Look, a job is a job and work is well, work. As noted in the other comments trades are hard work. Far harder than a desk job. I would suggest not romanticizing the trades as some replacement for a desk job. Go do some trade work in your free time (go build a fence in the middle of the summer as an example) and really find out how much hard work it is. If you still enjoy it after being in 95 degree heat for 8+ hours w…
I second this. I've performed many jobs around my house, and while I don't regret any of them, there are many I would never do again.
This kind of work has turned out, in almost all cases, to be far more difficult and time consuming than I expected.
I wonder how HN would respond if I asked "heya HN, what programming jobs would fit someone who has 10 years of TIG welding" This is effectively what the OP is asking.
I like this thought exercise, but I also think the analogy would be more accurate if we asked "heya weldingnews.com, what programming jobs would fit someone who has 10 years of TIG welding".
The answers would be bad I guess, which I believe is your point :)
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…
Less pay and harder work sounds great, and I don't understand why people are so quick to knock it.
There's nothing quite as soul-draining as staring at a computer screen for 8 hours a day doing pointless, easy, busy work that actively makes the world worse and feels like being a slug.
The way I see it (admittedly, as a 24 year old working in tech for the past 7 years), manual labour is okay, but definitely not something I’d do as a means to get by. My dad worked in construction for most of his life (mainly motivated due to debts incurred while he was locked up and taken up by my “mother”) and it has had an immense toll on his body, mostly back injuries and other non-reversable issues it has caused. But there were still many occasions where I went along with him to Finland, Sweden, and Norway as a “helper”, which have all taught me the value of hard work and dedication, pushing through whatever hardships you might have, and have generally been great for father-son bonding. Now that he however has exited that fieid (to work as a trucker which he loves because it’s basically “getting paid to travel long distances” which he loves), although I value the work done by tradies and have an immense respect for them (or at least the ones working as hard as my dad did), I still don’t see myself ever wanting to do that as a “job”. Since my dad has those skills, he still puts then to good use for personal needs (remodelling the house, fixing the roof, building a gazebo in his yard, etc), I still love going there to help him with all that, but much more as a father-son activity than as work.
I wonder how HN would respond if I asked "heya HN, what programming jobs would fit someone who has 10 years of TIG welding" This is effectively what the OP is asking.
The most interesting thing about programmers is our unshakeable confidence that we could easily do any else's job. Where does that even come from? Coding is not even the hardest job I've done.