Hacker News Reader

Comment by xfitm3 | Hacker News Reader

> I refuse the premise that we tech workers know best and therefore must protect the fragile little minds of everyone else.

I quit my tech job and went into construction. Only in hindsight has it been glaringly obvious how egocentric tech workers are. High paid, wielding incredible power, and the praise from their managers/peers just reinforces delusions.

Try doing a hard days work in a skilled trade such as woodworking, electrical, or HVAC. Now that's humbling. It also exposes you to many different people and types of thinking, which IMO, promotes healthy self perspective. Echoing here even on HN just amplifies the dilemma.

View on HN

more and more i've grown into the opinion that aspiring members of the professional class should be required to spend at least one year doing some form of ungracious working class labor. there are things you learn as a line cook or a garbage truck driver that not even the most elite school will ever be able to teach you. personally i think i would've become a real asshole if not for misfortune & hardship and learning exactly what it means to start over with nothing.

Yep, definitely. I'm very fortunate that I didn't discover coding until my late twenties. I worked odd jobs in several industries, and right up until I started in tech, I was working two jobs in order to make $30K per year. I feel unbelievably lucky to be in this industry and I try not to take it for granted.

Some professional classes in Eastern European countries used to have mandatory time they had to spend working in factories, probably for this reason.

Early high schools in the US had shop classes, too. It was still just a token effort at trade work but it was still something. Almost all of these classes have been cut due to budget.

I think 6 months around age 13. That way it also helps kids who don't really see the point of school and it helps ordering school tasks by importance.

I am not a trade professional, but I do a lot of physical building projects as an amateur. I find the work to be much more mentally stimulating than my job in a well-known CS/EE research lab. I think that it is because structures must be elegant, and every piece affects many others. This can also be true for code, but it often isn’t. At work I’m forced to take part in software monstrosities that any tradesman would laugh at if it were a piece of architecture. And it’s okay to laugh and be laughed at too.

I did it at an amateur level many years before depending on it to pay my mortgage. When you do it for a living it's very different. You no longer strive for perfection, you strive for expectations management.

Some things cannot be perfect due to prior imperfect work. For example if a room isn't square, or something isn't level, you build your new work to match previous errors or your work looks out of place.

I walk onto a jobsite and there are some unspoken rules. Learning these rules is part of the fun. At the end of the day it's just a bunch of people trying to get something done.

Working in trade also helps you accept the principle of "good enough". You should always try your best, never give up, but accept things aren't perfect. What you see as imperfect will likely never be noticed by the property owner.

Dealing with the customer has some quirks too. If you run a bundle of cat6 that looks like laminar flow then you will blow their socks off. They assume everything else is perfect. Meanwhile you could have wrapped cat6 around a/c ducts 10 times in the attic and they will never know.

Knowing where to put your effort is an art.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com