Ask HN: Career in trades for possible ex-programmers

My first question is why?

But I won’t judge and I think I can help! I would recommend HVAC or electrical work for a programmer. I manage the software team of a relatively large trade company which specializes in these fields. Many of our electricians are hobbyist programmers. Having done field work with both electricians and HVAC technicians I can say that both fields will provide you with challenging problems, and a familiar diagnostic and repair process to fixing software. I think HVAC is much easier to jump in to compared to electrical work (and you will still work on low voltage electrical components) so I would recommend looking for work in that space.

HOWEVER this is extremely hard work. I would not willingly trade places with any of our electricians. While it can be very fulfilling and enjoyable for the right type of person, what you’re talking about is essentially taking less pay to do more and harder work. And in that sense I would urge you to reconsider. But if it’s something that truly truly interests you, HVAC should be really easy to get into as long as it’s an active industry in your area.

Electrician should be your first option. Pay is often better than other trades and it is more intellectually demanding and less physically demanding at the same time. There’s a shortage now too.

Most electricians easily work into their 60s so age should not be a factor. You will need to start off as an apprentice but given your demonstrated technical ability, I would hope you’ll be able to identify niche jobs within the profession that you will give you leg up for more rapid advancement.

I worked as an electrician in the military, albeit for aircraft. I do miss getting my hands dirty in that regard; however, the civilian side aircraft electrician pay is not remotely comparable to my SE salary (in fact it'd be a more than 50% pay cut). Is residential/commercial electrician pay closer to SE pay?

Not until you're a master electrician.

And that comes after years of ditch digging and other labor intensive apprentice tasks.

The embedded world is crying out for people experienced in modern software teams. A big chunk of it is one man bands who know C and maybe some C++. Most embedded projects could benefit from unit testing, automated build systems and modern memory safe languages.

If you're interested in a job in embedded you could learn it on the side. Buy a dev board (from one of the main vendors - ST, NXP or TI) and write an application for it. Learn the detail of developing for microcontrollers - setting up peripherals and clocks, debugging over JTAG, handling interrupts etc.

If you manage to get in front of a hiring manager with a couple of well executed open source low level projects along side experience in higher level languages, you'd have a good chance of getting the job.