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Comment by rybosworld | Hacker News Reader

"Youtube university" has most definitely had an effect. Particularly in regards to the lack of pay increase in the trades.

My toilet is leaking? 10 years ago I'd call a plumber. Now I diagnose the problem and determine if it's within my skill level to learn the repair (it usually is). For me, this wouldn't be feasible without online how-to videos.

A plumber/carpenter/electrician will charge me $50-$100/hr for work that I can do myself for just the cost of parts. The cost savings really adds up over the years. Not to mention, I'm getting increasingly self-sufficient as time goes on and I become more confident doing larger repairs and projects.

Most of my friends and acquaintances have fallen into the same path.

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I work at a union plumbing company in a major metro area and union plumbers make very good money here (100k+).

We aren’t losing any business to YouTube. We only do service for commercial businesses, and the house engineer isn’t going out of the way to do any more work than what is absolutely necessary.

You will still need a plumber if you do a large remodel or new construction. Good on you for learning how to do more yourself, but this trend has negligible impact on the industry at large.

Couldn't agree more.

> and the house engineer isn’t going out of the way to do any more work than what is absolutely necessary

Most contractors: Doing the absolute minimum necessary and cutting corners

If you changed the incentive structure and allocation of risk you might get different results.

As somebody that has done both contracting and worked in tech, I hope this comment makes sense.

Most homeowners (product managers) want the cheapest (fastest) thing that fixes (delivers) a working home (feature) to them. When given the options those are generally what people choose.

Sure some contractors (software engineers) always cut corners, but I believe many take pride in their work and given the option would prefer a solution they take pride in.

I really hate this mentality. I don't understand how people do shoddy work on peoples homes. For example, I drilled through my joist and put in these plastic rings to prevent rattling. 100% any other plumber would have just cut holes and left it at that. I originally planned on getting 1 per hole, but thought, it fits two, why not spend another $30 on material so both sides are covered? It turned out that it more than double the pipes rigidness while surely making the pipes silent for life. With one, I could see them eventually moving/popping off or having slight rattling. With both, you could hang off them and they wouldn't budge.

I ended up paying "professionals" to install some vinyl flooring in my house. They were making like 5 of the top 10 mistakes from the YouTube video I had watched the night before. I had to correct them, which was awkward since they had been installing floors for 15 years, supposedly...

YouTube changes things for sure, although I am unsure if that's the cause of fewer folks going into the trades. Demand over all seems higher than ever in my area. Very hard to get good trades people, or even bad ones a year ago!

How can you be sure that the YouTube is right and real life professionals are not? Making money on YouTube ad revenue share is quite popular thing today, and no one verifies what is uploaded there, unless it is a copyrighted material.

It obviously depends on the field. But if the YouTube video explains clearly why X technique is sub par, and demonstrates the failure mode I'd believe it over a tradesperson. Say you see your mechanic tighten the nuts on your wheel hub in a circular pattern instead of a star pattern. Would you point this out?

I'm not sure about your particular example but it seems to me like this argument could be made for something like software engineering too, ie someone watches YouTube on the top web frameworks or SWE best practices and asks you why you're not doing it the way they saw. Sure, the video might show failure modes too, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's always the right way to do it, there are tradeoffs everywhere.

The difference is that the SWE probably has to maintain the software.

The contractor just needs their work to fail not-before the warranty period expires.

Think of them more like foreign software contractors being paid per JIRA ticket, rather than in-house long-career developers.

I know nothing about nuts tighten patterns. I always tighten four bolts system diagonally because I saw how things could deform otherwise. But I took it from my own experience, not from some guy with the camera and strong wish to earn money from ads on cloud video platform. Also I am 100% sure that if I first pre-tighten bolts in a circular manner, and then make a second circle of full tightening - it will be okay, just longer.

A good YouTube tutorial would tighten bolts circularly and how the resulting deformation. This is my point: if the failure mode is illustrated in a way understandable by a layperson, it seems totally reasonable to trust the youtube tutorial over a contractor. After all, the contractor is looking to make money, just like the YouTuber.

> the contractor is looking to make money, just like the YouTuber

That's a very valid point. The question is who has more skin in the game. Contractors have more of a positive feedback: if I am satisfied, I will recommend them to my friends and relatives. YouTubers may have more of negative feedback (not that much since dislike button is gone), but it takes someone to call their bullshit and write a refuting comment. I don't think lots of core YouTube userbase is inclined to do so, the default behavior there is to make a "pffff" and swipe away.

A bit off topic, but I’d love to see something like Wikipedia references added to YouTube in some way. Being able to cite something at a point of video would be awsome. Sounds like it might be sorta impossible tho

No please no. Me like read. Video no good.

I believe it. For floors, especially, the barrier to entry to the field is very low. Most of the important techniques you can pick up on the job during your first install.

> For floors, especially, the barrier to entry to the field is very low.

If that was an unintended pun, I LOLed really hard xD

(Sorry in advance for the low quality comment)

Youtube basically helps me do jobs I could already do, to a higher level of quality. Like painting a room, I now know the mistakes to avoid. But when it came to major drywall repair/replacement it was no help, there is must too much individual variation that experience trumps information.

This is spot on. We're at a point where the basics of virtually any field can be learned quickly online, but I think becoming an actual expert takes just as long as it always has.

Only on HN would this be so highly upvoted. Most electricians and plumbers are doing commercial work or residential construction. The plumbers and electricians doing house calls are a tiny portion of their business. And before YouTube university people were just as handy and could figure it out by going down to the local hardware store and talking to someone rather than ordering it on Amazon and watching a YouTube video.

People used to have parents that taught them things abs how to deal with home maintenance.

Absolutely this, I learned a lot from doing maintenance with my dad to our house, cars, etc. The first thing I bought when I moved out was a tool box.

Lol, I never saw my father with a wrench in his hand, except maybe when he took of my training wheels.

But event if you would want to hire someone, good luck finding somebody to show up for a small job!

Why would I need someone for a small job if I’ve spent years tackling small jobs? It’s the big jobs the OC specifically mentioned maybe needing help with.

It’s like insurance at this point. I can probably cover 90% of the small stuff. But when the big stuff hits, I call someone.

Had a small job recently - install vent from bathroom fan to go outside. Required getting to attic, cut a hole in the wall/roof and install vent. It was too small for most companies i called. Took me 3 month to find someone and it costed 1k cad.

One thing I've found is that you have to call the right people. As tempting as it is to get a professional in the right field, you do find pretty quickly that they don't want small jobs. For that you will be much more successful if you talk to a handyman.

And being aware of how state and local laws could affect the market. Depending on municipality, only licensed tradespeople can touch electrical and plumbing, except for the homeowner, so handymen can't help with certain things.

As an example, I wanted to have a new water heater installed and replace the improper vent. When I asked plumbers for a full quote, replacing the vent added thousands of extra dollars because I would have been paying plumber rates for it. But I was able to pull a permit and replace the water heater myself, and then hire someone much less expensive than a plumber to replace the vent.

Your mileage may vary, but there could be a few steps in a multi-step process that are significantly raising the costs because the only people you can hire by law are expensive, but are also simple and legal to do yourself.

True, electrical and plumbing can be exceptions to the rule. They're also the two areas I've never had any trouble getting help with small jobs, so maybe that's why. But most any construction-related work, I've had to learn to be comfortable with a handyman for all such jobs.

Yeah same here. My dryer stopped working. Had someone come out and tell me the heating element and thermostat needed replacing. $275 for the part, $250 for the labor. That’s a $525 for a $650 dryer. Not worth it. I bought a complete heating element and thermostat kit on Amazon for $29. After a few YouTube videos and about an hour and a half, I had it fixed.

Did they charge to diagnose the issue?

Diagnosing a busted heating element and/or thermostat and/or fuse requires the answer to like two questions. Does it produce heat while it's running? Is it a Samsung? Okay maybe just one question. The $29 heating element comes with a new thermostat and fuse so you just replace them all regardless.

Exactly. Yep, Samsung. Only a 4 year old dryer too, with good upkeep.

They did not. All they did was turn the dryer on to see if any heat was produced. The dryer spun and seemed like it was working, but no heat. So they said heating element and or thermostat. They replace both as a precaution.

Why anecdotes are not data: I have the exact opposite experience. In my opinion time is money, and $50-$100 is money I can earn a lot faster at my contracting rates than I can fixing my toilet.

In any case, the fact that skilled trade work is still extremely expensive where I live and has not gone down post-pandemic points to the fact that these tradespeople are having no trouble finding jobs.

> In my opinion time is money, and $50-$100 is money I can earn a lot faster at my contracting rates than I can fixing my toilet.

I'm sure you realize that most people make quite a bit less than this, though.

Hence:

> Why anecdotes are not data: I have the exact opposite experience.

> In my opinion

> $50-$100 is money I can earn a lot faster at my contracting rates than I can fixing my toilet.

This only applies if you had to use your normal contracting time to fix the toilet. If you're doing it on personal time the value isn't as obvious.

For $50 I'd gladly call someone to fix my toilet. When the minimum rate is $250 it now makes a lot more sense for me to spend an hour doing it myself.

You used to get this stuff off of PBS.

Hey hinkley, how come you know how to fix these things? PBS. And living in a fixer-upper as a child. But mostly PBS.

There's an interesting other factor that I don't think you're considering here. If you had surplus cash I'd be willing to bet you'd be more willing to pay someone to do this rather than do it yourself. Most people aren't going to YouTube University for the pleasure of learning new things, but rather because they need to learn something new and need to save some cash.

I don't know about you, but my repair self-sufficiency came out of being poor and having to do things myself because I had an excess of time but not an excess of cash. This seems to be a rather common divide I see in people. Though I'll be honest, I don't think most people even want to learn these things, even if they are strapped for cash.

So the interesting factor I see here is really about a wealth distribution. A fundamental aspect of capitalism is that money needs to constantly be changing hands. There are many factors in an economy that can slow down the exchange of capital and this seems to be one of them.

perfectly stated. If I am not getting raises, I won't be able to afford to pay more for skilled labor needs. Therefore I'll spend time on YT University. Therefore I'll reduce the amount of flow to skilled labor, therefore they get desperate and exit, and the cycle continues.

It's kinda an interesting thing with a fairly straight forward causal path. I honestly believe that most things in society have similar levels of complexity but we are only looking at single causal factors instead of these higher order terms. Maybe they contribute less, but they need to be accounted for.

I don't know. I was under the impression that a lot of those sort of things are skills you use to learn from your parents, and being able to do maintenance of the things you owned was more common in the past not less.

This era is surprisingly troubled. With the advance of tech, the change in workload (more bs jobs), the distribution of knowledge, the potential coming of robots .. it will alter society's tissue.

That may only work in countries with lax regulations. Some countries, you're barely allowed to touch anything yourself as far as electrical and plumbing goes.

Or, of course, you could do it yourself - but there's no way you'll ever get your house insured unless certified professionals sign off on inspection.

And that is for a good reason - shoddy electrical work can burn down the house, while shoddy plumbing can cause extensive damage.

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