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> the highly skilled tradesmen I've met in the last 5 years make at least what I do, often more, and have the benefit of actually owning their own businesses or real, meaningful slices of other ones.

_This_. A lot of software developers think they are the only high earners out there. Skilled tradesmen are making a killing in europe as well. And unlike software engineers, the path to starting an actual business is much shorter and the growth potential much higher.

Guy down the street has a (house) painting business. I am sure he started out as a painter before deciding to own his own company.

He heads out to the sites/jobs he has that day to see that the teams know what to do, then heads to the golf course.

Sometime in the late afternoon he makes the rounds again to see how the jobs have progressed that day. Does some book-keeping in the evening.

I envy him. I would be surprised if he completed college (although I know his kids all have now).

Construction is very cyclical. My wife's family owns a construction business and they knew a lot of guys like this, and then 2008 happened. Most of them lost everything. Wife's family almost did the same. Had to go bankrupt, but managed to dig back out.

I married into a family that owns a construction business, and I don't think the impressions of how much the trades make or how easy it is to start a trade business I see around here are in any way grounded in reality. It's a very tough way to make a decent middle income living for the vast vast majority, and almost all of them end up bankrupt or close to it during at least one economic downturn.

Starting a software business as a SWE requires almost no investment

Any competent tradesman is making a living wage on basically day 1 with his business. A software business (not writing software for someone else, selling your own software) is much more difficult.

Why compare a tradesman to a software entrepreneur? The tradesman sells his skill and labor in exchange for money. A more direct comparison would be a SWE selling his skill and labor in exchange for money. Or, a manufacturing entrepreneur creating a product and selling it. In both apples-to-apples cases they either make money on day one, or it takes a long time to make money.

I do agree with you, it's just the wording in the parent made it seem like a different scenario. When a software friend of mine says "I'm starting a business", I get a very different picture than a software friend of mine saying "I'm starting consulting". If a tradesman says "I'm starting a business" I envision him still doing similar work, but also finding clients, figuring out contract details etc.

The apples to apples comparison that pops to mind is a tech consultant. Where you own a client funnel and have some potential to scale and delegate. How hard is it to create this client funnel in IT vs manufacturing?

Yes exactly. Doing SWE as a 'contractor' type as a tradesman, very difficult because you have to find customers, and most customers have software teams and aren't just calling up SWE to work a few days. Trades have easier time being expert at X, and people can call them up and get them immediately to do X.

Perhaps, but scaling one requires extreme investment. Recent startups are raising close to a billion to take on competitive markets.

Sure, but I doubt your average tradesman starting a business is targeting billion dollar markets.

Scaling software to the same level of revenue as a trade business is as easy if not easier. For one you don’t need that many employees

Scaling software to the same level of revenue as a trade business is a sure way to get run over by the VC backed competition.

I get that when you live in a forest all you see are trees, but 99% of software companies are not in rather VC markets, nor have VC competitors.

There are massive problems that come with "scale" - problems most people don't want. The VC model is all about the exit, whereas, again, 90-something-% of businesses, trades included, are focused on long-term sustainability, not on the "exit".

Sure, the VC space us very visible, very "loud", gets a lot of press, and so on. And of course 100% of non-vc owners don't get to be billionaires, but to VC world is a tiny sliver of the software world.

My experience is that you are either in/will be in the vc space - or you are in a specialized/regulated industry (finance/health) or you are a consulting firm.

Even living outside of SV I don’t see a lot of in between firms.

I guess that's a limit of your experience :)

I'm in a space that doesn't remotely interest VCs, it's not a regulated industry, and we're not a consulting company. Actually we're in 3 such spaces.

I also teach other (working) developers and while some are in health care the vast majority are unregulated.

But to be fair, you've likely never heard of us, or our ilk. We do the boring office software that underpins every boring industry. We're not self-driving cars or exoskeletons, we're data in, data processing, data out.

Our market isn't sexy enough, or wide enough for VCs, we don't need millions of $ anyway, so we've never bothered to ask for it. We do boring things like make a profit, and fund growth out of cash-flow. We hire slowly, and we don't do layoffs.

We have lots of competitors just like us.

A good test for me of whether you are a consulting firm is “how many customers do you have?”, “How many of them provide significant revenue?”, “how much work serves only one customer?”

There are many boutique SaaS firms - but if you only have a few customers, the business looks more like an outsourced internal team then an independent concern.

happy to be proven wrong on this point, would give me some ideas for my career :)

skilled tradesmen are on skid row here in California.. no building, race to the bottom hiring practices when building happens. Unions filled with red-tape rules and "hurry up and wait" situations. really distressing and sad to hear unrealistic enthusiasm from people in completely different cost of living and hiring environments.

I really envy anyone working in Industrial Robotics. It's such a fascinating field. Automating physical things is so much more rewarding than automating digital things.

My dad ran a robotics engineering company after being vp of engineering for a company Siemens bought that did factory automation (conveyors first, then of course robots). Playing doom in his office while he overworked into the night is when I learned about computer networking mostly...I follow in his footsteps in the overwork)

Anyway, in automotive manufacturing right now frequently the industrial automation firm is told they will be paid net 240. This is insanity. It leads to unnecessarily long projects as the firms have to figure out how to cash flow enormous expenses.

In the meantime, inexperienced competitors regularly fixed bid quote something that cannot be safely and timely built for the quoted budget, ignoring profit. They win the project and they're worn down to a nub and either go under or deliver to avoid being sued into oblivion, so it's a horrific race to the bottom.

The latter behaviour I witness regularly in the software consultancy industry and it's a bothersome thing.

Maybe not surprisingly, the real money in this field is in maintenance and ensuring uptime. The robots are cool to develop too but its really hard to get a job doing that directly unless you're a startup with funding from a VC or have an incredibly good resume, but there is a cottage industry of people (businesses or business units usually) that make lots of money maintaining deployed fleets and developing patches / augmentations for existing robotics.

I think its hard to break into in some respects, compared to other fields (you need some certifications iirc in addition to a degree) but my limited, anecdotal exposure suggests its quite interesting and lucrative.

That said, my sample size is small, and on the other end of the spectrum, I know a few folks who maintain complex CNC equipment and develop software for it (using a language I don't recongize, I think its proprietary) and while they make good money, its not better than you can make as a senior engineer at a reputable place as a web developer, for example.

Maybe it's different where you live, but here in California you don't need a degree to do industrial robotics. It certainly doesn't hurt, but unless you're in controls people aren't too picky.

You would make more in webdev or ML though.

Not all of industrial robotics, but what they do, which is maintain and develop software for robotics in critical settings and oversee maintenance related to, I believe did, or at the very least, they are highly incentivized to get them after getting hired.

The one outlier example I gave is specifically tailored for medical equipment.

Industrial controls engineering was a ton of fun, and indeed more rewarding.

But the pay was nowhere near that of a software dev job in SV.

It’s fun when you’re working for the robot manufacturers but traditional software engineering is a lot funner to me. Robots are either programmed with a proprietary language that abstracts anything interesting away or with a joystick. PLC programming is funner but the tooling is still garbage and most of the fun things are also abstracted away unless you are doing servo motion. Things like ROS are typically used in industry. Worked in factory automation for a few years until I realized that software paid better and had better tools.

Meh Pay is better in programming. Fun fields part peanuts

You can get into the field! It's growing fast. There is a ton of pure SW involved.

>have the benefit of actually owning their own businesses

This sounds like a business is just something that happens to fall on your lap while you're fixing a pipe rather than something that you build with your blood sweat and tears. Most tradespeople make nowhere close to 300k. Their success is credited to their hard work, not their happening to choose the trades.

I should have addressed this more sufficiently, but there are a couple different things I'm saying here so let me clarify:

One is being the trades is rewarding, yes not all bring in 300K+, but I don't know a single trades person, many often my junior, who don't bring in a good income pretty comparable to software engineers at non FAANG companies make (typically 150K+) and I don't think any of them are carrying high debt student loans (many states even pay for trade education outright) and their benefits can't be beat, esp. if they're union.

The second is that there are trade businesses that do earn, esp. right now in the industrial sector, but they all have a singular thing in common: Travel Travel Travel. thats the name of the game. They're gone alot. For instance, my cousin is an industrial electrician, and works on windmills. He travels all over the midwest and Texas to do the work, is rewarded quite handsomely for the privilege, but is gone over half the year. Has no wife or kids currently, so there is that, but its taxing. Other trades folks I know have businesses and do pull in alot, but the "grind" can be very real at times, but I've been told that its rewarding, because its yours at the end of the day

Third is in a specialized sliver of robotics / industrial systems, you can make a fortune, but its not so outsized across the board. Medical systems are a big one, robotics are being really big in surgeries, and there's alot of money to be made there

When you say trades are you just talking about industrial robotics and the like? My family owns a construction business and the only tradespeople making anywhere close to $150k own their own business, and even then it's pretty rare to clear that kind of money. In my experience a tradesperson in the top 5-10% of the distribution might make around what a software engineer in the bottom 25% makes, and it's a pretty long hard road to get there.

I dont know what trades you have in mind, other than that you mentioned industrial robotics, but most trades people without college are not making anywhere close to 150k. The really successful ones do though, and maybe thats who you are talking to.

WRT travel: I think if you are willing to travel, you can make a lot in any industry (except maybe being a truck driver).

FWIW, re: comparing to "elite SV company" compensation, it doesn't really make sense to discount stock, since stock at the "elite" SV companies is effectively cash, because they're public. Unless you mean that your friend is also making a significant amount of stock, but since you can't value it (e.g. the company is private), it's harder to compare to the "elite" SV companies.

I know Google was handing out $385k total compensation offers ($200k salary, $150k stock, $35k annual bonus) in 2020 to senior software engineers, and Google's 401k matching is 50%.

Two things I want to point out:

First is Google is an outlier, even among Silicon Valley. So is Meta. They both are well known for very high total compensation. I also specifically didn't say FAANG for this reason. There's other high compensation places that I would bucket in as top 5% that aren't in the acronym (Microsoft comes to mind) which very good TC packages.

Second is I removed stock because stock is hugely outsized in value for tech companies, and most of these jobs aren't going to have RSUs. If you compare salary to salary however, its a better metric. I know an industrial HVAC specialist that pulls in north of 300K in just salary, and has great retirement benefits. In fact, better than you might see even at say, Apple on both fronts, for most people, and importantly, they're young (7 years my junior).

One thing alot of the highest paying trade jobs have in common though, is travel travel travel. The folks who work only local jobs do well enough, but not near the gangbuster rates the travel folks are pulling in.

Source: I have friends and extended family who are all trades people. Plumbers, carpenters, masons etc. as well as a few who work in other engineering disciplines (like industrial engineering & robotics). Blessed with a large enough extended family that I think I get a decent idea of whats out there

I don't know anyone in the trades who is going to pull north of 200k unless they own the business. In which case my Ex's father comes to mind; he owned a plumbing business and had 4-5 vans out servicing clients.

He made 300+, and busted his ass to get it. Most of his guys were in the 60-85k range.

HVAC at 300k is an absolute outlier, and there are going to be some serious tradeoffs in terms of how brutal that's going to be on your body. Gonna be some long, hot days.

Yeah, my in-laws own one of the biggest construction businesses in our area and they don't pull nearly $300k out of the business a year. For most trades it's an extremely tough way to make $70k a year.

> Second is I removed stock because stock is hugely outsized in value for tech companies, and most of these jobs aren't going to have RSUs.

RSUs are the companies you're talking about are effectively cash, and they make up a significant portion of the compensation for the "elite SV" companies. So yes, if you exclude ~40% of the compensation for the "elite SV" companies, then you friend is probably making more.

I dont get it. Why did he say it will reverse? Do you think other countries arent offering freebies or a high skilled labor at cheaper rates than the US?

The US has outsourced so much, this cash dump is just going to head straight into the pockets of cronies who will then say 2-5 years they need more.

It doesn't matter. In 5-10 years all those jobs will be entirely automated by autonomous robotics.

These are jobs that either aren't even yet on the spectrum of automation (carpentry, plumbers, industrial HVAC & electricians) or as I referenced in more detail, folks who work on the robotics that "replace the jobs" or are otherwise augmenting the spectrum (in the outlier instance, its medical industrial systems stuff. I think they make surgical robots)

Unless the robots are either going to become good at swinging hammers or designing, maintaining, and install themselves, I think these are some of the safest jobs you can have, if there is such a thing

Plumbers and electricians will be absolutely last jobs that are automated. We'll automate CEOs long before them.

I highly doubt this and even if it becomes legitimately true, people have been claiming we’re all being replaced out of jobs for the last 2000 years. It’s not happening.

“By your command…”

Source? Seems like an Elon Musk- or Fusion research proposal-type timeframe

Don't need a source... in 12 years climate change is going to kill us all anyways. Spoken by another Oracle of Delphi.