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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

I think “grey area” is the right way to think of carpenters and electricians and plumbers too.

You say that programmers need a lot of societal components but so does every one of those professions. Unless your kids are learning how to harvest and dry their own lumber along with classical carpentry with nothing but wood joints, they will need a massive supply chain for the lumber and fasteners - unless you expect them to hunt down bog iron and bootstrap all of civilization themselves. Same with plumbers who need PVC/copper/solder and a modern sewer/water system or septic tank. Or the electrician who needs copper wire and power infrastructure (or solar panels, which require semiconductor manufacturing). What good is an electrician without the power plants to feed their customers?

I like your approach but I can't help but feel that unless you’re going full apocalyptic prepper, the practical skills are an illusion.

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It’s all about the degree of independence. There are a lot of places that you can’t find work as a data scientist, and. Being a data scientist does little to directly solve problems your family might encounter if your career gets eaten by AI or a pandemic. I’m not suggesting working in the trades vs a profession.. by I do advocate competence in a trade in addition to your chosen profession, with some exceptions.

On the other hand, who would you prefer to end up on a deserted island with, a programmer or a carpenter?

Of course the knee jerk answer is a carpenter, but unless that carpenter knows how to make metal tools from scratch, hand hew a log, and fashion his own nails, I’m not sure how really useful they’d be apart from better physical fitness. A carpenter that buys nails at home depot by the box and sends plywood through a table saw likely isn’t going to have the practical skills to survive on a desert island without the modern supply chain.

Traditional woodworking and blacksmithing like that is now mostly a novelty in the developed world. No one really knows how to make their own tools from scratch which is what it’d take to bootstrap carpentry. The best realistic set of skills would probably be knowledge of how to work with fibers to make rope and gather pitch for adhesive. Then you could make a primitive axe that can do most of the hard work in bringing down and hewing trees.

If a carpenter can’t read a book and understand how to make a structure without metal fasteners, they are not competent in that field. And working with raw logs is also not much of a challenge.

I’m not an especially good carpenter, and I can work with limited tools. A chainsaw and an auger drill would be really nice, especially if I had to make lumber.. but an axe , drawknife , and chisels will do.

That’s like being a programmer that can’t write software without a framework and libraries. The idea is that tools make the job easier and faster, not that you don’t even understand how to do the job, but only how to staple code together. We all start out there, and while we may rarely if ever work that way, we can when it is needed, do something no one has done for us.

Obviously, different trades have different utility if you are talking about the breakdown of society, but I’m not really leaning into that particularly hard, more leaning into the breakdown of one’s plans or expectations, the failure of a company or the evolution of an industry, those kinds of force majure events that one can reasonably expect to have happen during a life lived.

Even so, there is some comfort in knowing that your personal knowledge and value to society is robust and resistant to black swan events, I suppose.

> If a carpenter can’t read a book

Deserted islands don't have libraries.

Depends on the situation... If the food source is on a nearby deserted island, connected by two small boats that can carry inconvenient numbers of people + food, and for some reason the boats must always be full and you must always take all the food by the end, well, give me an older programmer accustomed to puzzle interviews!

What are the characteristics that are actually useful on a deserted island? Outdoorsy (ideally, skilled in bushcraft), ex-military, able-bodied. On the first two, the programmer wins. On the last one, it's probably a wash. For every obese slob in this field, there's a carpenter whose back is fucked and is dependent on opiates.

Carpentry offers limited applicable skills if they're stranded 1000 miles away from the nearest Home Depot.

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