Hacker News Reader

Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

You could also just become a plumber and probably make $300k a year[i] (~150$/hour). Engineers are incredibly undervalued for all the effort they put in their education (and containing education). A plumber could pull in at least $150 per hour in the bay area. I just hate the headlines Sky-High which in the rest of the professions is normal. Try finding an (below average english major) attorney at $150 per hour.

[i] https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/plumbing/

View on HN

This is, like the comment of varelse, also a bit of an oversimplification.

To earn that kind of money as a plumber you would need to either work your way up over the course of roughly 15 to 20 years at a very generous plumbing company, or be an independent plumber with next level marketing skills.

The average plumber, pipe or steamfitter just coming out of their training is not going to get anywhere near 300 000 a year.

Yes this is the top end. Like what we are talking about with engineers here: AI Talent.

In my case, I turned a career in driver and low-level algorithm coding into a career in AI in <2 years emphasizing the ability to implement AI algorithms in C/C++ and CUDA. That said, when Tensorflow Monkeys can make $300K right out of school, imagine how someone who could bang the metal directly could do...

TLDR: Chance favored the prepared skill set. No fancy degree required, just results.

PS Before that, I blew a boring blind-allocated gig at Google insisting that GPUs were about to play a huge role there a year before they acquired DNNResearch. I even tried to join the very beginnings of the Google Brain team but they didn't have any openings or the budget/willingness to make one for me.

With no evidence whatsoever, I would argue against that. "Top talent" does not equate to "moving into an industry with potential". I think the other comment re TensorMonkeys is valid. How many AI researchers actually understand the ins and out of what they do or the tools they use? Seems to me that AI is/will become abstraction on abstraction etc as AI gets more complex and that means the people using the tech are more and more removed from "first principles", and therefore need to know less and therefore not really "top talent" in my book. Maybe at the start though.

The top end of engineers and researchers in artificial intelligence earn magnificent salaries. That domain is not, itself, the top end of software engineering, it's a specialization of it with its own salary track. You aren't actually comparing like for like here, because most engineers doing work in "artificial intelligence" aren't even pulling down the salary you noted for the top end of plumbing (which is itself wildly unrealistic).

When you say talent you mean Tensorflow monkeys?

$150/hr is the maximum of the range they give, and then you have to subtract payroll taxes, equipment, marketing, etc. On top of that, it's not like plumbers are working jobs back to back 40hrs a week.

Yes. They get to write off equipment, marketing, etc. "It's not like plumbers are working jobs back to back 40hrs a week." In California probably more like 60hrs.

Yup, the closer analogy is consulting but with the massive capital investment of equipment, vehicle + professional insurance.

I'd be surprised if the take-home on $150/hr is even close to $60/hr.

> Yes. They get to write off equipment, marketing, etc. "It's not like plumbers are working jobs back to back 40hrs a week." In California probably more like 60hrs.

Are you just making up numbers? You've asked for sources, other commenters (including myself) have provided several, and the sources disagree with what you're stating spectacularly. I'm baffled by how confident you're being about something that, as far as everyone can currently tell in this thread, is plainly incorrect.

Have you tried to get a decent plumber lately? My plumber just bought a fancy new truck and boat. Previously he traded favors with my contractor to remodel both their homes on the cheap.

> You could also just become a plumber and probably make $300k a year[i] (~150$/hour).

...how many plumbers do you personally know? The reason everyone in this thread is pushing back against this is because the suggestion is ludicrous. It doesn't make sense in terms of market dynamics - the barrier to becoming a plumber is significantly lower than the barrier to becoming a software engineer. That's not intended to demean the profession, it's just true - you do not necessarily need any education (and the profession embraces this far more than tech does, which is itself progressive on that point) and requisite domain knowledge is not as extensive or as rapidly changing as software engineering. You need technical knowledge, but unless you're taking the most complex plumbing jobs and the most mundane engineering work, they're simply not comparable.

Some plumbers do well, particularly if they own their own business and are thereby successful entrepreneurs. But you can't judge the typical outcome of a professional career by the entrepreneurs who use it as a basis for their business. The modal plumber doesn't earn anything resembling $300k/year - according to the BLS, there isn't a single state where the average is even $100k.[1] Where are you getting your data, from how much they're billing you when you have someone fix a problem in your house?

____________________________________

1. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers...

Plumbers make closer to 40k a year. Some tiny pcnt of them will get as high as the low hundreds, not as plumbers but as owners of successful plumbing companies. But the top tiny pcnt of software people who move into ownership and succeed become... stupid rich. if you compare apples to apples, the wealthy plumber fantasy fades quick.

Haha. $20/hr plumbers hilarious. I am sure you can't, but please provide a link to this source.

https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Plumber/Hourly_Rate

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/plumber/salary

When the data disagrees with your mental model, consider re-evaluating your mental model.

The amount a client pays per hour for labor != the takehome pay of the person whose time you're ostensibly being charged for.

*Thanks for the link. So my last plumbing job should have been $10!!! (Not 290$!!).

That's not how labor-intensive businesses work. Again, The amount a client pays per hour for labor != the takehome pay of the person whose time you're ostensibly being charged for.

Revenue is not profit, and "price per hour for labor" != "hourly rate I pay my laborers". This is even true in owner-operator businesses. Furthermore, in bursty markets, "annual income amortized over career" != "my hourly rate multiplied by 40-60 multiplied by the number of weeks I want to work".

The numbers from my links are INCOME, not "what the business charged the client".

My plumber charges me $80/hr in the bay area. Now that's ~50% above the poverty line, but it's >2x the median wage around me.

If only every employee received {total revenue generated by company}/{# of employees in company}.

:-)

Well, either he's pocketing a large fraction of that or he's up to his eyeballs in debt looking at his new boat and his fancy new truck. Methinks you're overanalyzing it.

To the contrary. We have actual data that directly answers the question "what is the typical take-home pay of plumbers". You just have to look at the damn table.

Why keep insisting on proxy variables and anecdotes?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com