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Comment by Ralo | Hacker News Reader

After 5+ years of actively trying to get into the field (pre AI), I left.

I threw my degree in the toilet, I closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic.

Greatest choice I've ever made. The pay is great, the work is steady, the coworkers are relaxed and not trying to one up each other. I'm now being paid to go to school, and get raises every year until I'm fully ticketed (way more than I ever made in the entry tech positions).

I've heard non-stop my whole life that if I join a trade it's going to be grunt labor and I'll be paralyzed in 5 years. Maybe some are, but this isn't hard at all. I lay on a creeper and turn wrenches. Anything over 50lbs we have lifts for.

Tech has become fun again, I'm just making projects because its what I wanted. I come home and relax by writing on my projects.

Now, I'm watching my tech friends from a distance and my only regret is not doing this sooner.

"Sometimes you gotta give in to win"

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Reading this and some of your other comments in this thread, I think it’s awesome you’ve landed up doing what you really enjoy and are well compensated for it.

It makes me wonder if I would be happier doing something else, but (because of my personality) I’m very doubtful.

Since you see yourself as also being a computer guy I’m assuming that lack skill or intuition was not why you left the industry, so don’t read the rest of my comment as talking about you.

But I’ve definitely seen plenty of people in the software development industry where they may get by “okay” at their job, but things don’t tend to “click” as easily (in terms of intuitive understanding) for them the same way they do for me.

So I feel lucky and deeply happy to be at a company I enjoy working at and doing what has always been my passion.

It’s not that the computer industry is completely terrible (although plenty of parts of it certainly are), it’s just that for some people it’s not their true passion (which is fine).

I think its the smart people who things click well for that have the most problems because theyre not worried about things clicking, so their whole focus is on how B.S. the actual industry is.

> I closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic.

Love it! A score of years ago, I considered being an auto mechanic after graduating HS but then ended up back in CompSci.

Did you have to go back to school? Did you find a shop that would take you in as an apprentice? And if they did, how did you convince them you can/will be good at the job?

I had lots of personal experience under my belt. I built a hot rod out my garage on the cheap (because I was broke and wanted a nice car). I used that on my resume and they were extremely excited on that. The company I work for is famous for their fleet of "show" semis. It's super super cool and I think the mix of my passion for cars mixed well with their eye for details on their fleet.

However, the bar has never been lower.

I didn't want to do automotive, the piece work is a cancer. You'll do 12 hour days and get paid for 8. Not my cup of tea. I was interested in the big stuff. Offroad equiptment sounded cool too.

Adore it! Why did you not become an auto mechanic, then?

Turns out that I was really out of my depth when it comes to ins and outs of a car at the chassis level. I also realized that if I can’t toy with it in my free time then I’m not going to pursue it as a career. Working on cars needs a lot of space which a broke college student doesn’t have.

FWIW, there's a huge difference in job quality between diesel and a regular auto mechanic (at least if you're in the states): Unless you work somewhere rare and amazing, auto mechanics typically work within the flat-rate system. In case you're not familiar, this is a joke of a wage system wherein you're not actually paid for the time a job takes, but the time a book says it should take in a perfect world. Rusty fasteners, broken equipment, bad/wrong parts- all the real-world complications that come up during jobs will conspire to make you take longer than book time and, especially for new people, can leave you making less than you'd make in fast food.

Wrenching is a better than the average trade, but you will accumulate damage in your hands and shoulders from it. The vibration of impact guns do considerable damage to your hands over a decade or two of work along with the tight squeezing of tools. Thick padded hand grips might be a good idea even if impact guns don't feel like it hurts right now. Heavy wrenching can do a number on shoulders too but shoulder sockets can be replaced, although it is supposedly not a pleasant experience.

Absolutely. It's not perfect but safety is in your control, and all up to you.

I accept the trade off, as the alternative is going back to linkedin and begging for a job all day.

This is why I try to hoard all my money. I don't want to do this when I'm 50. I've always thought about doing this for 10-15 years and then building a semi and doing some owner operator long haul trucking. I could easily fix anything on the truck and save major money.

Besides, sitting in a chair all day isn’t great for your body either

Have you thought of opening your own truck repair shop? Often there are places where trucks break down and the solutions are slim to None. A good repair shop in the right place might make decent money.

I'm so at peace right now, the flow is good. I don't need the hustle of chasing mllions of dollars. The owner of the company can deal with that, I just want to do my 8 hours and go home free and clear.

Avoid impact guns at all costs.

I install heavy machinery for a living and I forbid them on site.

Use regular spanners, ensure adequate cross tightening and final tightening with torque.

> I'm now being paid to go to school, and get raises every year until I'm fully ticketed (way more than I ever made in the entry tech positions).

This. People tend to underestimate the joy that steady progress brings. A quick peak usually just leads to a long, depressing decline. Many people would rather take a career that grows a few percent every year for four decades over one that spikes and crashes any day. It’s better to be a slow grower who stays valuable than a flash-in-the-pan who burns out by 35[1].

[1] Honestly, I think there is a reason for this decline that has nothing to do with AI: the IT industry has just matured. Aside from the classic GoF patterns and Enterprise patterns and their variations, what new popular and deep design patterns have we actually adopted lately? Or look at all those must-know data structures and algorithms that are all over the web. How many of those were invented in the last ten years? Even in open source, where are the new platform-level projects invented in the last 5 years that every major company is pouring resources into? There are not many.

In other words, we are just eating our own tail at this point. It is just CRUD to death. When things get this stagnant, tech departments inevitably turn into cost centers. Even without AI, we were already heading toward a dead end. AI just happens to be the tool that makes it easy to automate everything because, at the end of the day, most of our work is just rearranging the same old code patterns anyway.

> Many people would rather take a career that grows a few percent every year for four decades

That's exactly what the corporate IT world has always been once you leave SV.

Paying about 10M/yr for a team of 50 people makes perfect sense. It doesn't really make a dent in payroll to keep daily operations going while their people get paid competitively to work from home in an affordable suburb.

In this world, AI is not a threat. It just auto-transcribes meeting notes and sucks at code review. There's very little to delegate to AI because everyone is maintaining services that have to stay in prod for years if not decades. You wouldn't replace them in the same way you wouldn't replace your lawyers and accountants.

Did you have qualifications / an interest in this field before switching? What drawn you to this occupation in the first place? Just being curious

I'm a car guy, and a computer guy.

I wanted a nice car, so instead of racking up mega debt on a $70,000 mustang I bought an old classic car and learned everything. After 5 years I fully restored it on the cheap (less than $10k) and now I've pivoted my career to that.

A long-ago colleague got a junk classic car and took night classes at the local community college to learn how to fix/restore everything. He finished the degree and quit the tech job.

Anyone currently with a tech job can pay for it out of pocket and barely notice. If it’s something someone thinks they may want to do, they should just do it. Nobody says you have to switch jobs at the end.

100%

And tools have never been cheaper. The knock off chinese clones are used by professionals too. I have tons of automotive friends and they all vary in their level of access to things. I have friends who built their cars on the public road infront of their house, and some friends who took a year long college course.

We all ended up in the same place.

I'm unconvinced that car mechanic pay is anywhere near programming but either way I'd say you have a pretty select and valuable skill set if you know cars and computers, given how computerised modern cars are.

It depends? It's certainly not gonna be more than you'd make as a SWE/SDE at a big tech company. But for semi diesel specifically you can probably clear $100k+/yr, so you might be making more than some entry level programming jobs that don't pay as well.

It's kinda like law. A mechanic doesn't make more than someone in the right side of the bimodal lawyer pay where 3Ls with the right clerkship or internship walking into a biglaw job paying whatever that is now ($200k?). But a mechanic might make more than the other tranche of lawyers fighting for the rest of the scraps who don't yet (and may never) have a good practice set up.

As a mechanic at the local quick lube, not much pay. But if you can get positioned as an expert in any car-related field, the pay can be huge. I know several people who are local experts in various car related professions who cater to the very rich automotive enthusiasts who have basically no budget limits, once they trust your work, you can name your price.

Maybe 10 years ago. Now you have to fight 300 other applicants for an entry position that pays $50k in NYC.

The biggest thing for me that pushed me over the edge was thinking, how will I get a mortgage? All this applying, 100s of applications, even if I land a job it's not stable. Maybe it pays more, but I'll be laid off in a year or 2. Then back to 100s of applications while my mortgage is ticking away.

I have a friend who worked at Adobe for 5+ years as a senior AI researcher. Has a PhD in compi sci majoring in AI. He got laid off last year and couldn't find any work. I witnessed it. He gave up and started doing a side hustle thing on a video game. It's just not stable, and thats not how I want my life.

I don't see much overlap between mechanics and cars honestly. Everything in a car is modular. If it doesn't work, you replace it. Car tuning has some level of tech. Kind of. But that's an entirely different field that people specialize in, typical mechanics cannot do that.

Honestly, I think the biggest enjoyment I got from this thread is that programming culture is often toxic in ways that people aren't really ready to admit on this site which is dedicated to computers and programming.

I can hear them now: "Surely, you can't be happy with your decision, Mr. Ralo. You're leaving so much money on the table!"

And you're saying calmly: "Yes, yes I am."

Best of luck to you and your efforts.

I've tried both. I've seen what both offer and I'm so confident in my decision that I just sit back and watch the gong show at this point.

My decision gets further cemented when I ask my tech friends how work is going.

I just downgraded the skillset needed and moved back down to dedicated IT. It's so much easier and I have zero job-related stress 95% of the time. I already worked a flashy job with big name recognition. I don't need to prove anything to anyone. I want no extra hours or responsibility. It's great.

That's really inconsistent with my experience. Are you a game dev maybe? I can believe it for them. Or maybe a web dev. I think if you do anything a bit more technical and "boring" like firmware development or data engineering there's tons of highly paid work, at least in the UK (which has lower salaries than the US for skilled work).

> Everything in a car is modular. If it doesn't work, you replace it.

Doesn't it require some skill diagnosing what isn't working using CAN tools? Plus there's all the coding of parts now. I guess to be fair, you're kind of limited by what tools the manufacturers are willing to sell you and it's probably difficult to go outside that unless you are a university level researcher.

I did door to door sales for a while and let me tell you there's nothing more degrading than getting the door slammed in your face at best and being chased off by dogs at worst.

Would have taken grunt labour any day over the latter.

But it gave me a thick skin in the long run and made me a much better (nastier?) negotiator when I had to run business groups.

Happy to be out of it now. Kind of rose at the right time and left before LLMs showed up.

that is so inspiring to hear. would you mind answering a couple of questions:

1) How long were you in software? 2) How did you get your break in the trades? Did you go to school etc? 3) Did you have to start on an apprentice program?

Thank you very much

My entire life I've done tech. I remember in middle school all my teachers knew me as the kid who wrote code. I did my degree, and did an internship but nothing ever really stuck (still not sure what happened with that) and my full time job became begging for work.

I didn't do any schooling but thats because I've always liked cars and would tinker at home. So I was very advanced for an entry level. They get government kick backs for hiring apprentices and the less of a burder you are to them, the better. However, the bar has never been lower. Before this, I tried electrician but didn't like it. I have zero experience as an electrician.

Your employer signs you up after you pass probation. Then every year you do a 2 month schooling course which is all government paid.

I'm looking to leave working in tech. The local public transit bus agency is always hiring mechanics. Going to a technical school for a diesel mechanic training and working there is high up on my list of things to explore. Thanks for the positive reinforcement.

That's how the majority get into it. My first year course, half the students were all from the public transit and knew each other.

> I've heard non-stop my whole life that if I join a trade it's going to be grunt labor and I'll be paralyzed in 5 years. Maybe some are, but this isn't hard at all. I lay on a creeper and turn wrenches. Anything over 50lbs we have lifts for.

The first sentence is what I'd think too.

Have you considered if the fully ticketed salary includes risk of serious injury if something bad happens (like, knock on wood, lifts failing)?

The far higher risk of injury and death is one thing that keeps people away from physical jobs.

Absolutely.

It's not perfect. I risk crushing my hands everyday. Or falling. Or causing 10s of thousands of dollars in damage because I didnt tighten a bolt. Arthritis is likely.

But it's still incredibly rare, and mainly in your control. All my coworkers are major injury free.

You might want to do a search on Boron and arthritis. (Knowing that it might be mildly beneficial or not help at all)

I just did a search on "Boron and arthritis". It was helpful but didn't give you the information I thought it would. After Boron and arthritis I'd search on "Boron and arthritis and region" --> "Epidemiological studies suggest a link between geographic dietary boron intake and regional arthritis rates, with areas consuming higher boron having substantially lower arthritis prevalence"

I'm in a similar process. I've enjoyed working in tech but it feels for me that it has run its course. We recently started making EDC bags and minimalist laptop backpacks. https://ancientedc.com And while it probably won't generate tech money, it's really nice sitting down at the sewing machine and cranking out a physical product that people really enjoy using.

You might be able to be a diesel mechanic and clean up in tech. This video is almost a year old, about applying Claude Code to boring businesses, a mobile diesel mechanic service in this case study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWNFna6fgS8

I try everyday to apply my tech background to my mechanics. I use it for things like torque specs and brain storming issues but nothing much else.

Utilizing it for business purposes is certainly an option too. Possibly in the far future, having the highest quality website with good SEO would help me stomp out competition.

Until AI comes for your mechanics job too,

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

I feel we are getting the worse of “both worlds”.

Fiction has sold AI in the form of Data from Star Trek. A robot with perfect recall of information over a wide range of topics and flawless reasoning.

Today’s AI is nothing like Data with its hallucinations but are taking jobs anyway because it’s “good enough” for many corporations.

P.S. Haven’t been keeping up to date but let’s say I have a story where I retcon a previously an established fact midway through the story with no explanation. If I feed it into AI as part of its training data, will it “challenge” this contradiction? Or will it just blindly accept it? What if the story is part of a prompt, will it “challenge” it in anyway?

I mean even a young child will point out that “that wasn’t what you said earlier”.

>Until AI comes for your mechanics job too,

AI didn't "come" for software either. This is just a rerun of the 2000s outsourcing boom with a different kind of dirt cheap slop code.

That one ended with execs patting themselves on the back for hiring "only the best" software engineers- almost as if slop actually was a problem.

I'm not concerned. If the trades get replaced, then its just over for everyone.

Then literally nothing is safe.

Besides, unless we build physical robots to trace airlines and replace them, I'm safe.

That kind of work needs robots in the loop. There is very little training data, most of it is private or opaque, and a lot of the know-how was never written down. It should hold out at least 20 years longer than programming, where basically the whole job happens inside the computer, and where the best references, examples, and source code are public to a degree unimaginable in most other industries.

>Until AI comes for your mechanics job too,

Yes and no!!

New cars are computers on wheel, you need a computer to release the break pad in some cars which is insane.

Now, when it comes to being a mechanic per se, there is no robot able to perform most of the jobs done by a human. Good mechanics are full booked.

Did you go into tech because you love software or for the money?

I love software, but knew I would quickly learn to hate it. I'm not going to be working on my passion projects. I'd be working on horribly boring software used by some corporation.

I really wanted to go into tech because I've been told the trades were the boogie man my entire life.

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