Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?
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Every day these guys would show up at 8am and long sleeves and jeans and hard hats, work super hard, pee in a port-a-potty, and be exhausted by the end of the day. They worked out in the 100 degree heat as well as the rain as the job got near the end. Luckily the bosses were pretty cool and provided them with decent food for lunch and plenty of drinks (but I still offered them food and drinks too).
I on the other hand was working at my desk in my air conditioned house in comfortable clothes. A few times a day I'd put on my flip-flops and wander around outside to check on their work, ask a few questions, and then head back in when it got too hot.
And a couple of times the plumbing sprung a leak just as they were getting ready to leave, despite their best efforts to get all the risky work done early, and they they had to stay super late. Once the plumber was here till midnight after arriving at 8am.
I used to have thoughts about how it would be nice to have a job with totally spelled out requirements that end at 5pm and then you have the rest of the day off. But no more. I'd much rather work at my comfy desk inside and deal with the occasional call at 9pm on a Saturday than deal with what they all went through.
A neighbor owns a painting company. He goes around the various job sites in the morning, sees that everyone has their marching orders for the day, returns in the afternoon to check in on the progress. In between the morning and afternoon though? He does what he pleases.
I believe he started the company with a buddy, the two of them doing the painting. Things grow though, you hire guys, your role changes (and your income too).
One of the things I legitimately struggle to understand about other people is the willingness to exchange an irreplaceable thing, time, for a very replaceable thing, money, and suffer while doing it when other choices exist. The "when" in that bit is very important. A lot of people do not have that choice, and I understand why they continue; there's no other option. But for people who do what we do and how we do it, why chase the brass ring for so long? You don't have to suffer at Amazon, no amount of stock options are worth it. You will never get back that night you spent working on that one last thing instead of going home to your partner or kids or friends. The marginal impact of another $5,000 when you already make $125,000 in a year is very small.
And, as a bonus, not only are you helping yourself, you're helping the rest of our industry. Since we are largely allergic to unions in this industry, the only leverage we have is if enough people finally realize that it is possible to have a good work as part of a good life.
You really will get back that night you spent working: it likely afforded you many more nights retired, free.
If the only thing you value is retirement and complete freedom indefinitely. Personally I'd much rather have an extra day on my weekend now, and have to work an extra year at the same pace I'm working at now (and enjoy it too) rather than minmax to the point of sacrificing everything for the next 15 years to finally be able to do what I want to do - which is what I have right now.
I often wonder why the other painters working for him don't go off and start their own painting companies. Perhaps a few will. But I suspect many of them would not enjoy or be comfortable with spread sheets, business taxes, work insurance and some of the other things that go along with owning the company.
I suspect my neighbor, like many of us, fond those things to be fairly un-intimidating and so he owns.
I've got a very good friend who worked as a painter, did the 8-3 5 days a week gig for probably 8 years or so. He had no interest in running a business, managing clients, dealing with costing, estimates, etc. He just wanted to show up, paint and leave at 3.
> and some of the other things that go along with owning the company.
One of the big differences is what happens if there's no work, or if someone stiffs you or if the work required is substantially more than the estimate? In all three of those cases a business owner is in trouble, but the painter doesn't care.
Unpopular opinion: being an owner is hard. You think it's easy until $80k doesn't come in on time and you have to make payroll by mortgaging your house, or you have to wake up at 2 am because a developer got arrested by INS (even though they were a US citizen), or you have to deal with a $150K medical bill that your insurance wouldn't cover... etc... Or an employee tries to make a copy of your code and launch a competing business...
Life is hard.
It's no different in Tech. What is hard about being a developer is that you are building. The analogy between your friend who owns and manages a painting company, isn't really that far off. As long as your are primarily responsible for getting the work done... well, the expectation will be closed tickets, shipped features.
"Constant need to stay up to date" is actually one of the things I really like about this field, because it's one of the things that prevents the work from getting redundant, at least in the long run.
In software, someone with their own software consultancy or an indie app developer could be equivalent.
I have done a decent bit of network and systems administration in the past. I don't like it. It's hard on me sitting at a computer all day. Sometimes I got to go somewhere else and play with some equipment for a bit, but it was mostly a sit at a desk and stare at a screen kind of job. I really need the physical activity. Nowadays I repair rental houses for a number of property owners around here and I'll never go back, even if does pay a little less. I don't really find the work any more or less enjoyable overall, but I work less hours which means I have more time of my own, I sleep so much better at night, and my mental health has improved significantly. Also I get to work by myself which is real nice.
Edit: Many trade jobs are not like mine. I work my own hours, at my own pace, doing mostly light work. Every now and then I might get a helper. I was a roofer when I was much younger, and that's not something my body could handle anymore.
Worked fast food, retail. Been a dishwasher, bus boy....
I think there is something abut the manual labor that gives you a daily sense of accomplishment. The lawn work for sure. Arriving at a tatty yard, leaving it looking like a golf course.... That sort of day-to-day sense of achievement is much more rare in software development.
To be sure I ultimately chased the higher-paying software field. But when I would see the "grounds keepers" at the Apple campus, I was often a little envious....
I think a good part of it is also the fact that manual labor involves physical activity, which in itself can help to improve mood.
If you've seen Good Will Hunting, imagine Affleck and Damon's characters meeting again years down the road. Affleck might call Damon a "computer pussy" but both of them know Affleck is proud of Damon and would trade places with him if he had the skills.
Not to say "computer pussy" isn't potentially extremely condescending; just that such usage of profanity among laborers is often colloquially used to express sincere kinship and camaraderie.
On the plus side, it really is satisfying to be able to see the results of your work at the end of the day, nearly every day. Progress is visible and real.
On the downside, construction in the summer is rough work. You can be on rooftops working with materials or tools that make it even hotter. There's lots of exhausting carrying heavy things from here to there. There's incredibly long hours (10 hour days is within the norm, 6 day 12 hour schedules aren't rare, and 16 hour days not unheard of). In any decent construction job that's a ton of overtime pay, which really adds up, but it's also exhausting. A 6/12 schedule is basically work/sleep/work. Great way to save money for the coming school year, terrible way to make a living long term.
I miss being able to see my work. And to be able to drive by 20 years later and point and say "Yep, I built that." Don't underestimate the pride that brings.
But I don't regret my career choice at all. Construction is viscerally satisfying in a lot of ways, but it's not how I want to spend my days.
Yes, there are almost always jobs with less strenuous requirements on time, fewer requirements and late nights. But the average tech worker has a pretty good gig. And if they don't they can go down the street in 2022 and get one.
Trades scratch a similar itch to development in some ways - you're working with a set of tools and generally always building or working on the same projects. Yes, it's tactile, it gets you something palpable in the end. Yes, like software development you get that dopamine hit when you've built something nice. But there are late nights, big jobs that go too long, crappy coworkers and clients, because ... it's a professional job.
Did this behavior start with the coda of Office Space or has it always been a thing?
"A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Same things goes with anything really.
There's a world of difference between taking a week to ship a new button to Chrome at Google (low impact, but at least high visibility) and creating a project from scratch over the course of months for it to be killed off by or not work out for the stakeholders (no impact AND no/low visibility). This happens with most projects.
On the other hand, building or fixing something physical you know that at least you're solving a real problem for someone, and it will probably last them a while.
Software is constantly churning and evolving precisely because such evolutions are not limited by tools, materials, or constraints of the physical world. Way better for creativity, but rarely leaves us devs feeling proud of the work we've done
> the object which labor produces – labor's product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.
> [...]
> the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts...
I suppose there's a sense in the trades that you know somebody wants something before you do it, because they've asked for it. And you can usually see where it fits into the bigger picture because the interconnected pieces are visually and physically connected.
I get a similar satisfaction from being a part time musician. When I show up to play music, it's because somebody has hired me to play music, and within the band there's a specific part that's filled by my work. I also know the quality of my own work instantly as I do it. I love music as an art, but on the bandstand, I'm a tradesman first and an artist second.
Working in a tech field, it can be hard to know if what you're making is ever going to matter to anybody, and it's possible to do negative work in the sense of costing more than what it returns. That can be frustrating.
And sometimes you just want something radically different. But don't pretend it's simple enough that we - the brilliant computer and maths people - could easily just start doing it. I think that's where the patronizing comes in. Any professional job requires training and experience.
As far as training goes- software engineering doesn’t seem particularly rigorous in providing it compared to other disciplines.
Complexity is no indicator of worth to society, nor is salary.
I'd say the major difference is that in the trades, the tools actually work.
If you simply fuck up during your development, the most you'll get in practice is a letter from the regulator requiring you to change the fucked up thing; Fines arrive when management refuses to change the fucked up thing and tries to invent a loophole instead.
I started learning joinery a year ago. I'm still terrible at it by professional standards, but I've made some bespoke furniture pieces for our house that would have cost 2-3x what I spent in tools and materials, and I enjoyed the process.
It's definitely something you can do in your spare time, and even if you don't decide to go pro, you've still learned a valuable life skill.
No, it's such a cliche that's why Office Space chose to use it.
The movie Lost in America explores this theme much more generally.
The funniest thing about the end of Office Space is that by "dropping out" of software during the Y2k era and entering the construction field, the protagonist is just swapping one bubble for another, software for housing.
This also happens with Kiki's Delivery Service. It makes the English dub much, much better than the Japanese original.
I can confess to passing the person holding the STOP and SLOW sign at a construction site, and even saying out loud, "Now that's a job I could do."
But when the fog clears, and the paycheck lands in the bank, it's, well... nah. I'd rather put up with the stress or ennui and have the cash.
Most trades (!including plumbing!) have VASTLY more stringent requirements than tech, are often more mentally stimulating, and yes, quite rewarding.
Disclaimer: I've worked in software for ~9 years and worked in trades before that. ASE master certified auto technician, father is a master electrician, uncles are contractors. I'll probably become a plumber.
What I can say is have more hobbies, and perhaps we (those who care) should be working to differentiate a genre (vertical, size, location, something) as being better, so it feels like less of a game of chance every time people are looking for 'better'.
This is really a problem, there's inherent value in egalitarianism or democracy, but perhaps due to a lack of deeply technical managers it often plays as you say hard to get anything good done due to bike-shedding and not being led by experience.
A big aspect of Marxism is that labor has been alienated from their production in the age of industrialization, so I’d say it’s been a thing for a while.
Agreed. SO recently left a career in academia to get a job in tech as an entry level software developer. Says this is the easiest job they've ever had in their life, and wondered why they didn't start sooner.
Developers have no idea how difficult even other white collar jobs are, let alone blue collar work that involves physical labor and the outdoors.
I also temporarily quit my IT job because I felt burned, got a job cleaning floors and washing clothes. Again I loved the work.
If it weren't for the pay I wouldn't work in this field. I'm hoping to quit for good in a few years, switching careers doesn't make much sense at this point.
Out of all of them, I have the "best" job in terms of what's expected of me on a day-in-day-out basis. The biggest problem I feel us tech-workers have is that we compare our "bad" with their "good".
On a good day, a construction worker may get there, do their work for the amount of hours stipulated, and leave the work at work. That's our perspective. What we do not often see is the time they spend worrying about the weather conditions (if you're painting outside, can't do it in the rain), or whether this or that material will be on time/to spec, or that you sprained something yesterday and you really need to haul heavy stuff around today, and it cannot be delayed because people are relying on it being done, and this might mean your injury will worsen and you might not be able to work for a while.
We can get bad days. And our bad days can get pretty shitty. I won't begrudge anyone who'd love to leave the tech sector; I've often thought about it myself. But from hearing my friends in other professions talk about their bad days? Mine don't occur so often, and when they do, are often not as bad.
It's very difficult to deny our privilege when we talk to someone who works all day in the searing heat, and our day consisted of turning on our laptop at 11, running some Terraform scripts, making it to our favourite restaurant for sushi, enjoying an extended lunch while monitoring some deployments on our work tablet, and having a meeting while walking on a nearby park to negotiate internal deadlines. I've often been embarrassed to describe my day to some of my friends.
Nearly every bad day at work I had ended with beers + sometimes a huge (and expensive) party. This is lifestyle comparable to high-level directors in other fields. No wonder it's totally unrelatable experience to them - they usually find the boss of their company relatable too.
My father was a corporate finance executive for 25 years. He hated the political drama, attention to detail, mundane routine, long hours and being indoors all day. He quit and started roofing. And loved being outside.
Would you feel the same way about a plumber wishing for the job software developer? Would you call out a plumber for being condescending in wishing for the “easy” job of a software developer?
The more accurate interpretation is that all people have frustration with their job and start to imagine an alternative that would eliminate the frustrations.
I'm very confused by this because I'm arguing the exact opposite: that people in tech romanticize these "simple" trades of the people.
> Would you call out a plumber for being condescending in wishing for the “easy” job of a software developer?
Absolutely. If they treated it like something you can just step down into without putting in the work, which is precisely how it's positioned when devs daydream about it.
I live in a climate where normal (I.e. not extreme) temp fluctuates between -25C and +30C. You can add 5-10C to either end for the above/below average days. There is absolutely nothing romantic or glamorous about working outside in those temps. This “romanticism” you speak of, while very real, often comes from a place of ignorance and inexperience. I’ve done enough physical labour in my time in reasonable weather than I see no reason for me ever want to make a career out of it. Similar goes for interior work, I’ve done the “good” and “mediocre” jobs as DIY enough to know I would not want to do it for a living.
I am pointing this out because by understanding why people actually complain it will deepen empathy for the complaining person and also avoid creating a pseudo classist framing of the situation which is actually not only inaccurate but harmful for understanding the people involved.
You misinterpreted my original point and when I attempted to clarify you're now telling me what I'm "too focused on," as if I don't understand that all people have stress.
So I'm finding this reply a bit ironic. Maybe it's supposed to be and I'm just not picking up on the bit.
You ascribed some malice to my original post that wasn't there and are now doubling down. Why?
In the software world, you don't get the satisfaction of knowing that you have done something well in the same visceral way physical trades provide.
I worked with the county doing road construction and logging for seven years, then was a teacher for a couple years after that. Now I work at a cushy FAANG job.
I still miss both of my previous jobs often. Construction wasn't super meaningful, but there was a focus on making quality artifacts that isn't really the same in software. (Software is too complex, too large, and has too many constraints.) Working with physical implements is nice. I miss knowing the weather more intimately, and being physically exhausted at the end of the day.
Teaching was very meaningful, but emotionally exhausting. If the pay hadn't been terrible and if I had found a supportive administration, I'd probably be happier teaching. I miss working with children, being a part of a community.
Having worked these sort of jobs and having enjoyed them, I don't think it's condescending at all. I think there may be a bit of ignorance there. If you didn't grow up doing physical labor (I grew up on a farm) then you likely will have a hard time adapting to physical exertion/pain. And you have to recognize that you'll likely encounter physical injuries, especially later in your career. (In my shortish stint, I managed to injure my shoulder, and it still affects me). But if SWEs still like the idea, then they should give it a shot for a year. Software will still be there.
Then there's also the problem of not using your body. Up until extremely recently in evolutionary history, we used our bodies and brains together. It turns out office work can be just as bad for your body as swinging a hammer or welding pipes due to inactivity. It's really a dehumanizing way to live. Certainly you can try to balance the scales by hitting the gym after work, but it can be a struggle when you're fried from the day.
The tech meme of dropping out to pick up a trade is pretty funny at times, especially when it's coming from people who couldn't change a doorknob, but I don't think jobs are one-size-fits-all, and I do think some people would be happier with a job that requires doing hard work outside.
The biggest thing that jumps out to me about programming vs my father’s work is the agency. He goes into a home, diagnoses, and fixes an issue. No MBA / PM / Scrum Bags to needlessly insert themselves into a process and cause issues. Contrasted with most jobs where I get delivered a small chunk of an issue (as a Senior / Lead) which robs me of my agency as a professional and often time just leads to more delays and defects driven by a lack of a coherent vision passed down. Rather abstract, but infuriating when I damn well know I could have delivered higher-quality and ahead of schedule. Providing “Commander’s Intent” is a very real necessity.
I don’t know that tangible vs. intangible is a factor, for me at least, making web / mobile oriented systems. Hell, even a really good shell script to codify a workflow for coworkers is insanely satisfying.
Other than that, human interaction. Having a human be genuinely satisfied that you helped them with their issue they couldn’t have solved... that’s rewarding at a level rarely ever get.
The big offer is comfort (both in workplace and in salary) is the primary offer - perhaps to many friction is the spice of life.
The scrum-driven, jira-driven "small chunk" style of development is kinda depressing to me. It wasn't always like this, and there's so many new folks in tech many don't remember it used to be different.
For instance, my entire family works in mining, some riggers, some electricians and others environmental surveying. I am the only one that works in front of a computer all day. When they get home from work, that's it they switch off, no emails, no calls, no reports to write late at night due to a delayed project. Their work shifts to another group of employees to continue or finish. They come home tired and sleep way better than I do.
I think about it all the time and what it would be like to work with my hands in a trade, sure we all work late sometimes and that's not industry specific. But its the feeling of working in a field with your hands as opposed to your words.
It's also easy for tradesman to look at what we do and think its easy too. But at the end of the day there's no perfect job and some appeal better to others.
That's not the issue. The issue is assuming it's something you could "just do" to remove the stress in your life, as though the job is trivial.
Yes, if you were an actual plumber who spent half a day tugging diapers out of a 2 inch pipe, and some dumbass hipster you run into later tells you how glamorous your job is, that might be a bit annoying. But people in all sorts of fields experience that annoyance to some degree.
Anecdotally, I have two friends I went to college with who daydreamed about quitting their desk jobs and working a trade. One of them, I worked with on construction crews during school breaks, and he'd talk about how much he preferred that to college. He ended up in an office job anyway.
The other guy didn't have that trade experience, he just felt he'd like it better. He did some white collar work after graduation, hated it. Later he went on to work in a couple trades until finding one that fit; he went through a very extensive licensing process, and now makes good money and spends very little time behind a desk. And he's very happy with that -- so it does work out for some people.
Frankly, I hold a few roles and have for years. Some of those involve flat out making stuff, wielding tools, taking a shower at the end of the day type stuff. Others are business, development, some engineering electronics, software.
For me, the variety is good, and it reflects how I came up in rural America, where basically you learned how to fix your own car, help on the farm, do what it takes because few had the money to spend to solve problems. And no judgement on those who have that. I have that today. It's just that I didn't then, and the skills came along with the scene.
I'm writing this because there are plenty of times where I look for something I'm not currently doing, or involved with. The reasons vary too:
Less stress
More structure
Right now: less liability / risk though I expect a reward for that happening
More people
Less people
No people.
Any of us, whether we are in construction, software, electronics, plumbing, mechanics, all reach a point where we can nail it. If we are lucky, we are exposed to a few different disciplines and can reach that point a few times in our lives.
If anything, I would call said "pining" boredom, or seeking perspective of some kind, just a change up, if nothing else.
Personally, I feel that is OK, and encourage it in my peers, help them where I can.
Stretch a little. Feels good sometimes. Sometimes it's regrettable too.
You are better for having done it though.
I think your experience of tech workers is not representative of the tech industry in general: for every high-paid IT person, there's 2 or 3 (maybe 50?) who're getting paid peanuts and have very indecent working conditions, and i personally find it somewhat condescending to suggest it's just an isolated incident and it's so easy to just walk down the street to find better work conditions.
In fact, that very sentence was pronounced by our slaver-in-chief Emmanuel Macron and was widely derided as condescending. It's hard for people to find a job, especially if you don't have high connections. It's even harder to find a decent job: to find a quasi-slavery posting you can just walk down to any luxurious restaurant/hotel but to find lawful/respectful working conditions, i still don't know of a magic formula.
A friend of nice from school stopped coding to open a brewery and I'm regularly considering starting a street food thing. Even started to get some of the gears sand the certifications...
And who I think would be unpleasantly surprised to find out certain inconveniences if everyone's available working hours were cut back by 1 day per week.
The argument for the 4 day workweek is that _many_ jobs would be performed just as efficiently as if they were 5 days per week, so they might as well be. If there was a compelling argument that hospital patients required 16 hours of care per day rather than 24, you can bet people would be suggesting dropping doctor and nurse shifts to 4x8 or 5x8 rather than 4x12 or whatever insanity they're doing right now.
In addition to your other good points, I used to work construction, and it was never like this. Requirements were not spelled out, and we constantly had to deal with unexpected issues, or ridiculous homeowners with dumb ideas. Timelines and deadlines were harsh, and you were often blocked by somebody else's work, but were still expected to finish by a given date.
There's no requirement to sit at a desk, you can use a standing desk or in my case I actually use a treadmill at varying heights inclines and speeds while typing in a computer using an economic keyboard.
I did some landscaping work during summers while in university and it can be absolute hell on your joints - now stack that 40 hours a week for years.
Yeah... have fun with that.
Easy, clean, indoor work (generally) that you can get really good and you can pretty much name your price because everybody freaks when they don’t have hot water or it is leaking.
None of them were top-level contractors, those who plan and hand out work to others, instead being people on the ground working on sometimes physically demanding tasks in all conditions and being the public face of the operation so sometimes interacting with difficult members of the public. Maybe if you get one of those management/middle-management jobs in construction the dynamic would be different, but then again you'll have a lot of the same problems that make me avoid management/middle-management jobs in our industry.
[1] and have known others
Most people weren’t made to sit behind a desk all day.
The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.
"This is one-third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.
Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.
One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got "minus pi times r square."
He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"
https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/sm54ri/a...
No job is going to get you away from unreasonable people with unreasonable expectations, and most trades introduce a bunch of other unpleasant things that you'd have to deal with.
It's all tradeoffs. Someone may legitimately prefer the stresses of a trade to the stresses of working in software, and that's great for them. But it's not an objectively easier path: if it were, plumbers would be much less expensive.
Crawling around in my loft sistering joists is satisfying work but also, if it were to become the kind of thing I did over a long period of time, would 100% wreck my knees.
And that's just one downside. There are plenty more: e.g., all the ancillary guff you have to do (same as you have with contracting really), and then dealing with the general public and having people phone you at all hours of the day and night looking for estimates and quotes. No thanks.
I use them all the time. Cable management under desks, tile work, electrical. I wonder how I went so long without them.
I get contractors to my house to help me renovate. It's just standard practice to get multiple tradesmen (>=3) to make a quote for the same job. I do that whenever the job is above $5000. I assume they must have a lot of other clients who do the same for lower thresholds too. I don't know the margins in each trade but I guess at least half of the quote is costs?
For the transport, the time on-site, the time to make a quote (depends a lot on the job).. I believe they each spend at least half a day on this. Then you add various time-consuming items like phone calls, people canceling appointments, people changing their minds about what they want, time to chase unpaid invoices, dealing with other tradesmen on some projects... All of this for a 1/3 chance of getting the job ?
Clearly some tradesmen are doing very well, but let's not pretend it's easy. As a contractor in software, I realized quickly I could and would only bill on a time-based approach. I've gone through the hassle of making a quote for a project with a lot of uncertainties and spanning over multiple months. At the end the client played with my weakness of being still quite young. He was older and much more experienced in legal & contract matters so he kept adding items pretending my contract was not fulfilled otherwise.. I ended up OK but would never go back to that anymore
Now I only have to negotiate once or twice a year (with my latest and ongoing client it's been multiple years so even better) when tradesmen have to do that multiple times a week
Costs are likely more 80-85% in building/construction, margins are thin.
Electricians/plumbers may have something more, but not much.
If I ever get another contract I'll be doing it your way: time-based via a settled hourly rate.
When I got my 2nd home, I hired pros. The pros tell me they want their kids in my job.
- If it was fun they'd charge money at the door.
- If you can't write it down you can't do it.
You can argue about the accuracy of those ideas, but more or less I've found them to be true.
I've told people that at my work and had it said back to me later.
"If it was fun, it wouldn't be work." Also, I leave after 40 hours each week because there will never be a day when the work ends early. If we run out of work, it's because the company is sinking.
I'm not sure if 'fun' is the right descriptor, but certain fields of work with relatively high prestige and supply of applicants but relatively low credential requirements (in comparison to credentialed professions like law or medicine) pay little or almost charge money.
Examples include journalism (very low paying, limited jobs in North America), museum curation (requiring many years of low-paid, unpaid internship; most people can't afford it), and many creative fields (e.g. graphic designers are, in my view, paid very low comparative to the skill and creativity they bring; creative writers often have to pay to submit to a literary journal; and video game developers are notoriously overworked/underpaid, compared to other types of software developers).
Software development followed me home, lived in my brain 24/7. It also caused a good deal of stress I was unaware of at the time.
If you need the job, you start to care. Even with manual labor, there are problems that didn't get solved that need to be worked out before 7 AM tomorrow. I would say it is even harder to leave it at work. If a pipe breaks, and water is pouring out, sleeping on it isnt an option
Good grief what a scheme that entire field is. If I wanted access to residential MLS data I was going to have to be a residential realtor. To be a residential realtor you have to work for a broker who will charge you monthly for the pleasure. You have to put the name of the brokerage on any site that uses the data even if you pay for it yourself. You also have to pay for each MLS you want to access.
If you want to start your own brokerage you have to get a brokerage license. To do that you have to have your real estate license for 3 years and take the brokerage class. There’s nothing you actually have to do during that 3 years other than maintain your license.
Seeing the profession from the inside was eye opening and I’ve been extremely happy getting to enjoy being in an unlicensed profession ever since.
If I really hated it, I could save up for some time and do something else, because again… I’m pulling insane amounts of money for software work.
Trades like plumbing, electrical work etc are -hard- work. I recognize that I have the privilege of not sacrificing my body and health for my income. My biggest concerns are making sure my posture is correct and that I take enough walks. Such a hard life.
I’ve noticed that some programmers tend to romanticize things like farming or plumbing, and generally speaking not understand the hard physical work those people have to go through. It can be quite patronizing.
Edit: sitting a desk is not “sacrificing your body”. Comparing that to the labor that people in trades do is completely detached from reality. Obviously there are things like standing desks and working out. But in life you have to sit or stand regardless.
https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/sitting-time-linked-to-hi...
Oh, sitting in a chair in front a screen for hours on end does wonders for the body. It's still early, you'll appreciate it in ~10 years.
My point was that office-work is far away preferable to daily physical labor. I’ll take sitting over throwing out my back, blowing out my knees and having constant pain. Not to mention the hazards of working with chemicals or industrial equipment or electricity, and so on.
Of course there are options that I use like exercising and standing desks. My point was that this is a significantly better situation health-wise than working in trades. And that I have the privilege of doing that.
It's not. I've never been fitter than when I was doing physical work. The problem was the pay and the powerlessness at the workplace (e.g. awful hours with no notice, management compromises on safety, the expectation that you'll keep silent when management cuts corners or cheats the clients/customers, etc.)
The reason I stopped doing physical work is because physical workers are disrespected by the world, and your bosses would rather shut down and leave the industry than to pay you a dollar more. After I decided I would never work with my hands again, jobs paid a lot more. The less you actually do, the more holy you get. One day I'll just sit in the lotus position, floating two inches above my prayer mat, giving cryptic pronouncements about what other people should be doing. By then, I'll have billions.
You're describing social/interpersonal problems which happen regardless of the type of industry or work. That has nothing to do with the objective fact that working in an office is better than having physical labor take a toll on your body in the long term. I never stated that doing nothing but sitting is healthy.
Sitting for longer periods in any amount is incredibly bad for one's health long term, every study on the subject has confirmed this.
You are sacrificing your health, just in a different way.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/21/health/sitting-study-partner/...
An aside: I also just loathe ergonomic design, I'm never comfortable in anything other than a recliner or laying on a couch or bed. I'm wholly convinced that chairs are the way they are because "they've always been that way" with tables and desks following suit. It's unfortunate that better designs haven't caught on, aren't readily available, and tend to be inordinately expensive. What I'd really like to see is a practical true to form holistic ergonomic design instead of this weird traditionally inspired clusterfuck with its productivity centric model.
Do you have any links to examples of these different designs? After using a bunch of different chairs, I'm seriously considering just repurposing my piano stool, even though I'll lose all the back support.
I just can't find anything sustainably comfortable and supportive.
I sit seiza-style on my chair currently to enforce good posture by tilting the pelvis, but it's taxing after a while, and it took me a long time to adjust to seiza, I use a standing desk in complement.
https://store.flokk.com/us/en-gb/products/hag-capisco?model=...
For example, would you accept a 1.4x (+40%) chance of brain cancer? Vs sedentary peoples who have 2x chance of diabetes and +14% cardiovascular disease? (and sedentary means sitting + not exercising after work!).
I'd argue diabetes is easier to avoid through other life changes. I"m confused about whether "sitting" means "never exercising", and articles that talk about "sedentary" lifestyles are not very helpful.
I also use a standing desk anyways, but I am not sacrificing my health like my grandfather or father did who had/have back/knee and other health issues in their 50s from physical labor.
Being able to earn a nice living while sitting at a desk is an enormous privilege, and I also get money and healthcare to routinely visit doctors anyway.
In the mornings I walk my daughter to school: 25 minutes exercise.
At lunch time I'll take a 30 minute walk.
There's no reason to be unfit as a software developer.
Sometimes when dragging myself and wire though tight rat-shit crawl spaces... I yearn for my nice little home office. But, overall, I enjoy the work. It feels good to do work in the physical world.
A lot of electricians are nearing retirement. Meanwhile, electrification is picking up steam. The National Electrical Code 2020 is letting distributed / behind-the-meter software do a lot more heavy lifting (e.g. its letting software manage loads so that (expensive, delaying, and grid-taxing) utility service upgrades can be avoided)[1]. There's already big demand for electricians, let alone when EVs (and level-2 EV chargers), solar + batteries, and other flexible loads become mainstream.
My aspiration is to spend one week a month in the field, leading an electrical project (and taking all or most of the profit). With a low-cost lifestyle, I think I'll be able to spend the other three weeks improving processes / tooling around that electrical work. And working on related FOSS and education resources.
1. https://www.dropbox.com/s/klt1zzc7zxqwrfe/IAEI_Bill-Brooks_2...
I'd like to become a licensed electrician. After completing a few successful projects around the house, and studying the 2020 NEC inside out, I looked into becoming licensed. The required 4 year apprenticeship, before I'm able to take the exam, turned me off. How would I ever be able to satisfy that requirement while keeping my day job. It's like a forced pay cut to become licensed.
What's your arrangement look like?
Yeah, people learn / master at different rates so it's too bad they require so many hours to qualify for a license. Once you're a journeyperson and have your chops, you could arrange a profit share (or something) under a licensed electrician. ...Where you're pretty much "owning" the project, but they're available to answer questions and review you work. And take liability.
I sensed you could make good money in the Bay Area in any contractor-type field: electrician, plumber, etc. When we needed an electrician it was often hard to find one (and that didn't, for example, only do commercial electrical work).
* rewire 1920's three story house with romex instead of knob & tube
* install 6.6kW ground mount PV arrays and connect to grid
* replumb two kitchens and three bathrooms
* install water softener (all copper, dozens of required brazed joints)
To be fair this same logic likely is the source of stress for a lot of software engineers. Loving to program and programming for other people for a living initially seems like a brilliant way to make a living. For plenty of people it is, but for some what programming for money looks like and programming for passion look like can be so different as to be depressing.
The hardest part of software engineers in this situation is the money is really good and, all things considers, the job is quite cushy. However having your passion drained by your profession still can be an awful feeling, and that can be magnified by the fact that there's no easy solution.
For me personally I resolved this by realizing and fully embracing that the programming projects I like to do need to be in a completely separate part of my mind that the ones I'm paid to do.
By day I sling mediocre code on arguably useless things because I need to pay the bills, by night I work on a separate set of interesting problems that are related to the day time ones only insofar as they technically involve writing code. If I get a cool insight at work, great, but I've learned to leave my passion at home when I check into work.
I think in general "doing this for a hobby and fun" and "doing this for a living" are two entirely different things. Many people love to cook as a hobby, but being a chef in a restaurant is a completely different thing. Years ago I had a friend who loved to drive trucks as a hobby; I never understood the appeal myself, but he just loved the feeling of driving a truck. He left his teaching career to become a truck driver and in a matter of months ended up hating it (and he ended up going back to being a teacher).
A few years rolled by and I found myself doing construction stuff for friends. "See you in the morning" I would say as I left, and then find myself returning a week later. There's even a situation now where I've left an absurdly simple final task helping one of my neighbors with some minor repairs ... I think I told her 3-4 months ago that I'd be back in 2 days.
I don't really understand why this happens, but it did give me some insight into a whole extra layer that is required from you when doing work for other people: you have to go back, tomorrow, even, over and over until it is done.
Now this certainly applies to any regular (well, contract?) employment too, but there is something different about construction that I think requires a different kind of personal character to enable you to fulfill the implicit obligations.
This is pretty much how I feel about IT work nowadays. I've done it in the past, nowadays I repair rental houses.
The "grass is always greener" is probably the most repeated aphorism for a reason.
I’ve worked in biotech/healthcare and have never had anything close to a FAANG salary even in a HCOL area. I burned out and am just now taking a month off to just exist. I have had the same thoughts about going blue-collar as the OP, but taking a month to figure out if it’s just general burn out or if I need a career change.
I’ve been working since I was very young and have had all sorts of jobs: door-to-door sales, lifeguard, retail, waiting tables, property maintenance, cleaning homes from flood/fire damage, and on and on. I loved a lot of those jobs, though I didn’t do any for more than 2.5 years (or even just a summer).
I don’t know if it was the pandemic or what, but never been so miserable at a job in my life and can’t imagine staring at a computer 40+ hours/week right now. I was literally staring into the Taco Bell drive-through window 6 weeks ago thinking I’d rather be working there and learn how to make a quesadilla in 1min than sit at a desk, which was the last straw for me.
Plus with software it’s all about the skills. So if I drop out for awhile and decide to get back in a few years later, I should be fine after a couple months of self-study.
This is a really naive statement. Software development is so easy and fun compared to most of the shit work out there. Everytime I see someone whining about burnout, I think about all the busboys and dishwashers I used to work with who probably also get burned out working long hard physical shifts for abusive bosses, in order to make in a week what many devs do in a couple of days.
I'm counting the days until CoPilot suddenly turns a bunch of John Galts into Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, but an additional effect is that a lot of people are going to notice that most programmers are at exactly the same professional level as other tradespeople, the difference is that since we're riding a wave of financial scams and deregulation that require the internet and cellphone apps as part of the grift, we're showered with cash. There will be a oversupply of programmers that plumbers will be laughing at.
Invariably, the conclusion is that low-wage or part-time jobs almost always come with enough baggage to outweigh any perceived benefits as a semi-retirement gig. A job is a job -- anything that produces a consistent income is going to involve dealing with unreasonable people or expectations or situations. [0] The most efficient path is to get into the most lucrative role possible early on and simply do that until you don't need to work at all anymore.
If you like carpentry or machining or driving around or landscaping or gardening, you're going to enjoy these activities a LOT more if you're doing them on your own terms in proper retirement for your own satisfaction. As soon as someone else is paying you to deliver these types of services for their benefit and not yours, you're in the same situation you're in as a software engineer, just with far less income and thus less potential to ever truly retire.
[0] I'm sure some "unicorn" jobs do exist. So I'm speaking in generalities here. There probably do exist some gigs out there that are genuinely great for semi-retirement; they're just going to be surprisingly difficult to find, they may not be stable over a long period of time (decades), and it may not be possible to find one for yourself.
Realistically though, I think my secondary post-retirement career will end up being a teacher of some sort (high school or community college -- I'm mainly interested in teaching, not research, so university is largely out of the question).
I have an EE degree but find there is little overlap between that knowledge and electrical work.
It's pretty easy to forget how low the median income really is when one's social group is exclusively tech or other professional occupations (lawyers, doctors, etc). Meeting somebody who's doing physical labour 40-60 hours a week only to make 25k USD or whatever puts things into perspective really quick.
Thats not really true outside US
But we are not, in UK developers are slightly above average office workers, they have no advantage on lawyers, bankers, doctors, etc.
Is there some logical reason I'm missing why it should be any different than it is?
Climbing in a ceiling at 30 years old I asked my self what the hell am I doing? I have a hard upper bound in salary. I’m sore, I had stitches on several occasions, I’m a bit battered from physical labor. The after work drinking was a short term analgesic but a long term killer.
I realized a life time of labor is back breaking and will leave me a broken old man long before I should be.
I decided at that moment to move on to engineering.
My days of labor provided me with a great foundation for problem solving and understanding how projects are executed in the field. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, it was incredibly rewarding.
My office life has been equally rewarding. I worked as hard wearing a dumb tie everyday as I did wearing Carhartt.
The balance I struck was earning in the white collar world while keeping busy at home on blue collar pursuits. For example I took my contractor special condo from plain to fully executed trim. All of the doors and windows are cased, there is crown and picture rail. Some areas have wainscoting, the knock down wall finish is now level 5. There is 4 color paint.
I have since begun maintaining an old sports car.
For me it would have been hard to start on an office and then transition to a shop. The reverse worked best for me.
In general I agree with the sentiment: high salary is the only nice thing about working in IT. It's simply too much pressure. Best you can do is to make your fortune quickly (joining FAANG helps, becoming a freelancer is a reasonable alternative in Europe), build a house, set up a college fund for kids, and then retire, or find yourself a job as a carpenter, of scubadiving instructor, or whatever you like, as long as it has nothing to do with computers.
What grates with CS I feel the combination of never being challenged and not doing anything that furthers humanity. If I fix toilets then at least I'd be squandering my resources on something meaningful.
What frustrates me is I know I could do so much more, I could do good things. In the same time period of roughly a year it's taken a team of like 8 people at work (myself included) to develop a prototype for a stupid crud-application that exists entirely because Conway's law doesn't permit team B from talking to team C without going through my team, that has basic MVP-functionality of being able to process some simple requests and change a few fields in a database; in the same number of days I've developed a fully function search engine the scale of late 1990s google in my spare hours.
I just had an old 2 inch steel drain pipe descaled ($600) because it was causing the washing machine to backup and overflow. I had had it power cleaned/jetted before (several times) but that did not work. The rust corrosion had constricted the pipe to about 1.25 inches. Descaling seems to have really opened it up.
I used to hate drywall. It would get wet and need replacing after plumbing problems, but I recently came to realize that as messy and time consuming as drywall is to replace, it's a good thing because it allows you to spot water leaks early and absorbs a lot of water. A more water resistant surface would hide the problem and only allow it to grow much bigger before someone noticed it. If you have enough space, drop ceilings are the best thing since sliced bread.
Also, when you are not using your washing machine, turn the water off at the wall. That will prevent a washer water line bursting (while everyone is at work) and ruining an entire room/floor of the house. And when you buy replacement water hoses for your sinks and washing machine, buy the best you can afford and replace them every 3 to 5 years. You'll save yourself a lot of money and trouble by doing this.
If you ever own a house, you'll learn to fear and respect water (and chipmunks) more than anything else.
None of what we're doing here matters at all in the grand scheme of things. At least the vast majority. We're not contributing to anything useful only a broken economic system, we're not making the world a better, more sustainable, more peaceful place. It's the opposite, the people that contribute more division, get paid the most it seems. Once I realized that I was able to steer my attention to opportunities that at least contain a sliver of something positive, be it supporting movements, clean energy, something that on your death bed you could argue didn't make the world a worse place. Personally, that's all I think I can do because at this point in my life I'm not in a position to make any larger positive change by myself on a societal level.
I'm sorry if this is too ranty, I'm just in a very negative headspace these days with everything that's going on.
Now I find myself needing to jump back into programming, and my strongly preferred language is Pascal. It's going to be an interesting ride.
If you do this yourself, make sure you have planned for contingencies like long term disability, should you be injured on the job, or get sick. Having a large nest egg of tech worker pay is a very good idea to secure before making the leap.
I used Pascal in 1992 programming in high school on a Mac LCiii, and never really thought about it again. Do modern compilers even exist for this language?
What genuinely curious what you could possibly want you to program in Pascal let alone prefer using it for anything meaningful?
Although I personally don't know anyone that uses this and there probably isn't many jobs for this.
It's not pascal that I was talking about into, it was the job market. I haven't been a full time programmer in decades. I've written quite a few things since then, but not full time.
As for Pascal, I learned it back around 1985, when Turbo Pascal first came out. I followed through version 7, then into Delphi for Windows. It was at Delphi 5 that I took a non-programming job.
I also tried out Borland's C++, but all the non-editable boilerplate, case sensitivity, and non-counted strings really seemed like antipatterns to productivity.
A few years ago, I had used python for some small projects, and so I figured I'd try it out for a GUI project that came up. I figured in the 2 decades since I had used Delphi, things had surely gotten way better.
What a disappointment. There were no open source 2-way GUI builders that offered IDE support for python. I wasted a year trying to support the project building a shim between wxBuilder and python 2.x. It worked, but was so brittle that I ultimately gave up on it.
I was able to rewrite it all in Lazarus in less that two weeks of part time effort.
I still think it's one of the best programming languages available, despite its failure to overtake C/C#/C++ in the market, which I blame mostly on Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero management.
I'm positioning myself to be able to take a 3 month vacation once every 2 years or so. Since I really want to travel outside the US working remote outright is a bit harder, but I could live in the US Virgin islands, or Hawaii right now while keeping my amazing job.
Not having to move, even after getting a major pay bump last year was a giant perk. I also make enough so I can just not work , i'd move into a cheaper place but I don't need to work for a good while.
Compared to real America, where working class people skip medicine. I can explain it this way, I have a very treatable illness. For a very nominal amount of money, less than I spend on a night out, I'm able to stay healthy. If I was poor I wouldn't be able to afford my meds. Even with Medicare, how do I get to the doctor ? That means taking time off work, that means spending 100$ on an Uber round trip.
Software Development is VERY VERY easy.
In the US they aren't actually paid that well, particularly compared to software engineering (in the US).
But go to Australia and you'll get a vastly different experience. For one, just being a plumber is strictly government controlled. You need a license that requires a four year apprenticeship. There are pros and cons to this system but you will generally find that the base level of skill and competence of any Australian tradesmen will be far higher than that of many other countries.
I had a Australian friend who was a plumber in the UK where you can be a plumber by just calling yourself a plumber. The stories of incompetence he'd tell were shocking.
Trades in Australia earn more than software engineers do and will generally have a much better standard of living, straight up. It's one reason why I, as a software engineer, moved from Australia to the US. If you want to be a plumber, you may want to go the other way, assuming you're willing and able to get certified.
There is no getting away from updating your skills, or sometimes doing work outside of the 9-5 if you want to stay competitive in ANY profession. Especially if you want the 200k+ comp so easy to get in software.
Personally as a data scientist I might as well be described as a digital plumber.
I wouldn't mind a real dirty job, but physical dexterity isn't my strong suit.
But, I have been blessed/lucky to be a one man show for many years and I had to stick with one tech stack and my learning only added not shifted out from under me. So when I made massive changes it was on my own terms.
The cost is mentally going against the trends/grain in the industry. My LAMP stack is now back in style, and I am grateful I never dumped it for something trendy.
Results are what mattered and I think we've seen massive shifts in perspective in our industry over the past 20 years. Changing everything from code versioning systems, databases, back and front end languages, all the mix of build systems. There was a lot to avoid changing to for the sake of change.
And sometimes you wonder if you are missing something because you can't see the value in changing. (ie, GIT was obvious from SVN, PHP to Node not so obvious...)
1. The desire to create tangible, physical products and improvements rather than abstract ones- some of which never see the light of day outside of the sprint.
2. The desire to expend physical labor and use one’s body rather than only one’s mind.
I think the trades would fulfill that but maybe more software engineers who experience this anxiety would be happier if they pursued some sort of skilled craftsman hobby, or even career. Being a construction carpenter is one thing, becoming an artisan who makes bespoke wooden products is probably closer to the lifestyle (and compensation) that’s being idealized here.
* I now work more hours than I did as a programmer
* I have to deal with a lot more bullshit, politics and doing annoying tasks
* In total I lost about 5 years of career, due to education and starting at a lower level in a different field (in North America this may not be so bad, in Europe they have difficulty counting years of experience in other fields)
* I lost 2 years of pay (education), then started work at half what my cs peers make. Since programming pay increased a lot, but mine didn't, I'm now at a third.
* Instead of a (internally) well respected expert feeling near the top of my particular field, I am sort of on the path of getting there
I did it because I didn't want to code for work anymore and actually shape the real world, but it's not exactly been an easy path. It should be considered well before doing it. Ymmv.
So, yeah. This resonates.
But recently I watched a video where a guy had to do his ten millionth ceiling fan install and he had some particular trouble getting to where he needed to be in the customer's attic and he was filthy and hot and probably bored by this stupid task he'd done a million times and in that moment I realized I was idealizing and over-extrapolating from the excitement of learning a new skill.
Learning to wire my own house was fun and interesting. I don't want to do it every day for strangers.
It's satisfying to start with a blank screen or perhaps a times new roman mess, and leave it as something that looks great and works well.
Backend development can sometimes be a tedious death march where all you get at the end of the day/week/sprint is not-an-error or perhaps just wiring up RPCs, or maybe if you are very lucky upgrading to a new point-release of a library with no other visible changes. Don't get me wrong, refactoring and fixing backend bugs can be satisfying, but I often find it is not as genuinely enjoyable as being able to actually see the results of your work.
Sometimes you can't appreciate the good aspects until you're missing them.
Forest fire water bomber pilot?
On a side note, I always thought it would be a very cool thing if there were some kind of exchange program for people with good skills wanting to try them out in another field, kind of as a rotation. (I originally thought this for academia -- researchers who would love to see another field getting to visit for maybe 3 months or similar) But I guess, what company would be willing to participate in such a thing and let their people do it, having to pay for the cost...
Now tell me how your wrists and hands are feeling. How about your knees? Imagine that everyday, plus an array of powertools such as impact drivers + drills, rotary hammers, sawzalls, band saws, and crimping tools that can weigh 20+ lbs.
That mouse & keyboard will start to look very, very comfortable.
It’s true that white and blue collar work have ergonomic and health hazard mitigations. I saw from another comment of yours that you mostly had to work on unsafe and inconsiderate commercial crews with no decision-making ability, which understandably colors your view of physical labor. You’re also right to point out a novice would likely fare similarly, especially if approaching a career change romantically.
Those sort of trades do present problems like coding does - your brain is still engaged (a bit). However, I think you are also adding/improving people's lives.
Fix someone's dirty toilet? That is clearly a good thing. I can't think of one thing in my computing career that has been as positive..
As someone who spent a couple years doing commercial plumbing:
1) You are lifting very heavy 10-20ft long sticks of cast iron pipe, often 10+ ft in the air. There is technology to aid with this (scissor lifts) but it is brutal work.
2) You spend a lot of time in the air - on ladders or lifts - often overhanging the edges. You are constantly drilling hangers in the ceiling, breathing in dust that will ruin your lungs permanently. And again, you are also fitting cast iron pipes in this environment. You will feel the sway and it's pretty easy to hurt yourself. OSHA is a joke. I've been caught in the middle of a huge storm, since the foreman didn't want to let us off early, and we had to run down 8 stories of scaffolding while heavy material is being thrown around like ragdolls.
3) People on job sites generally don't give a @$%^. Toxic fumes? Check. Concrete/cement dust? Check. Crazy welders that don't care that they can potentially ruin your eyesight? Check.
4) Your company will track you with apps, often not pay you until you arrive on the jobsite, but you still need to be at the shop @ 6AM to help load materials. Unpaid.
5) Depending on where you live, you can expect to listen to nothing but conservative talk radio on that morning ride. I've worked with people from all paths, so this didn't really bother me, but something to consider if you have spent most of your life doing white-collar work. You can expect to be around some hateful ignorance.
6) If you're not doing new construction, you can expect to be in the ceiling, crawling among ducts, trying not to fall through. This is generally with copper pipes, which is another ball game as far as cutting, soldering/brazing, or crimping. Otherwise, you are often trying to do this standing on a 12ft ladder.
Commercial plumbing pays better than residential (fixing a dirty toilet) and is often in more demand. It is also a pretty good way to wreck your body. Most of the older/senior plumbers that I worked with spent their time trying to do as little work as possible, and were drunk after lunch. Addictions are very common.
IME, people who often are shouting "get in the trades!" are the exact people who have never once worked in one (or they own a business in it). It ain't all that.
Managers/foremen etc are asses the world over. I was really addressing the work. And I thought I picked a pretty unpleasant example in dirty toilets!
I contrast the work you do with work I have done. I was making a moral point.
I have worked in financial and other institutions. I really see no value in what I have contributed. If I achieved something, its that the shareholders of those institutions were happier in being able to squeeze a bit more life-force for themselves from others. I helped the fat cats get a little fatter.
BTW - I think you wreck your body sitting in front of a machine all day. I accept that coding is not as overtly dangerous though!
I think that is just the way of the world, especially in America. Even though I have worked in fields that produce a more "tangible" product, I can't say that I have contributed or helped much of anything. And now I'm in my 30s without an education and I only have experience doing things that I never want to do again.
Bosses are always terrible, but it's a little different when your life is literally at stake. I've had "old school" foremen who want to sit and call you a pu$$y because you don't want to stand (without a harness) on a flimsy piece of wood over a six story shaft, cutting and then brazing 8" copper pipe. It's also harder when you don't have dedicated recruiting networks and the ability to WFH like many do in tech/SWE.
(Just my perspective! I appreciate the discussion.)
Personally, I believe that knowing how to navigate this (increasingly) digital world is an essential skill. I'm enjoying trying to build foundational knowledge about computing & networking for these reasons - and I also just feel like there is _so much_ to learn, and that is both exciting and overwhelming at times. I have some negative views towards the way technology has trended in the last decade or two (bordering on tin-foil hat territory :P) but I think that is all the more reason to understand it.
I don't have any interest in pursuing SWE, esp. for financial reasons. But I am enjoying learning about programming. I'd be happy if I could hack on things at home & contribute to some OSS projects. I'm hoping to land a junior position at a NOC in a year or so, but who knows? I've given up on the idea of any career giving my life meaning or purpose, so I'd be happy with an education + skillset that makes me employable, especially with remote opportunities. Not having to destroy my body is a bonus!
Still involves a surprising amount of carpentry. And finding where the hell the wires were run in other people's "wtf were these fools thinking?" grade framing. and other fun stuff.
I suppose telco might be most reasonable. Or if pay isn't important electronics. And even there is problems.
On the other hand: about once every 3 years, I shut my computer down and get the dust out. I even hate that. The only nasty wet messes I don't mind dealing with come from my child or the refrigerator. All else, I'm happy to pay somebody else.
The carpentry was easily the best part, and the part that I really enjoyed. The concreting and steel roofing/cladding parts were pretty brutal though. Admittedly a pro could justify spending on better tools than I had but still it has taken a toll on my aging body.
But even the carpentry would be hell trying to do that work under commercial pressure on other peoples projects - never mind that carpenters are generally worse paid than most other trades despite usually taking on the bulk of the project responsibilities.
As sick as I am of tech, I would rather stick to carpentry as a 'hobby'.
They could definitely use skilled people and while there can be the same crazy expectations and conflicting missions, you can say no a lot more easily.
None of those. But I would like to be carpenter or machinist.
I do often dream of moving back to Romania, to a hamlet in the mountains and building a wooden house like Mr. Chickadee ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TcARfChhbE ).
But I'd never do it because I'm greedy and don't take risks.
Reminds me of how Stardew Valley starts off with that premise and within 2 days you are mining for crystals in a dungeon.
1. $#!7 flows downhill.
2. Don't bite your fingernails.
Bad back and shaky hands from years of hard labour? Sure.
How about years of stress and gaslighting? Is chronic depression and learned helplessness any less bad?
“Don’t worry buddy, you’re getting paid enough to hate yourself and not see the point in living anymore. Just keep at the grind and enjoy your comfy chair and latte.”
If you’re starting to feel that way I would look into starting therapy first before making big life decisions like that. You might find the root cause of your discomfort and treat the cause rather than run away from it. And if it is the right move for you you will go in with eyes wide open.
Nah, I'm good.
One of my former co-workers left to become a lumberjack. I don’t blame them, I spend a day or two cutting trees on my property and it’s enjoyable. That said, you won’t make six figures doing that.
Without fail, the people I see making complaints (1) lack a family with kids and / or (2) don’t own a home / property.
We’re very much predisposed to having a family and having something to build (physically). If people feel this way, try a decent sized garden (150+ square feet). Or build some furniture. It’ll be fulfilling and you’ll learn to love your job lol
I made just enough for rent, food, and fun. The job was easy to be good at, but rewarding because I was helping actual people. Most of the time it was slow so you got to joke around with the other employees.
But sometimes you'd get slammed and have to organize your crew to work efficiently for a few hours, which was stressful, but very fun to figure out and do well at.
I think about that a lot when my current software job becomes really boring or difficult.
EDIT: Oh, and I was certainly less sedentary being on my feet all day. I slept really really well after a long shift.
Part time at a pizza shop in your teens/20s? Time of your life! Doing that exact same work in your 30s when you're trying provide for a partner and potentially kids? When you have bills stacking up, rent is shooting through the roof, and your hopes of one day owning a home are slowly circling the drain?
What do you do now, when that is your sole skillset to fall back on? Being on your feet doesn't feel nearly as nice as it did when you were in your early 20s. Those slow times become stressful because you know it means you could be out of a job like that. Sure, people might always want to eat pizza ("there's always work") but that doesn't mean your quality of life is going to increase _at all_ because of that. Your only hope out - opening your own pizza shop - is an incredibly fragile & stressful undertaking. You're much more likely to lose all the money you borrow/invest into it than ending up with a successful restaurant that provides for you financially.
But I have to admit that as a mechanical engineer now working in software I really miss touching the result of my work. Nothing better than designing something, building it and then being able to touch and see it.
They put up with the same, as well as job-specific BS, just like we do.
It’s a pipe dream to think it’s some career utopia. Unless you want a change of flavor in the BS you put up with, for a while.
Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.
In terms of "constantly staying up to date", that's a large reason I moved to a tech stack with less moving parts and slower-moving major change. It helps a little.
Could you please share what tech stack is this? Frankly speaking, I also consider finding something more stable and slow-paced as a continuation of my software career at this point.
Fortunately, I have a part time director level job as a soldier for my backup plan.
But I think I'm too tainted by software to really be any good at any of that.
The fact I told HR (and coworkers) that this was my vacation really helped keep some silly inspiration going, especially as I could keep up with them with everything I needed to do. (I'd also snap to attention, military style, for the HR lead, the only non-military person in management .... got a lot of laughs that way) No I never served, wasn't permitted. I did go through years of cadet training though...
Anyway, went back later to say thank you and complain that my vacation was over. It was a cheerful hello.
The work itself was back-breaking hard but ... it felt good. The only regret about the job itself is I should have done work like that a lot earlier in life (instead of 30s).
The problem is that the trades are hard as hell to learn and get into unless you're connected. It's easier to become a programmer than a plumber/carpenter/electrician.
The work is hard, dirty, and you need to go through a half-decade apprenticeship program before you can even start making the big bucks (which are still nowhere near what a programmer makes.)
And good luck finding someone to take you on as an apprentice.
I remember one of my buddies desperately pounding the pavement to get an on-the-job apprenticeship as either a plumber or electrician. It took him a couple years to find one. 20 years later and he's a successful industrial plumber, but that first decade was a lot of hard work - even before he got his first job.
Also, just about everyone I know who does even a skilled trade for a living has a body full of aches and pains and injuries. That's why the smart guys become foremen or start their own business - but they've all got at least a ten year head start on anyone reading this.
Just keep sitting in your home office cashing giant checks for screwing around on the computer.
I'm in industrie automation and everything with software gets worse really update by update
If it's a case of "oh, in fact most of my career was (re)building things that weren't really required in order to consolidate power and to reduce the strength of democratic society and institutions", that could be a bad time.
If it's more along the lines of "I genuinely helped to improve the lives of a large number of people by assisting them in doing what they want to do day-to-day, extending opportunity, access and freedom" that could be better.
Plumbing, baking, carpentry, etc seem to be more likely to unambiguously fall into the latter, happy category -- although I think software can, too.
Regardless, for many of us, a way to opt out of the moral quandary is simply to say "oh, well it pays the bills well and is not physically demanding".
At the time my parents were worried that I was getting paid enough doing that kind of work that I might consider not going to college. If anything it solidified my view that college was my only option.
I do occasionally miss working with my hands but I’m thankful for what I have now as a software engineer. I’ve never seen anyone get sprayed in the face with hot coolant or hurt their back sitting at a desk programming. I don’t have to worry about punishing my body for 30 years.
White collar work can be exhausting, unfulfilling and stressful but it has to be put into perspective.
It is all shit and it is not fun any more.
Having spent several summers working manual labour and others spent working as a school janitor I certainly don't long for those jobs. I will probably spend my time on personal health and volunteering including tutoring. I will presumably continue to write software for my own enjoyment but I am indifferent about even participating in open source as it has become, too often, a cudgel used by one company or faction against another rather than a societal good.
“The grass is greener…” fallacy seems to be prevalent in most people. It becomes most intense when encountering obstacles, frustrations, boredom, and stress in the current situation, which makes sense I suppose. And it’s so easy to gloss over all the privileges that come with the current situation. When I was broke and busting my ass in university, I couldn’t wait to start my coop jobs. Then half way through coop, I couldn’t wait to get back to class. Now I have the luxury of living a comfortable life and there are no abrupt changes unless I decide to implement them. Yet the dissatisfaction creeps in…
I, on the other hand, have thought about buying quite a bit of carpentry equipment when I am done with IT. These new CNC machines are amazingly programmable and just the thought of actually building custom furniture excites me.
I did grow up in an era and place where I learned electrical and carpentry ("ok students, in order to have the photography class we need to build a dark room"). So, I do know a bit about basic techniques, but would probably take some classes to refresh my knowledge and learn the "right way".
From what I understand, the placements are almost random, and pretty much tend to all be something pretty tedious. E.g. a postman, working in a bakery, some random office admin/assistant crap, a cinema usher, collecting trolleys/carts at supermarket/grocery stores etc.
I think those were pretty educational in terms of what shit jobs are like.
I am not sure if they are deliberately shit jobs to try and get you to concentrate on studies etc. But they do at least give you a baseline for how depressing and brain-dead many jobs can be
> Maybe I’m misguided but in other fields one becomes a master of their craft over time. In CS/data science, I feel like you are forever a junior because your experience decays over time.
I get where this person is coming from, but:
- Improving at the things in the first list is part of mastery, unfortunately.
- A lot of old experience is still valuable. But one needs to be able to transfer/translate the important lessons to new contexts as tools, frameworks and languages change.
Instead of telling me that it will be better, he says that sometimes he contemplates buying a bar and just serving people and listening to their stories.
On that day I realized that not tech, but the idiotic company processes and the people I had to put up with were what got me into that state. I was hired as a Python backend developer, but I was also working as a Postgis expert (and I was no expert, I had no idea what I was doing), Go+gRPC integrator, Kube and Docker Swarm ops guy, frontend debugging person and I was in charge of the dev experience internal tools. It was simply too much to keep up with.
That same month I resigned and started working on selling my own product. 3 long months later, I launched the paid version of Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) and I again discovered why I like being in tech.
There’s a kind of freedom that you can rarely find in other domains. You can be creative, start ideas on a whim, go into rabbit holes of satisfying curiosity, learn to use languages and tools that allow you to do in 3 lines of code what you needed 300 lines for yesterday. It feels like earning super powers sometimes.
And after all that, you can also make enough money to live comfortably in a nice apartment, small house, or just sleep in the woods if that’s your thing.
Since that day, I never considered being an employee, and just continued on doing my thing and creating stuff. This lead to the creation of https://lowtechguys.com/ and writing about my tech journeys on https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/
I’m still contemplating about building a house in the forest and start making Kaval flutes some day, but I think my tech skills will be a helpful aid for that goal, not something I want to leave by behind.
Unfortunately it is a hobby that requires lots of space to keep the machines and tools.
i started out trying to build a little mini-shop. that turned out poorly. working with the small tools seems to require alot more expertise and patience than working with the normal-sized toolroom machines.
space aside its pretty much free. old machine tools are great learners and can be had for not much more than scrap price. steel is dirt cheap.
To those looking to increase your ability to express yourself - this is a very satisfying interest. Making besutiful & helpful stuff for the people in your life is quite interesting ... People tell you their life dreams - when you work on those projects, there is a lot of learning & fun.
And for anyone who's interested in this stuff, a question- what is considered the "GitHub" of makerspace projects, plans, 3d models, stock designs etc? I'm looking for that open-source feel good sharing vibe... "Is there an HN for that"?
He loved it - no more being in the shop at 4am getting the day's bread ready and still being there at 8pm doing admin. He'd kept some of his gear, though, and was the go-to man for wedding cakes and fancy patisserie for the company.
I combined the two and I am making a 3D CAD of the family house. I'm learning a lot about foundations, sill plates, rim boards, insulation, sheathing, plumbing. electrical etc.
FYI Matt Risinger has a great channel on YouTube for general home building science. And I watch fellow Canadian Got2Learn on YouTube for plumbing.
Although I think that for a lot of people who feel this impulse, the problem might not be the type of work — it might be that the software you’re working on doesn’t do any real good for the world, or have any impact that you can see.
You can change that without having to switch fields — just don’t go to work in ad tech.
Chat with the plumbers (and other tradespeople). Nothing deep or profound. Don't even bring up these work topics unless they do. The weather, the Super Bowl, your dog, what they're doing right now...
I could enumerate the benefits, but let's leave it as "you'll feel better, and so will they." And you'll get a gut feeling about them as people.
There are plenty of crappy boring jobs though (I never want to do typical web dev), so try to find something better if you're stuck there.
Constantly acting under time-constraints removes the creativity from building. And, focusing on short-term productive gains comes at the expense of long-term fundamental progress.
Then there are people purely fantasizing about professions like plumbing because of that 20% of their job they're unhappy with. They probably would do more for their mental health by donating 50% of their 5x plumber's salary to a non-profit of their choice.
I have a lot of urges but becoming a plumber is not one of them.
But then I'm reminded of how prviliged I am and how much better the working conditions are as a work from home developer is compared to a teacher... And the feeling goes away.
Maybe the best is if I could FIRE and then just hold evening classes for those who are interested, but I'm not there yet.
More realistic: I often look at “IT guy” wanted job postings, or “programmer wanted” from companies that shouldn’t need a programmer. One I regret not applying for was a programmer for an auto-parts company.
I watch machining videos on YouTube for fun knowing that I’ll never make the jump.
I occasionally build physical things just so I can have some variety in frustrations that help me put my day job frustrations into perspective.
Of course you can attain mastery over certain sections of computer science/engineering.
> He charged a cool $350 to simply replace the tap
No, he charged you $350 for his knowledge that replacing the tap was the right solution in this case. If all you had to do was replace the tap, you could have done that yourself and saved a bunch of money. But you didn't know that was all that needed to be done; he did. You paid for his knowledge, not simply the act of replacing the tap.
I chose to be a SE because I knew I'd have fun doing so, and I advise the younger generations to have a similar approach.
Sometimes, I even tire of writing the code once I know how to solve the problem. But you sort of have to do that to get the next problem.
It’s effectively similar to plumbing or anything else — a trade off to a different scale of problems and pressures.
Take a break, get a little more balance in your life, and perhaps the desire to program will come back. Maybe it won't.
Would never go back.
Being outside, dirt in your hands, physical exercise, and the satisfaction of seeing large changes and accomplishments relatively quickly compared to many trades.
For the first time in my life I feel like I have a sustainable lifestyle that isn't hell to live
Laying sewage pipes - fixing sewage blockages - replacing hot water cylinder in the roof in the heat of summer (our homes don't have basements).
Dealing with staff issues - people not paying their accounts.
However, that's also way harder to do, but probably more satisfying when it works if other people's experiences are to be believed.
Tldr, trades can be fun, but are also physically demanding, get boring, don't pay as well as it might appear, and have a pretty low ceiling on growth unless you want to manage a fleet of tradesmen or something.
Sometimes I do still wish I was a carpenter. But realistically, software has so many of the same aspects as trades, but is changing so quickly there is always something to learn, it pays better, and doesn't depend on having peak physical health.
The biggest difference in terms of satisfaction I think might be that plumbers et al are more likely to be entrepreneurs, while well paid software engineers mostly work in big companies. Consider entrepreneurship within software before bailing to a completely different trade
I respect trade work, but I also don't idealize it.
It sucks in a lot of ways that are very similar to how software engineering sucks.
As a SWE I get respect from my peers and family for having a "smart job", make 4x what most plumbers make, work from my home office, and do not have a boss breathing down my neck. I do not destroy my body by constantly kneeling over and getting into awkward positions.
A PhD in Philosophy I know was a lifelong carpenter.
Loving my current position(s) way too much.
But also, if I did leave the field with some cash, I’d probably go be a backwoods flight instructor.
Marx touches on this concept of alienation of labor [0]. Not pushing Marxism at all here, just using one of his lesser known theories to tease out this topic.
I know several.
That shit ain’t worth it.
Go be an electrician instead.
"Biden really ruined the yachting industry."
OK. What does that person do? Does he work in IT? No. Does he work in production? No.
He collects seven figures a year for presenting a particular persona for a successful company.
Think on that before you start comparing middle/lower class occupations. I'm not saying its wrong, I'm just trying to provide another magnitude of contrast to the issue.
For example, plastering, when having to plaster a ceiling, the effort would be good for boxing, ie arms above the head dragging the board and plaster over for a whole day does wonders for the shoulders & arms! Walls & surrounds are easier, but you have the usual dust and mixing mess which if an indoor job means some tidying up to do, obviously men dont always like cleaning up and their Henry vacuum cleaners are not a Dyson. Some also do ornamental styles of plastering, but I think this was more popular 100+yrs ago as there were less different jobs around unlike today where new sectors exist like this one. Building regs dictate what you can and cant do as well.
General building, like new houses or extensions, lots more mess indoors and out, more planning involved. Bricklaying, cant be below 3DegC because the mortar wont set, and you can only lay so many rows of bricks in a day otherwise the mortar gets squashed out. Building regs dictate what you can and cant do as well, but many home owners and trades people dont know the regs!
Plumbing, fiddly job, you could be digging up gardens, drives, ripping up floorboards working in tight spaces. Biggest risk is plumbing and central heating leaks damaging carpets, plasterwork, blowing electrics. Building regs & plumbing certification dictate what you can and cant do as well.
Electrical, again a fiddly job like plumbing, most of the products that can be fitted in a house setting already have the regulations built into the product, so its a bit of a no brainer, biggest mistakes come from choosing wrong product like dimming lightswitch which doesnt work with dimmable LED lights, or choose the wrong cable for laying underground. Building regs and electrical certification dictate what you can and cant do as well.
In terms of mental thought processes, local and national govt regulations control what you can and cant do. For example here in the UK, there are next to no regulations for laying driveways and patios so that those not academically qualified, ie cant read/write but maths never seems to be a problem, can still work, even for themselves.
General building, the building regs can be a pain, I ended up spending a week going through the UK combustion appliance regs, spoke to some of the authors and found, to use a software term a number of "unhandled errors" which had to be referred back to the planning authorities for clarification but they wouldnt commit, so I ended up making my own decisions!
Generally the more lethal something becomes the more rules and regulations. Gas & electricity seem to be the most heavily regulated, then plumbing then building. These are in a non commercial setting.
Commercial jobs, like infrastructure, much much more regulations & qualifications required but these are bigger projects like building schools & hospitals, roads, etc etc, and there is a hell of a lot more planning & paperwork with multiple external entities.
Work ethics varies, I've seen some turn up early, like 7am and do 7 hours, others will do dawn till dusk weather permitting.
Quite a variability in price quotes for a job, it can be hard to get stuff written down with trades, dont forget many cant read and write well, but the ideas to do a job can vary from just using expanding foam, to taking a few bricks out and filling holes in walls with bricks & mortar properly, even using the write matching colour mortar.
The quality of workmanship is all over the place even when they may be part of a govt recognised trade body, but I think this is also a way trades get at people to eek out the job or just mess someone over. Its very clique.
Dont get me wrong they can have a strong work ethic just not know how to do something properly and vice versa and somewhere in between.
Fall out with them and they can mess up stuff which you wont know about for years, like leaving flux on copper pipes which slowly develops a pinhole where water drips out and then slowly ruins studwork and plaster work.
Where jobs interfere with other domains like plumbing interfering with electrical jobs, generally they will take a flyer and do the other domain job even when not qualified. Property owners will be put on the spot in these situations and if the owners doesnt know the regs, they can end up with expensive problems if things are not done properly which is madness considering the price of property in the UK and wider world today.
Overall if you want a job where you can do it with out much thought, do a trade job, if you want something more mentally challenging stick in IT, with coding being the most challenging.
Edit.There is also alot more superstition and stereo typing in the lower skilled trades, but this isnt unlike what you see with nurses and doctors.
This might be unpalatable for some, but I think anyone who does want to go into a trade could wipe with floor just by providing detailed written quotes, because that bit of paper is worth much to many people, although some insist on only word of mouth trades people. Like I said its very clique.