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Comment by sobkas | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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

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.

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