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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

You are not wrong about the messaging but lets not pretend trade work is green fields and roses, a lot of it absolutely fucks up peoples bodies.

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This. My dad is a contractor. I’ve been taking some time off SWE work to try to learn some of what he knows while he can still do it. It is just hard on my body, half the days I wake up with the wrong kind of pain. Hanging drywall, digging post holes, sanding, painting, laying tile, etc. So much of the work is an ergonomic nightmare.

I think it’s not as bad in single family construction as commercial work, since the activity varies more over the day/week. But still, I can’t imagine my body not breaking if I did this for a career.

OTOH electrical work seems mostly reasonable. If one of my kids wanted to get into a trade that’s where I’d steer them.

Not diminishing the degree to which it can hurt your body long term - it absolutely can. That being said, most people that do that kind of work as a career start it as a job when they're 16-18 years old, and are typically active (sports, etc.) for many many years before that.

You're starting it at best in your mid-to-late twenties? And even if you played sports in HS and go to the gym regularly, your body just isn't used to it and it's past the point where it can quickly adapt and more importantly get used to the stimulus. You're likely much more prone to injury than someone fifteen years older than you whose been doing that work since they were 17 (I'm sure I am too, it would destroy and I am very active for a SWE).

Yes and no. I don't know of any exercise that would compare to sanding a wall, for example. It's not exactly an activity you would want to be doing for a long stretch of time. No matter how fit you are, construction work isn't like you're getting paid to go to the gym.

Fair. I’m late 30s, my dad is 74 and can work circles around me. He definitely started manual labor young. I did some of it in high school but have been behind a desk since college.

I do consider myself very fit/active, but it’s not the strength or stamina that’s the limiting factor, it’s the holding weight at weird angles, or applying torque, or just reaching out over my center of mass for hours.

Anecdotally it seems like the specialists have it worst. His friends who did flooring all have wrecked knees, and the drywall hangers have messed up shoulders. He seems to have made it out unscathed, though other generalists he knows have back problems.

I think even in single family construction, it is often the case that people specialize and the work can be quite repetitive. We had some drywall work done, notably finishing a portion of our basement. Hanging the drywall, followed by taping and mudding, followed by painting. All were done by different people, probably with different pay scales and expectations of working conditions.

I've had people come to my house to do handyman work, and at the same age as me, they are hobbling and broken.

I suspect that one of the causes of the opioid crisis is that we had a pain crisis, caused by bad working conditions. I could imagine advising one of my kids to go into the trades, but only if they move to a country with decent labor laws, safety net, and health care. Not in the US.

Being poor absolutely fucks up being able to live, so I'd rather have a meaningful career if I had the choice versus being look at unfavorably compared to an automaton in other fields.

I hadn't considered this before reading your comments, but it makes sense that skilled trades will be somewhat automation proof, at least in the medium term.

In part because skilled trades already are fairly mechanized. Backhoes, skid-loaders, nail guns, power tools, etc.

(And in general, I think mechanization is under-appreciated as a productivity enhancer compared to automation... Who is more productive moving something like gravel around, someone driving a 5 ton capacity dump truck or someone overseeing 100 gravel-moving drones with a capacity of 5 kilograms each? Even if the drones are essentially autonomous, the dump truck driver will be more productive in moving the material around because he's driving a big machine and the drones will need someone to manage them especially when there are problems. Or even compare 5 ton autonomous mining trucks with a 500 ton dump truck... the 500 tonner is gonna win. Larger scale machines are still a pretty straightforward way to improve productivity.)

Honest question. Why do your examples assume that the autonomous machine has to be smaller than the human operated version?

Well there’s an argument that there’s not a lot gained by going fully autonomous for huge machines. These huge trucks are like $5 million apiece not including sensors and hardware and software for automation, and so hiring a human to operate them (or even just babysit them) for $20-30/hour (typical dump or coal truck operator wage) seems like a pretty obvious idea. Which doesn’t mean people aren’t automating mining trucks… they are! But there aren’t huge cost savings in terms of labor.

I guess I’m just saying that scaling up your smaller machine to be larger has the same kind of productivity enhancements as switching your smaller machine to autonomous. It is also something humans have been doing ever since the development of domestic beasts of burden.

Modular houses - where the fittings are made in the factory itself - is one kind of automation.

I met a guy a few years ago who had a plumber role in one of those modular factories... he said he was paid lesser but he likened it to a 9-5 job in a factory, and was ok with the pay.

But not recession proof. Also, the "automation" can happen gradually without making it look like it's affecting the trades. Thinking about plumbing, in my locale they've gone from sweated copper and iron drain piping, to plastic tubing that comes on a roll and is joined with some sort of tool that squeezes the fittings onto the tubing. Drain work is all PVC glued together.

So the skilled labor content of plumbing a house has decreased over the years.

Every house in my neighborhood has hardwood floors throughout -- it was cheap when the subdivision was built out, but laborious to install. Today, the same class of house would have carpeting or sheet flooring, costing a lot less to install.

Other things like vinyl siding, Romex instead of hard conduit, etc.

Is there a building industry equivalent of build the machine that builds the houses?

You can be a massively skilled electronic engineer, but you don't need to hand solder every board to have a great, skilled, outcome. I guess the answer is all the machinery we employ for larger buildings, but there's no real equivalent for the individual suburban home which still involves most of the manual labor.

Actually, the electrical engineers that I’ve worked with didn’t know how to solder. They had technicians to do that.

OTOH, I, a physicist, used to be a certified NASA solderer.

That was in the days before surface mount.

All the EEs of my generation knew how to solder.

Interestingly, no electrician I've used knew what inductive coupling was. :-(

Well, I’m about fifteen years older than you are. You must have worked with a different class of EEs. The one I knew weren’t hams and probably didn’t grow up building kits and stuff like we did.

Inductive coupling is one of the most fascinating topics in EM. And, is all the power really flowing in the air between the wires? The electricians don’t know that, either.

I'm a physicist too. The electrical engineers at my workplace know how to solder. However, if someone needs a noise budget, they bring it to me.

I'm the one who teaches the chemists to solder. ;-)

Well there's the tools industry and robotics in general but the issue ultimately comes down to cost and speed. You can use heavy automation and tooling to reduce the tax on a person but that equipment is incredibly expensive and often times is slower than a person or a few people just doing the job by themselves or with more "manual" tools.

Apprenticeship.

Good small time subcontractors show up to the job themselves but train others to do most of the work.

Subs I worked with had pretty healthy markup over what they were paying their workers (>100% when invoicing hours).

The catch is they all had spent years learning the trade, and that part is definitely dangerous. I saw a guy ruin his back being over eager pouring concrete.

> I guess the answer is all the machinery we employ for larger buildings, but there's no real equivalent for the individual suburban home which still involves most of the manual labor.

Suburban housing is very easy to build. Building 1 storey houses is not a challenge anywhere in the world, and it is possible to build it super cheap even without any capital equipment.

Steel housing is a prime example that even a double digit percentage cost advantage, with it being a very straightforward, and overwhelmingly superior, replacement for wooden framing, doesn't seem to been enough to drive new technology adoption in USA.

I had an interesting experience, I did electronic engineering but i completely misunderstood how to solder - i was trying to melt the solder onto the iron and drop a drop of molten solder on the board with the wire. The technicians were laughing their asses off and said "if you cant solder maybe you shouldn't be here"

It was in 2nd year when I watched a youtube video when some guy actually explained thay you need to heat up the pad on the board, then add solder. I was totally flabbergased.

Soldering was a very minor part of my degree, so it didn't really matter, but still.

It helps to put a small amount of solder on the tip of the iron before you touch the pad - it improves the heat transfer. The main amount is added into the part/pad interface, as you saw on YouTube.

I’m thinking that, when you first learned to solder, you remembered the first step but not the second one, and thus got off on the wrong foot.

Well, houses are literally built by cnc increasingly often. There's a whole industry in the Baltics of building houses in a factory and shipping them around Europe.

There’s one channel on yt that I watch a lot. The fellow builds houses, and his ability to reach down and do useful work four inches below his toes amazes me.

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