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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>> 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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