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Comment by tsomctl | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: he is destroying his body. He's pretty commonly lifting heavy things and exposing himself to hazardous chemicals. Depending on what kind of welding he's doing, he's breathing smoke from all kinds of different paints and oils. There are fume extractors/ventilation, but they don't remove everything.

My dad and grandpa are both plumbers. My grandpa destroyed both his shoulders. He's had one replaced, and needs to have the other one done. My dad is well on his way to destroying his shoulders too.

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I'm kind of tired of the trades "break your body" argument.

I think just as many bodies routinely get destroyed in office environments—especially in tech. You know the trope. Sitting all the time under artificial light breathing nasty "inside" air staring at screens in open office environments with a lot of mental stress. Etc.

In each case, blue collar or white, proper care can be taken to avoid these injuries. Especially in blue collar trades.

I think your last point holds true, but it's really not an equivalent amount of stress you're putting on your body in an office. You can always go outside more after work and remain physically active to counteract the damage you're doing by sitting in an office all day, but if you're in a physically intensive trade, you can't avoid the damage you're doing by remaining less active after work.

Also you're going to have less energy to do the physical activity you want to do.

I paved roads for a summer at 18 and even though I was a very young energetic kid, I was barely getting anything out of my evening workouts or soccer games with friends after 10 hours outside shoveling asphalt.

Sure I might get some RSI, but my welder friend has to contend with someone on site accidentally creating phosgene gas. I don't feel like the two levels of potential self harm are in the same ball park.

Your welder friend could also end up with RSI- depending on how much grinding he does in a day. That was the main reason I quit being a mechanic, it's actually easier to prevent RSI in an office environment by careful selection of equipment, whereas running a grinder for an hour with your wrists at a funny angle since it's the only way to get the tool into the work is sometimes just required.

My dad passed away a couple of years ago of some weird cancer after a career working in nuclear power (we got a class action settlement from the DOE).

There are definitely some careers that are more dangerous than others.

Never mind that work conditions have improved since the days of GP’s grandpa.

Plumbers pick their own work conditions as they are often self employed. So uh kinda? Mostly not. Heavy things are still heavy and still need to be lifted. You're probably not going to bring in a jack.

My best friend was a HVAC repairman and is a programmer now. He's happier as a programmer. Some people are happier as an HVAC repairman, and more power to them. However it's not the norm for people who have done both.

Plumbing isn't the only kind of blue collar work, but I expect even there the work safety has improved considerably. Many things that used to be heavy are now light (copper and lead vs PVC and other plastics), many things that used to be toxic are no longer required or have safer alternatives (e.g., solders), and in general the cultural expectation for a plumber to risk life or limb for a job is far lower.

And if you're working in a factory, conditions have improved far more drastically. Worker safety is serious business given OSHA and legal liability associated with workplace injury.

Happy to hear about your best friend; I doubt it extrapolates, but it doesn't matter much to me--I don't have a dog in the fight.

Office dangers: carpal tunnel, rounded shoulders, and undesirable weight gain to name a few.

Sure but you don't get carpal tunnel from screwing up once, you get it by screwing up over and over for a decade. Trade injuries are often one shots. Being said if you don't have the discipline to avoid posture injuries you might not have what it takes to survive a trade.

Sounds like you should spend some time in a trade. It's still worth doing don't get me wrong but there are more risks, they are harder to avoid, and with worse consequences.

Then again, safety is probably much better several decades later.

I know for painters, it's a completely new world with paints that don't dissolve your brain anymore.

One interesting comparison that is likely to become highly relevant over the next couple of decades is long term viability. In software you're getting pretty old by your late 30s. By your 40s you're edging towards obsolescence. Beyond that? Of course there are exceptions but I think it's safe to say that they're the exception.

The is only something that's not such a big deal yet because the rapid growth of software is very young, and consequently so are most software developers. By contrast the average age of a welder in the US today is 55. [1] It'll be quite interesting to see how this plays out. You have people increasingly living well into their 80s, yet they start to lose their place in the job market after after a couple of decades? Maybe the bias against older workers will simply fade as the industry matures alongside its workers, but if it doesn't then there's going to be quite a spectacle over the next couple of decades.

[1] - https://www.lincolntech.edu/news/industry-news/need-skilled-...

There is bias against tech workers who haven’t learned anything in the last 10+ years. I’m less certain that there’s bias against workers over a particular age per-se.

I wonder about that - is it that tech sheds older workers, or that tech just seems to skew young because it's a young "industry"? There weren't a lot of older programmers in the 90's because there weren't that many young programmers in the 70's. The "older programmers" today are the ones (like me) who were young programmers in the 90's, and today, at 45, I've never felt any real age pressure. I think it's just a bit harder for me to find jobs now than it was when I was in my 20's, but I don't think that's because I have a few gray hairs and more wrinkles than I used to, but because I'm asking for 3 times as much money.

Or maybe I'm just being unrealistically optimistic and life is about to get really difficult for me.

I think you hit on the key point. Like you mentioned, you're expecting 3 times as much as you were initially. On top of a better understanding of your own value, you're also going to have a better understanding of the employer:employee relationship. In other words you're not going to bend over backwards solely in in hopes of proving yourself, achieving some sort of recognition, or other such things. I don't think companies are choosing not to hire older developers because of any form of discrimination or even a belief that older developers have less skills. Instead, it's just a value measurement no different than e.g. outsourcing. It's the same reason that I think most large tech companies are pushing hard for 'get [anybody with a heartbeat] into computer science'. Increase the labor supply, lower labor costs, increase profit margins.

This would also explain why other industries don't suffer from a similar problem. In software development companies collect software developers by the tens of thousands. This results in extremely high labor costs and so reductions on this front can see tremendous savings. As an example Google has about 100,000 employees. That means reducing their average salary by just $10 per year is worth a million dollars of 'free' revenue (yeah, ignoring taxes etc). Really amazing to think about those numbers! By contrast even very large companies in other fields will have relatively small numbers of engineers. For instance petroleum engineering is critical in the fossil fuel industry which is an extremely large industry, yet there are only a total of 33,700 petroleum engineers in the entire country.

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/petrole...

I wonder how much of this is actually about how we take care (or don't take care) of our body and just expect it to take care of itself.

For example, I work in an office job. Over 50% of us either have serious injuries (like joint replacements) or are pending surgery.

To counter your point: there's just not enough data on modern day software industry jobs to really understand the physical and neurological harm it can bring to your body. I can see entire arms being replaced just from the phone syndrome alone.

Not to mention steel coming in that's radioactive from India and China.What a way to get rid of radioactive waste.

I'm not sure I've heard this before. Do you have any reputable sources on this?

I follow a You tuber his handle is Ave, He went into detail about it , I don't have the video title off hand. Being a former welder it really caught my attention. He was testing scrap he brought into his shop with a geiger counter. Commentor's below mentioned they had to test all steel coming in because it could set off sensitive monitors and halt the production line.

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