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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

Part of the reason white-collar salaries are so high (along with demand) is that a lot of jobs actually aren't that interesting to do.

The stereotypical office job is "get on a train for 1-2 hours a day, then sit in front of a screen for 8 hours a day in a boring office with fluorescent lighting, five times a week, forever".

Not everyone works at a company that actually matters so they're ultimately just pushing bits around.

There are definitely other monotonous jobs (checkout staff is the obvious canonical example), but then there's interesting stuff like working for emergency services, mechanic, personal trainer, etc, all YMMV of course.

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If I had to choose careers again I would probably think more about finding something that’s more active and outside. My current job keeps me permanently at my desk or meeting rooms. No physical activity, no outside,no travel. This together with commuting being in a cube without daylight is really impacting my mental and physical wellbeing.

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

You're not the only software engineer I know who's in the Reserves. The way my colleague talks about it, it feels like more duty than hobby. What tips it toward hobby for you? Asking as someone who has been curious about joining in a reserve force or volunteer SAR organization.

I'm not sure if you mean a duty in a negative sense? Or in an obligation sense? I'm not obligated to do it and I'm sure they'd get by fine without me.

It's a hobby because it's challenging, social, physical, rewarding and just fun.

Go and see your local Reserve unit now if you are even remotely curious!

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.

> I also use that extra time to spend with my family

Remote can be nice if you already have a family. Otherwise one could end up simply trading office desk and meeting rooms for their own desk and own room, still staying inside.

I think it is more that remote is nice when work is a part of your life and not the center of your life. Swap family with other major life pursuits. Family is often a forcing function for people to learn to balance work and the rest of their life. Remote affords more flexibility, but that means it requires more experience and discipline to balance your life.

If you already have the skill, remote gives you more flexibility to balance. But if you're not intentional about it being remote gives you more rope to hang yourself with, so to speak.

How do you turn work off? I have worked remotely the last several months and I feel like I am always at work to the detriment of my family life. I find myself sitting at my desk working when if I was in an office job I would be spending time with my kids or doing things for myself.

What do you find difficult? I'm working remotely and when 6pm comes I get up and close my email client. I might use the same computer later in the evening for whatever non work related activity I want.

But I wouldn't stay at the office after hours, and I don't find it more difficult when the office is in my house.

I expect white collar pay to drop relative to blue collar pay in the future, it’s probably even happening now. Everyone knows the toll physical labor takes on your body, plus much of white collar work isn’t that hard so there’s a lot of supply of labor that are able to do it.

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 see the same thing in Poland. The thing is, to do most modern white collar office jobs well, you need to be somewhat intelligent, while the people who got their worthless degrees from degree mills are most often just average. They cannot learn quickly, they cannot communicate efficiently, they don't have an "active mind" that is always looking for a better solution. They are ok paper pushers, but the mindless office jobs are getting automated, and what is left is the jobs which require intelligence.

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.

> Part of the reason white-collar salaries are so high (along with demand) is that a lot of jobs actually aren't that interesting to do.

I'd buy that if all these blue collar jobs seemed more interesting. Holy shit they tend to sound boring. Even when there's something interesting involved in the job (for example, as a machinist, you get to play with fancy expensive CNC machines!), it's often turned into monotonous and repetitive grind.

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.

Having looked it up I think my definition of 'blue collar' is a bit off. I'm British, so there is that, the term isn't in common use over here.

I figured it just included everything that wasn't in an office.

A decent amount of the stuff in your list is unskilled labour that I've done in the past and also hated. I mean, the fact you've switched between them all pretty much illustrates it - they're not careers, they're stuff you do for a bit of money to keep going until the next gig.

What do you guys call a job that isn't the sort of thing that anyone physically able can do (well) with a day's instruction, but isn't office based either?

Like, I can't imagine a car salesman is considered white collar? (Not that that's an example of my dream job...)

Blue collar job pretty much just means manual labour, although this definition gets stretched a little when you consider factory work where a machine performs the job and the worker pretty much just operates & oversees the machine. There are plenty of skilled blue collar jobs that you won't do with a day's worth of instruction.

Salesmen are as white collar as it gets.

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.

Being an EMT seems like it would be interesting in a bad way, not a good way. I don’t really want to see people dying in a gory way every day.

Why do you think that being a mechanic or personal trainer is more “interesting” than being a software developer? I don’t think it’s true in the general case at all that blue collar work is on average more interesting than an office job.

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

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