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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Although I've worked for plenty of men who seem to be perfectly comfortable with the arrangement of using the money they earn with their own skills to pay for someone else's expertise, there are three reactions I've grown familiar with that suggest there's often anxiety about letting another guy do your "man jobs."

I grew up here in the U.S., but I still find Westerners weird sometimes. My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh, and for him it's always been a great point of pride for him that he could afford to pay someone to do "man work."

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I think you're entirely correct -- in the US we still have a national mythos of "rugged individualism" and self-reliance.

As others have pointed out in the thread, there really is a feeling of accomplishment that comes from doing something yourself, but we seem to have conflated that to mean you should do everything yourself.

> As others have pointed out in the thread, there really is a feeling of accomplishment that comes from doing something yourself, but we seem to have conflated that to mean you should do everything yourself.

Yes, and it's not just about building things.

I feel guilty every other day about how much house should be cleaner. I could probably hire someone to come out once a month, do a much better job than I could, more quickly, at a price I can actually afford.... and yet I feel it's my responsibility and that I would be somehow negligent if I were to do that. Different cultures, man...

I feel exactly the same way. Nothing makes me happier than to hire a skilled tradesman and see the great results when the work done. His work is going to be much better than mine, assuming I could even do it. I don't really understand why any guy would be threatened by this. I think of it as working smarter, not harder.

That's pretty much my view - I haven't done any "serious" DIY for years once I found out that a really good tradesman will be much faster, much better quality and often not even that expensive.

Of course, the trick is finding the good tradesmen.

It is kind of depressing to consider,but your wages have been going up by 5%-8% a year and the tradesmen's wages have been flat to to down. I have a great, problem solving carpenter who charges $25 per hour - a whole day of his work for $200. There is no way I can compete with that. The trouble is he is pretty busy and hard to get a hold of. I tell him every time he is at my house he should raise his rates and mark-up the cost of the materials he buys

Which village in Bangladesh out of interest?

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