Blue-collar workers who become white-collar later in life

It's _not_ easy to move a box 1000 times with little change in quality.

Before software, I did a bunch of construction. Some of those tasks were highly repetitive. ("Remove this commercial firewall that's 45 feet tall and 200 feet long". "Fill these 500 holes with metal plugs, weld them in, then grind them smooth", "remove 500sq feet of carpet on concrete, and get the glue up too")

If I paced myself and went carefully, my quality stayed high. If I rushed, quality went down. If I worked too long, quality went down.

One can move boxes, but... one can also:

  - damage the box by careless handling
  - loose the order (if the order is important, which it usually is)
  - hurt oneself in the process
  - hurt someone else in the process. (If its 1000 boxes, you're prob using a forklift or at _least_ a pallet jack)

and more.

(edit: formatting) "blue collar" jobs have quite a lot of room for optimization and process management, just as software jobs do.

(though, yes, the _scale_ of moving boxes vs. working on a system that will be used by thousands/millions is very different.)

You’ve obviously never been in the position to do the former as a requirement for paying bills... sure, lifting the boxes (or nailing the shingles, or digging the trench) is easy, it’s getting up and continuing to do it day-in and day-out that takes persistence, a strong constitution, and grit that isn’t present in many/most of the software devs that you’re likely to encounter In the workplace.

That sounds like a gnarly stretch of work you did. I’ve also experienced burnout and it is nothing to scoff at—this coming from a guy who also did physically demanding work. In terms of negative affect on my life, burnout tops the list.

I’m not the OP but I read the comment as not saying burnout isn’t a thing or that it pales in comparison to blue collar struggle. It was more that the common gripes you may hear at an office—especially from folks whose work history is only office work—tends to make you reflect. At least that’s my experience.

Mental exhaustion is a legitimate issue. But most blue collar jobs are demonstrably worse than most office jobs.

Factory line workers and truck loaders are trying to get into software, accounting, etc., not the other way around.

Ironically one of the most mentally cleansing things you can do is to bust your ass physically then sleep like the dead.

Might not even be a bad idea for larger companies that have the logistical range to get their staff swap collars a week a quarter.

How many of those days and hours were spent inside an air conditioned room with a bathroom and, probably, a kitchen/cafeteria?

I work in engineering for construction - when we were building Bertha's rescue shaft in Seattle the crews worked 5 months straight drilling holes and placing concrete with two crews on 12 hour shifts with only July 4 and Memorial Day off. When we excavated the shaft and repaired the machine we switched to three 8s and ran for almost another year.

Rain or shine, hot or cold, day or night. We worked that job every day. Nobody left until we switched to 8s because guys wanted to work 10s on another job - that's just blue collar work. In fact, that's the type of blue collar work that guys want because the OT pays the bills so you're right about that. The management on the project? Worked 1.5x as many hours as the crew because they would normally cover a shift and a transition. Every one salaried. Nobody left.

What the tech industry complains about for working conditions makes me laugh.

All true but blue collar work can mess up your body - either by wear and tear, or an accident. Then not only do you have pain, you also have trouble paying the bills.

A guy recently joined my team whose father was a mechanic and mother a health aide. He said he went into software because he didn't want to hurt and be exhausted like his parents.

Can only agree. Was working 70h a week on average I think. I had multiple several weeks at 90h in succession. Became central to the team because I was fixing everything around me. Yet they would see me as extremely disorganized and unfocused (which was just the result of the immense load that was put on me). They set up control procedures on me (which I think were illegal) with absolutely no respect for my work-hours for the sake of treating everyone on the team according to the same standard. People who earned almost twice as much and worked twice as less and who were supposed to be my peers (lean management) also offloaded part of their work onto me and and bragued about how it wasn't about the number of hours you'd pour in but to get the job done.

I left. 2 months after a colleague told me that "velocity" was the new word the managers had in their mouth. 6 month later I got a call from another colleague telling me he was about to leave as well and now wanted to punch another guy. What's funny is that I want to punch them both because they used me as a terrain for a proxy war (I don't really want to punch them, but when I heard those words it made my day and I'm still giggling as I'm writing this). I was also told that the persons who replaced us took 6 months to build something that would have taken us 2 weeks. They recently started an overtime hours program with the company's employees.

I left. I left.

Edit: I'm somehow considering a blue colar job.

The worst is when you make a decision that will take weeks or longer to play out.

I have been busy when I worked in a factory and had estops going off, but when the shift is over, Not my problem... Although don't make a mess.

For me, proper perspective has been the best help there. You seem qualified enough to be able to find other work if the worst happens, and the worst is unlikely to happen.

This doesn’t mean be lazy. It means relax, and you’ll probably find that you do better work that way.

Unless someone’s life is directly on the line (maybe it is and I’m wrong), the stakes being high is often just a story we’re telling ourselves.

> But for me it was also a type of work where I put in some heavy work and got physically tired and slept well at night without a thought of the job.

I have a friend who went the other way: worked as a nuclear engineer but eventually got fed up and became a chef (he runs a restaurant in Palo Alto). As he put it to me “when I go home work is over. I don’t have many tasks that span days.”

If you're not already, you should try getting enough exorcise to exhaust you during your off time.

Seems this is one thing that nations with compulsory enlistment really have an edge with. It helps offer perspective on top of providing useful life skills, instilling more self confidence, physical training, and so on. Big problem is that, unlike most of these other nations, we tend to actively deploy our armed forces and in ways that are of dubious value which really makes compulsory enlistment a non-starter.

Big reason I mention this is that even if the indulgence you're describing might be the most effective means of getting your tasks done, it makes one wonder about the consequences of this change in society on a macro level.

> Many nights you kiss your family good night and then while they are asleep you sit slumped at your desk just trying to get a few more hours in before you collapse for 4 hours of sleep and then get up to do it again. This is obviously not all the time but it is for the most part at some time in all software jobs.

I've been in software for many years, including 5+ years as hands-on developer, and I've never ever stayed up this late to do anything. I've worked in startups, including failing startups. Maybe i'm just naturally zen. My career is doing great btw.

It's not strange at all. What does almost every human being on earth have in common with Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos? a back! If all you're willing to do is break your back then good luck standing out from the masses. You are competing with 7 billion other humans after all. Meanwhile software? I doubt there are more than 10 million software developers in the entire world.

Obviously both kinds of experience can bring different perspectives. There's not just one way to do things. You want someone who has faced some challenges, had some failures, had to recover, things sometimes worked out. That works for both sources of experience.

It's already happening in some places. E.g. here in eastern europe.

After USSR fell, everybody wanted to go to university. Because during soviet times you'd get assignment to a cushy job for life. Yet people missed that it's over and just having a degree from random university won't land you a job.

Thus we have a shit ton of not-so-talented poorly motivated people with a degree. And a lack of tradesmen. End result is that a professional (show up on time, not drunk, do job up to specs) tradesman easily makes 2x or 3x salary of average citizen with university degree. Let alone it's hard to land a job in one's specialty because the market is overcrowded.

Thankfully the trend is slowly reversing. Since the '08 crash tradeschools enroll more and more people. There's still a massive gap to be filled.

Yep. I think around here you could make pretty good money as a competent welder. No big surprise, getting competent takes time and the working conditions aren't particularly luxurious. So there's a shortage of competent people, and the teens who are deciding where to go next in life don't seem interested in this kind of work.

I’m in the Army Reserve for this reason. It’s a great hobby for a programmer to have.

I’m volunteering with my local EMS service am loving it. It’s just about the opposite work environment as coding.

I’m outside, moving around, helping people and working hand-on in a small & highly focused team. Knowing the basics of emergency medical care is a great life skill too.

Interestingly the skill of “debugging” translates pretty well and is quite useful.

I feel like that sometimes too. I find going for a run at lunch helps a lot.

It also helps my reality in check - when the weather is nasty, I get to go back inside after my run is done. That wouldn't be the case if I had to work outdoors...

Find remote work. I've been working remotely for over a decade, because I felt an office confining and I missed being able to go outside.

With no commute, I also use that extra time to spend with my family.

I have my own office and many times work outside in the summer. I've even traveled to other states/countries and worked from there. You just need a good Internet connection.

It does take a lot of discipline. I basically have no manager now after proving that I can get my work done without being watched.

I've seen lots of remote developers come and go because they couldn't handle working remotely without someone sitting over their shoulder/telling them what to do.

Agree; I can't think of many things more monotonous than laying bricks, nailing off roofing shingle, installing 100s of outlets, or concrete flatwork.

Because they _are_ boring. I have no idea what to think of the GP other than to assume they've never actually worked a blue collar job. I have. They suck. They're boring. They are the definition of boring work.

Here's a list of manual labor jobs that I worked during my teenage years. This list will not include any job that I worked in my 20s. If I added all of the manual labor jobs that I had in my 20s I'd be here for the next hour.

* Picking corn/green & soy beans/tomatoes/peppers/berries by hand (this is summer and fall only, mind you, so not only is boring it is also hot -- even when you start at 5:45AM, you get very little reprieve working the fields because you're there until 11AM or noon).

* Working a farm stand, selling aforementioned corn/green & soy beans/tomatoes/peppers/fruit (moving up in the world!).

* Flipping burgers / running a fry station / running a fast food cash register / washing dishes in a fast food joint.

* Delivering pizzas.

* Delivering printed materials (hard to explain, friends dad had a printing business, I ran deliveries for them for a while -- loading, unloading, driving. Driving for a living is easily the most boring thing that can ever happen to you, IMHO).

* All manner of construction -- but mostly roofing and framing.

* Working the end of a glass plant factory line, inspecting glass television screens for defects. OT was in abundance here and I would often work 16 hour shifts doing this.

* Waterproofing basements / dealing with broken sump pumps / digging out deteriorating septic tanks.

* Throwing boxes at a FedEx.

This list represents ages 13 (maybe 14?) - 19 for me. 3 of these jobs were things that I did while attending University (though I left and didn't return until later in life). It doesn't get much better until 22. At 22 there's some manual labor that is disguised as technical work (military). A lot of this is or was seasonal work. That was the nature of manual labor, when and where I grew up. I'm sure that hasn't changed too much.

All of these are boring jobs. They are mind-numbing in ways that are genuinely hard to express. If salaries are dictated by who is doing the most uninteresting work then we have things _completely_ backwards, IMO.

I think this is true of just about any job. I was a carpenter for 8 years. Nailing up wall after wall gets pretty boring. Then I went to grad school. I swear I spent at least 25 % of my time making figures “publication quality”: adjust the axis limits, squeeze the axes 0.1mm in, fart with linestyles so it’s still intellligible in grayscale [1], whatever. I’ll taking framing any day over that nonsense.

[1] Many journals still have a print version and charge for color figures.

A close friend is an EMT. According to him, 95% of the job is taking care of intoxicated people.

Wow - so many negative reviews! This must be the most controversial thing I have posted!

In general you are right that blue collar wages have not kept pace with the cost of living. This is particularly true in the SF bay area. I have often thought that the poor livability in the bay area is not sustainable. I used to live in a neighborhood with only a few engineers. Now everyone seems to be an engineer. Having said that - there are far more livable places to live!

As for college education - I do support free college education but with caveats. I am shocked by the number of people who think college needs to be expensive. For instance, you can get a degree from Berkeley by going two years to a community college and the final two years at Berkeley even today. When you don't have much money, that is a great option.

I am also here to tell you that you can have a great career with a degree from a state college. My husband and I worked our way through school and the state colleges are very flexible with working students where universities are not. With my degree I was at some of the greatest companies in the world including Apple, IBM, Xerox in their heyday. I also worked at 4 successful startups.

Even in your generation this is possible. My son got a liberal arts degree in 2008 which was the worst possible year to get a liberal arts degree. He discovered that that the curriculum from Stanford and ITT India were on line. So he studied on his own to get a college-equivalent education and worked in tech for a couple of years. Then he decided he wanted a computer science masters degree. He took the prerequisites from community colleges and applied and was accepted to graduate school. His expenses ended up being small enough that he paid half through his savings and the other half he was able to pay back within a year of graduation.

I can understand that this route is not possible in all fields such as medicine. But an interesting life is still possible.

I agree with you. I wasn't going to say this because it seemed too much outside the original discussion.

School seems to have 3 roles: to gain skills, to certify skills, and to join a professional network.

In today's world more and more skills can be gained without school. We can join professional networks outside of college. I am starting to see we can certify outside of college. Therefore do we need college at all?

It's similar to how you relate to a kid where you recognize yourself as an adult and them as a child, so you don't personalize or internalize their actions. Doctors and patients, even developers and users. You can be equitable about it by accepting things as they are, but internally, you can do that because you don't need for them to reflect your own self belief.

Among adults, it's recognizing people as true others, who are not a part of "your," tribe or experience, just neutral independent beings. In a professional context, their opinions are objective things that you don't register personally because your sense of self does not depend on your relationship to them. People will bend over backwards trying to explain it in a non-hierarchical neutral zen way, but the example makes it easier.

It comes from working with animals, where a trainer needs to emotionally separate themselves from the animals actions so you cease to relate to them an a reactive way.

Pretty sure that word was made up - Google draws a blank.

> Feels rather contradictory to say that a skill that's well paid isn't admired, given how many people who go into medicine or law for the pay.

High-end prostitutes make great money and no one admires their skills. People go into medicine (or prostitution for that matter) for the money, not to have an admirable skill.

Your thoughts about minorities and women in positions of power are about 2 decades out of date.

I've worked at many companies, big and small, in many states, and I never saw anything you described.

What I do see is that when a woman is in power, other women try to take that woman down a peg. Men are respectful and now have to walk on eggshells because if you even breathe the wrong way, it can be construed as some form of harassment.

Disagreeing (even if you have facts to back your argument) is called 'mansplaining'.

This is something I see a lot. When people say "my plumber makes $200k/year" what they mean is the guy who owns a plumbing business they use makes that much money. Very few blue collar workers that aren't also small business owners make over $100k/year and it can be pretty hard to get the gigs that do (usually require having many years of experience and being in the union in a particular area like NYC, or having a very rare specialty). The only "easy" way to break $100k/year as a blue collar worker is to work lots of overtime, which isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison with white collar jobs

No wonder all the blue collar work is boring. You're automatically excluding everything that is interesting...

Dishwasher $8/hr , Linecook 10.50/hr (Grad student), Construction worker 18/hr, Construction Superintendent 60K plus bonus, PhD Student, Field Superintendent 75k, Business Analyst 90k, .NET developer 100k, Java Dev 110k & now Program Manager (confidential :) )

Because there is no setting out to change the world “fakery”. Let’s face it, we are not changing the world by swiping right or left for hookups. Or, ordering delivery by tapping on the phone instead of calling the takeout place. When I am feeding a hungry person or building a shelter that’s going to stand there for a hundred years I am literally changing the world.