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Comment by StudentStuff | Hacker News Reader

This is the nature of truck driving, the headline has been $100k/yr job without the need of a degree for years, but in actuality, only those who work very hard & cheat the books get close to that.

Are you willing to drive while sleepy, break regs when the customer is demanding you drive longer to deliver their products (due to traffic delaying you or similar)? Its a really screwed up industry.

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This is the nature of truck driving, the headline has been $100k/yr job without the need of a degree for years, but in actuality, only those who work very hard & cheat the books get close to that.

No, trucking was a decent living 'till deregulation in the 90s.

"How Trucking Went From One of the Best Jobs in America to One of the Worst" http://time.com/money/4325164/trucking-worst-job/

"No" is an incorrect response. The 90s is two decades ago. Your comment doesn't contradict the previous one at all.

Presumably he was contradicting "This is the nature of truck driving" - saying, in other words, that the problem isn't inherent to truck driving but rather came about due to deregulation.

Agreed, my hope is that it isn't a foreshadow for other industries. Once breaking regs and cheating (whatever that looks like for a given industry) become part of the revenue forecast. It’s pretty hard for market participants to compete without doing those things.

Then we should just completely remove regs, obviously /s

Very hard to do that today with Electronic logs and most companies going to Systems that track based on what the truck is doing not what the driver reports.

This is one of the reasons there is a shortage alot of those drivers that used to "cheat the books" (which is a whole other thing) stopped making as much money, and can not pull the same number of loads anymore

Just curious, how does cheating the books work for a driver?

The only one I’m familiar with is that you drive more than you report and that lets you take on more jobs. You’re not supposed to drive more than (for example) 14 hours / day for safety reasons but most drivers that pull six figures tend to have violated these laws fundamentally.

It may not be to take more jobs, it may be to keep the one you have. Say it takes 14 hours and 45 minutes and you can only log 14 hours drive time. How do you get the job done when dispatch is promising you'll be there? Start driving before you log the start of your day, log breaks when really you've been peeing in a bottle, log some time to inspect your truck when you are stuck in traffic. A little here and there. You can also fudge when you slept and start so you can get rolling sooner. The pressure to do this is huge. If you won't, someone else will, so you do it to keep your job.

Bonus, if you are caught the company doesn't care, they will hire someone else, but it sticks with your record.

The only way to align the incentives here is for the company to also face sanctions if one of their drivers is caught.

>Bonus, if you are caught the company doesn't care, they will hire someone else, but it sticks with your record.

Which is why the company is also fined in many places (like the EU). The problem is the company most of the time.

> Are you willing to drive while sleepy, break regs when the customer is demanding you drive longer to deliver their products (due to traffic delaying you or similar)? Its a really screwed up industry.

Screwed up would be forbidding people from making this personal choice through regulation.

The problem is that it doesn't just affect them. If drunk drivers only killed themselves it would be a lesser issue not worth setting up checkpoints over.

Warrantless checkpoints aren't legal in Washington State, and having experienced them in other states I'm very happy to not have to interact with an armed goon at a random checkpoint.

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