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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

It might be a bad area. There aren't better employers in the area. He knows he is being abused. He used to live and work as an electrician in another country where he was treated considerably better. He spends his days wiring new homes that sell for 1.5M+ and gets treated like crap. Moving is unfortunately not an option because my sister's career is very location-dependent.

"Well if you aren't in one of the good areas you'll get fucked" doesn't tend to make it into articles like the linked above and I think it is worth knowing.

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New home/residential wiring jobs are basically the entry point for electricians. It's about as mindless and simple as it gets. I'm not sure what the licensing requirements are but those are the sorts of jobs that an electrical contractor puts their new/junior people on.

I know nothing about the industry, but out of curiosity... what are considered the more interesting jobs?

I only know a bit more than nothing, but I'd wager anything industrial is considered more interesting. Single-family residential wiring, especially for new construction where there's nothing in the way, is so simple that even I, using just what I've learned being a homeowner, could meet code with it.

Industrial.

Yeah, industrial/institutional, high voltage, multi-phase, transformers, utility-level stuff e.g. generation and transmission, etc.

Industrial automation as well.

24V / 4-20mA isn't really the same job though.

Talk to contractors in any city with a hardware startup scene and they absolutely are making a killing. Lots of 220V, 480V, miles of 120V. Transformers, machine hookups. You name it.

220, 221, 222… whatever it takes!

208 and 277 as well!

Higher voltage = Higher wages

And a perk, in casse of on-the job death, free cremation service included!

commercial sites are supposed to be good; I know a commercial electrician and he'd talk about the many tech company headquarters and new buildings he and his team would wire up and do all the equipment for. This includes outlets, infrastructure like AC and any special equipment like fire alarms smoke detectors, any everything in between. He'd say working for government jobs were too slow, they took forever to complete, it was always more lucrative to go for private industry large construction sites like new malls, big buildings with large square feet footprints. Basically commercial real estate stuff.

Commercial....wayyyyy different. Need to know a lot more. Employment sucks. I knew HVAC people and flooring people who had it made but they worked for themselves.

Industry and commercial construction got mentioned. But also, the film industry can be an interesting one. Really crazy voltages over there too.

Lineman, controls, fire alarm, even commercial is probably better then stapling romex and ruining joists.

A guy I went to high school with was dangled from a crane to do stuff with a new turbine in a power plant. Sounded pretty crazy.

That's where all the jobs have been in the last five years in his area. His teams are also doing commercial wiring as well, but new builds dominate the work. And they are supposed to complete jobs fast - even if the work is simple doing it fast is not easy.

And so what? "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles" is a very different narrative than what is usually presented.

CS obviously makes way more but I hear tons of stories of people working overtime or having shitty bosses in developer jobs too, and yet the narrative I hear a lot is get a FAANG job, make 400k then retire by 30

There isn’t any automatic get rich easy scheme. To some extent you have to keep your wits about and make sure you are getting your worth

> "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles"

Everyone I know in the trades "put in their dues" with at least 10 years of working for someone else, doing the shit jobs, working outside in the rain, in the mud, in the heat, in crawlspaces, in attics, etc.

The smart, driven ones learn all they can, advance, build relationships and reputation, and start their own businesses. The lazy or dumb ones continue to do the crap jobs for their entire career.

Basically, you described that it is pretty bad job. And the only way out is to stop doing that job and start being manager who pressures others to be faster at the bad job. Also, work is pyramid. You have one manager/business owner for many ordinary team members no matter how "smart" all of them are.

And even that, management and business skills are not the same thing as being good tradesman. Just like with programming, you can be smart and driven and not be management material.

The question was whether trades arw good occupation. Not whether you can be better off by stopping being tradesman and going into management.

OK. So what you are saying here is that the trades are a bad job. You spend ten years getting treated like crap and then only succeed if you become a small business owner.

Imagine this for software engineers. "Yeah, SWEs get paid shit and have a bad working environment but some of you will become managers and get paid bank." That wouldn't exactly be a "wow software is an incredible field to be in" situation.

If people want to say "we need more tradespeople - going into the trades will be good for your career" then it better be the case that the actual laborers are getting decent pay.

He should start buying some cheap tools of his own (to start with) and do weekend/night jobs for himself. If he's working on 1.5m homes I guarantee you there are a ton of homeowners who need electrical jobs done. Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.

There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.

Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.

If there's one thing that I've learned hanging out on /r/freelance, it's that most people are not cut out to be business owners.

Seems like a startup niche - a more idealized Uber for electricians - abstract the worst parts, help tradespeople keep more of the money their work produces.

That is basically franchising, you exchange some cash upfront and ongoing royalties for a brand name and some level of support with training/business planning/marketing/leadgen/software etc. There’s a franchise for just about anything you can think of, and a surprising number local businesses in the US these days are actually franchises, not just fast food restaurants. Some are excellent and some are scams!

Can you elaborate why?

The self-employed plumber has to accept phone calls when they're in the middle of a job, has to do a whole day's work then spend their evenings lining up future work, has to manage their schedule a long way in advance, has to keep commitments even in the face of illness and family emergencies, has to go around giving quotes to people many of whom are just comparing prices, has to manage cashflow and deliveries, has to make nice even with homeowners who are a pain in the ass, has to be able to sell potential customers on the quality of work they haven't yet done, has to deal with complaints, has to chase payment and deal with nonpaying customers, has to keep accounts and business records properly, and so on.

A jobbing plumber just needs to text his buddies asking if they've got any work for him this week, do the job and leave with cash in hand the same day.

If you're good at plumbing but disorganised or don't have great self-discipline, the latter is a much simpler way of working.

Very well said!

A very significant number of freelancers think of themselves as employees. They struggle with "asking for raises," instead of telling their clients "this is my new rate." They are extremely depressed when a contract isn't renewed, or is terminated early "they fired me. Why?" They are dependent on a single client, let themselves form close relationships with that client's employees, have their working hours set for them, etc.

Going into freelancing, the first thing you should be thinking is "I am a business that employs one person: me."

> He should start buying some cheap tools of his own (to start with) and do weekend/night jobs for himself. If he's working on 1.5m homes I guarantee you there are a ton of homeowners who need electrical jobs done. Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.

> There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.

> Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.

Did you think about possibility that his current employer will crush him like an egg for competing with him on weekends?

How would they even know? Assuming they keep quiet about it

Yeah, once the employer finds out, they've got enough business to quit.

Licensing is different for trade employers vs trade people.

it depends....

sometimes licenses are different between working for yourself vs someone else. Other times your employer can't take on jobs without you and your license present.

Then there's insurance differences between self-employed and employed ______ tradesperson.

Depending on the size of the town / city, it could be trivial. There's ~6 companies doing electrical work in my town. Not only are they commented on / recommended on local social media, they see each other's quotes all the time when people compare prices. If someone started a new business, I suspect they'd all know within days/weeks.

From other specialist non-trade business I'm familiar with, people are normally aware of new employees coming to town before they even start working. People talk to each other.

This part:

> Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.

You can’t do a good business without leaving visible traces - permits, customers, suppliers, etc. all provide ways for information to leak. If his employer is exploitative, he has above average odds of correctly fearing retribution and depending on the area that could mean unemployment. It’s not exactly uncommon for companies to discretely agree not to hire certain people.

> depending on the area that could mean unemployment

This is the key reason why for most jobs, small town America is flyover country, an economically inefficient, exploitative, broken system. Without a large labor & employment market within easy commuting distance, your skills aren't portable if you get fired, and your boss can't readily find a replacement, so most employment relationships end up in a reluctant, often abusive state from one or the other.

Contracting electrical requires different licensing than most trades people have to do their job.

Employment works very differently in trades than e.g. software. The main thing is that customers don't care about the company they're using, but about the guy that comes out to help them. So picking up a clientele is extremely easy if you do a good job. And word of mouth multiplies that clientele pretty quickly. And the thing about the trades is that they always need to be done, endlessly. Paint starts to chip, electricity eventually breaks, plumbers go without saying, ...

This is why the normal trajectory, for a skilled tradesman, is apprenticeship -> experience -> accumulate clients -> go independent.

If you want to go independent in something like software you need, among other things, a good idea. If you want to go independent in the trades, all you need is a good reputation and enough people with your card. You don't even need to try either really. Do a good job and people themselves will proactively ask for your contact information. Finding a good and reliable tradesman is not easy.

If he's union he can't do side jobs

Unions pay living wages and provide insane health care and retirement packages. So I supposed when people say side jobs, they imply those working non union jobs.

I’m skeptical of the narrative that trades is some great career choice, but "Well if you aren't in one of the good areas you'll get fucked" applies to pretty much every career choice.

For example being a software engineer outside the US, working for a local business, selling to local customers. In Latin America, programmers can make about 10 or 20 times less than in the US.

Why does this happen?

Most software ultimately automates menial labor. If the menial labor that's being automated is highly paid, the software engineer is highly paid. If the menial labor is lower paid, the software engineer is lower paid. Adjusting also for the amount of menial labor which is automated.

In a poorer society equivalent menial labor is more poorly paid than in a richer society. Edit to add: And in a poorer society some of the highly paid menial labor that exists in richer societies may just not exist, or at least not in the same amount.

Wages are generally controlled almost entirely by supply/demand. In an area where there are more people interested in doing a job than there is in demand for that job, wages for that occupation will trend towards the lowest possible value. In an area where there is more demand for a certain skillset than exists, wages will trend to the maximum affordable cost for anybody with that skill.

All the other stuff like expertise and value is, counterintuitively, near irrelevant. For instance postdocs are some of the most highly educated and ostensibly highly skilled individuals - and many have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get to where they are, yet they earn about as much as a plumber does, because there's far more supply of postdocs than there are jobs/positions for them.

So putting all the theory into practice. There are usually three possible reasons. Supply is too high = excessively high rates of software training/education. Demand is too low = not many roles for software developers. Or the companies that are hiring aren't making much themselves so the "maximum affordable cost" is relatively low.

The distribution matters. How common are the bad/good/mediocre scenarios? Some just might be mostly bad, with rare exceptions. While other jobs might be mostly good, with rare bad cases, so you might risk this outcome.

The distribution isn’t random though. At some point people need to be honest with themselves about where they’re likely to wind up.

>At some point people need to be honest with themselves about where they’re likely to wind up.

Ah, the social mobility of the american dream.

Do you own a house? Have something go wrong and get a few quotes from corporate institutions. You'll be seeing insane prices. Some smart tradesmen will look at their call volume and charge more accordingly since more calls means people are settling and paying corporate rates.

What this says to me is that the society/country in which he's living -- yes, I can guess which one it is -- is pretty broken.

$1.5M+ homes is not a bad area

It can easily be a bad area for freelancing: imagine if it’s an area where you have big developments and maybe some large commercial or agricultural sites but not a ton of smaller places. The bigger contracts tend to go to the big companies who can handle a ton of work so there might not be that many people looking for small jobs - someone who just bought a new $1.5M home probably isn’t going to be doing much electrical work for years.

> someone who just bought a new $1.5M home probably isn’t going to be doing much electrical work for years

unless its UK, then the house with that pricetag was last fixed in the 60's, needs total rewiring, and has energy efficiency of a damp tent.

Often these houses will have immediate renovations to suit the new owners aesthetic --- oftentimes major. Lots of trades needed for such things.

Fair point about scale of jobs however. Things need done and eventually a real world timeframe.

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