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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

Plumbing. Electrical. HVAC. Roofing.

The average age of trade workers is over 50. Carpentry is in extreme demand but the pay hasn't caught up yet -- eventually it will.

Demand already far exceeds supply.

Edit: I like how I gave a perfectly truthful answer to the question and I'm being downvoted to oblivion. A lot of contempt for tradespeople, I guess. I went to high school with people who became electricians and they were all debt-free millionaires with their own businesses (usually several) by 40.

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Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. Besides not doing any good and making boring reading, it often ends up being uncollected garbage when the original comment gets corrective upvotes, as yours has.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I don't doubt your anecdotal data. However there is a difference between being a trades worker and running a business. Usually running a business means managing a team of trades workers and that comes with it own set of headaches. If you look at the BLS data on median income for traders workers, the data is not so impressive ~60K for plumbers, electricians and other workers.

People in the trades are some of the most likely group of people to go into business for themselves. Doing a few years of work and then going out on your own is the norm.

Don’t forget welding. I’m colorblind so that’s been my dream if I were to start over. Most of those require a good amount of color coded wiring. I did try to become a cop and passed all the exams, but they also check for colorblindness.

I’m a fan of trades over office jobs. They’re paid fairly, you either have a union or at least paid for your hours you actually work. And I’ve always dreamed about overtime pay. Instead I’m pitted against overseas labor which instead of fighting, I’d prefer to unionize with them against our employer. Anyone that hires overseas deserves it. Certainly didn’t care about jobs here so we shouldn’t care about their well-being either.

Hm, I think those industries are subject to boom and bust cycles in construction.

In fact, no. Those are specifically the trades that always have work and don't depend on new construction. "General Construction" is very boom&bust.

There are also many specialties available in plumbing and electrical that demand top dollar. The average electrician where I'm at in the US working for themselves is making $80-150 an hour (market depending) without any specialties involved.

I mean take roofing for example. Of course roofs need replacement eventually. But after a construction boom the fraction of new roofs is high, so those don't need replacement for a while. Wouldn't that mean that roofers have less work?

Roofing is maybe the weakest link in that list of four and also the most punishing of those trades on the body. Congrats, you found it. It's also the one I put last.

Commercial properties also have roofs that need replacing and residential & commercial construction often don't boom at the same time. More importantly, storms are always a thing and one of the most common places trees go is into buildings & from the top.

I have never met a roofer that wasn't insanely overbooked.

Demand for HVAC is only going to get bigger on current trends.

I was roommates with a heavy equipment mechanic in his >$500k house. He barely spoke English and when his company got terminated from their contract on a tunnel he was rehired the same week for a $40k pay raise. He quit that job for another $30k raise to work for a different company on the same tunnel project a week after that.

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