I've done manual labor in both construction and at a lumber mill.
Invariably, the following happened:
- I was given grunt work as a I was the new/junior guy
- Did this for about 1.5 weeks
- After the above, someone (usually the owner's wife) would say something like: "Instead of Alex doing grunt work, why doesn't he helps us <fix technology thing>"
And that ranged from "order us a new computer" to "fix the North American Controls lumber sorter machine".
My point is:
Being able to solve complex problems is a surprisingly transferable skill. It's so transferable that even in the trades, if you can solve those problems, people will identify it and rapidly move you to the most complex problems they have.
My working life has always been exactly like this. I'm not sure why, but I always tried to avoid doing tech for a living. Grew up in construction, joined the military, when I got out I was just going to follow in Dad's footsteps and went to finish my journeyman as an electrician. But as the company was growing, the technical and managerial skills were harder to come by and they wanted me to give it a shot. A similar cycle kept happening in every position I've held - facilities management, stationary engineering... once my technical skillset was realized, both the skillset and it's direct skills (development, etc) and the problem solving skills were asked of me to be utilized.
With that, never having a reason to intrinsically develop that sense of solving complex problems is one of the biggest heartbreaks to come along with AI.
Ok but now you’re not actually doing the trade work. When I was a machinist, if someone asked me to fix their computer, I’m no longer a machinist. And you can’t just become a machinist because you can solve complex problems, you need specific training.
Producing something like a turner's cube or a captive nut requires skills. Coming up with a way to produce them requires an ability to solve complex problems and think in non-obvious ways. But these are well-known puzzle objects. Being able to produce something tricky but novel, applicable to a problem at hand, definitely sets apart a high-class machinist.
You were lucky then. I know highly intelligent people who worked in the trades who were stuck doing grunt work for a long time, not because they weren't capable, but because they didn't have the right connections. Of course white collar jobs can have the same problem.
Being personable and having good to great communication skills is a prerequisite for almost everything. The software and hardware engineering fields have largely had a free pass on this historically because supply was so low.
How do you define "Great communication skills"? Is it replying to emails quickly, using a lot of exclamation points in your replies, being a clear thinker and having good ideas, or just being friendly and docile?
Indeed, university educations go with you everywhere, they're one of the few stores of big wealth that cannot be seized at a border.
Whereas, okay, the whole reason we are paying electricians so much is because unions in California and New York, where real estate is the largest and second largest economic sector, prevent you from doing almost exactly that: transferring a prefabricated piece of a building from China across a border with all the work built into it, same as everything else.
You can split hairs on my metaphor here but don't miss the point. There's no scarcity of labor to correctly install safe wires, whether it is in datacenters or homes or electronics, nor scarcity of innovations in logistics or whatever to transfer that labor from places where it is cheap to places that need to build. It's all guild feuds.
Better than the nincompoops my landlord sends out to "fix" stuff. Better than trying to get someone to fix anything at all in San Francisco.
The truth is I would rather choose from 100 varied vendors - if prefab were permitted in San Francisco, you would be able to buy it from anyone - than to be forced to endure the shitty alternative of simply unpermitted work, or the kind of work that my lunatic licensed electrician neighbor does, which has burned down just as many walls as in your total hypothetical that has never happened.
'The IT guy who thought he could fix the 3 million dollar sortation skid' is such a common trope amount people who actually know what they're doing that it's funny to see you casually drop it here as evidence of ... I'm not sure what.
Just had a dedicated 120v 20 A circuit installed. I was clear that I worked on complex systems but fully respected what a trade person could do. It’s easy to look at his work after the fact and say “I could have done that” but it’s fully to code and wife is happy.
Now on to my plumbing issue. I’m calling a plumber.
If you scratch the wire while pealing of the insulation it looks the same now but it might burn down the house later.
Edit: or more fun, if you twist the end of a flexible wire (so that you can stick it into a clamp easier) the little threads cut each other while tightening it and wiggling the cable breaks them. It's like a person can stand on your hand without pain but if you cross your fingers first....
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.
I'd like you to show up on site and let everyone with shoulder and back issues (which is everyone) that you've cracked the case wide open and it's their own fault.
It's wild sometimes the level of man child bubble the average HN poster lives in.
Lazy is not a very nice way of putting it, but I would urge anyone without a simple stretching routine to develop one.
Five to ten minutes a few times a week, and I've not had a back problem in years.
It's a simple and easy way to keep a healthy baseline. Good for all sorts of physical and mental issues. I feel like shit if I've not done them for a while.
You do have some choice on a construction site. Physical activity depletes nutrients. You can choose to replenish them. Strength and obesity is also a choice.
I once had a coworker 24 years old but he barely ate and barely slept. In a few years he has injuries everywhere that didn't go away.
One guy I know fell down 10 meters onto his back then got up and went back to work. He looks exactly like someone like that.
I've met a surprising number of manual laborers who seemed to believe you can build or repair something without materials.
Much like office workers who think ergonomics is something that comes after ruining your body.
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.
Hey, mentioned it above, assuming your making $80k, it's a one time cost of non expensive standing desk and ergonomic chair, plus 5 minutes of workout before and after work. And stretching brakes during.
Those 15 min is actually quite a lot if you don't have the habit yet. But you're in a better situation than someone working at a slaughter line, with no time to scratch your nose for 2h15min in between brakes not long enough to eat, use bathroom and sharpen your knives for the next 2h15min run.
I still feel sorry for your herniated disk, I don't think it's just your laziness, but more ignorance and equally lazy ignorant surroundings normalizing unhealthy lifestyle.
But you can't say someone that can get up and stretch for 30s every 15 min has it as bad as people running to the toilet and eating by swallowing big bites just to make it in time before the next animal comes to their position in line.
Of for fucks sake, this comment is so backwards, it reminds me of an ex of mine who refused to brush his teeth because doing so caused his gums to bleed.
When I had no exercise routine, my back acted up. I think distilling it into laziness is, well, a lazy take on it. It’s very hard to make proactive actions and work off delayed gratification. Especially when you are in pain. Pain is often all encompassing and you can’t perform long term thinking, and when you are out of pain (laying in bed) then you are just so happy to be relieved. It’s hard
In the US if you aren't union (which most people aren't) you will be fired and blacklisted by anybody and everybody if they find out you called OSHA. And if you are union they will probably be pissed you didn't contact the union first. It also likely won't result in any real changes, just some paltry fine and pissed off lead men. The exploted worker themselves will likely take a lot of the financial hit. (wages theft in the US dwarves all other theft combined)
Atleast half of trade jobs in the US expect you to break OSHA and labor laws regularly as part of the job. If you don't there are enough other desperate people to replace you.
No, especially with stress, even carrying relative light things can cause lasting damage with one moment of not paying attention. Nevermind all the other dangerous things. Also I thought laws were tough for safety in germany, but they restaurated a big railway bridge right next to where I lived (years ling project) - and they worked even in icy, windy conditions with fog. You know those fog, that combined with freezing conditions will cover everything with a slipery wet ice layer. And this with heavy wind. No wonder people literally died there in accidents. (And officially this was not mentioned ever, DB rather celebrated themself for this project often. It was mostly east europeans working there).
I was the Health and Safety Representative at a previous job site, with a lot of different nationalities. Of course I can't generalise all of them, but I noticed that eastern europeans usually had way more disregard for job safety than Danes. There was one guy from Hungary especially who I had to reprimand at least weekly for doing stupid acrobatic shit on ladders. And we usually weren't even under time pressure, he just had barely any regard for his own safety. It was maddening. I would have fired him if I had authority to do so.
Injuries happen most often because the rules or best practices weren’t followed (ignored safety to meet unrealistic quota, cut corners to leave work early, and why not, sometimes just being lazy, etc.) and less often because of some really unexpected condition (invisible defect in the safety equipment).
The difference between office and construction workers is that the former probably have more control over the situation but the damage is so slow they only realize too late, while the latter have too little control most times even if they are acutely aware of the immediate risk. They are the people who can’t afford to protest, lose the job, go to court, etc. and usually the informal requirements are shaped in such a way that in the end it looks like their own decision to forego safety concerns.
But an office worker can be under similar pressure to deliver day after day, and ruin their muscles, spine, eyes, joints, psyche in the process. Just less abruptly.
Indeed, but about the exact case I talked about - I doubt the construction workers were fine with going to work in those conditions but they were pushed into it (they were behind schedule). I am a climber - and icy windy foggy conditions are not when it is safe to be in heights.
And that was my point, a office worker can get stressed a lot - but when they make a misstake they have to compile again(and maybe consider quitting), not go to the graveyard, because they fell to death.
Otherwise sure, heart attacks can happen as well. And burn out is real, too. But the work itself is not physically dangerous.
Neither does the police stop murders from happening, but if your employer demands you haul around 50 kg of bricks around by hand, you have legal recourse.
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.
Yes, I did this, but I could still work as a programmer. My dad on the other hand was a painter and decorator, he fell off a ladder, hair line fracture in his back. Couldn't work to provide for his family. Fortunately he had critical illness cover. He never did painting and decorating again, but did start a building firm.
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.
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.)
In trades, those projects have obvious beginnings, ends, and results. The driveway is poured. You’re often not expected to maintain that driveway either.
A lot of tech is basically a treadmill. You’re never finished. It is no wonder people burn out mentally.
Something like cybersecurity? Great, we made it through today, tomorrow will be worse. Repeat until something bad happens.
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.
>relying on supply and demand leads to unfair outcomes
And I don't think anyone here is unaware of this either. Peoples abilities (actual or potential) will forever be variable and fall on some sort of standard distribution.
This is not about abilities at all though, compensation shouldn't be tied to just "ability" either. My point is that it should to some extent depend on the risk a person takes on as well.
No matter how many people are are able and willing to do some "low-skill high-risk" work, their salary should reflect the fact they are taking on a risk. Taking that risk should be valued and rewarded by society.
This is not about equal outcomes, it's about fair compensation. If someone risks their life and damages their body in a mine every day, it's absurd and insulting that I make more than them sitting in an air-conditioned desk typing on a keyboard.
What’s the point of this? Talking about fairness or how things should be doesn’t do anything. How do you actually accomplish it? Without some notion of what could be done, it’s akin to complaining about the weather.
Well recognizing the problem is the first step, no? If you scroll up you'll see that this is what this was about. There are plenty of people who haven't even gotten that far and think supply and demand is the perfectly fine and the only option.
But sure, if you want, there are plenty of ways. Mandatory bonuses for higher-risk or generally physical labour would be one easy start, although it likely wouldn't be as effective in practice as one would like it to be. Restructuring the way people are paid as a whole is a more effective solution, which could cover other aspects too, although it would obviously be less popular with The Shareholders™ and therefore more difficult to pass. It's all a matter of legislation - every sane country has a law that says what the salary may or may not be based on, various limits (e.g. minimum wage), bonuses and modifiers... Maybe take inspiration from some countries' public sectors and make salaries fully standardized with a big lookup table and a bunch of modifiers based on objective or at least measurable parameters?
I don’t see anyone not acknowledging the problem. Some don’t see a good solution.
You propose a legal requirement to pay these people more. That will indeed solve the problem of unfairly low pay for these jobs. It will also create a problem of reduced hiring for those jobs and reduced output, possibly substantially reduced depending on how much more they have to be paid.
In short, you can mandate that lumber mill workers must be paid more, but you have to accept that less lumber gets produced and fewer people get paid to work there.
Less lumber gets produced, luber prices get higher or lumber productions profits get smaller, yes. Ideally it's a mix of the three.
But this isn't nearly as bad as you're making it sound. Lots of things used to be done by extremely low-wage workers or even slaves, and haven't gone away now that workers have to be paid better (or at all). Obviously many of those people are still paid very poorly and there's lots of work left to do there, but we improved things to a noticable extent and we didn't really suffer any bad effects. We can go further.
A lot of that was automation rather than legislation. You could use this as an automation push. That could work well. My main point is that this should be something like “legislation should mandate higher wages for riskier jobs and push for automation to control costs and reduce risk” rather than “it’s unfair.”
You're mixing up two parts of the discussion. This is unfair, THEREFORE we should ____. You need to agree on what the problem is, why it's a problem and what the outcome should be, then you can get to the methods.
And no, not that much. Automation is of course a factor, but it came at different times for different things and don't forget that it often made things worse for workers, at least where or when they didn't have institutional support.
Having institutional support for workers (unions and a pro-labour government) is what ultimately matters. Even if some prices go up and some jobs are lost, such institutions help smooth out the transition and put pressure on businesses which would otherwise jump at the opportunity to also increase their margins.
Equality in outcome doesn't need to be the goal. I much prefer the idea that someone who puts in (40|30|20) [0] hours a week of actual work gets some sense of dignity and purpose from that work along with a reasonable standard of living, no matter what the work involves.
[0] actual number would vary by culture, nation and technological time period
If by "supply and demand" you mean all supplies have positive and reasonably sized elasticity, and all demands have negative and reasonably sized elasticity, through all reasonable price ranges...
Some niche cases include any kind of labor, anything that comes out of a factory with economies of scale, and anything that involves land or extraction of natural resources.
No?? I'm sorry but that's an insane comparison. We live in countries that have laws. Those laws are what applies the "law" of supply and demand to wages. We could alternatively have laws that say all human labor is paid equally per hour worked, or have a master table of types of work to monetary amounts, or some complex formula that takes various measurable factors into account.
I'm not saying any of those specific examples would be better than the current, but they're definitely options that exist and they're just words on a page passed by parliament, just like the current system is.
Hell, some of those things already exist in the public sector [0]. My base salary is calculated based on my job title and level of education, automatically adjusted with cost-of-living inflation, with modifiers for years of experience, job performance, being on-call, mentoring, working non-standard hours or weekends, dangerous conditions...
[0] I'm only familiar with some EU countries, not sure how this is done in the US or wherever else
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.
I've been a welder, a machinist of exotic metal orifice plates holding ten thousandths of an inch, a lowest level carpenter, got a college degree in horticultural science (pretty useless degree IMHO), became an entrepreneur,a licensed sprinkler pro, a landscaper, an executive running a mail order company, and the most successful of all: An installer - servicer of underwater pumps on the area lakes for the wealthiest waterfront property owners. It was dangerous, indeed. Working with 230 V electricity at all times (been shocked multiple times), diving alone in almost constant zero visibility water at depth, up and down hillsides where a mis-step could cripple you and end your career (or worse), driving 100 miles or more RT 3 to 4 times a week for 15 years+.
Luckily, I survived it all without serious injury. What I discovered affected me the most was business OVERHEAD, the cost of doing business. I had 8+ employees in the mail order business plus a lease space, numerous expenses, huge overhead. With the lake pump business I had day labor guy I paid only on days I needed him. I was quite able to be the chief salesman, website creator and manager, head diver, head electrician and plumber, etc. Lowest overhead of anything I ever got involved with, consequently the most successful. Huge savings for retirement, mortgage paid off, no debt, got a Rivian on order. Rec diving in Asia and the Caribbean with my son, kiteboarding in Costa Rica. Blue collar made me successful.
On the other hand, my son is a degreed comp. sci grad who got hired just before machine learning became a thing, his company gave him the title of "senior engineer" recently instead of a raise, in fact, his salary raises have stopped, luckily he still has a job.
My mom insisted I got a job the summer after my freshman year in high school and I didn't want to. We lived in a small town and there was a small new French restaurant about to open just down the street so she walked me down there and talked the owner-chef, Franc into giving me a job. I ended up working there all throughout high school (washing dishes and eventually cooking) and the education was arguably as valuable as what I learned in college. I was studying French so Franc and I only spoke in French. It was incredibly helpful but I also learned a lot of words and phrases that weren't useful on the AP French test. Working in the kitchen I got exposure to people and lifestyles that I didn't know existed and it was eye opening in the best possible way. One time when I was home from college I got a frantic call from Franc to see if I could fill in because his sous chef had been busted with a kilo of coke.
I worked at a deli from age 16 to 18. Working alongside people 2 and 3x my age who had been doing that their whole working lives taught me more about life than almost anything since.
Was this all in the US? If so, that's broken. I've been permanently employed since 1998 in Australia and I've never earnt less than about $27 per hour, and even that was only in the very early / junior days. The exchange rate (US$ to $AU$) has always been approximately $0.60 to $0.80 US to $1 AU for almost all of that time, so I wonder why the US pays so little when you also don't get the benefits of affordable healthcare etc?
I’m pretty sure today entry level (non-union) factory work is around $15-$20 USD ($21.62-$28.82 AUD at current exchange rate) in most parts of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if it’s lower though in very rural, low income parts of the country like West Virginia.
Federal minimum wage is still $7.25/hr, hasn't changed in years but very few jobs today pay less than about 2x that, as people simply won't work for less. Even fast food pays about $15 in most places.
I think it’s just that the dangerous jobs are avoided y those who can avoid them. So they are left to those who have little choice, which depresses wages. This is rather immoral, but Covid made quite clear that the essential jobs weren’t the high-status or high-paying ones.
I find this worrying because the entire economy is built on the idea of cheap physical snd cheap unskilled labor. So if we do a good job educating, we’ll need to fill these jobs by paying more rather than preying on the desperate. And I don’t see the current world being willing to pay more.
> the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
the high-paying jobs are for reliance under obscurity: part of a very big deal, and if you screw up you ruin everything, and it's hard to know if you screwed up. That's everything from CEO's to investors and researchers, teachers, and yes, some tradesmen.
If you want to reduce wages, increase transparency.
its ok.....i got a diploma from a prestigious music school at the age of 18 and still spent the large chunk of my 20s working my way from busboy to assistant kitchen manager at a variety of classy restaurants, culminating in about $12/hr.
During the restaurant years I was also going to college for computer science and ultimately dropped out halfway through to do remote R&D work for a silicon valley gig making a whopping 500 bucks a week (living in FL)...Than covid hit and the boss went back to Korea.
Now I make 12.50 an hour repairing and designing boutique tube amps in KS
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.
That’s the thing about pension schemes like American social security: they were originally set with a retirement age that matched mean mortality, so half of potential recipients would die before drawing on them. In other words, half of workers were not meant to retire, and the half that did would be protected by the contributions of all. Modern medicine completely changed those expectations, keeping the elderly alive twenty years longer and making twenty years of unproductive, publicly funded retirement an expectation and entitlement for everyone. It’s political suicide to discuss whether something should change about that.
> the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits
Anyone who advanced that ‘defense’ has a poor understanding of economics.
Risk is not an essential element of capitalism. Some investments are effectively risk free. ‘Disproportionate’ return seems to be something you’ve just made up. There’s no mention of the proportionality of returns in any economic treatise I’ve ever read.
Lastly, there’s nothing to defend. There’s simply the observation that if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital. Nobody has ever come up with a working alternative.
> if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital.
Untrue. Capital accumulates. People have desires for their world/society/community beyond their own wealth. They want to see certain things happen, and owning capital puts a person in a position to influence whether it does (or does not).
In that case most capitalists and owners don't understand capitalism, because there are only two standard arguments - one is the one about risk, and the other is that everyone should be grateful when a capitalist creates jobs at all.
As for defences - capital is just political power by other means. If the capitalist is wasting money on yachts while workers can't afford food and housing, the return is morally disproportionate, and the usual outcome is socially catastrophic, in various possible ways.
Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences. That's a shockingly stupid way to run anything - as we're all about to find out.
> Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences
It is people who ALWAYS reduce everything to personal opportunism (no matter capitalism or not). Capitalism is the smartest way to run anything exactly because it is build on concepts of broader consequences of that fact.
The problem is that "the owner can simply become a worker" doesn't really work like that because they likely sacrificed career advancements, education, time, saved up money, etc.
If someone starts running a company at 20 years old and goes bankrupt at 40, they can't simply go back to working a regular job. They don't have a resume, they sacrificed 20 years of career progress. They'll be working at Walmart while their peers who got the same education and have the same intelligence are becoming partners at law firms or investment banks.
Precisely the same objections can be made about someone who takes one particular job instead of another. There's an opportunity cost to deciding to go and work for company/person X instead of company/person Y (or maybe to not work at all, and instead study, or raise young children etc. etc.)
Yeah completely unlike the regular worker whose factory gets shut down or gets injured on the job or any of a million things that breaks the fragile little house of cards that gives them any kind of basic human dignity at all.
The capital class doesn't need you to defend them. You're embarrassing yourself.
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.
It is. That is the whole thing where American setup is supposed to be better then European - you can fail, fail again and then again with little punishnent or consequence. And it is not like European consequences were grave, you are just less likely yo get another investment once you failed.
Frankly, too many people like to talk about risk taking in fairly low risk situations.
When you look at capital and risk, the risk are not that large. And economic policy favorwed capital over labor literally for decades on top of it.
> One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
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.
> That capital owner - or his ancestor - either worked exceptionally hard or took exceptional risks to get into that position.
That’s nuts. The industrial barons of 19th century America neither worked hard nor took amazing risks. They were lawyers and bankers who manipulated stocks and broke unions.
But nobody answers the question of why that would allow them to treat others like basically slaves.
The standard answer is: but the others could do the same thing. Well, if everybody tried to become a capitalist at all costs then we'd be in a pretty bad place.
Not trying to argue on the downsides of capitalism, but what comes to mind is the Endicott Johnson Corporation. They paid decent wages to their workers during 1950s, but got overcompeted by Nike partly because they were unwilling to lower their wages to stay in business
"Or his ancestor"? What are we, an aristocracy? Personally I don't think there should be any inherited wealth beyond a few million dollars but that's another story. Luckily, this hasn't been a big problem yet. The heirs tend to be very bad at maintaining or building their inherited wealth. Cornelius Vanderbilt II is an obvious exception.
But in the middle we do have an increasing problem of trust fund kids dominating industry. Hollywood is an obvious example. But even in the startup world, your education matters an awful lot. And you going to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale has a lot to do with elite private schooling and all of it has a ton to do with the luck of birth not merit.
I'm actually curious who you think risked their fortune? Is it anyone in particular or is it just some romanticized idea? Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Jeff Bezos's parents had a quarter million in retirement savings to lend him in the 1990s and he was playing with investor money after that.
Now wealth creation seems to be taking other people's money and buying up industries with inelastic demand to extract wealth from ordinary people. Housing, medical care, vets, utilities, that sort of thing.
And then there's slavery and its aftermath. How much generational wealth was created from slavery? Even a century after Emancipation, we had the government creating wealth for white people with the GI Bill post-WW2. Free college and cheap mortgages. Who was taking a risk there?
You get sufficiently wealthy and you aren't allowed to fail. The government will bail you out.
I feel like James Cameron has never tried anything safe. He was a truck driver early on. Some dentists took a risk and financed a truck driver to make a movie.
I installed an oven in my house. The oven was on a 30(? it's been a while) amp circuit, and the new oven kept blowing the breaker that had kept the old oven happy.
The stove was on something like a 60 amp circuit, so rather than try to rewire the panel, I patched the oven into the stove's circuit, because it was way over capacity.
That said, the wires were beasts: single-strand copper, maybe 6 gauge (over a tenth of an inch in diameter) and did not want to bend at all. I ended up going back to Lowes three times to get bigger connectors. In the end it was a box of aluminum half an inch wide, with a tube down the middle and a screw-in on the side to hold the wires in place.
I got it done, but it was a pain from start to finish. And of course with that many amps at play, every time I touched anything I first went to every single person in the house to tell them what I was doing, and not to go near the breaker box.
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.
Living in a 200+ year old house, I've seen a lot of this first-hand through both planned and unplanned renovations and repairs. In my experience, some contractors are better able to deal with all the uncertainty than others and, if you find the right people (which I have again), hold on for dear life--and, of course, be prepared to write some substantial checks and make potentially expensive decisions.
Had a kitchen fire caused by an appliance in the middle of the night a couple of Januaries ago. Was a complete nightmare to deal with which basically ended up redoing much of my interior because of smoke. Insurance covered a lot, but it took a lot of time and something north of $50K out of pocket.
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.
Residential also has to deal with regulators who are capricious jerks and might (have a boss who does) not like your boss, the contractor who hired your boss, the property owner, etc, etc. and will happily screw you out of thousands of dollars of opportunity cost to get at them.
Working for BigCo you never get that stuff because anyone who wants to screw you has to go through BigCo's legal team to do it.
> Residential has to deal with individual home owners, house flippers, renovation GCs and weird change orders
In other words, the customers are awful. I sell and run commercial and industrial electrical work, I’d rather go do something completely different as a career than deal with homeowners, flippers, and residential GCs. The work itself has zero challenge and requires almost no thinking, it’s not hard to pull and fish romex through finished walls.
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.
The best advice (a good) spackler ever gave me, started with his question "why do you make all your wiring holes so small?"
In my apprenticed ignornance, I figured I was "doing the gypsum guys a favor" (by not cutting large holes everywhere) but it turns out cutting larger holes made both trades' lives easier.
Making a large cut-out "disappear" is actually much easier to conceal than a smaller opening.
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That, and wet sanding (it's incredible how many people dry sand - all the dust!).
Drywallers don’t understand anything except “it’s my turn to hang gypsum board.” It will be one of the first trades that is completely automated.
Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing contractors need to understand the most since their work goes all over the building and they’re on the project from start to finish.
Drywallers just come in and put up gypsum once walls have been framed and MEP has been roughed in, and then they leave.
Tapers and mudders command my respect, that’ a difficult trade to perfect. Holding up 4’ x 8’ sheets of gypsum and screwing it to studs might be hard work but it’s dead ass simple.
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
I've done too many jobs around my house that should have been done by a qualified <whatever> because none of them are interested in a shitty little repair job, or if they are, the quote is astronomical because there's a huge cost overhead of taking a job and getting your shit onsite.
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.
Tangentially related... Back when I was a product manager for fairly large old-timey computer systems, it took a while for me to wrap my head around the fact that all these super-smart digital designers basically didn't know jack about anything remotely related to AC power. I needed to talk to the mechanical/power systems people directly.
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 sincerely question the intellect of those that join the military of the USA and Britain. I don’t trust these people and would not allow them in my inner circles. If they are not lacking intelligence they are lacking morality.
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.
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.
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
If there actually is a large displacement of white collar work because of AI there will simultaneously be 1) a huge surplus of physical labor which will bring wages down 2) a huge decrease in the number of people who can afford to employ tradespeople.
The dynamics of blue collar employment would obviously be changed as a second order effect of white collar worker displacement
I think we're a few decades away, at least, from seeing a robot on something like a residential construction site. Sure they look good in a flat controlled environment, but humans have a hard time walking around a construction site. Then there is the dexterity issues that they have an human hands excel at. The startup cost of a robot is probably 4x the cost of an entry level tradesperson, at least.
Right now, today, modular homes are factory built, transported and site assembled (accurately lowered into place and levelled on biscuits to hydraulic jack together) that are multiple large Lego blocks of click together cast concrete foundation with utility piping inbuilt and "some part of a larger house" fully built above.
These can be trucked or flown into place.
Factory built simplifies full trade critical path, with pipeline schedule of custom variations moving through to be wired, plumbed, built out and finished.
There's a very large difference between robots on a new construction project - we're still quite a few years away from that - and the sort of flexibility and problem solving required for "old work" (fixing broken pipes, installing new wiring in existing homes etc. etc). I very very much doubt that the latter type of work will be roboticized within 50-100 years, even if the former might be.
You sound like I sounded in 2021 but for software, and robots (will) have LLMs/RSI to make them advance even faster. It probably even starts like software where I can buy a home repair assistant to do basic repairs or maintenance, but that advanced to the point where it could source and renovate an entire room. I don’t doubt that white-collar work will be obsolete before blue-collar, but 50-100 years feels way off. I’d say 15-20.
If you've ever done residential wiring or plumbing fixes in an older home, I suspect you'd share my opinion.
That's why I differentiated between robots working on new construction sites, where I do think that a 15-20 year timeline is entirely feasible (not necessarily desirable, but feasible). That's an entirely different task than renovations in an existing building, which is much *much* harder even for humans.
Also note that there's another way of thinking about where technology will take housebuilding that already exists: more factory-assembled modular cosntruction. That's less popular in the USA, with its focus on single family "unique" homes, but is taking off elsewhere and is already highly automated.
I suspect what will happen is that the relative value of fixing 100 year old construction will decrease. Sure you can hire someone for 20k to fix the broken plumbing in your house or you can get a new one for 30k that also has the windows, kitchen, electrical and insulation fixed.
> 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.
Exactly this I've been saying also. It’s completely obvious and I don’t understand how this argument is not brought up more frequent. If AI would take let’s say 50% of IT jobs there'd be a huge drop in consumer demand that’d send shockwaves through the entire economy…
Me too. I am personally much less worried about typical AI doomsday scenarios like bioweapons or mass hacking swarms. I am sure those will happen, but will be relatively targeted (even if that means huge numbers of casualties). But something like unemployment of nearly all working age people across humanity is really an apocalyptic scenario. I can't imagine how terrible it will be that no one has any drive or ambition any longer. We can already see the signs of this future coming, with AI use destroying education, and the staleness of modern culture.
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.
So people working in white collar jobs are holding the economy hostage? That's basically your point. But society has shown it is far more resilient than narratives like this would make you believe. We seem to have survived through a lot events such as the 2008 crash and covid as recent examples. And yet there is no "collapse" except in the most extreme cases. Even some countries that are in war have not yet "collapsed".
The west has transitioned away from a manufacturing economy into a service economy. We gave China all the manufacturing while we (the US) transitioned into a 'service' economy. Once the service economy is run by AI, there will be no jobs here. Manufacturing ain't coming back...well maybe once everyone is impoverished and willing to work 40 hours a week for their bread ration.
Grandparent poster is making the claim that the economy is structured in a certain way. Their claim is that simply dismantling the existing structure of labour and economy is something that will have a very negative effect.
Also the COVID part is a false analogy / non sequitur. COVID was expected to end. Surviving COVID doesn't mean the economy can survive permanent shocks.
Everything either eventually ends or we adapt, and Covid shut down a lot of blue collar work. Society is resilient and has proven to be many times over not just with Covid.
> The idea people will suddenly go to the trades and work on "solar power" as someone said just mind-numbing nonsense.
That is pretty obvious and mostly correct idea. I don't understand why people who have even a little bit of common sense about how the economy works thinks that mass layoffs of programmers or office workers will destroy the economy.
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.
Are you sure about that correlation? I mean how would those who inherit this old stock pay for all these renovations if they just lost their job to the AI and barely scrape by? Maybe then the 70s tiles bathroom doesn’t looks so bad anymore.
Indeed. My original 1967 white 1"-square tile bathroom floor looks pretty good if I keep it clean. In fact, when I reflect that it was laid down nearly 60 years ago by someone more likely than not no longer alive, it looks very good.
I think you are overestimating the shift off of fossil fuels. I mean, MAYBE people will finally wake up now that the cost of feul is so high, but I wouldn't bet on it.
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.
Know what I miss about it? Having the satisfaction of doing a good job every couple days or week. Taking pride in jobs and regularly pleasing the people you are doing them for. Interacting with normal people who are grateful for you being there and helping, making you a cup of tea and a biscuit. These things are sorely missing from a career in development.
100%. A few months ago I walked away from a 5-year job in biotech programming a manufacturing execution system because I couldn't take interfacing with people thru a screen anymore. My boss was a chemist with an MBA, knew little about what I did, just how I had to follow regulations. I was so silo'd it was boring and lonely. The only highlight was working with the low-paid production staff on how to understand and improve their processes.
I did the inverse, and while I don't enjoy poo and fibreglass, I do immensely enjoy the days I work outside in the spring and summer. Easily worth a bit of occasional poo. :)
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.
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.
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.
Do they get 200 days worth of work per year, paying 5K to 10K per day? I think, that's where the problem lies for anyone who runs a business of trades. Whenever there is a work, they have to charge 400% to cover the overhead.
>Residential master electrician makes 5K - 10K per day.
No.
Perhaps: the electrical contractor of a very large MSA would be having an indredible day if they made $5-10k per day
No resi sparky is making that, regularly, not even weekly (do your math, you estimate $1MM+?!).
Src: IBEW electrician, with decades of residential "side work" (including as a licensed electrical contractor)
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>The supply of electricians is limited by gatekeeping.
Yes and no.
Just show up. Then show up again. This is in such limited supply that if you can make yourself look presentable, on a regular basis, you can walk into many smaller shops (union and not, I've done both) and just ask for a job (it still works).
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For me, one of the best advantages of the jobsites is essentially no females on-site, which gives work the comeradery that my initial career into medicine was lacking (heavily female dominated). Perhaps an oft-dreampt "third place," albeit while at work.
I only share this gendered thought because being a tradesmen would be much more difficult for ANY woman (e.g. hazing, upper body strength)... the one female bricklayer I know (and respect, she is a haus!) agrees with me that "she wasn't built for good ole boys club, but it's all she knows how to do that isn't minimum wage" so she keeps slinging brick with her 99%+ male co-workers.
If you are a young single male, willing to travel around the country: get your union ticket (either indoor or outdoor) and follow storm season restorations for half the year, and make six figures "playing hero."
I think it you are really smart, the end aim isn't to be an electrician. The end aim is to run a crew or own an business with multiple electricians working for you. Doing that can pay very well.
Exactly this. Everyone I know who "got rich" in trades work (including several of my neighbors) did it for 10 years or so, got a reputation for being smart and reliable, saved their money, and then started their own business.
All the people saying kids should go into trades instead of college have clearly never done much manual labor. You know what sucks? Working under a sink. I’m guessing it sucks even harder when you’re 60
By the time you are 60 you are the one speaking to clients and getting the work in, planning it etc, then sending your workers out to do it instead of yourself.
To me this reads as naive as saying by the time you are 60 you should be a director or VP or whatever. The trades are just as much of a pyramid as white collar work is.
Anecdotally, I grew up in a very blue collar area and most of the 60 year old guys I knew were either medically retired (read: too fucked up to work anymore) or getting by through brute force and pain pills.
Agreed, My uncle worked as a tile setter for most of his life. Was very good at it, had his own company and contracted to other companies. I only ever heard good things about his work.
His knees were dead before he was 50. Never made it to "stable", has never owned a home, now living in a van in his 70s.
There were many other issues in his life which prevented things...don't get me wrong...but his case is more the norm from my observations of workers.
It is much easier to be a good "worker" than it is to be a successful one.
Also, Drug/alcohol use in the trades is incredibly common. As is the habit of planning your life around claiming unemployment every winter (at least in my area).
The other problem about to hit the trades is an LLM-driven compression of knowledge-based skills in the home arena. Where it used to take a decently experienced electrician to decode the wiring in my breaker box, a smartphone camera and an LLM already does a decent enough job one can avoid calling the sparkie out for small jobs around the house...
One thing that is sort of alluded to, but not explicitly called out is that one of the ways unions can keep wages high, is by keeping the supply of workers low. So it is quite difficult, and very competitive to get the higher paid licensed, union-protected jobs.
> 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.
Yes, as most science fiction writers, he has good observational skills of current society and is great at seeing the core issues cropping up with new technologies.
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"
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.
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.
I work in robotics. You are sadly mistaken. There is exactly a 0% chance that humans are still using wrenches by hand in 2076 (unless there's some global collapse from climate change / war)
1. Humanoid robots learn to do everything. Perfectly plausible at current progress rates.
2. The skill is removed and AI acts as a leveler, same as in programming. You still need humans to point the nail gun and squeeze the trigger, but everything else is just instructions coming into their smart glasses from an AI. The tradesman is just a meat proxy.
I'd say there's similar challenges to changing legacy hardware/software and all it interacts with. If all you're doing is new then you could probably devise a robot friendly standard and they'd take over the profession, the issue is the huge variety of how plumbing is implemented within a building of any given age, different building eras in a city, across a country, different countries, complying with all their different sets of regulations, all the variety of parts they connect to. That's with very little plumbing knowledge, in my field of courier shipping where companies have been actively pursuing automation for a long time and still are, even if one of the largest companies with influence like amazon are able to standardize on a few things, it's a huge number of other entities they need to interface with where they are limited on how much they can push (i.e. standard size items) without making themselves irrelevant.
> But the people who will be replaced won’t have money to pay the people with wrenches.
Those people will spend their savings, sell their houses to live in the smaller ones, or find another jobs. They will probably gonna get poorer. But the majority of the people with wrenches definitely will get richer, that is how economy works.
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.
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.
You're probably not counting all the overhead, particularly from heavy equipment. Skidsteers, dump trailers, stump grinders, as well as all the oversized/towing capable trucks to haul those machines around. All of that equipment needs maintenance and fuel, as well.
The expensive part is usually just showing up ready to work, with a marginal cost for each additional tree. If you had 15 trees taken down in one day, the cost per tree would work out to seem much more reasonable.
My neighbors were having a bunch of tree work done, and I asked the supervisor what it would cost to take a big dead one down on my property. I planned to do it myself, so I had a strong haggling position, and I got him to $400, which felt worth it to save me a day's worth of hard labor. If they weren't already onsite with all the gear, that would've been $2K+ easy.
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.
>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
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
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.
Most importantly if the water table of the surrounding soil is high enough, it will lift an empty pool, even concrete. At most you would lower the water level below the lights. You’re likely getting wet either way.
In Canada the official electrician trade name is actually 'Construction Electrician' which to me is much more descriptive of the work. Electricians typically need to know a little bit about framing, drywall, hvac, plumbing, etc so that they can confidently cut into walls and modify things.
I'm an electrician in Canada and my favourite part of the job is actually this construction type work. I probably should have just been a carpenter but the job prospects aren't nearly as strong.
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.
Probably bot. Last electrician i met was doing Uber and desperately trying to find something else because the overtime required to make good money was brutal and he wanted to see his family more.
This has been thr pattern with most of the trendy "well paying jobs": They're only well paying once you account for the insane overtime. I've even see people posting jobs bragging about how many hours you'll work.
> So: The actual price paid for college isn’t very high and is declining. Obtaining a college degree unlocks higher wages. Plus, white-collar jobs are safe and easy.
Sounds great. Except we keep hearing about people getting zero callbacks after submitting hundreds of resumes for white collar jobs. While at the same time we're hearing about how the trades are desperate for recruits and can never find enough people to hire.
I think young people should try to follow a path that might hold their interest as much as possible, and collect data about their interest. Talk to people that are doing the actual work. Don't assume trades are for people who have no choice because they're not smart enough for anything else. And don't assume that white collar jobs are best because you're guaranteed to have an easier, more prosperous career.
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.
When I was young, I thought I could be an electrician. But I couldn't because I'm red-green colorblind and at the time wasn't allowed to go down that path (I think this is still the case in Germany but not in other countries). Interestingly I also couldn't apply to the police for the same reason. For electrician it makes sense to me as there is a certain risk, same for flight-controllers (another job I am banned from) but for police it never made any sense to me.
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.
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.
that's medium voltage. High voltage is over 15kV. Low voltage is usually 50V or less, at least in MEP electrical parlance. So there's a gap from 50V-600V that doesn't really have a clear name
In Europe anything below 10kV is low voltage because 10kV is what feeds the 380V 3-phase distribution transformers that then feed single 230V phases to residential/office.
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.
How do you know it’s installed right without putting power through the thing? You’re going to turn the breaker off an on for every single switch? NOPE!
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.
Also the fault current is really low at these locations. My electrician shorted 2 wires together in my garage to avoid having to go back to the panel and shut it off. Try that right by a big substation at 480V and you would not be doing great.
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.
I'm not so sure about that. I think there are things you can do in either case, but you do not want to be in roofing for 40 years. I would take a 100% sedentary job over roofing 10/10 times
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 know 5 people closely that have had long careers in the trades.
They are all physically damaged in ways I am not from sitting at a desk.
What I notice about the trades is that the conversation from the inside is mostly about retirement because the work is not fun the way I find my white collar work to be fun.
Well okay you have your anecdotal evidence while I have mine, and they seem to be opposed to each other so I guess the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Some like it and some don't. Some hurt their bodies and some don't. It also matters a lot which trade exactly. Painting ship tanks is not good for the lungs it seems to me.
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.
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...
Most people are a bad judge of quality. They just don’t know the difference between a good and bad electrician. Even more obvious stuff, like painting, I find people can’t judge quality.
So you end up with a ton of unreliable reviewers online.
These days I take recommendations from people who are picky and when I can see the results myself.
There's also social stigma, from where I came from at least. From where I came from, in high school there are three paths to college: Science (engineering, medical, and all in between), literature (philosophy, languages, arts, and so) and trade/ vocational education. For many at least for me (millenial) it was not an option to even think about arts and vocational education at all, that would be failure in life.
It would take a bit of time for similar societies to adjust to the new realities.
This article gives a good and comprehensive picture but leaves out one, in my opinion important, aspect.
It starts, rightfully, by pointing out risks to health and physical harm. It later goes into depth describing how automation (the nail gun example) has changed the game, and especially how dexterity is in much less demand than it used to be.
It fails to point out that the same automation has made most blue-collar jobs much safer. Where I live, the paragraphs from the beginning, where everyone knows someone with a serious injury, ring true from my childhood in the 70s and 80s, but not anymore.
That seems like an important part of the picture when comparing blue-collar work then and now.
Really enjoyed reading this article, deep insight into the dynamics of being an Electrician. I’m not sure the future is going to be kind to humanity and their labor in the near future. human input is going to be actively devalued across the entire economy.
It's not the job security from AI, or pay that attracts me to "the trades". If I tell my daughters to consider electrician it is because my own career—working in an office, writing code, fixing bugs—has often felt unfulfilling. When I have free time I often find myself in the garage, building furniture with woodworking tools—or huddled over a silkscreen in the basement pulling screen prints. In short, I need to do something with my hands—have something tangible at the end of the day.
Not a trade, but I worked in a paint factory for a while in my teens, filling paint cans: loading a conveyor, putting cans in boxes, cleaning and prepping machines,.. It was hard work, and it was annoyingly repetitive but required attention to avoid accidents. The pay was very good. It wasn't until I'd been a software engineer for 4 years that I reached pay parity (and this is taking the tax benefits of student jobs into account).
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.
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.
Funny enough, a good team is almost always successful in either path, and that is the advice I give to those facing the decision. Your tradesman career and your white collar job is as good as the worst member of your team.
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.
Software jobs have great international mobility. Not so much for the regulated trades. But fundamentally you're likely to be paid more to make software since it scales to millions of customers while tradespeople customers are inherently limited.
This sounds a little bit like a tension cycle so we have now for example also in IT the problem that young graduates from university currently get no jobs anymore This will lead to it that we in ten years will probably get a problem in IT becuase we simply lack the new generation We do not know it exactly It can of course also be that much less demand is there But it could also be that although very many jobs are cut we then still have a gap in the demand. In the trades exactly the oppisite could happen: that there is an oversupply of workers whereon then the wages will sink very strongly. Therefore I would now reccomend young people, young humans who are maybe still in the middle class in school to maybe orient themselves in the IT area after all.
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.
Here in Australia too. Can’t do anything until you’ve done a multi-year apprenticeship, even change a plug or a light fitting, or on the plumbing side you can’t change a tap.
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.
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 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.
To be fair though...I haven't used a through hole resistor in a long time.
Once you get down below 0603 there are not even labels on most resistors.
Yeah I learned the color codes way earlier in to my training...but it is largely irrelevant nowadays.
Also, it isn't just brown/dark red. Gold band can look like brown at times. Causes issues on 5 band resistors where the multiplier is gold. [1]
I had someone in industry with a board they were testing techs with that had one of these snuck in. I was the only one to figure it out...took me 10min. Some of the long term techs never fixed it. (I suspect one of the assemblers did it on purpose because they all knew the answer when I found it).
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 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.
>why we don't put drains in bathroom floors in America like is prevalent in Asia
You've touched on my pet peeve. I've believed ever since I bought my first and only house in 1983 that EVERY room or space that has running water should have a floor drain. Oh, the messes I've cleaned up because they don't....
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.
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.
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.
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.
The number one reason I am unhappy about AI killing white collar and for a short time making blue collar lucrative is that for all the shit talk about office politics, I’ll take it any day over the school yard bully “banter” shit that the most average construction site has between their employees.
You can do physically demanding jobs without embracing every stupid meme of blue collarism. You don’t need a mullet. You don’t need to waste your money on lifted trucks. You don’t need to hate liberals. You don’t need to claim electricians have “women’s hands”, etc
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.
All this is the Texas equivalent of the meme showing all those great British novels like V for vendetta with their intended meaning but the actual “living in the UK fucking sucks” meaning whooshing over the readers head.
The take away from this comment is and should be “living in Texas/Houston fucking sucks”.
It should not be normal to live somewhere where 80% of houses have serious problems with their foundation. That state is cursed and should be glassed from orbit.
I once heard a story from an electrician who received a severe shock when the circuit he was working on - which he had de-energized and tagged with a lockout tag - was re-energized by a different electrician (which required physically removing the lockout tag) because the general contractor wanted some lights turned on.
I've heard other horror stories about boneheaded tradespeople creating dangerous situations for their coworkers.
You should be thankful if the worst your coworkers can do is send you slop to review.
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.
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.
Yes, I do think I could be an electrician, because I have an understanding of how electricity works, and I’m pretty good on the tools.
Obviously there would be some retraining and a period as an apprentice, and honestly I’m not sure I could afford that, but if we downsized the house maybe.
But mostly I’m posting here because this article is a pile of crap.
It uses pre-AI figures to try to assure us that post-AI the trades will still pay less than jobs for college graduates. That’s the whole point, duh, that things are changing.
The article talks about “trades” in general, conflating painting walls with installing heatpumps.
Electricians and plumbers stand out in “trades” because these jobs are fairly technical, while not particularly exhausting. A good plumber is always in high demand and can charge well for emergency interventions.
A plumber quoted me 1500 euros to install a swimming pool heat pump. I did it all myself with no prior experience and without the right tools in 8 hours. It cost me 300 euros worth of material. The guy would have made 1200 euros in a day. He was available 30 days from the time I called him, meaning he was quite busy.
Not saying that it’s the right call for everybody, but yeah right now, as a plumber or electrician who works in the high end of the trade, you make a decent living without the annoyances of office politics or fear of AI.
Don't forget (at least in the US), artificial scarcity intentionally created by licensure requirements and/or unions. If I wanted to be an electrician tomorrow, even given my experience and knowledge of the subject, I'd still need 8,000 hours of apprenticeship and other verified instruction/classes. Finding someone to apprentice under, being paid slave wages, tends to be the biggest blocker.
A buddy of mine is a former car mechanic of over a decade who recently got his first job in software dev, i hired him. It being his first desk job and all, i was asking him if that felt odd at all. He of course mentioned the stuff you'd imagine; boy its nice not being on my knees all day, having AC, etc. But what struck me most was that he said it was nice being around educated people. At his shop, he'd have angry customers, crackheads, and dipshit coworkers. Talking about anything other than some ignorant bullshit was an impossibility because, frankly, many of his coworkers were just dumb.
> 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.
Invariably, the following happened:
- I was given grunt work as a I was the new/junior guy
- Did this for about 1.5 weeks
- After the above, someone (usually the owner's wife) would say something like: "Instead of Alex doing grunt work, why doesn't he helps us <fix technology thing>"
And that ranged from "order us a new computer" to "fix the North American Controls lumber sorter machine".
My point is: Being able to solve complex problems is a surprisingly transferable skill. It's so transferable that even in the trades, if you can solve those problems, people will identify it and rapidly move you to the most complex problems they have.
With that, never having a reason to intrinsically develop that sense of solving complex problems is one of the biggest heartbreaks to come along with AI.
You can split hairs on my metaphor here but don't miss the point. There's no scarcity of labor to correctly install safe wires, whether it is in datacenters or homes or electronics, nor scarcity of innovations in logistics or whatever to transfer that labor from places where it is cheap to places that need to build. It's all guild feuds.
There’s a lot more to it than laying wires, and the union has negotiating power for good reason.
The truth is I would rather choose from 100 varied vendors - if prefab were permitted in San Francisco, you would be able to buy it from anyone - than to be forced to endure the shitty alternative of simply unpermitted work, or the kind of work that my lunatic licensed electrician neighbor does, which has burned down just as many walls as in your total hypothetical that has never happened.
Edit: or more fun, if you twist the end of a flexible wire (so that you can stick it into a clamp easier) the little threads cut each other while tightening it and wiggling the cable breaks them. It's like a person can stand on your hand without pain but if you cross your fingers first....
They all carried serious risks of bodily injury, and some far more so than others - but this is what's crazy to consider: the difference in wages we are talking is no more than $3 per hour. Meaning, that grunt work where you could lose your hand to a steel injection mold was $9, the teflon coating job where someone working third shift on the machine I ran was struck in the skull with the peg-end of a steel 72+ inch roller pin holding a full 300 yard roll of coated fabric, nearly (millimeters from), resulting in her having a steel plate surgically placed - that position paid a whopping $12 in 2014.
I've worked as a line cook, over 5 years, and as a driver, 6 years. None of these paid well, and all are inherent of risks. It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
I've worked physical labor too, though never in a factory. More like lugging baggage and cleaning toilets. Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
It comes down to rarity of skill. Not to be to crass about it, but when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand.
For example, I spend a lot of time in hotels when I was young. Just finding people who were reliable and trustworthy and legal enough to drive the airport van without wrecking it were like 1 in 10 of the people who were potentially eligible to do it. If you were able to do rudimentary math and not steal from the till, you were one of the "lucky" few who got to work at the front desk. If you showed up regularly, well, the world was your oyster.
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.
Or to build muscle to avoid the issues. I know it first hand, herniated disks and no working out while people who do work out turn out ok. Gene and other variance to be taken into account.
Heavy physical labor with no place for rest and stretches in between is however much better at messing you up, than a work when you can pause every 15 min and do 60s of stretching. + Do 5 min of yoga before and after work. + A standing desk to stand 15min per hour. + A HÅG Capisco style chair that forces you to change position every 10 minutes (it's somewhat uncomfortable), but due to its build, allows like 4-5 different positions out of the box.
R in RSI is for repetitive.
It's wild sometimes the level of man child bubble the average HN poster lives in.
Five to ten minutes a few times a week, and I've not had a back problem in years.
It's a simple and easy way to keep a healthy baseline. Good for all sorts of physical and mental issues. I feel like shit if I've not done them for a while.
I once had a coworker 24 years old but he barely ate and barely slept. In a few years he has injuries everywhere that didn't go away.
One guy I know fell down 10 meters onto his back then got up and went back to work. He looks exactly like someone like that.
I've met a surprising number of manual laborers who seemed to believe you can build or repair something without materials.
Much like office workers who think ergonomics is something that comes after ruining your body.
This doesn't even look real
https://youtu.be/7bXNCrGc0Ro?is=zCL-1ARUzygbdSqS
In order to do everything needed so that no one calls you lazy, the day would need 80hous.
Otherwise said, if you called a hard working guy who also cooks and spends time with kids lazy, because they also did not do yet another optional activity on the regular, maybe you should not.
Those 15 min is actually quite a lot if you don't have the habit yet. But you're in a better situation than someone working at a slaughter line, with no time to scratch your nose for 2h15min in between brakes not long enough to eat, use bathroom and sharpen your knives for the next 2h15min run.
I still feel sorry for your herniated disk, I don't think it's just your laziness, but more ignorance and equally lazy ignorant surroundings normalizing unhealthy lifestyle.
But you can't say someone that can get up and stretch for 30s every 15 min has it as bad as people running to the toilet and eating by swallowing big bites just to make it in time before the next animal comes to their position in line.
Most programming folks I know sit so long, it screws up their back and ability to exercise. Rinse, repeat.
It’s a common issue for drivers too.
Part of why I left the industry.
Same with truck drivers.
If your job is cool with it, good for you.
Sciatica screws up your ability to exercise.
Civilised countries have laws prohibiting this. Here in Denmark it's arbejdsmiljøstyrelsen (bless you), and OSHA in USA.
Atleast half of trade jobs in the US expect you to break OSHA and labor laws regularly as part of the job. If you don't there are enough other desperate people to replace you.
I was the Health and Safety Representative at a previous job site, with a lot of different nationalities. Of course I can't generalise all of them, but I noticed that eastern europeans usually had way more disregard for job safety than Danes. There was one guy from Hungary especially who I had to reprimand at least weekly for doing stupid acrobatic shit on ladders. And we usually weren't even under time pressure, he just had barely any regard for his own safety. It was maddening. I would have fired him if I had authority to do so.
The difference between office and construction workers is that the former probably have more control over the situation but the damage is so slow they only realize too late, while the latter have too little control most times even if they are acutely aware of the immediate risk. They are the people who can’t afford to protest, lose the job, go to court, etc. and usually the informal requirements are shaped in such a way that in the end it looks like their own decision to forego safety concerns.
But an office worker can be under similar pressure to deliver day after day, and ruin their muscles, spine, eyes, joints, psyche in the process. Just less abruptly.
And that was my point, a office worker can get stressed a lot - but when they make a misstake they have to compile again(and maybe consider quitting), not go to the graveyard, because they fell to death.
Otherwise sure, heart attacks can happen as well. And burn out is real, too. But the work itself is not physically dangerous.
Worker in the US do not have substantial protection. It's limited to penalizing employers and even that almost never happens.
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.
A lot of tech is basically a treadmill. You’re never finished. It is no wonder people burn out mentally.
Something like cybersecurity? Great, we made it through today, tomorrow will be worse. Repeat until something bad happens.
My knees and back might last longer though.
I don't think anyone here is unaware of this, it's more that maybe, purely relying on supply and demand leads to unfair outcomes...
And I don't think anyone here is unaware of this either. Peoples abilities (actual or potential) will forever be variable and fall on some sort of standard distribution.
There will never be equality in outcomes.
No matter how many people are are able and willing to do some "low-skill high-risk" work, their salary should reflect the fact they are taking on a risk. Taking that risk should be valued and rewarded by society.
This is not about equal outcomes, it's about fair compensation. If someone risks their life and damages their body in a mine every day, it's absurd and insulting that I make more than them sitting in an air-conditioned desk typing on a keyboard.
What’s the point of this? Talking about fairness or how things should be doesn’t do anything. How do you actually accomplish it? Without some notion of what could be done, it’s akin to complaining about the weather.
But sure, if you want, there are plenty of ways. Mandatory bonuses for higher-risk or generally physical labour would be one easy start, although it likely wouldn't be as effective in practice as one would like it to be. Restructuring the way people are paid as a whole is a more effective solution, which could cover other aspects too, although it would obviously be less popular with The Shareholders™ and therefore more difficult to pass. It's all a matter of legislation - every sane country has a law that says what the salary may or may not be based on, various limits (e.g. minimum wage), bonuses and modifiers... Maybe take inspiration from some countries' public sectors and make salaries fully standardized with a big lookup table and a bunch of modifiers based on objective or at least measurable parameters?
You propose a legal requirement to pay these people more. That will indeed solve the problem of unfairly low pay for these jobs. It will also create a problem of reduced hiring for those jobs and reduced output, possibly substantially reduced depending on how much more they have to be paid.
In short, you can mandate that lumber mill workers must be paid more, but you have to accept that less lumber gets produced and fewer people get paid to work there.
But this isn't nearly as bad as you're making it sound. Lots of things used to be done by extremely low-wage workers or even slaves, and haven't gone away now that workers have to be paid better (or at all). Obviously many of those people are still paid very poorly and there's lots of work left to do there, but we improved things to a noticable extent and we didn't really suffer any bad effects. We can go further.
And no, not that much. Automation is of course a factor, but it came at different times for different things and don't forget that it often made things worse for workers, at least where or when they didn't have institutional support.
Having institutional support for workers (unions and a pro-labour government) is what ultimately matters. Even if some prices go up and some jobs are lost, such institutions help smooth out the transition and put pressure on businesses which would otherwise jump at the opportunity to also increase their margins.
[0] actual number would vary by culture, nation and technological time period
It would be akin to saying its unfair humans can’t fly due to gravity
If by "supply and demand" you mean all supplies have positive and reasonably sized elasticity, and all demands have negative and reasonably sized elasticity, through all reasonable price ranges...
Some niche cases include any kind of labor, anything that comes out of a factory with economies of scale, and anything that involves land or extraction of natural resources.
I'm not saying any of those specific examples would be better than the current, but they're definitely options that exist and they're just words on a page passed by parliament, just like the current system is.
Hell, some of those things already exist in the public sector [0]. My base salary is calculated based on my job title and level of education, automatically adjusted with cost-of-living inflation, with modifiers for years of experience, job performance, being on-call, mentoring, working non-standard hours or weekends, dangerous conditions...
[0] I'm only familiar with some EU countries, not sure how this is done in the US or wherever else
Good points, I figure it's interesting from both sides hearing the others' perspective.
Finding employees who were legal to drive, insurable, at least somewhat able to avoid accidents, and reliable enough to show up to work was a constant hassle.
Not a coincidence they are also known as the clients with the longest driveways.
Luckily, I survived it all without serious injury. What I discovered affected me the most was business OVERHEAD, the cost of doing business. I had 8+ employees in the mail order business plus a lease space, numerous expenses, huge overhead. With the lake pump business I had day labor guy I paid only on days I needed him. I was quite able to be the chief salesman, website creator and manager, head diver, head electrician and plumber, etc. Lowest overhead of anything I ever got involved with, consequently the most successful. Huge savings for retirement, mortgage paid off, no debt, got a Rivian on order. Rec diving in Asia and the Caribbean with my son, kiteboarding in Costa Rica. Blue collar made me successful.
On the other hand, my son is a degreed comp. sci grad who got hired just before machine learning became a thing, his company gave him the title of "senior engineer" recently instead of a raise, in fact, his salary raises have stopped, luckily he still has a job.
This is a big part of the reason you see so many successful immigrant owned businesses. The owners (and family) work nonstop.
I find this worrying because the entire economy is built on the idea of cheap physical snd cheap unskilled labor. So if we do a good job educating, we’ll need to fill these jobs by paying more rather than preying on the desperate. And I don’t see the current world being willing to pay more.
the high-paying jobs are for reliance under obscurity: part of a very big deal, and if you screw up you ruin everything, and it's hard to know if you screwed up. That's everything from CEO's to investors and researchers, teachers, and yes, some tradesmen.
If you want to reduce wages, increase transparency.
That's power for ya. It comes with all kinds of perks.
What's crazy about it? Do you mean it's crazy that people chose to work a dangerous job when a safe job was available for not much less?
During the restaurant years I was also going to college for computer science and ultimately dropped out halfway through to do remote R&D work for a silicon valley gig making a whopping 500 bucks a week (living in FL)...Than covid hit and the boss went back to Korea.
Now I make 12.50 an hour repairing and designing boutique tube amps in KS
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.
That’s the thing about pension schemes like American social security: they were originally set with a retirement age that matched mean mortality, so half of potential recipients would die before drawing on them. In other words, half of workers were not meant to retire, and the half that did would be protected by the contributions of all. Modern medicine completely changed those expectations, keeping the elderly alive twenty years longer and making twenty years of unproductive, publicly funded retirement an expectation and entitlement for everyone. It’s political suicide to discuss whether something should change about that.
The number of men who make it to 65 after having made it to 21 is about 20% higher than it was in 1940.
And the average remaining lifespan for men reaching 65 is about 3 years higher than in 1940.
These factors certainly change the calculations, but the size of the baby boomers is a much larger factor.
Anyone who advanced that ‘defense’ has a poor understanding of economics.
Risk is not an essential element of capitalism. Some investments are effectively risk free. ‘Disproportionate’ return seems to be something you’ve just made up. There’s no mention of the proportionality of returns in any economic treatise I’ve ever read.
Lastly, there’s nothing to defend. There’s simply the observation that if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital. Nobody has ever come up with a working alternative.
Untrue. Capital accumulates. People have desires for their world/society/community beyond their own wealth. They want to see certain things happen, and owning capital puts a person in a position to influence whether it does (or does not).
As for defences - capital is just political power by other means. If the capitalist is wasting money on yachts while workers can't afford food and housing, the return is morally disproportionate, and the usual outcome is socially catastrophic, in various possible ways.
Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences. That's a shockingly stupid way to run anything - as we're all about to find out.
It is people who ALWAYS reduce everything to personal opportunism (no matter capitalism or not). Capitalism is the smartest way to run anything exactly because it is build on concepts of broader consequences of that fact.
If someone starts running a company at 20 years old and goes bankrupt at 40, they can't simply go back to working a regular job. They don't have a resume, they sacrificed 20 years of career progress. They'll be working at Walmart while their peers who got the same education and have the same intelligence are becoming partners at law firms or investment banks.
Capital has no special position here.
The capital class doesn't need you to defend them. You're embarrassing yourself.
I've known people who believed they would never live past 20. I've also known people who want to live to 200. The difference in mentality between the two as well as the different approach to life is large. IMHO, the difference is directly comparable to working for what you need for the day/week vs saving for when you are 80.
Frankly, if you had just enough money to simply retire, would you risk it on employing folks who drink themselves to death, wreck expensive equipment, take responsibility for as little as possible and generally don't care about your bottom line? ... or would you retire?
It's easy to frame the owners of capital as the bad guy when you act like they are the Monopoly man but most businesses are small businesses and sole proprietorships.
Contrary wise, most Capital is a problem for many because most of the capital (literal trillions) is tied up in the hands of a very few individuals and boards who are exerting an undue influence on hundreds of millions.
And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.
Frankly, too many people like to talk about risk taking in fairly low risk situations.
When you look at capital and risk, the risk are not that large. And economic policy favorwed capital over labor literally for decades on top of it.
That’s nuts. The industrial barons of 19th century America neither worked hard nor took amazing risks. They were lawyers and bankers who manipulated stocks and broke unions.
The standard answer is: but the others could do the same thing. Well, if everybody tried to become a capitalist at all costs then we'd be in a pretty bad place.
But in the middle we do have an increasing problem of trust fund kids dominating industry. Hollywood is an obvious example. But even in the startup world, your education matters an awful lot. And you going to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale has a lot to do with elite private schooling and all of it has a ton to do with the luck of birth not merit.
I'm actually curious who you think risked their fortune? Is it anyone in particular or is it just some romanticized idea? Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Jeff Bezos's parents had a quarter million in retirement savings to lend him in the 1990s and he was playing with investor money after that.
Now wealth creation seems to be taking other people's money and buying up industries with inelastic demand to extract wealth from ordinary people. Housing, medical care, vets, utilities, that sort of thing.
And then there's slavery and its aftermath. How much generational wealth was created from slavery? Even a century after Emancipation, we had the government creating wealth for white people with the GI Bill post-WW2. Free college and cheap mortgages. Who was taking a risk there?
You get sufficiently wealthy and you aren't allowed to fail. The government will bail you out.
The capital owner risks his status, the laborer risks his life.
The stove was on something like a 60 amp circuit, so rather than try to rewire the panel, I patched the oven into the stove's circuit, because it was way over capacity.
That said, the wires were beasts: single-strand copper, maybe 6 gauge (over a tenth of an inch in diameter) and did not want to bend at all. I ended up going back to Lowes three times to get bigger connectors. In the end it was a box of aluminum half an inch wide, with a tube down the middle and a screw-in on the side to hold the wires in place.
I got it done, but it was a pain from start to finish. And of course with that many amps at play, every time I touched anything I first went to every single person in the house to tell them what I was doing, and not to go near the breaker box.
I would not want to do that for a living.
There is the house wirer, the panel builder, automotive electrician, HV, marine, drilling, industrial, maintenance etc etc.
Some kinds pay better, others yield work almost wherever you go, others lend themselves to starting your own business better.
It is nowhere near as homogenous as often described.
A good many I've known have pulled cable and slogged for several years, invested in shitty old house after another (renovating and flipping), transitioned into running electrical subcontracting companies, and "retired" out of trades and into software careers (in GIS or other domains) in their mid thirties to early forties.
Neither trades nor university education are lifetime commitments or mutually exclusive.
Had a kitchen fire caused by an appliance in the middle of the night a couple of Januaries ago. Was a complete nightmare to deal with which basically ended up redoing much of my interior because of smoke. Insurance covered a lot, but it took a lot of time and something north of $50K out of pocket.
Larger organizations come with more specialization and greater resources, but you will never find a jack of all trades there.
Working for BigCo you never get that stuff because anyone who wants to screw you has to go through BigCo's legal team to do it.
In other words, the customers are awful. I sell and run commercial and industrial electrical work, I’d rather go do something completely different as a career than deal with homeowners, flippers, and residential GCs. The work itself has zero challenge and requires almost no thinking, it’s not hard to pull and fish romex through finished walls.
The speed needed by a residential electrician is very different than the long-term outlook you hear from industrial electricians (“label that box because the next guy to service it could be you”).
Another recurring trope is the perceived hierarchy between the trades. I lose it when a plumber is described as a “turd herder.” And drywallers get no respect.
I find this especially unfortunate given that, in my experience, drywallers understand the rest of the trades far better than vice versa, since they're in the position of being able to see everyone else's completed work.
But you can probably tell the difference between it and a crappy version.
In my apprenticed ignornance, I figured I was "doing the gypsum guys a favor" (by not cutting large holes everywhere) but it turns out cutting larger holes made both trades' lives easier.
Making a large cut-out "disappear" is actually much easier to conceal than a smaller opening.
----
That, and wet sanding (it's incredible how many people dry sand - all the dust!).
Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing contractors need to understand the most since their work goes all over the building and they’re on the project from start to finish.
Drywallers just come in and put up gypsum once walls have been framed and MEP has been roughed in, and then they leave.
Tapers and mudders command my respect, that’ a difficult trade to perfect. Holding up 4’ x 8’ sheets of gypsum and screwing it to studs might be hard work but it’s dead ass simple.
This is incorrect; they know what my hammer means. Not just anybody's, mine.
–(former data center) Electrician
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
Where's that? In the US the median annual wage for electricians was $63,190 in May 2025 whereas it's $135,980 for software engineers.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric...
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
If you’re in the US, the top 10% might. But the median residential electrician certainly does not.
I became a licensed ship's electrician a decade and change after doing my MSc in RF design - turned out that in the line of work I stumbled into, doing control systems for heavy offshore equipment, it was a massive benefit to be able to work hands-on on the systems during commissioning, rather than pointing at the stuff which needed doing and trying to agree with some poor guy I more often than not did not share a language with as to what I meant.
The supervisor at the local trades office had a laugh at that when I called and asked if I could get to take the test(s) based on relevant work experience rather than by having served a conventional apprenticeship.
Most often, the ones asking to take that path had started working as cable pullers and helping hands at fifteen; having an MSc ask was... ...uncommon.
It was quite the experience learning HOW to do all the stuff I knew needed doing.
Anyway - I can now do all sorts of rather competent work on a ship.
I'd be utterly useless (as well as in violation of the law) if I ever attempted to do anything in a house.
The latter has been very helpful - seeing as I've been asked often whether I can help out friends and relatives with electrical installations at home, seeing as I'm an electrician and all.
Sorry. Against the law. Phew.
And the skill you learn, you can use it to build your own house and save money.
White collars usually aren’t that good at manual work, at least not to professional levels.
I think one problem is thinking of the trades as a place where you put people not (good|competent|intelligent) enough to go through college. (Some people's conception of the armed forces makes the same mistake.)
Go a generation or two back and in the UK, we had a much clearer separation between working and middle class, for example one got paid weekly or hourly wages, the other got paid a monthly salary. The trades themselves were divided into skilled and unskilled. While it made a huge cultural difference which class you were from, a good skilled trade could easily make you more money than a clerk job. (Bob Cratchit was middle class!) An unskilled day labourer such as a stevedore might live from hand to mouth, an engine mechanic could usually afford to raise a family and afford a place to live (in a working-class area).
Federal Certificate of Vocational Training in Information and Communication Technology
It’s a 4 year high-school apprenticeship and you have to work under a licensed professional during your apprenticeship during those 4 years.
I had such apprentices on my team. It’s a good system.
Another guy I know started his career as a cabinetmaker but dropped out of his apprenticeship to go into software development. He didn't have what it takes for that and now he is unemployed.
Moral of these stories? Everything depends on your abilities and interests. Hitting the books and going after a white collar job works well if you're smart. But there a lot of frustrated white collar workers out there doing meaningless work or (with AI at the moment) getting laid off. Many would be better off doing a trade.
That part is very important. I have seen very smart people failed to understand how truly software developer works. They just do not care. They try, as it is a good profession, but deep inside they cannot care less.
They do well. It is not like they cannot do the job. But here is no passion, they know the basics, and were they shine is in solving business problems even if their code/architecture is not very good.
In Sweden companies sometimes forbid employees of doing passion projects. They kill that same drive from the inside, but their desire for controlling workers is bigger than to actually have a successful company.
Passion is hard to come by, enjoy it.
The dynamics of blue collar employment would obviously be changed as a second order effect of white collar worker displacement
The value of human labor is going to the price of electricity and raw materials outside of a few, small realms and people are not ready for that fact.
These can be trucked or flown into place.
Factory built simplifies full trade critical path, with pipeline schedule of custom variations moving through to be wired, plumbed, built out and finished.
Also opportunity for automation streamlining.
Simpler offerings of that market look like: https://modularwa.com.au/
That's why I differentiated between robots working on new construction sites, where I do think that a 15-20 year timeline is entirely feasible (not necessarily desirable, but feasible). That's an entirely different task than renovations in an existing building, which is much *much* harder even for humans.
Also note that there's another way of thinking about where technology will take housebuilding that already exists: more factory-assembled modular cosntruction. That's less popular in the USA, with its focus on single family "unique" homes, but is taking off elsewhere and is already highly automated.
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.
Also the COVID part is a false analogy / non sequitur. COVID was expected to end. Surviving COVID doesn't mean the economy can survive permanent shocks.
Not permanently. And, as sibling pointed, not at all in lots of areas.
That is pretty obvious and mostly correct idea. I don't understand why people who have even a little bit of common sense about how the economy works thinks that mass layoffs of programmers or office workers will destroy the economy.
I mean then they will start to sell their homes and situation for those who can buy them cheaply and renovate will become even better, no?
I did the inverse, and while I don't enjoy poo and fibreglass, I do immensely enjoy the days I work outside in the spring and summer. Easily worth a bit of occasional poo. :)
However the main point is: just pay attention to who is telling you to get a job in the trades instead of a knowledge one.
And the conclusion is...?
But now that you're asking:
It's the ones that need to make wild claims like that your brain is obsolete so they can continue operating at a huge loss.
It's the ones that have multi-year investments in data centers so would very much love a discount on the trades price tag.
It's the ones that want to monopolize and control the price and value of intellectual work.
It's the ones that have been claiming that engineers will be out of a job in 3 months for the past 3 years.
I can keep going but I think that's enough.
Perhaps the only thing to note is that you should pay attention to your long term health. You can definitely stay fit if you don't grind on when you shouldn't. No job and no amount of money is worth destroying your body.
Oh, and desk workers die from lack of activity. If you sit for more than an hour you gradually start dying.
However the risks compared to physical jobs are not even close, they're at two different levels.
There's many, many things that can kill you instantly in the trades. Then there's stuff that may ruin your body no matter how careful you are.
Example: doing roofing means you're walking in a sloped plan all day long, every day. After 20 or 30 years, you'd barely have usable knees.
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.
Everything is going to be electric. The world is only at 23% electrification. The target is 35% by 2035, which many think is wildly optimistic.
The supply of electricians is limited by gatekeeping. A young kid in high school can get the training in school (less gatekeeping, career help), become a professional and quite possibly become a master electrician by 30. Then make big bucks forever.
Looks like kids and parents are coming to these conclusions on their own. The Hottest High Schools in Massachusetts Are Trade Schools: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/massachusetts-trade-hi...
[1] Can the World Hit 35% Electrification by 2035? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49904154 [2]Electrification Special Report, INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY: https://www.iea.org/reports/electrification https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/1c696cc3-e251-46a9-...
No.
Perhaps: the electrical contractor of a very large MSA would be having an indredible day if they made $5-10k per day
No resi sparky is making that, regularly, not even weekly (do your math, you estimate $1MM+?!).
Src: IBEW electrician, with decades of residential "side work" (including as a licensed electrical contractor)
----
>The supply of electricians is limited by gatekeeping.
Yes and no.
Just show up. Then show up again. This is in such limited supply that if you can make yourself look presentable, on a regular basis, you can walk into many smaller shops (union and not, I've done both) and just ask for a job (it still works).
----
For me, one of the best advantages of the jobsites is essentially no females on-site, which gives work the comeradery that my initial career into medicine was lacking (heavily female dominated). Perhaps an oft-dreampt "third place," albeit while at work.
I only share this gendered thought because being a tradesmen would be much more difficult for ANY woman (e.g. hazing, upper body strength)... the one female bricklayer I know (and respect, she is a haus!) agrees with me that "she wasn't built for good ole boys club, but it's all she knows how to do that isn't minimum wage" so she keeps slinging brick with her 99%+ male co-workers.
If you are a young single male, willing to travel around the country: get your union ticket (either indoor or outdoor) and follow storm season restorations for half the year, and make six figures "playing hero."
Subsitute trade of choice
Anecdotally, I grew up in a very blue collar area and most of the 60 year old guys I knew were either medically retired (read: too fucked up to work anymore) or getting by through brute force and pain pills.
His knees were dead before he was 50. Never made it to "stable", has never owned a home, now living in a van in his 70s.
There were many other issues in his life which prevented things...don't get me wrong...but his case is more the norm from my observations of workers. It is much easier to be a good "worker" than it is to be a successful one.
Also, Drug/alcohol use in the trades is incredibly common. As is the habit of planning your life around claiming unemployment every winter (at least in my area).
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.
That technology is now creeper Ray Bans serving ads.
Punch cards & CRMs yesterday.
AI video monitoring today.
Little chip for "AI proof secure access" tomorrow.
…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63326-0
The hardware is already there waiting for the right model to direct it. If GPT 7 or Claude 6 is a true AGI we'll be months away from the same type of blue collar automation. The fact that the models are already building with blender demonstrates a growing understanding of the necessary spatial awareness and reasoning.
People with wrenches aren't being replaced any time in the next 50 years.
There are two risks:
1. Humanoid robots learn to do everything. Perfectly plausible at current progress rates.
2. The skill is removed and AI acts as a leveler, same as in programming. You still need humans to point the nail gun and squeeze the trigger, but everything else is just instructions coming into their smart glasses from an AI. The tradesman is just a meat proxy.
Those people will spend their savings, sell their houses to live in the smaller ones, or find another jobs. They will probably gonna get poorer. But the majority of the people with wrenches definitely will get richer, that is how economy works.
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.
The part about blue collar jobs being inherently more deadly doesn't feel right to me. For one, I want to believe we have collectively gotten better in avoiding "dumb" deaths and injuries, these, that could have been prevented by inventing and following safety procedures. The health risks certain profession implies is certainly to be considered when choosing one, white collars included. Desk job kills slowly, but surely.
So, answering to the title, which doesn't seem to be related to the article contents, I absolutely do. Qualified engineer knows enough to be able to double off as a technician, and missing monthly payments is much scarier than high voltage, so if my entire job field was to become obsolete due to AI or any other reason, I would absolutely consider getting out of desk and getting my hands dirty.
The expensive part is usually just showing up ready to work, with a marginal cost for each additional tree. If you had 15 trees taken down in one day, the cost per tree would work out to seem much more reasonable.
My neighbors were having a bunch of tree work done, and I asked the supervisor what it would cost to take a big dead one down on my property. I planned to do it myself, so I had a strong haggling position, and I got him to $400, which felt worth it to save me a day's worth of hard labor. If they weren't already onsite with all the gear, that would've been $2K+ easy.
better, yes, but there will always be inherent risk. even if you don't die, there will often be injuries from years of strain
He had to spelunk under the house to run new lines, cut concrete, dig trenches, and scuba (yes, SCUBA!) with tools to get everything done.
Maybe 5% of his time had to do with electricity. In my mind, I really paid him to dive into 55f degree water.
I'm an electrician in Canada and my favourite part of the job is actually this construction type work. I probably should have just been a carpenter but the job prospects aren't nearly as strong.
Most of the work is opening walls, closing them, running cables, etc.
This has been thr pattern with most of the trendy "well paying jobs": They're only well paying once you account for the insane overtime. I've even see people posting jobs bragging about how many hours you'll work.
Sounds great. Except we keep hearing about people getting zero callbacks after submitting hundreds of resumes for white collar jobs. While at the same time we're hearing about how the trades are desperate for recruits and can never find enough people to hire.
I think young people should try to follow a path that might hold their interest as much as possible, and collect data about their interest. Talk to people that are doing the actual work. Don't assume trades are for people who have no choice because they're not smart enough for anything else. And don't assume that white collar jobs are best because you're guaranteed to have an easier, more prosperous career.
Things have to get real, real, real bad before the state decides that it's better for the state to lower barriers to entry than keep them.
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.
What gloves? For 110V? Bah!
Unless you’re a complete idiot and try to cut both wires at once with a conductive cutter, nothing happens when you snip them one by one.
And selection bias means we don’t see those guys around for long.
2. You are thinking of survivorship bias, selection bias is a different thing.
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 confounding factor is lifestyle. Kicking back after a hard day of physical work with a huge meal and a few beers feels amazing, but that's going to wreck somebody's health if that turns into a lifestyle. And similarly, a gym rat who works a desk job is going to probably be in excellent shape.
*Edit : though/tough, not native
I know 5 people closely that have had long careers in the trades.
They are all physically damaged in ways I am not from sitting at a desk.
What I notice about the trades is that the conversation from the inside is mostly about retirement because the work is not fun the way I find my white collar work to be fun.
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.
> lack of office politics
Why is there any less?
> ship construction
Your story is interesting. I read articles by Gary Kim about Kim's theory of why the US has a shortage of workers for well-paying shipbuilding jobs - it's a dangerous job and the pay doesn't per Kim, compensate enough. [0] I wonder what your experience is?
https://garykim0505.substack.com/p/the-brutal-reality-of-bui...
Yes.
> Why is there any less?
Smaller company and down to earth attitude.
> I wonder what your experience is?
It's less safe than an office that's for sure. But the biggest accident in the company of 100 people has been due to arc flash and not due to walking across the shipyard. In general, the older colleagues seem physically as healthy if not healthier than average for their age; some having worked there for more than 20 years. I'm also surprised by this. The shipyard looks very dangerous but somehow not much happens to the electricians it seems from what I hear and see in the older colleagues.
I’m not saying it should be that way, but people need to be clearheaded that a top blue collar job is not as easy as showing up. There are real performance differentiators - reliability, judgement, skill, etc - and the numbers touted often belong to the top performers.
And anyone who thinks office politics go away in a family owned shop is extremely naive. Nepotism is default (and frankly reasonable. Why wouldn’t someone leave their business to their daughter if they were interested?). Large places are like that, too. Someone on a union job asked me point blank who I knew, the implication being that I’d have to know someone to get hired on.
I loved the camaraderie, being on the move, and building something physical. But it wasn’t a nice relaxing stable existence, either.
This is quite obviously true whenever you hire trades people. I had a guy just cut into a pipe behind some dry wall. I’m uncertain how after looking at hole and the pipe.
I remain convinced that anyone enterprising could build a very lucrative trades business simply because so many trades people are bad.
Maybe we just live in world where every time when there is advantage gained from quality it is later destroyed to make slightly more for bit of time...
So you end up with a ton of unreliable reviewers online.
These days I take recommendations from people who are picky and when I can see the results myself.
It would take a bit of time for similar societies to adjust to the new realities.
It starts, rightfully, by pointing out risks to health and physical harm. It later goes into depth describing how automation (the nail gun example) has changed the game, and especially how dexterity is in much less demand than it used to be.
It fails to point out that the same automation has made most blue-collar jobs much safer. Where I live, the paragraphs from the beginning, where everyone knows someone with a serious injury, ring true from my childhood in the 70s and 80s, but not anymore.
That seems like an important part of the picture when comparing blue-collar work then and now.
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.
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.
Perhaps once there was a high demand for good SWE coming out of 4 years of $$ tuition uni.
Personal anecdote: Got a buddy who dropped out of Bible school, worked at a auto shop while getting his certs. After 2 years about any dealership would hire him.
He moves, lands a 100k+ job. 2 years later, switches to a dealership in San Jose, earning 150+.
6 months later, he gets an offer to become foreman at a dealership in gilroy with a $5/h raise + foreman benefits. How it works is techs are paid flat rate: Paid per job, not per hour. So if youre good, you can really rake in the money.
Its been wild to see his career arc in real time.
He's highly trained, very handy, Nd he's damn smart at debugging.
Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
He earns more than me who got a MS in ECE.
On the flip side, his job is physical and he works more hours than me.
I get to so R&D, think about cool math, and code. But in another life I'd love do be a tech.
All that said, there's a lot of demand for good auto techs.
I'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.
They are using an OEM diagnostic tool and following approved shop procedures.
I agree with the below poster, this reeks, no one is doing o-scope level debugging on a production vehicle. It's what someone would say that has no idea how cars are designed, built, and serviced in reality.
https://www.snapon.com/EN/US/Diagnostics/Products/TRITON-D10
I feel bad for mechanics in the rust belt getting paid what another mechanic gets paid for much more effort
Massive protectionism.
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.
What does not make sense is to have such brown vs dark red scheme in the first place.
Once you get down below 0603 there are not even labels on most resistors.
Yeah I learned the color codes way earlier in to my training...but it is largely irrelevant nowadays.
Also, it isn't just brown/dark red. Gold band can look like brown at times. Causes issues on 5 band resistors where the multiplier is gold. [1]
I had someone in industry with a board they were testing techs with that had one of these snuck in. I was the only one to figure it out...took me 10min. Some of the long term techs never fixed it. (I suspect one of the assemblers did it on purpose because they all knew the answer when I found it).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_color_code#Decoding...
In my city the pay scale for the first 5-7 years of a grad software engineer and grad electrician careers are comparable and I expect that to be the case in most of the world outside the handful of American bubbles. One thing I enjoy is that the minimum pay is regulated by a union so I don't have to hop job every year to make sure I'm not underpaid.
After that the salaries diverge quite quickly and the ceiling is much much lower as an electrician.
It's still pretty good money, though, so I don't think that's really a con to this career.
That’s the real comparison in my opinion
I get the whole apprenticeship route, but even that isn’t the same
Specifically what I mean is what if a teenager took 4 years to really home a skill before even looking for a job?
If you wanted to be an electrician and spent a couple years really learning from somewhat first principles up and keep yourself in good shape, you’d be set up for success
The article makes it seem like someone who would be smart enough to go to college and graduate wouldn’t be smart enough to navigate how to get an electrician job or pass those aptitude tests?
Also, a lot of trades people simply don’t take care of themselves. I’m not saying the job isn’t hard, because it is. My dad was a contractor and I worked on the sites every summer til I graduated college
But these dudes would eat like crap, skip ear protection, prove how manly they were by working to exhaustion - this only makes the “these hands” lectures worse
All in all the article felt scattered much like my own comment
The truth is, there are some people who go to college who should have gone into the trades in stead. I’d go on a limb and say I’m sure of it. (And the answer isn’t purely based on intelligence which the author touches on condescendingly)
Similarly, I’m sure a lot of kids who go into the trades would have been better off going to college
What’s missing imo is guidance
What kids imo need is guidance, someone to give them exposure to what’s out there in some way, lay out options, pros, cons and help kids make an informed decision
The real problem is that there are so many professions that people simply don’t know about - instead of telling people to go to college or scare them away from trades, I’d be pushing to introduce more of these resources to high schools. No kid at my high school would have ever known what a business systems analyst is or what firmware is.
I have a feeling the guys who could have gone to college but picked trades for some reason (like maybe a brush with the law), end up owning businesses. My friend dropped out of college after the first year and now he owns a thriving home renovation business, for example.
Personally I find a lack of curiosity to be prevalent among trades people, like asking a home builder about Spanish persianas, or why we don't put drains in bathroom floors in America like is prevalent in Asia, or trying to get an HVAC guy to install a split type heat pump, you often just get a sense of annoyance rather than a willingness to learn anything new. They just want to stamp out the job the same way they do every job so they can get to the next one. In some sense I understand it, but you have to think there's space for people who apply more thoughtfulness to the space.
You've touched on my pet peeve. I've believed ever since I bought my first and only house in 1983 that EVERY room or space that has running water should have a floor drain. Oh, the messes I've cleaned up because they don't....
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.
Those who can, will, those who can't won't - and in response to the question posed, those who can no longer afford will either have to learn how or put up with decay creep.
Obviously there are practical limitations to how fast things can rearrange but there's no reason in principle you couldn't have an economy where everyone retrained into blue collar work, and all white collar job needs were handled by the magic internet box.
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”.
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.
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.
You can do physically demanding jobs without embracing every stupid meme of blue collarism. You don’t need a mullet. You don’t need to waste your money on lifted trucks. You don’t need to hate liberals. You don’t need to claim electricians have “women’s hands”, etc
The trades are full of crabs in a bucket.
After going around the blue collar block a few times, I wound up thinking the most interesting pivot for me would be to get into foundation repair. Everyone I know looks at this kind of thing with dread. As if I had just casually proposed we go slay the local dragon.
The physics of installing push piers is incredibly straightforward. The hardest part by far is digging the holes around and through the foundation. Also, the logistics of procuring steel and concrete piers can become challenging depending on local geological conditions.
Selling the service to customers is very hard (the actual moat). I don't know of many home owners who approach this with calm. They want 5 quotes, 100 year transferable warranty, etc. Having a sales technique that brings reason to the prospect makes all the difference. I had a sales guy from a major Texas repair firm basically ignore all my stated complaints and hand me a sheet of cold data. He lost the sale. Months later I learned that the proposed solution (helical piers) isn't even logical given the availability of reaction mass and their tendency to not reach load bearing strata as well as well as other options.
The Houston metroplex is potentially one of the most lucrative markets I can imagine for this kind of business. I don't know of a single home in the south Houston area that isn't suffering from some degree of differential settlement. The ground water pumping caused (is causing) a lot of subsidence issues. Most homes in my target market are slab on grade (80-90%). I wouldn't even think about servicing pier and beam customers.
The take away from this comment is and should be “living in Texas/Houston fucking sucks”.
It should not be normal to live somewhere where 80% of houses have serious problems with their foundation. That state is cursed and should be glassed from orbit.
I've heard other horror stories about boneheaded tradespeople creating dangerous situations for their coworkers.
You should be thankful if the worst your coworkers can do is send you slop to review.
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.
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.
Obviously there would be some retraining and a period as an apprentice, and honestly I’m not sure I could afford that, but if we downsized the house maybe.
But mostly I’m posting here because this article is a pile of crap.
It uses pre-AI figures to try to assure us that post-AI the trades will still pay less than jobs for college graduates. That’s the whole point, duh, that things are changing.
Classist bullshit from the first title alone.
Electricians and plumbers stand out in “trades” because these jobs are fairly technical, while not particularly exhausting. A good plumber is always in high demand and can charge well for emergency interventions.
A plumber quoted me 1500 euros to install a swimming pool heat pump. I did it all myself with no prior experience and without the right tools in 8 hours. It cost me 300 euros worth of material. The guy would have made 1200 euros in a day. He was available 30 days from the time I called him, meaning he was quite busy.
Not saying that it’s the right call for everybody, but yeah right now, as a plumber or electrician who works in the high end of the trade, you make a decent living without the annoyances of office politics or fear of AI.
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/