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Comment by hollywood_court | Hacker News Reader

I work for a home builder. Our single biggest problem is finding and hiring quality contractors that have enough skilled tradesmen.

There are dozens of electrical contractors in my area. But only two that perform work to our standards.

There is only one HVAC company that can meet our standards. Same for all of the other skilled trades.

Our framing crew is the best within a 75 mile radius. Other builders are constantly trying to poach them from us. We keep throwing money at them to prevent them from going to another builder.

Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. I just fired our main pesticide and herbicide contractor today because they couldn’t get it together.

Of course I had them replaced before I fired them but I had almost 20 options to choose from.

Unfortunately I can’t say the same about all of the skilled contractors.

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This. I live in a very different place from you and I'm just a humble homeowner, but contractors here are less than competent and I as a layperson can often do better after reading up on the thing and watching a couple Youtube videos.

I know it's meme tier and horrible when a guy who watched some videos tells the tradesmen how to do their jobs, but unfortunately I often end up being right and prove them wrong.

For example one of the last things I experienced was one of the electricians needed to get a cable through the concrete upper floor, and just couldn't do the calculations on where to drill and ended up drilling into the middle of the wall instead of right next to it.

These kinds of fuckups are constant and the contractors are pretty good at hiding these unless I stand next to them.

I've yet to meet a roofer that could properly do trig to calculate the sloped roof area.

>> For example one of the last things I experienced was one of the electricians needed to get a cable through the concrete upper floor, and just couldn't do the calculations on where to drill and ended up drilling into the middle of the wall instead of right next to it.

The exact same problem exists for small manufacturers in the US. There are lot of people who believe they should have jobs in skilled trades and check some boxes but are missing fundamentals.

> a layperson can often do better

I think it's a mixed bag. I've purchased homes where the previous owner thought they were a wizard at home improvement. One apt example is a dryer outlet that was converted from 14-30R to 10-30R because the homeowner googled the wrong thing and went down a bad rabbit hole. A good electrician would tell you to change the cord on your dryer and that anything else is a code violation.

>A good electrician would tell you to change the cord on your dryer and that anything else is a code violation.

It would be a code violation for me to take my exiting 120yo retaining wall and extend it by copying it in exact detail despite the fact that the details of its construction are provably satisfactory.

The code isn't there to ensure results. The code is there to make the subjective quantifiable so it can be bickered over and litigated in a fairly deterministic manner.

> provably satisfactory.

I don't think the chassis of my dryer becoming energized is a provably satisfactory outcome.

I agree that a lot of code amounts to bureaucratic nonsense, but many rules were changed over time for good reason.

How did ground fault protection not kick in when you touched it?

Everything sounds like a good reason in a vacuum. I could write an equivalent appeal to emotion justifying why retaining walls ought to be engineered but the fact of the matter is that a bunch of barely literate people working from reference tables managed to do fine and copying them probably will do fine too.

> I know it's meme tier and horrible when a guy who watched some videos tells the tradesmen how to do their jobs, but unfortunately I often end up being right and prove them wrong.

Normalization of deviance is becoming common place. There's a lot to unpack here but there is a severe lack of professionalism, responsibility, genuine knowledge, and experience. Now its just a bunch of greedy man children who live by "fake it till you make it" and use every dirty trick to intimidate and mislead the client. Once they secure the job they barely show up to the the job site because they ran off to play with their golf clubs, sports cars and yachts or whatever while a crew of cheap unskilled labor shits all over the job site. And if you call out these morons and challenge them they get angry and defensive because they're the experts and you're a dumb client. Infuriating hubris.

> I as a layperson can often do bette

Except often times you can't because of all the regulations. First there's the code which you can't possibly understand sufficiently if it's not your day job. If you do figure out what you need to do you'll then find plenty of things you can't do without a license that you need to put in years for, not just pay and pass a test.

The only stuff that's not subject to exclusionary regulation is the "average homeowner" type renovation stuff and even then only because there isn't political will to tolerate it, not because the government and trades wouldn't try if they could.

But what do I know, I'm just someone who's been told he has to pay for $50k of engineering studies to assess the runoff impacts of converting forested former pasture back to the latter because a bunch of useful idiots 40yr ago heard some politicians talking points and thought it sounded good.

> First there's the code which you can't possibly understand sufficiently if it's not your day job.

Some of the stuff I found from contractors who worked on my house demonstrate that it turns out people whose day job is understanding the code also don't.

....There's no trigonometry in common roof-slope-area calculations and designations, only pythagoreans. Rise over run, 6ft for every 12ft, etc.

I do feel your pain about vetting "professionals", especially living in a place that tries to prevent me from making my own improvements.

Arent sloped roofs just rectangles?

The intersections of the joists/beams and the rafters require you to cut angled cuts on the rafters to sit appropriately on the joists/beams.

See: https://www.structuralbasics.com/rafter-roof-design/ and imagine how you would get a rectangular piece of wood for the rafter to sit flush against the rectangular joists/beams.

OK there might be some confusion here on what's meant by "roofer." Roofers as I have always seen the term used means the crew that puts the shingles on.

The roof structure is built by carpenters or framers. Or more likely just delivered as pre-built trusses which are placed on top of the walls.

For a roof built on-site, a speed-square or framing square will include markings for common roofing cuts, hip/valley cuts, etc. You have to know how to use them but you don't really need to understand the underlying trigonometry.

Yes agreed. There's skill and experience - and then there's... common sense? And some folks just don't have it.

I doubt you meant it this way, but that last bit hits a little rough. It's good that you are able to hire people when you have vacancies, and it's good that you don't have to be at the mercy of some insane rent-seeking because one crew in town has managed to monopolize one of your inputs.

But saying it's unfortunate that you can't just whack anyone at will with 20 people lined up behind them jobless is wishing for a pretty bad situation right? If all your positions were filled by someone with 20 jobless people standing behind them, who would buy the homes you build?

I’m guessing you’ve never hired a general contractor, or any other kind of home contractor for that matter? I’ve hired over a dozen at this point in the 1.5 years of owning my home, and I’d say, of those, about 2 have been any good. The construction and contracting landscape is a trash heap - a straight race to the bottom filled with lies, shoddy workmanship, and illegal labor. I’m suing 2 of mine for bad workmanship/abandoned projects. I do 100% of my own home renovations now, regardless of the cost of time, tools or materials.

Finding people is easy. Finding good ones is hard. You basically have to interview them. Even then you can end up with a slick salesman and garbage crew.

Needed a moving company. One guy shows up sits in my driveway gives me a quote. The next guy walked thru the house and gave me a quote. The third guy shows up opens every closet every cabinet and has a fairly spot on estimate. The first two were off by nearly 30% on weight/cost.

Needed someone to paint the entire interior of a house. One guy pulls a no show on the walkthru and then 3 months latter says I didnt show on time that day (it was already a done job at that point). Second guy goes 'hmm duno maybe X price'. Next guy measures everything has a itemized estimate. I hired the one with the good estimate.

My sister needed some simple electrical work done. 2 guys just handed her a number and an open ended contract. The 3rd guy had an itemized estimate that was lower than the first two because he did the prework.

Had some AC work done. Again with the 3. 1 just random didnt even come out, 1 driveway guy, and 1 who actually looked around and figured it out correctly. Even then I walk out there and the outside unit is installed backwards. I tell them, they puff out on me. I grab the foreman and walk him over with a 'uh there is a small issue here' didnt tell him what. They had to redo 3 hours of work once the foreman saw it backwards. All because the guys he had were willing to do backwards work. The foreman is usually the key. If they give a crap it will be done right.

Trying to have a covered porch added to my current house. So far 2 no shows and totally ghosted.

I wish this was atypical. But it isn't. I have many more.

The real answer behind the scenes: commercial pays better for the same work.

Any competent tradesperson is doing majority commercial.

Ergo, if you’re looking for residential, you get…

I always go back to our real estate agent to find contractors. We've never had any issues with the ones she's recommended.

And how did you get your real estate agent???

I'll second that finding a good contractor (or even just a "handy man") as a home owner is very hard. When i moved into my house we had two bathrooms and the kitchen renovated. Not a single piece of plumbing the original contractors touched has made it past 3 years, it's all been replaced. About the only thing that was done correctly was bathroom tile. On the other hand, on my street my neighbors and I have a good hvac guy. They are treated like royalty in my neighborhood because they show up, know what they're doing, and fair.

my father in law who has passed away ran a little independent hvac shop. Just him and another guy, they had more work than they could ever handle and he could have grown to at least a 10-15 person shop but chose to work by himself. In southern US climates HVAC is def. a career option, however it's hard physical work that will slowly destroy your body. heh Not unlike how SWE is hard mental work that can slowly destroy your mind.

edit: i miss my father-in-law very much, he could do anything. he replaced the floor in a pier and beam house while living in it. Just think about that for a moment, how do you replace a floor? that's what holds up the walls and the walls hold up the roof...

If 2 have been good why not stick with them?

Because my stone mason, as good as he is, doesn’t do plumbing.

You could ask what plumber that stone mason uses. "Good people like working with good people" etc.

I have tried exactly this, and it does not work. Nobody who did direct work ever had recommendations for peer workers. They just don't care. Most subs work directly with generals and not each other that much.

The general contractors know which subs are (currently) good and bad, so their recs are good, but you have to be friendly with them for them to share (instead of taking the project on themselves).

Ah, that's a shame :/

Worked for me, bathroom guy recommended a carpenter that turned out great. Was hoping it was a general thing one could do.

Professionals trade favors for each other. Someone who has done good work for a peer won't necessarily do good work if hired by some rando.

The original guy’s rep is on the line for making the referral, so if there is already a relationship, he will want to rec someone who will do good work.

His recommendations weren’t good? Often good tradespeople know other good tradespeople.

Like the parent, I haven't found that's true at all. Most people doing residential work on houses work either on their own or in very small teams. They spend their time working on houses, not networking with other tradespeople. They might have a few people they work with regularly, but it's not a deep network.

Much better is local whatsapp groups where people who've hired good people can make recommendations. Those are a trove of good information.

We are at the mercy of one crew. Over 150+ jobs in my company are all at the mercy of that one framing crew that has ~30 people. If we lose them, we'd have to scramble like crazy to find a replacement.

I have guys in Brownsville, TX that I could fly in and put up in hotels to get us through a tough spot, but that would cost a lot of money. And I'd love to encourage them to all move up here to Alabama with their families, but the current political climate has them afraid to do so.

Edit: I'm not saying I wish I could fire anyone I want at any time. I'm saying that it stinks that I literally have no other options for the other trades. So I'm forced to stick with the subpar options.

The post doesn't mean there are 20 unemployed people, but that there are 20 interchangable pest control contractors who all do an adequate job, and so the one they fired was easy to replace.

I'm not sure what's it like in the GP's area, but here I'm happy there are landscapers and other contractors who aren't part of the builders teams. There's lack of people available for odd jobs and for example it was hard to find a painter who wasn't busy with new houses. Unless it's a pathological situation on the market, those people are not idle/jobless. There needs to be a good mix of both.

Appreciate you highlighting the need for unions. Hopefully the skilled trades shortage persists indefinitely, otherwise they’d be treated just as you mentioned: disposable and interchangeable. The scarcity is the only thing protecting these folks at the moment.

https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rebuilding-construction-tr...

>> people are bad at their jobs so I fire them

> need for unions

What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.

Unions help protect workers from single, dominant/ monopolistic employers where workers have no other options and can get taken advantage of. The construction industry is nearly the polar opposite, where there is almost no barrier for entry and the employment space is very competitive, including the ability to start your own business.

Construction unions would be an absolute nightmare.

Construction unions do great across European countries.

Any company that can take advantage of workers will do it, no need for "dominant/ monopolistic".

There is a reason why security measures that put the workers life at risk are almost nonexistent on countries where unions hardly have a presence.

No helmets, no eye protection, no masks when dealing with chemicals, bending metal bars with bare hands, no protection shoes, hopping into a ladder alone,....

Some examples of what I have seen in practice.

>Construction unions do great across European countries.

Do not know about your country - but over here the construction sites are full of people who couldn't even write the word union (mostly Asian countries like Philippines, Nepal, etc.)

Germany, and yes if I go to southern countries, Portugal my home country, alongside the other ones, there is a certain flexibility between the law, unions, and what actually happens at the construction site, unless someone does a complaint to the respective goverment authority responsible for checking worker conditions.

I can also add that Scadinavian countries, and UK tend to be similar to Germany.

Naturally all of them have black sheeps that ignore good work conditions if they can manage to, that is why work inspections are also a thing.

I mean what happens is skilled workers from poorer countries (Croatia in my case) move to richer EU countries, then we have nobody to perform construction - and now we have issued work Visas for 5% of the population basically. And you see newspaper stories of these people basically being treated like slave labor (crammed in small apartments, completely dependent on the visa provider, often abused). Just a few days ago there was another story about an immigrant worker being raped by her employer - also an immigrant that was just done serving his previous rape sentence. And plenty of stories of these people not being paid for months, documents being held, etc.

The unions have no standing because theres nobody left to be a part of the union - most people already left for Germany/Switzerland/etc. So Germany is just riding on the EU migration for now - but considering population dynamics - that's a short wave.

I wish NYC could suck out cheaper construction labour from the likes of Missisippi, maybe Second Avenue Subway could actually be built on time and on budget in that case. Right now, expensive local labour has the city by the balls

> Any company that can take advantage of workers will do it, no need for "dominant/ monopolistic".

What a nonsense thing to say. This is not an opinion most people, and certainly not most economists, would agree with. It's a foundational pillar of regulated free markets.

Moreover in this instance, construction companies are not some sprawling international megacorps, they're locally oowned and operated.

A pillar of free-market models, sure. But economics is built on a stack of spherical-cow assumptions that don’t really hold up in the real world.

Of course an employee theoretically has total freedom to leave an abusive employer and go somewhere else. But do they have time to search for jobs while working full-time? What if their employer makes them work mandatory overtime? If they don’t have time to search while working, can they afford to be unemployed for a few months? What if their employer threatens them or discourages other employers in the area from hiring them?

It would be great if competition made unions unnecessary, but it doesn’t.

> Construction unions would be an absolute nightmare.

They seem to work fine.

https://nabtu.org/

https://www.liuna.org/

https://www.carpenters.org/

https://ibew.org/

> What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.

Trade unions tend to have a large focus on training and skill building. Yes they make firing people harder but the flip side of unions can be increasing the average quality such that firing due to quality or skill is less often necessary.

If I have need 10 people and I have a choice between two looks. Pool A is harder to fire and costs more but has a 95% competence rate. Pool B is easy to fire and costs less but has a 70% competence rate.

Setting any contractual rules aside I’m going g to find myself firing from pool B more often, and it is easy to attribute all of that to the rules that make A harder to fire. They are easier to fire (component of variance), they are more likely to be bad (component 2), and because they are easier to fire in going to be more likely to fire than coach for quality (component 3).

as a home owner, i don't want any barrier to demanding someone never step foot in my house again.

Scarcity also creates automation and efficiency pressure. You either get more of that human resource, or you make it so you use less of it, productivity increases also allow for the resources used to make more money without increasing project costs. This is also a very boom/bust industry, so the 2008 bust washed a lot of people out, especially juniors who would be experienced seniors today. A union is not going to protect labor from a building bust, they will stop hiring and the pipeline stalls.

There is a housing shortage of between 3.5M and 12M units; there will be no bust for at least the next decade, as housing production rate dropped substantially after the 2008 global financial crisis and did not recover.

(typically, union workers go on unemployment during slow periods; this includes electrical linemen/journeymen, automotive, pipe fitters, etc based on first hand conversations with union tradespeople in my examples)

Housing Supply and Housing Affordability - https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694 - April 2025

The Housing Industry Never Recovered From the Great Recession - https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-housi... - December 11, 2024

APM Marketplace: In an uncertain housing market, home builders face a range of challenges - https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/11/26/in-an-uncertain... - November 26, 2024

U.S. Housing Shortage: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once - https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives... - October 31st, 2022

Fannie Mae: The U.S. Housing Shortage from a Local Perspective - https://www.fanniemae.com/media/45106/display - October 2022

> There is a housing shortage of between 3.5M and 12M units;

The problem with this stat is that the historic data does not support it:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S

The supply is just fine, more so with a declining population, how we use housing has changed dramatically.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...

U.S. Housing Shortage: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: that you called out states "While the United States does indeed have a national shortage of affordable housing, every state and city's path to addressing it is relatively unique, and the tools and tactics used to create badly needed new housing supply will have to be tailored."

This is a gross understatement of the issue. The problem is voters. No one will vote in more housing, housing benefits for others or more affordable housing. Because the people who vote own homes and go into the voting booth and protect their own interests and assets: https://www.route-fifty.com/management/2022/08/problem-homeo... . There isnt a law about having to be a landholder to vote but there is a very strong correlation between the two.

Planing and zoning is hyper local, hyper political and very active. This is why mixed use zoning is harder to find, you can't run a garage out of your garage. The is why the "missing middle" is a thing in America. This is why "corporate ownership" of housing wont get fixed (it is a hyper local issue and the people who would show up to vote against it are the same ones whos property prices are being propped up by it).

Software engineers have recently had a chance to taste how does it feel to be plentiful and disposable, after decades of shortage.

There is so much work for skilled tradesmen that they would rather see more automation so they can take more jobs. Even many unions, e.g. carpenters' unions, think this way.

I mean no large group is a monolith so I'm sure one can find opinions either way among tradesmen. But IMO the problem is so big that it's no longer revenue maximizing for anyone, even the workers. By some measures productivity has actually been declining for construction. If that was good for workers then we should just set them to digging a second Panama Canal with spoons.

Real men would dig Route 66 canal instead of Panama.

I'm a layperson and this touches on my greatest fear about hiring contractors, that I'm not able to quickly enough determine who does meet the quality standard or even what the quality standard should be for a given job. How are average people supposed to navigate these things? I suppose I would just ask Claude/ChatGPT these days but there is surely a lot of tribal knowledge that they don't have.

And chatgpt is going to pull the data from an random UK website when you are in the US and vice-versa, and will augment it with knowledge from its model that come from a reddit thread from 2010 written by an italian plumber.

I saw that on the DIY Uk subreddit where people were confused because ChatGPT was answering question using american standards. It's really hard to answer questions based on regional tribal knowledge.

Apparently a good source are the tradesmens shop? THey might know their customers? Word-of-mouth?

poor prompting then. One should narrow down the question to the particular circumstance it should apply.

this is exactly what you can’t do as an amateur though. You don’t know enough context to provide your relevant circumstances.

Well no, not really. I’m replying in the context of the parent comment, that was painting a scenario where the GPT would reply with information relevant to different countries.

It doesn’t need to be advanced prompting, it’s enough to provide enough information and ask to “provide advice relevant to the current and applicable codes and regulations”

It’s the first question a forum dweller would reply to a poorly articulated post.

And how would the LLM know that a comment in english in a random forum is applicable to a specific country but not another?

UK, US, Australia all have different rules and regulations, but their websites don't exactly advertise their location. It is implied that you visit them based on your country. The UK has a weird mix of metric and imperial, so you can't even use the units to figure it out!! It's not always easy to figure it out, even for a human.

I think you're exaggerating. There are several ways an LLM can discern the applicability of certain data to a context (document metadata such as TLD, cross check with applicable authoritative codes and regulations, be wary of random forum posts.)

I'm pretty sure an LLM can provide pretty refined answers given some reasonable context. i.e. I want to rewire a socked in my apartment, which is in London, UK. What do I need to do?

The most basic thing you do is hiring by referral, you talk to your friends and neighbors about contractors they used, and then hire the ones that were recommended, being ready to slightly overpay or wait for the slot.

Framing is skilled, but landscaping and pest control are unskilled? Are you living in a well framed house overrun with mice and a terrible yard? I've done some framing. With a communicative foreman and a straightforward building design I did not find it that hard.

If performing quality framing was so easy, I imagine I’d have less trouble finding folks who want to earn $125k+ per year to do it for me.

Instead I just have a group of ~30 Guatemalans who do it while I listen to my American friends and neighbors complain about immigrants “taking all the jobs.”

Folks may not know about the jobs, or there might be other details that aren’t mentioned here that make them less interested, for example are there occasionally big chunks of being unemployed, is the work dangerous, is the work stable, etc.

20 years ago, before I started making good money as a software engineer, if someone had offered me a similar opportunity, and training, I would’ve taken it assuming there were no big gotchas.

A lot of this is a result of how trade licensing works.

In most states it's not about whether you know how to do something -- you can't just take a licensing exam and get a license even if you know the material -- it's about having access to someone who already has a license to sign off on you. From which you get two consequences.

First, if you know someone who already has a license but doesn't know what they're doing or isn't a good teacher, they sign off on other people without actually teaching them how to do a good job, and then you get even more people with a license who don't really know how to do the job.

And second, because the existing license holder has to sign off on several years worth of hours for someone new to get a license, you deter people who would do a good job but -- because of that -- have more opportunities in other industries where you don't have to spend a large chunk of your adult life beholden to someone else because it's still prohibited by law for you to strike out on your own, in an industry that people would otherwise want to enter because they want to do exactly that. Which both lowers the average quality of the candidate pool and creates shortages by lowering the number of candidates.

Is this a symptom of every teacher and parent telling kids to get college degrees?

This is a little bit tangential to the conversation but I was wondering how you find the best skilled contractors? Do you use Google maps like everyone else and look at the ratings? Or is it information you glean by trial and error over time? Or do you check in with trade schools to see who their best graduates are? Or perhaps something that I haven't mentioned?

Mostly from people at supply houses and lumber yards. They know how to tell if a contractor is good or not.

Or if we catch wind of a good contractor doing great work for another builder, we'll go inspect their work and then try to get them to jump ship and work with us.

Trade school information won't help us any because we're hiring contracting companies. We don't hire individuals unless it's for something specific that can be handled by one individual like kitchen installs.

Highly skilled tradesmen are often like really good lawyers. Just because they're good at their craft doesn't mean they'll necessarily be good at running their own contracting business (or law firm).

So being a successful contractor really boils down to being able to properly manage your skilled labor (and keep them content) while also keeping things on budget and following the critical path.

The single most common mistake I see with most contractors (and most all small business owners in general) is the fact that they think "hey, I own this business, therefore I should be the highest paid person here." So they don't take care of their labor and they end up losing them to someone who will take better care of them.

They think that they own the business so they must provide the most value to the company and should earn the most. That's rarely the case in real life though.

When I was a contractor out on my own, there were plenty of times when I was paying some of my employees more than I ever took home. The President of the company I work for now isn't the highest compensated member of our team.

For me it’s personal references from other people via local Facebook/whatsapp groups - since I have kids that’s almost always parent groups

Do you have any advice for how homeowners can screen tradesmen?

Go to the lumber yards and supply houses. Go to the sales counter and ask who they would recommend for a certain job.

>Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen.

As a former landscaper, I can tell you that you either aren't taking the time to understand at least one of these professions at all, or simply have some very low standards for good landscaping. It is not a dime-a-dozen field that requires minimal skill, at all, and given all I've seen of GOOD pest control, the same applies, fully. You might have dozens of small contractors out there claiming to be either of these things but knowing little, sure, but those that actually know the technical balances at work and can apply those to what they're doing so that it creates durable results for your building/land/home, are people who need to know quite a few very fine nuances of their work.

I mean, unless you think that constructing external landscapes that soon collapse, flood or fill with dead plants is irrelevant, or have no problem living in a building riddled with rats, mice, cockroaches and easy domicile to all of these pests and sundry.

Well yeah you've practically done the same thing that's been done with software where juniors need education plus three years of experience for their first job so you have no juniors.

I think the difference is that the pipelines for becoming a junior software developer are well-documented online, where the pipeline for being a "Junior Developer" in the trades is generally accomplished by calling and walking into places and asking for a job still.

Not accurate, even slightly. You might get hired as a gopher and spend 5 years trying to do other work if you just blunder in without training or skills.

Now, there are certificates and other training that most places expect for blue collar workers starting as apprentices.

The days of walking off the street to get an apprenticeship in the trades is over. You'll get one after proving you're not on drugs, can show up, and are willing to do bullshit jobs for minimum wage for a three to five years beforehand.

nah, i went from apprentice to lead installer in under 3 years, there is full training programs for the trades, but you will most likely get injured out before retirement so a lot of people won't even go that route. Until the trades are capped at 30 hours a week, you're going to injure out most of your workforce.

It is really hard on bodies.

The HN crowd sure has some well informed opinions about people who work for a living.

Many of us do the same. I'd say most. Millionaire founders past exit are not the majority of the HN crowd by a long shot.

The contractor is supposed to train their tradesmen. There's no hypocrisy in insisting on good contractors.

How in the world general contractor can train tradesmen? Contractor organizes and manages, every particular tradesman is better in their respective field than contractor.

A good contractor will recognize new employees with potential and try to point them in the right direction and give them guidance.

My first construction job ever was in the Caribbean. I got placed with a group of Haitians, and we were all laborers. We never had a tool in our hands. We simply carried materials, loaded things onto the roof, set up scaffolding, etc.

On my third day on the job, the leader of the Haitians became angry at me and kept telling me to slow down. I kept pushing and the lead carpenter on the job noticed. The next day, the general contractor (my boss) pulled me aside and said "when you come in on Monday, make sure you have a tool belt, a hammer, a pencil, a speed square, a tape measure, and a razor blade."

I showed up that Monday with all of the required tools and the GC let me work alongside the lead carpenter. At the end of that first week, the lead carpenter lent me a book that he used to learned carpentry while he was in a union in Wisconsin. I spent all weekend reading that book and I had tons of questions for him when I returned to work the next week.

I never looked back. I have since worked professionally in every single residential construction related trade. I am confident that I can perform each trade at a professional level with the exception of welding. I can weld. I welded everything on my Land Cruiser and I've welded scores of hip plates over the years. But I'm not confident enough to say that I could perform at the same level as a good professional welder.

But HVAC, electrical, plumbing, roofing, siding, millwork installation, finish carpentry, landscaping, and irrigation are all things that I can perform at a top level.

That lead carpenter ended up being my best friend I have ever had and he taught me about a lot more than carpentry.

They weren't talking about general contractors, but trade-specific contractors with multiple tradesmen working together. A crew can supervise and train newer members, and the more senior tradesmen can make sure the output of the entire crew is high quality even though some of them have a lot to learn.

Even for the explicit goal of getting juniors trained, the crew that does the better job is probably doing more training than the worse crew.

Uh no. Our culture and society have told folks to go to college for so long like it’s their only chance for success.

I put on a tool belt as a kid because I didn’t have the opportunity to go to school. It was either learn a trade or fail into the pit of despair that is the hospitality industry.

I’m in the south so we don’t have the benefits of union training.

A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.

> A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.

Can you elaborate on this point? What is it about the union that makes their on the job training so effective? Veteran carpenters with 15-20 yrs of exp have, in general, a very strong skill set -- what is the union doing that makes people catch up so fast? And if that's true, why do more people not defect from the union?

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