YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It would take a bit of time for similar societies to adjust to the new realities.

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.

Subsitute trade of choice

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.

my coworkers would always tell me, the youngest, about how much their bodies hurt, how tired they were, how hard it was to make ends meet. they either wanted me to stick around because i made their jobs easier, or wanted me to get my degree and go. ive seen accidents happen, but none terrible. people were always so worried about my safety. i got lucky and was never injured.

i dont know. ive been in my current role for 4 months now. its not bad. i dont dislike it. i cant tell if i miss my old job or if im just lonely in a new place.

i really miss zoning out and working with my hands though. there are moments where you have to lock in, i remember moments where i was working with something dangerous and how acutely aware of the position of my body i was. but there were moments where you did a repetitive task for a while. and i always liked that aspect. the physicality.

i think about going back to it a lot actually. maybe im just nostalgic. should give it a few years to get used to the cubicle life. i really do miss it though. might do what my father did and compulsively renovate his basement to get the high of building something with his hands.

However my construction experience affords me the opportunity to get a good paying job anywhere in Canada. I do not work in construction because I don’t like it. I will venture to say that many people do not have the physical ability to do some of these jobs.

However I think electrical is not really on the ladder of difficult physical jobs when it comes to blue collar work. It’s the most white collar ish job in the blue collar world.

I am not blaming the HVAC technicians. It is the nature of trades: small business owners don't want to train up their technicians. So, they always look for fresh blood. Also, this field is seasonal: summers and winters. In summers, cooling problems; in winters, it is heating problems (furnaces, etc).

HVAC needs three different skills: controls (relays, transducers, contactors), electrical, refrigeration circuit, air flow (duct work, proper cfm settings), etc. In a way, this whole area is covered in multiple semesters of any mechanical engineering program (heat transfer, control systems, electricity).

As a software developer I’d like to imagine that good practices mean professionals are rarely (aka once every decade or less) shocked but a friend who is the son of an electrician said they wouldn’t do it as their dad said he gets shocked.