I've worked a variety of manufacturing jobs; from medical manufacturing of catheters the size of fishing lines with three inner diamters, running 5 story oven stack extrusion lines, laser etching tooth insert threading, and suface coating PTFE into sheet material for military radar and industrial applications, to grunt work factory assembly lines making the rubber gun butts for Ruger.
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.
>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.
> Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There is no comparison between a programmer who chooses not to concern himself with ergonomics and a labourer who must put his health on the line daily or be fired.
The comments here are confusing risk with health consequences. Whereas working in construction or with heavy machinery poses much higher risks than sitting at a desk for 30 years the results may be just as bad in both cases.
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.
This reminds of the scene in The Office where Micheal Scott tries really hard to show how office work was just as dangerous as working in the warehouse with heavy machinery.
Then there are quite a few essentially workplace injured programmers who are dismissively called "burnt out". Unable to work, unable to claim workers comp.
It seems that both blue and white collar jobs have their share of workplaces where in a do-the-task-or-maybe-get-fired situation, it's up to the employee to enforce their own boundaries and decide when saying no is a safer choice for their long term physical/mental safety. (Of course, sometimes you only realise this when it's too late.)
Being the one driving the important people, I can tell you from my experience, is one of the most eye opening of my eclectic history up til now, in that context. After doing it for 6 years, I can't imagine really voluntarily accepting that large pill to swallow of "lacking the skill."
Good points, I figure it's interesting from both sides hearing the others' perspective.
Not totally sure I understand your comment, but I wouldn't say the issue with drivers was lacking driving skill...it was more about dependability and reliability.
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.
I think you misinterpreted, I only meant the discrepancies between social/working classes becomes more obvious as you are exposed to clientele representing higher-ups and large spend limits. "Important people" I mean as what the industry itself terms them; VIP's. the clients who contribute towards a sizeable chunk of the owners business.
Not a coincidence they are also known as the clients with the longest driveways.
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".
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.
> 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".
That standard rejoinder is completely dismissive of how the capital owner came to be in the position of owning capital in the first place. That capital owner - or his ancestor - either worked exceptionally hard or took exceptional risks to get into that position.
I'm not arguing either perspective but being 59 and out of money looks very different than being 80 and out of money. If you have built up capital and that's how you make your living, you become very dependent on that capital.
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?
Most "capital" used to be workers who risked everything they've worked for because they thought they could do a better job than their boss. People mortgage their homes to get their businesses through hard times.
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.
Most businesses aren't a problem because they are many and small.
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.
That is not true tho. They did not risked "everything". That is super exaggerated framing. They risked not succeeding and being slightly worst off then other guys at most.
And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.
Sparky's with apprenticeships (in Australia at least) have the advantage of earning while learning while also segueing into the interstitial Hardware / Software zone.
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.
In my experience, datacenter industrial electricians seem to take a dim view of the skills of residential specialists as guys who just spend all their time pulling romex, but it's sometimes a lot more complicated than that... Residential has to deal with individual home owners, house flippers, renovation GCs and weird change orders in a way that people working in more technically structure and high-budget environments don't.
This is true in tech as well. Big Tech folks with figuratively infinite budgets believe they're all that, but they basically are incapable of understanding the day to day problems small organizations face, or develop the ability to jump between completely different fields of technical problems several times a day.
Larger organizations come with more specialization and greater resources, but you will never find a jack of all trades there.
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.
r/electricians is a good place to lurk to get more inside information about this trade. As you note, there are definitely sectors, like resi(dential), commercial, industrial, and they work by different rules.
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.
seeing someone else's work does not mean you really understand it. We've all seen Michelangelo's David, but none of us could recreate it. Just because you've seen the wiring/conduit in the wall does not mean you know the hows/whys about it.
Yes, but a person who has visited hundreds of art museums will have a better understanding of art than a guy who only paints landscapes or carves wooden figurines. You can learn a lot by observing what is good work and why, even if you didn’t produce it yourself.
rocket electrician, ... obviously they mean the one that comes and fix your house or breaker panel.
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
In a logical world, computer programming would be a trade. I take the point about risk of physical injury of death, hovever.
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).
I met a professional electrician in college who was in charge of the electrical system in an old high-rise building. He told me that it was common for him to work on high-voltage lines that could not be shut off for service. He said that hearing the pops from the high voltage was not uncommon. He regularly put his life on the line as part of his job. Just hearing that made me want to make sure I got a college degree so I wouldn't have to get a trade job. All trade jobs will wear your body down, and you regularly have to put your health on the line. Saying that trade jobs are the future is easy to say, but there's a catch. You may sacrifice your health. The better route maybe a career where you help reduce the dangers of trade jobs.
Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the “AI-proof career” advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then there’d be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
People here in these comments are largely just naive or unable to understand things outside of some nerd fantasy or something. If white collar jobs become untenable, the economy will just collapse. The idea people will suddenly go to the trades and work on "solar power" as someone said just mind-numbing nonsense. It would be a very unstable situation and "pulling wire for the county" would not be the main focus of the day.
> Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the “AI-proof career” advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then there’d be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
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.
On the other hand a loooot of people will inherit badly run down homes from their parents as the boomers finally go six feet under. That means a loooooooooot of demand. And on top of that we got the shift off of fossil fuels to electric cars, heat pumps, decentralized production (solar) and storage, which means yet another serious piece of demand.
Having been an electrician turned dev, friends ask me if I miss it at times and I can honestly say I don't miss being covered in rat faeces and fibreglass. Much prefer my standing desk and clean air.
Residential master electrician makes 5K - 10K per day. They have other electricians working for them, just need to sign off on the work. With inflation and lack of labor supply in US, this will only increase.
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.
I've tried and couldn't find anything wrong with the article.
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.
Even if manual jobs were safe from being replaced by AI (for the sake of the argument, we're assuming that this is what's going to happen) these jobs would not be safe from the market pressure created by the displacement in other areas.
Yeah I get all of those, and that's why I initially fancied about getting into a trade but nowadays I don't think that's a possibility. The physical part alone is too much for my aging 45+ body. If I lose my job right now and can't find a new one, I better pick up my very old life style of $1,000 a month (everything included) 10 years ago and adapt it to the inflated modern times.
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.
5 years ago everyone knew that human thinking was the last thing to get automated. Now everyone knows that physical labor is an impenetrable fortress against AI.
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.
Some absurdity here in Japan is that in order to do low-voltage work you need to be a certified "electrician", and it's a one-fit-all certification that doesn't even touch low-voltage work.
The other aspect I think people are missing is that, for the right person, the choice isn't between a white collar office job and trades, it's between struggling in retail and service work with a (possibly bad) degree and no upward mobility, where your only escape is into either management or retraining.
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.
Yep, conflating retail/hospo dead-end jobs where you get trained up in a week and replaced in a week with qualified tradesmen doesn't like high quality research.
On top of all this, electricians don't spend much time doing actual electrical work. Time is spent driving a van, doing metal work, cutting, drilling, crawling around tight spaces etc.
Well electrical work itself is pretty easy, just connect wires. You need some knowledge to know what do to and do it safely, but there isn't that much to do.
Most of the work is opening walls, closing them, running cables, etc.
> For instance, a future job site worker equipped with smart glasses and an earpiece might receive continuous direction via an AI interpreting and providing feedback on their actions.
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.
This was literally the hero utility use case that the HoloLens team previewed to partners back in 2015. The user played the role of "electrician", communicating with another party over Skype who was using a version of MS Paint to "wire" connections in real-time over the HUD.
That technology is now creeper Ray Bans serving ads.
Yes, he's a prolific writer and cultural observer. I think he's good at identifying and naming concepts which I find somewhat useful, like the one I mentioned.
Yea, but agreeable political opinions and being a good writer have little to nothing to do with making good predictions which is what we are weighing here.
I look forward to the future where employers can demand employees to have brain implants so their "smart helmets" can directly wire into their motor control centers. Voila, self healing and self maintaining robots.
Even if the tech was there today, I imagine it would take a couple of generations to socially condition people to not prefer killing themselves to subjecting themselves to this.
this is already happening in several nations' military for high value equipment. the tech knows how to use most tools, but does not have full expertise on the specific equipment. Smart glasses not only guide the technician but allows remote expert assistance through the glasses.
re: the first half of your comment, that's just good ol' fashion UI/UX though? "point at target, hold down button, wait for green, push button all the way"
Yes i could and i don't see me as the avg joe who barely made it in his trade doing one thing; i'm seeing myself as the non avg joe curious looking into wider topics becoing good in my job.
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.
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.
Guy I knew once was the son of a nuclear physicist. While maybe not quite as smart as his Dad, he was still pretty bright. He started his career as an apprentice plumber. His plumbing career got cut short by a serious back injury so he went back to the books and got himself a degree in mining engineering. Long story short he had a great career in mining and ended up as the wealthy CEO of a listed mining company.
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.
Not only do I think it, I am an electrician - for about 20 years. I have a few thoughts on this article. However, my experiences are from a danish perspective, and I think trades education and the job market in general differs in important way. Still, I have a few thoughts about this article.
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.
I can't, I'm colourblind. That's why I had to drop electronics and go into software. It was a hard requirement in the UK in the mid-90s when I needed to make a choice.
I’ve worked trades. I loved a lot about it! But I’m so glad this article pointed out the range of status: not all trades, or roles within one are equal. If you are an incredible welder who can run a perfect seam every time you can command a huge salary. For the rest of the welders it is quite different. If you can handle customers and a crew you can run a quite lucrative electrician shop, for the rest of construction it is quite different. Repeat.
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.
>* I’ve worked trades. I loved a lot about it! But I’m so glad this article pointed out the range of status: not all trades, or roles within one are equal. If you are an incredible welder who can run a perfect seam every time you can command a huge salary. For the rest of the welders it is quite different. If you can handle customers and a crew you can run a quite lucrative electrician shop, for the rest of construction it is quite different. Repeat.*
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.
It feels weird. Those with capability to pay should choose quality. But often they still choose price. And identifying quality is rather hard... Good reputation and good quality should carry business in future and get bit higher prices.
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...
Picking up a trade like that I believe also requires a much more practical and hands-on mindset, which said kids of white-collar parents might have had less opportunity to develop in the first place.
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.
I recently switched to being an electrician in ship construction after a MSc in Computer Science and PhD in Data Science with heavy focus on writing software/services.
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.
The issue is "physically demanding", look at the guys that are 50+ in the trades, they have all sorts of physical issues from working in the trades. I say this as someone who has two JM qualifications.
Serious injuries which will nag for the rest of your life do happen, but they're extremely rare. All things being equal, physical work is vastly better for your body than sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day. Desk work is associated with increased chances of heart disease, obesity, mental health issues, and much more. We're not meant to be sedentary, but desk work basically requires that.
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.
Gym rat + desk job hints at passable cardiovascular health though. An overall healthy body in the modern age is very tough* and time-consuming when you consider all aspects..
I always wanted to help people and realized more and more that nobody ever needs a programmer apart from the medium to big corporations. I’d rather help individuals. That plays a big role.
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.
I am not this person but in some segments of the market there is significant demand for people who can build ships. The US and Canada are both about to throw dozens of billions of dollars at new domestic military shipbuilding programs, for instance. Somebody with his educational qualifications who can do something electrical in large/complex ships might be able to command quite a high salary.
You can get jobs and have a career without education, certification and licensing?
> 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?
> You can get jobs and have a career without education, certification and licensing?
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.
Being wealthy is better than being poor, and being able to pay for college is better than working in construction. However, when choosing a specialty it is important to consider one's preferences. If your child don't want to be a lawyer it doesn't matter whether you can afford paying for the degree, and if he insists he would rather be fixing cars than dealing with documents, helping with a student loan is not really the best thing you can offer as a parent.
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.
>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.
better, yes, but there will always be inherent risk. even if you don't die, there will often be injuries from years of strain
You can only get so much better at reducing "dumb" deaths and injuries when you spend all day every day around things that will kill you if you touch them.
It's not about what you believe it's about what the facts are. Deaths and injuries are much more common in blue collar wok, because of accidents or wear and tears than in white collar work
I started out thinking about electrician when the AI thing took off. Then I got realistic about it and started thinking diesel mechanic.
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.
Electricians are a bit like airline pilots in that they are paid for knowing what they know, the limits, and making timely decisions. Good ones are paid well, and bad ones kill people. Other tradies have super skills. Welders - who knows how they (reliably) do what they do.
I think the most important aspect of high salary is job demand.
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.
> Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
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.
No, when all the tools fail, they buy back the car or you lemon law it. Story over. It would not happen, does not happen, cannot happen.
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.
There's demand but for all but the most specialized stuff (maybe NVH), the work is brutal and the flag hour system sucks ass. Got a warranty job? Better be happy with half pay. Got something that's an absolute bitch to get apart or something goes wrong? Yeah you're still getting paid the same even if it's not your fault. There's a good reason Ford can't find enough auto techs. There's no way I would go back to earning money as a mechanic over something like HVAC or being a millwright.
As a side note, the text styled with Noe Text in a bold weight is quite unreadable. I would use 100 instead, which makes the text more pleasant to digest.
A few years back, we hired an electrician to do some relatively small things for us—things I could do like replacing light switches with timer switches and the like, but didn’t have time to do. The thing that really blew me away was when I asked him if he wanted me to shut off the power at the breaker box and he said no and did all the work with live current in the wires. Yes, I know, gloves, rubber soled shoes, he was fine, but it still was somewhat terrifying to watch.
Not an electrician, but I did some when younger. And did it unknowingly at least once, when the other guy on the job cut power to the wrong circuit. My father would do it routinely.
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.
I know some electricians who would call this man an idiot. PPE is for when a hazard cannot be avoided, which in this case it could easily have been avoided. Though of course the safety culture and laws differ from place to place.
Have done this too (and am not a professional electrician either) --- you use insulated tools and make sure you stay out of the way of any possible current paths.
Live feedback without additional expensive and buggy test tools. May be marginal, but if you are trying to guarantee a certain income/payrate, it’s easy to take shortcuts in a system you’re comfortable in.
I think one thing the author didn’t touch on is what your outlook for jobs would look like provided you dedicated the same amount to the trade that you would college
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.
Yes I agree with this. There's often a culture among trades people of cutting corners on safety (sometimes they get pressured to do it but sometimes it's just out of over confidence or machismo), eating poorly and drinking too much, and so on.
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.
I mean when it says "Electrical linesmen tend to be killed by electrocution." one way to interpret that is if you become an Electrical linesman your most likely way of dying will be by electrocution, but I bet statistically that is not what is meant, instead I am just going to assume, without any evidence, that if you take the job your most likely chance of dying on the job will be through electrocution.
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'm an electrician. I used to be a programmer. I still program for fun and sometimes get small gigs.
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.
What was the transition like? How did this article's description of union electrical work as like the "McKinsey partner" of the trades world strike you?
I grew up on a farm. I don’t care what the author says, manual labor is very rewarding. I built my own office, carport, horse stable, chicken coop and many other projects in the evenings after already exhausting work, and if I could make more in construction, I’d pick that over an office job any day of the week.
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”.
I had some time and decided to renovate my kitchen. I'm doing everything myself: plasterboard/drywall, flooring, electrical, plumbing, cabinets, painting, etc. I had time to learn the standards and do it all the 'right' way, and I'm almost done.
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.
> 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.
That doesn’t say anything about taking care of your body though. A better part of my family works construction and it’s only the uncle that smokes, thinks proper posture is for wimps and lives off microwave pizza that constantly complains about his joints.
Simple enough, one group will be living in houses falling apart, the other group will be renovating distressed cheap housing into relative mansions to live in or flip at cost or less.
There is a much larger number of people who can do electrical work than those who are "electricians". We will instead see more people doing their own work, mostly with success.
Regardless, dry walling, stud framing, roof trussing, foundations, plumbing, gas fitting, electrics, etc are all umbrella'ed under "blue collar work".
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.
As a software guy who’s worked alongside trades for the past 15 years, ChatGPT can tell you some of the tricks but the know-how comes from hands-on experience. I’ve lost count of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up from watching and talking to those guys.
Well, in principle the economy scales to the labor constraint.
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.
The article literally admits is first point was misleading.
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.
> Almost every tradesperson knows someone who’s had at least one protracted absence due to a work injury, and many of us know someone who was permanently disabled or killed.
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.
150 comments:
I've worked a variety of manufacturing jobs; from medical manufacturing of catheters the size of fishing lines with three inner diamters, running 5 story oven stack extrusion lines, laser etching tooth insert threading, and suface coating PTFE into sheet material for military radar and industrial applications, to grunt work factory assembly lines making the rubber gun butts for Ruger.
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.
>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.
> Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
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.
That has more to do with lifestyle, than the job.
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.
> 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.
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.
>job requires him to lift heavier things than he safely can carry
Civilised countries have laws prohibiting this. Here in Denmark it's arbejdsmiljøstyrelsen (bless you), and OSHA in USA.
> Most are just too lazy.
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.
The frequency of occurance begs to differ.
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.
There is no comparison between a programmer who chooses not to concern himself with ergonomics and a labourer who must put his health on the line daily or be fired.
The comments here are confusing risk with health consequences. Whereas working in construction or with heavy machinery poses much higher risks than sitting at a desk for 30 years the results may be just as bad in both cases.
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.
This reminds of the scene in The Office where Micheal Scott tries really hard to show how office work was just as dangerous as working in the warehouse with heavy machinery.
Then there are quite a few essentially workplace injured programmers who are dismissively called "burnt out". Unable to work, unable to claim workers comp.
It seems that both blue and white collar jobs have their share of workplaces where in a do-the-task-or-maybe-get-fired situation, it's up to the employee to enforce their own boundaries and decide when saying no is a safer choice for their long term physical/mental safety. (Of course, sometimes you only realise this when it's too late.)
Being the one driving the important people, I can tell you from my experience, is one of the most eye opening of my eclectic history up til now, in that context. After doing it for 6 years, I can't imagine really voluntarily accepting that large pill to swallow of "lacking the skill."
Good points, I figure it's interesting from both sides hearing the others' perspective.
Not totally sure I understand your comment, but I wouldn't say the issue with drivers was lacking driving skill...it was more about dependability and reliability.
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.
I think you misinterpreted, I only meant the discrepancies between social/working classes becomes more obvious as you are exposed to clientele representing higher-ups and large spend limits. "Important people" I mean as what the industry itself terms them; VIP's. the clients who contribute towards a sizeable chunk of the owners business.
Not a coincidence they are also known as the clients with the longest driveways.
> the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
That's power for ya. It comes with all kinds of perks.
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".
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'm not arguing either perspective but being 59 and out of money looks very different than being 80 and out of money. If you have built up capital and that's how you make your living, you become very dependent on that capital.
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?
Most "capital" used to be workers who risked everything they've worked for because they thought they could do a better job than their boss. People mortgage their homes to get their businesses through hard times.
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.
Most businesses aren't a problem because they are many and small.
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.
That is not true tho. They did not risked "everything". That is super exaggerated framing. They risked not succeeding and being slightly worst off then other guys at most.
And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.
I don't think it's just slightly worse off
One point that most people miss is there are many different kinds of electricians who, often can't even do each other's jobs.
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.
Sparky's with apprenticeships (in Australia at least) have the advantage of earning while learning while also segueing into the interstitial Hardware / Software zone.
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.
Yes.
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.
In my experience, datacenter industrial electricians seem to take a dim view of the skills of residential specialists as guys who just spend all their time pulling romex, but it's sometimes a lot more complicated than that... Residential has to deal with individual home owners, house flippers, renovation GCs and weird change orders in a way that people working in more technically structure and high-budget environments don't.
This is true in tech as well. Big Tech folks with figuratively infinite budgets believe they're all that, but they basically are incapable of understanding the day to day problems small organizations face, or develop the ability to jump between completely different fields of technical problems several times a day.
Larger organizations come with more specialization and greater resources, but you will never find a jack of all trades there.
This.
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.
r/electricians is a good place to lurk to get more inside information about this trade. As you note, there are definitely sectors, like resi(dential), commercial, industrial, and they work by different rules.
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.
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.
seeing someone else's work does not mean you really understand it. We've all seen Michelangelo's David, but none of us could recreate it. Just because you've seen the wiring/conduit in the wall does not mean you know the hows/whys about it.
Yes, but a person who has visited hundreds of art museums will have a better understanding of art than a guy who only paints landscapes or carves wooden figurines. You can learn a lot by observing what is good work and why, even if you didn’t produce it yourself.
you are giving the word "understand" too much depth here. it's pretty obvious what the parent post was getting at.
All the dudes saying it's easy can't mud up a smooth wall for shit.
rocket electrician, ... obviously they mean the one that comes and fix your house or breaker panel.
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
Low voltage wiring is often a separate specialty. Modern smart buildings need enormous amounts of it.
In a logical world, computer programming would be a trade. I take the point about risk of physical injury of death, hovever.
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).
I met a professional electrician in college who was in charge of the electrical system in an old high-rise building. He told me that it was common for him to work on high-voltage lines that could not be shut off for service. He said that hearing the pops from the high voltage was not uncommon. He regularly put his life on the line as part of his job. Just hearing that made me want to make sure I got a college degree so I wouldn't have to get a trade job. All trade jobs will wear your body down, and you regularly have to put your health on the line. Saying that trade jobs are the future is easy to say, but there's a catch. You may sacrifice your health. The better route maybe a career where you help reduce the dangers of trade jobs.
Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the “AI-proof career” advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then there’d be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
That could be the main point of this kind of articles: to dissuade potential competitors.
People here in these comments are largely just naive or unable to understand things outside of some nerd fantasy or something. If white collar jobs become untenable, the economy will just collapse. The idea people will suddenly go to the trades and work on "solar power" as someone said just mind-numbing nonsense. It would be a very unstable situation and "pulling wire for the county" would not be the main focus of the day.
> Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the “AI-proof career” advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then there’d be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
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.
On the other hand a loooot of people will inherit badly run down homes from their parents as the boomers finally go six feet under. That means a loooooooooot of demand. And on top of that we got the shift off of fossil fuels to electric cars, heat pumps, decentralized production (solar) and storage, which means yet another serious piece of demand.
Having been an electrician turned dev, friends ask me if I miss it at times and I can honestly say I don't miss being covered in rat faeces and fibreglass. Much prefer my standing desk and clean air.
What do you think of the long term viability of the two careers?
Residential master electrician makes 5K - 10K per day. They have other electricians working for them, just need to sign off on the work. With inflation and lack of labor supply in US, this will only increase.
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-...
I've been in the trades. Everything in this article is real: the hard work, the internal hierarchies, the safety and health concerns.
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.
I'm very far away from this topic and your last sentence sparked my interest, could you please say who would tell such things?
> 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...?
I've tried and couldn't find anything wrong with the article.
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.
Even if manual jobs were safe from being replaced by AI (for the sake of the argument, we're assuming that this is what's going to happen) these jobs would not be safe from the market pressure created by the displacement in other areas.
Yeah I get all of those, and that's why I initially fancied about getting into a trade but nowadays I don't think that's a possibility. The physical part alone is too much for my aging 45+ body. If I lose my job right now and can't find a new one, I better pick up my very old life style of $1,000 a month (everything included) 10 years ago and adapt it to the inflated modern times.
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.
5 years ago everyone knew that human thinking was the last thing to get automated. Now everyone knows that physical labor is an impenetrable fortress against AI.
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.
You've never contorted yourself under a sink trying to undo a pipe, have you?
People with wrenches aren't being replaced any time in the next 50 years.
But the people who will be replaced won’t have money to pay the people with wrenches. We all are gonna get poorer
You think they won't invent the robot with the wrench in the next 50 years?
I think they won't replace most household plumbers.
Some absurdity here in Japan is that in order to do low-voltage work you need to be a certified "electrician", and it's a one-fit-all certification that doesn't even touch low-voltage work.
The other aspect I think people are missing is that, for the right person, the choice isn't between a white collar office job and trades, it's between struggling in retail and service work with a (possibly bad) degree and no upward mobility, where your only escape is into either management or retraining.
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.
Yep, conflating retail/hospo dead-end jobs where you get trained up in a week and replaced in a week with qualified tradesmen doesn't like high quality research.
On top of all this, electricians don't spend much time doing actual electrical work. Time is spent driving a van, doing metal work, cutting, drilling, crawling around tight spaces etc.
I hired an electrician to fix my pool lights.
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.
Well electrical work itself is pretty easy, just connect wires. You need some knowledge to know what do to and do it safely, but there isn't that much to do.
Most of the work is opening walls, closing them, running cables, etc.
> For instance, a future job site worker equipped with smart glasses and an earpiece might receive continuous direction via an AI interpreting and providing feedback on their actions.
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.
This was literally the hero utility use case that the HoloLens team previewed to partners back in 2015. The user played the role of "electrician", communicating with another party over Skype who was using a version of MS Paint to "wire" connections in real-time over the HUD.
That technology is now creeper Ray Bans serving ads.
You know Cory Doctorow is just a science fiction writer who never even finished high school, yes? He has no expertise in any of this stuff.
Yes, he's a prolific writer and cultural observer. I think he's good at identifying and naming concepts which I find somewhat useful, like the one I mentioned.
You don't need formal education to have agreeable political opinions and write good polemics.
Yea, but agreeable political opinions and being a good writer have little to nothing to do with making good predictions which is what we are weighing here.
I look forward to the future where employers can demand employees to have brain implants so their "smart helmets" can directly wire into their motor control centers. Voila, self healing and self maintaining robots.
Even if the tech was there today, I imagine it would take a couple of generations to socially condition people to not prefer killing themselves to subjecting themselves to this.
We'll wipe your memory after work, so you get to live completely free.
this is already happening in several nations' military for high value equipment. the tech knows how to use most tools, but does not have full expertise on the specific equipment. Smart glasses not only guide the technician but allows remote expert assistance through the glasses.
re: the first half of your comment, that's just good ol' fashion UI/UX though? "point at target, hold down button, wait for green, push button all the way"
Yes i could and i don't see me as the avg joe who barely made it in his trade doing one thing; i'm seeing myself as the non avg joe curious looking into wider topics becoing good in my job.
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.
I did work as apprentice before studying EE.
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.
Guy I knew once was the son of a nuclear physicist. While maybe not quite as smart as his Dad, he was still pretty bright. He started his career as an apprentice plumber. His plumbing career got cut short by a serious back injury so he went back to the books and got himself a degree in mining engineering. Long story short he had a great career in mining and ended up as the wealthy CEO of a listed mining company.
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.
> and interests.
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.
Not only do I think it, I am an electrician - for about 20 years. I have a few thoughts on this article. However, my experiences are from a danish perspective, and I think trades education and the job market in general differs in important way. Still, I have a few thoughts about this article.
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.
I can't, I'm colourblind. That's why I had to drop electronics and go into software. It was a hard requirement in the UK in the mid-90s when I needed to make a choice.
Same here, but I never considered electronics over software. Maybe woodworking after all. :-)
I’ve worked trades. I loved a lot about it! But I’m so glad this article pointed out the range of status: not all trades, or roles within one are equal. If you are an incredible welder who can run a perfect seam every time you can command a huge salary. For the rest of the welders it is quite different. If you can handle customers and a crew you can run a quite lucrative electrician shop, for the rest of construction it is quite different. Repeat.
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.
>* I’ve worked trades. I loved a lot about it! But I’m so glad this article pointed out the range of status: not all trades, or roles within one are equal. If you are an incredible welder who can run a perfect seam every time you can command a huge salary. For the rest of the welders it is quite different. If you can handle customers and a crew you can run a quite lucrative electrician shop, for the rest of construction it is quite different. Repeat.*
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.
It feels weird. Those with capability to pay should choose quality. But often they still choose price. And identifying quality is rather hard... Good reputation and good quality should carry business in future and get bit higher prices.
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...
Picking up a trade like that I believe also requires a much more practical and hands-on mindset, which said kids of white-collar parents might have had less opportunity to develop in the first place.
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.
I recently switched to being an electrician in ship construction after a MSc in Computer Science and PhD in Data Science with heavy focus on writing software/services.
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.
The issue is "physically demanding", look at the guys that are 50+ in the trades, they have all sorts of physical issues from working in the trades. I say this as someone who has two JM qualifications.
Serious injuries which will nag for the rest of your life do happen, but they're extremely rare. All things being equal, physical work is vastly better for your body than sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day. Desk work is associated with increased chances of heart disease, obesity, mental health issues, and much more. We're not meant to be sedentary, but desk work basically requires that.
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.
Gym rat + desk job hints at passable cardiovascular health though. An overall healthy body in the modern age is very tough* and time-consuming when you consider all aspects..
*Edit : though/tough, not native
I think the issue in physical work are mainly repeated strain on joints and back. Human body was not built to endure so much repeated strain.
Would you say your decision to switch careers is based on your evolving interests, or economics?
I always wanted to help people and realized more and more that nobody ever needs a programmer apart from the medium to big corporations. I’d rather help individuals. That plays a big role.
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.
I am not this person but in some segments of the market there is significant demand for people who can build ships. The US and Canada are both about to throw dozens of billions of dollars at new domestic military shipbuilding programs, for instance. Somebody with his educational qualifications who can do something electrical in large/complex ships might be able to command quite a high salary.
Perhaps over time doing complex things yes but for now I’m definitely a rookie I can tell you making many rookie mistakes like loosing tools xD
You can get jobs and have a career without education, certification and licensing?
> 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...
> You can get jobs and have a career without education, certification and licensing?
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.
Being wealthy is better than being poor, and being able to pay for college is better than working in construction. However, when choosing a specialty it is important to consider one's preferences. If your child don't want to be a lawyer it doesn't matter whether you can afford paying for the degree, and if he insists he would rather be fixing cars than dealing with documents, helping with a student loan is not really the best thing you can offer as a parent.
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.
>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.
better, yes, but there will always be inherent risk. even if you don't die, there will often be injuries from years of strain
Office jobs sitting in front of a computer are also pretty hard on your body, albeit in a different way
The article specifically mentions arborists. I don’t think there is any way to de-risk something like tree work.
You can only get so much better at reducing "dumb" deaths and injuries when you spend all day every day around things that will kill you if you touch them.
It's not about what you believe it's about what the facts are. Deaths and injuries are much more common in blue collar wok, because of accidents or wear and tears than in white collar work
I started out thinking about electrician when the AI thing took off. Then I got realistic about it and started thinking diesel mechanic.
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.
Electricians are a bit like airline pilots in that they are paid for knowing what they know, the limits, and making timely decisions. Good ones are paid well, and bad ones kill people. Other tradies have super skills. Welders - who knows how they (reliably) do what they do.
I think the most important aspect of high salary is job demand.
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.
> Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
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.
Nobody in a dealership is using an o-scope and logic analyzer.
They are using an OEM diagnostic tool and following approved shop procedures.
Nobody should be debugging code by hand either but when all the tools fail, its time to get your hands dirty.
No, when all the tools fail, they buy back the car or you lemon law it. Story over. It would not happen, does not happen, cannot happen.
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.
Yeah, GP is way off base on that point.
hn is full of people larping just like reddit
There's demand but for all but the most specialized stuff (maybe NVH), the work is brutal and the flag hour system sucks ass. Got a warranty job? Better be happy with half pay. Got something that's an absolute bitch to get apart or something goes wrong? Yeah you're still getting paid the same even if it's not your fault. There's a good reason Ford can't find enough auto techs. There's no way I would go back to earning money as a mechanic over something like HVAC or being a millwright.
> Got something that's an absolute bitch to get apart or something goes wrong? Yeah you're still getting paid the same even if it's not your fault.
I feel bad for mechanics in the rust belt getting paid what another mechanic gets paid for much more effort
As a side note, the text styled with Noe Text in a bold weight is quite unreadable. I would use 100 instead, which makes the text more pleasant to digest.
A few years back, we hired an electrician to do some relatively small things for us—things I could do like replacing light switches with timer switches and the like, but didn’t have time to do. The thing that really blew me away was when I asked him if he wanted me to shut off the power at the breaker box and he said no and did all the work with live current in the wires. Yes, I know, gloves, rubber soled shoes, he was fine, but it still was somewhat terrifying to watch.
Not an electrician, but I did some when younger. And did it unknowingly at least once, when the other guy on the job cut power to the wrong circuit. My father would do it routinely.
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.
I know some electricians who would call this man an idiot. PPE is for when a hazard cannot be avoided, which in this case it could easily have been avoided. Though of course the safety culture and laws differ from place to place.
From the perspective of many electricians, "high voltage" doesn't happen until ~600v.
Have done this too (and am not a professional electrician either) --- you use insulated tools and make sure you stay out of the way of any possible current paths.
Why not just shut off the breaker though? What’s the harm in that?
Live feedback without additional expensive and buggy test tools. May be marginal, but if you are trying to guarantee a certain income/payrate, it’s easy to take shortcuts in a system you’re comfortable in.
For effect. You want the client to feel that they got their money's worth and it wasn't something they could have done themselves.
Other devices on the same circuit that I didn't want to disturb.
Like what? A deep freeze? Genuinely curious. If this were commercial it would make more sense.
> Yes, I know, gloves, rubber soled shoes, he was fine, but it still was somewhat terrifying to watch.
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.
1. you can definitely get electrocuted snipping a single wire with insulated ppe, just brushing up against a wall can form a circuit.
2. You are thinking of survivorship bias, selection bias is a different thing.
I think one thing the author didn’t touch on is what your outlook for jobs would look like provided you dedicated the same amount to the trade that you would college
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.
Yes I agree with this. There's often a culture among trades people of cutting corners on safety (sometimes they get pressured to do it but sometimes it's just out of over confidence or machismo), eating poorly and drinking too much, and so on.
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.
I mean when it says "Electrical linesmen tend to be killed by electrocution." one way to interpret that is if you become an Electrical linesman your most likely way of dying will be by electrocution, but I bet statistically that is not what is meant, instead I am just going to assume, without any evidence, that if you take the job your most likely chance of dying on the job will be through electrocution.
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 can confirm it's not easy to get an electrical apprenticeship
I'm an electrician. I used to be a programmer. I still program for fun and sometimes get small gigs.
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.
What was the transition like? How did this article's description of union electrical work as like the "McKinsey partner" of the trades world strike you?
I grew up on a farm. I don’t care what the author says, manual labor is very rewarding. I built my own office, carport, horse stable, chicken coop and many other projects in the evenings after already exhausting work, and if I could make more in construction, I’d pick that over an office job any day of the week.
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”.
I had some time and decided to renovate my kitchen. I'm doing everything myself: plasterboard/drywall, flooring, electrical, plumbing, cabinets, painting, etc. I had time to learn the standards and do it all the 'right' way, and I'm almost done.
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.
> I don’t care what the author says
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.
That doesn’t say anything about taking care of your body though. A better part of my family works construction and it’s only the uncle that smokes, thinks proper posture is for wimps and lives off microwave pizza that constantly complains about his joints.
No, I do not, but thank you for asking. This is one thing I'm happy to pay professionals for!
One thing rarely mentioned is what happens when all the white collar people lose their job and can no longer pay for expensive blue collar work?
Simple enough, one group will be living in houses falling apart, the other group will be renovating distressed cheap housing into relative mansions to live in or flip at cost or less.
There is a much larger number of people who can do electrical work than those who are "electricians". We will instead see more people doing their own work, mostly with success.
Regardless, dry walling, stud framing, roof trussing, foundations, plumbing, gas fitting, electrics, etc are all umbrella'ed under "blue collar work".
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.
What does that mean?
Tradies will buy poorly maintained houses and fix them up.
ChatGPT will tell everyone else (who cares to do it) how to do the same thing. It's not hard.
As a software guy who’s worked alongside trades for the past 15 years, ChatGPT can tell you some of the tricks but the know-how comes from hands-on experience. I’ve lost count of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up from watching and talking to those guys.
Well, in principle the economy scales to the labor constraint.
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.
The article literally admits is first point was misleading.
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.
> Almost every tradesperson knows someone who’s had at least one protracted absence due to a work injury, and many of us know someone who was permanently disabled or killed.
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/