I grew up in a very blue collar area and most of the 60 year old guys I knew were either medically retired (read: too fucked up to work anymore) or getting by through brute force and pain pills.
His knees were dead before he was 50. Never made it to "stable", has never owned a home, now living in a van in his 70s.
There were many other issues in his life which prevented things...don't get me wrong...but his case is more the norm from my observations of workers. It is much easier to be a good "worker" than it is to be a successful one.
Also, Drug/alcohol use in the trades is incredibly common. As is the habit of planning your life around claiming unemployment every winter (at least in my area).
They could not be different from one another, and that was the reason dad invested time in befriending both. When he needed something that only technically solved a problem by the barest of margins, he called the one guy. When he needed help patching the roof or any kind of visible finishing work, he called the other.
One was alright to have over for beers and roughly 100lbs over weight, the other was a formal dining room dinner kind of guy and was built like a model.
One lost his kid in the divorce and is still working today if he's not passed. The other built himself a grand house full of custom hardwood, beautiful hand-built spiral staircase in the foyer, all at the head of the neighborhood he built, and retired about 15 years ago.
Purely in terms of "can they do the job I expect them to do", both were perfectly competent. But the actual trade itself isn't what set them apart. Neither could understand the mentality of the other. "Why do all the extra work to make it look nice if all it's got to do is work" vs "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right".
Their approach to the trade work showed in everything they did; one did verbal contracts, the other made sure every permit was pulled and gave you a receipt detailing the number of nails used. So, when the city put out for bids, only one of them was in any position to submit and win the contracts. He didn't win all of them because there's a multi-generational contractor with family in government but it'd be crass of the city to award all the contracts to that company, but the point remains that only one of these two had positioned themselves such that they could take and profit from larger jobs.
I like to say that the greatest cook in the world could be an ass of a restaurateur, and the world's finest restaurateur will need to hire fine chefs.
We all know brilliant techs that could never hack it in corporate, and people sailing through corporate without a lick of technical ability. While both are "in tech", they have very different goals that lead to very different daily work, very different career paths, and very different retirements.
I think every category of work has a spectrum of success, and it will be determined by a mix of ones ability, goals, and market forces.
I am not blaming the HVAC technicians. It is the nature of trades: small business owners don't want to train up their technicians. So, they always look for fresh blood. Also, this field is seasonal: summers and winters. In summers, cooling problems; in winters, it is heating problems (furnaces, etc).
HVAC needs three different skills: controls (relays, transducers, contactors), electrical, refrigeration circuit, air flow (duct work, proper cfm settings), etc. In a way, this whole area is covered in multiple semesters of any mechanical engineering program (heat transfer, control systems, electricity).
It would take a bit of time for similar societies to adjust to the new realities.
The stove was on something like a 60 amp circuit, so rather than try to rewire the panel, I patched the oven into the stove's circuit, because it was way over capacity.
That said, the wires were beasts: single-strand copper, maybe 6 gauge (over a tenth of an inch in diameter) and did not want to bend at all. I ended up going back to Lowes three times to get bigger connectors. In the end it was a box of aluminum half an inch wide, with a tube down the middle and a screw-in on the side to hold the wires in place.
I got it done, but it was a pain from start to finish. And of course with that many amps at play, every time I touched anything I first went to every single person in the house to tell them what I was doing, and not to go near the breaker box.
I would not want to do that for a living.
Perhaps once there was a high demand for good SWE coming out of 4 years of $$ tuition uni.
Personal anecdote: Got a buddy who dropped out of Bible school, worked at a auto shop while getting his certs. After 2 years about any dealership would hire him.
He moves, lands a 100k+ job. 2 years later, switches to a dealership in San Jose, earning 150+.
6 months later, he gets an offer to become foreman at a dealership in gilroy with a $5/h raise + foreman benefits. How it works is techs are paid flat rate: Paid per job, not per hour. So if youre good, you can really rake in the money.
Its been wild to see his career arc in real time.
He's highly trained, very handy, Nd he's damn smart at debugging.
Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
He earns more than me who got a MS in ECE.
On the flip side, his job is physical and he works more hours than me.
I get to so R&D, think about cool math, and code. But in another life I'd love do be a tech.
All that said, there's a lot of demand for good auto techs.
I feel bad for mechanics in the rust belt getting paid what another mechanic gets paid for much more effort
They are using an OEM diagnostic tool and following approved shop procedures.
I agree with the below poster, this reeks, no one is doing o-scope level debugging on a production vehicle. It's what someone would say that has no idea how cars are designed, built, and serviced in reality.
https://www.snapon.com/EN/US/Diagnostics/Products/TRITON-D10
It’s slow but it’s an oscilloscope. It graphs electrical measurements over time. They sold CRT scopes on carts for years and years.
Maybe you should move the goalposts and demand FFT or higher bandwidth.
I'm skeptical about this; I can run my 'scope on the CAN bus and decipher the output, but there's no point. I'll use the CAN bus diagnostic reader to determine which of the 27 or so modules are sending malformed messages.
And that, itself, is theoretical - a broken module or poor wiring is still not going to result in messages so fucked up that the diagnostic reader can't read them.
It's like pulling out the 'scope to diagnose your LAN issues; you can do that, but you'd be a moron not to use a network packet sniffer instead.
Sounds great. Except we keep hearing about people getting zero callbacks after submitting hundreds of resumes for white collar jobs. While at the same time we're hearing about how the trades are desperate for recruits and can never find enough people to hire.
I think young people should try to follow a path that might hold their interest as much as possible, and collect data about their interest. Talk to people that are doing the actual work. Don't assume trades are for people who have no choice because they're not smart enough for anything else. And don't assume that white collar jobs are best because you're guaranteed to have an easier, more prosperous career.
Electricians and plumbers stand out in “trades” because these jobs are fairly technical, while not particularly exhausting. A good plumber is always in high demand and can charge well for emergency interventions.
A plumber quoted me 1500 euros to install a swimming pool heat pump. I did it all myself with no prior experience and without the right tools in 8 hours. It cost me 300 euros worth of material. The guy would have made 1200 euros in a day. He was available 30 days from the time I called him, meaning he was quite busy.
Not saying that it’s the right call for everybody, but yeah right now, as a plumber or electrician who works in the high end of the trade, you make a decent living without the annoyances of office politics or fear of AI.
If you wanted to be a painter or a construction worker, you don't need any of that.
It starts, rightfully, by pointing out risks to health and physical harm. It later goes into depth describing how automation (the nail gun example) has changed the game, and especially how dexterity is in much less demand than it used to be.
It fails to point out that the same automation has made most blue-collar jobs much safer. Where I live, the paragraphs from the beginning, where everyone knows someone with a serious injury, ring true from my childhood in the 70s and 80s, but not anymore.
That seems like an important part of the picture when comparing blue-collar work then and now.
Subsitute trade of choice
While it isn’t the toughest of trades, physically speaking, it will strain you neck, shoulders, and arms.
A lot of the work is pulling cables, and extremely mundane work. All that wiring in the ceiling you don’t see, was installed by someone.
Lots of terrible work environments, especially when it comes to industrial sites.
But in the end it feels rewarding. It felt like honest work, while also offering some stimulating work. 3 of 4 I started with pivoted into engineering within 10 years.
With that said, I’d rather become a automation tech. Basically the best parts of electrician, but more technical work.
my coworkers would always tell me, the youngest, about how much their bodies hurt, how tired they were, how hard it was to make ends meet. they either wanted me to stick around because i made their jobs easier, or wanted me to get my degree and go. ive seen accidents happen, but none terrible. people were always so worried about my safety. i got lucky and was never injured.
i dont know. ive been in my current role for 4 months now. its not bad. i dont dislike it. i cant tell if i miss my old job or if im just lonely in a new place.
i really miss zoning out and working with my hands though. there are moments where you have to lock in, i remember moments where i was working with something dangerous and how acutely aware of the position of my body i was. but there were moments where you did a repetitive task for a while. and i always liked that aspect. the physicality.
i think about going back to it a lot actually. maybe im just nostalgic. should give it a few years to get used to the cubicle life. i really do miss it though. might do what my father did and compulsively renovate his basement to get the high of building something with his hands.
However my construction experience affords me the opportunity to get a good paying job anywhere in Canada. I do not work in construction because I don’t like it. I will venture to say that many people do not have the physical ability to do some of these jobs.
However I think electrical is not really on the ladder of difficult physical jobs when it comes to blue collar work. It’s the most white collar ish job in the blue collar world.
You know the boring dude who actually doesn't get electricuted because he always checks the wires.
Nonetheless, alone the fact that more people able to learn a lot for university enter trades, has a high chance of changing how the trades might look like in the future.
But with progress in physical AI, in 50 years we will not need them either anyway.
Obviously there would be some retraining and a period as an apprentice, and honestly I’m not sure I could afford that, but if we downsized the house maybe.
But mostly I’m posting here because this article is a pile of crap.
It uses pre-AI figures to try to assure us that post-AI the trades will still pay less than jobs for college graduates. That’s the whole point, duh, that things are changing.
Classist bullshit from the first title alone.
For someone like you, you can learn common codes in two weeks. However, this profession is gated by 2000 to 8000 hrs of apprenticeship.
Controls, PLC programming for industrial automation, etc is where you can shine. However, I don't like work with high voltage circuits, even the latter are controlled by low voltage control circuits.
Even in home appliances (washer, dryer, oven, dishwasher, heatpumps, dish washer, etc), we see a lot of control circuits (PCB boards, step down transformers, VFD etc).
As a software developer I’d like to imagine that good practices mean professionals are rarely (aka once every decade or less) shocked but a friend who is the son of an electrician said they wouldn’t do it as their dad said he gets shocked.
Electrocution = fatal injury (death). Shock = non-fatal injury.
At least in the developed world, electrocutions (deaths) are less than what we see in the third world.
70% of all workplace electrical fatalities are in non-electrical trades: https://www.esfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ESFI-Workpla...
Construction and other labor also have the highest suicide rates among occupations. [1] [2]
> ... Rowe has something in common with most people selling this popular narrative: a college degree.
Yes indeed - those senators and governors promoting trades jobs and cutting higher education funding, do you think their kids join the trades or do they go to college?
The pitch for the trades is an abomination in America (the pitch, not the trades) - telling kids to stay in their socio-economic class and do jobs appropriate for it. Don't think of college, think of where you belong. So much for 'all are created equal' in the 'land of opportunity'.
> potential missteps. Social work majors on average earn much less than their college peers
That assumes that college is about income, when it's about far more - personal development which will aid your life and your roles in family, community, citizenship, and yes, career.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7250a2.htm
[2] https://mhstats.org/blog/suicide-statistics-by-profession/
Massive protectionism.
What does not make sense is to have such brown vs dark red scheme in the first place.
Once you get down below 0603 there are not even labels on most resistors.
Yeah I learned the color codes way earlier in to my training...but it is largely irrelevant nowadays.
Also, it isn't just brown/dark red. Gold band can look like brown at times. Causes issues on 5 band resistors where the multiplier is gold. [1]
I had someone in industry with a board they were testing techs with that had one of these snuck in. I was the only one to figure it out...took me 10min. Some of the long term techs never fixed it. (I suspect one of the assemblers did it on purpose because they all knew the answer when I found it).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_color_code#Decoding...
I'm often in awe when I have these guys here, doing stuff and being allowed to observe, ask questions and learn (as much as that is possible, passively).
They just do things. An obstacle appears and it is just gone within minutes and with some clever workaround.
The white-collar corporate mind cannot comprehend.
__
The downside of that of course is that things get done no matter what. Common sense not necessarily included.
Which is a different style of dysfunction compared with 5 alignment meetings that go nowhere.
After going around the blue collar block a few times, I wound up thinking the most interesting pivot for me would be to get into foundation repair. Everyone I know looks at this kind of thing with dread. As if I had just casually proposed we go slay the local dragon.
The physics of installing push piers is incredibly straightforward. The hardest part by far is digging the holes around and through the foundation. Also, the logistics of procuring steel and concrete piers can become challenging depending on local geological conditions.
Selling the service to customers is very hard (the actual moat). I don't know of many home owners who approach this with calm. They want 5 quotes, 100 year transferable warranty, etc. Having a sales technique that brings reason to the prospect makes all the difference. I had a sales guy from a major Texas repair firm basically ignore all my stated complaints and hand me a sheet of cold data. He lost the sale. Months later I learned that the proposed solution (helical piers) isn't even logical given the availability of reaction mass and their tendency to not reach load bearing strata as well as well as other options.
The Houston metroplex is potentially one of the most lucrative markets I can imagine for this kind of business. I don't know of a single home in the south Houston area that isn't suffering from some degree of differential settlement. The ground water pumping caused (is causing) a lot of subsidence issues. Most homes in my target market are slab on grade (80-90%). I wouldn't even think about servicing pier and beam customers.
The take away from this comment is and should be “living in Texas/Houston fucking sucks”.
It should not be normal to live somewhere where 80% of houses have serious problems with their foundation. That state is cursed and should be glassed from orbit.
Now I couldn't really do the job anyway because my ADHD makes keeping track of a bunch of tools and stuff just not possible, which I am totally able to do in the virtual world of the computer with a ticket tracking system and understanding of codebases and so forth.
I've heard other horror stories about boneheaded tradespeople creating dangerous situations for their coworkers.
You should be thankful if the worst your coworkers can do is send you slop to review.
My carpenter buddy sets his own schedule, spends his time pulling his camper, works extra when he wants to, floats in and out of his union asks (exploiting their rigidity).
He’s been at it for years, so he’s a qualified instructor for anything he can get his hands on, even esoteric stuff like pouring concrete for nuclear facilities.
His job is hardly comparable to an Amazon driver, like this article conflates. Bro makes more than an equiv exper and age software dev, but with no glass ceiling.
This has been thr pattern with most of the trendy "well paying jobs": They're only well paying once you account for the insane overtime. I've even see people posting jobs bragging about how many hours you'll work.