Construction, trades, and basically physical-world stuff that AI cannot do are still hiring.
Like anything, it's important to spend time networking and building a reputation for doing high quality work. This gets noticed as it does in any job and will get you better opportunities and better customers.
Trades have a higher percentage of people at the bottom tiers who have trouble showing up for work on time and sober. Avoid being associated with that and you can rise fairly quickly.
I've done a stint in construction (I think y'all call it "civil engineering", aka digging trenches and moving soil) myself, it was rare to find Germans - most of my colleagues came from Eastern Europe.
I'm not your typical HN member I don't think. I've been a computer nerd since I was 14 years old. I come here to stimulate my inner nerd.
You didn’t experience a slowdown at the height of the recession circa 2008?
I am always curious about people who are strongly oriented towards one thing (computing) but somehow wind up in another area, such as construction.
The management company my mother and I worked for sent me to various classes over the next several years (electrical, plumbing, HVAC and pool maintenance) and my supervisor was an old HVAC tech. I learned a ton from him. By the time I was 22 or so, I was promoted to maintenance director.
I got bored with apartments and wanted more. I started doing side work and met a lady that owned lots of rental property. That opened doors and she introduced me to other investors. Eventually, I was able to leave the apartment industry and do my own thing. It just kind of blew up from there.
As far as your construction related ideas, just put yourself out there. Meet people in the industry. Go to local industry related events. See if the city you live in has real estate investor clubs. DFW has a few and it's a great opportunity to meet people. This is also a great way to pick up work. Rent houses are always needing things repaired or replaced.
I know Mueller metal buildings is always looking for sales people. They were even looking for an IT person not too long ago too. In the rural area of Texas I'm in, we finish out lots of them and seem to becoming more and more popular in recent years.
And frankly the work is miserable. I've crawled through suspended ductwork to run conduit and wiring in antifreeze recycling plants that were filled with god-knows-what reagents covering everything in dust thick enough to paint a clown. PPE be damned, my skin burned for days. It was hot, loud, cramped, wet with chemicals, uncomfortable, dangerous, and unpleasant. These jobsites are the bread and butter of blue collar anything; awful and dangerous conditions outside of your control, but required by your contract because not doing it means not getting paid.
Sure, an agent isn't going to be replacing the poor bastard who has to do that, but is our only response the the deliberate and systematic murder of the white collar job market "you can suffer for less money so you'll be fine"? That's a pathetic whimpering way to just accept the very loud and public murder of class mobility.
Residential construction is the absolute bottom of the barrel. It is trades equivalent of webdev monkeys flinging javascript poo at the web. You get benefits by not sucking and getting out of residential and into something else.