Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 470 posts

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#331

Post by GrizzlyMcGee »

blobbers wrote: post #101
mikewarot wrote: post #29

I took a job making gears in a job shop. I learned quite a lot of interesting things. However, the pay and commute were both horrible. I caught Covid in March 2020, and have been dealing with Long Covid ever since. Now I find myself needing to jump back into programming, and my strongly preferred language is Pascal. It's going to be an interesting ride. If you do this yourself, make sure you have planned for continge…

Hope your covid gets better. How does one "jump" into Pascal? I used Pascal in 1992 programming in high school on a Mac LCiii, and never really thought about it again. Do modern compilers even exist for this language? What genuinely curious what you could possibly want you to program in Pascal let alone prefer using it for anything meaningful?

It is possible to do Delphi development: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow...

Although I personally don't know anyone that uses this and there probably isn't many jobs for this.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#332

Post by hotpotamus »

redisman wrote: post #328
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #25

I'm a software engineer who does his own plumbing and his own electrical. Example projects: * rewire 1920's three story house with romex instead of knob & tube * install 6.6kW ground mount PV arrays and connect to grid * replumb two kitchens and three bathrooms * install water softener (all copper, dozens of required brazed joints) I love doing that stuff (carpentry and cabinet building too). But ... a couple of time…

That’s what I always thought about programming. So fun when you do it as a hobby and meh when you’re 10+ years into building business requirements

Yeah - I wonder about the age / experience level of commentors in this thread. If you had told me in my 20's about burnout (and I'm pretty sure people did tell me), I'd have said I love tech too much and it'll never happen to me. Now in my 30's it's a struggle. I think the last decade was pretty rough too, perhaps if I was a bit older and gotten into tech professionally in the 90's it might have been more of a fun ride, but it's also possible that's just nostalgia.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#333

Post by Fuzzwah »

I laboured for my Dad when I was 19. He was a master plasterer (dry waller for the Americans). We worked together for months travelling around Queensland (an Australian state the size of Texas). It was hot and draining work. Over the course of my 25 years of IT work, on the difficult days I've often looked back on those days and thought, "still better than sanding ceilings in 40 degree Celsius heat.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#334

Post by Apocryphon »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #222
firstplacelast wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I get it, but also people are way overhyping software development in this thread (which is expected on a tech website). The only thing going for it is an insane salary and lots of us don’t have those. I’ve worked in biotech/healthcare and have never had anything close to a FAANG salary even in a HCOL area. I burned out and am just now taking a month off to just exist. I have had the same thoughts about going blue-…

Software development has a lot more going for it than just high salaries. You have a enormous amount of bargaining power and ability to be picky about working conditions.

People always say this to claim that software engineers don’t need to organize, but consider a very banal but ubiquitous example pre-pandemic: if open offices are so universally despised, why was it used everywhere in tech? And why was remote work so rare in the industry despite worker demand for it?

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#335

Post by toyg »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #314
wbl wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just had fun with replacing a bathroom door knob that involved far more power tools than expected I'm not sure I can agree.

The tools might work. But then you discover the plumber from 20 years ago did something crazy. Or the wiring makes a left turn in the space between 1st and 2nd floor for some reason. Thee dimmer switch that was $15 and should have taken 10 min to install actually does not have enough clearance behind it because a drain pipe is there, and so you need a special smaller size electrical box or you need to cut holes in th…

Just another day in the life of a legacy enterprise project maintainer.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#336

Post by s1artibartfast »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #151
lolinder wrote: post #23

This comment and its top reply are dead on: https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/sm54ri/a... No job is going to get you away from unreasonable people with unreasonable expectations, and most trades introduce a bunch of other unpleasant things that you'd have to deal with. It's all tradeoffs. Someone may legitimately prefer the stresses of a trade to the stresses of working in software, and that's great…

Stresses of a trade? Never "plumbed" professionally, so I can't speak from experience. But from other non-software jobs I have had, I know it was easy to "leave work at work". Software development followed me home, lived in my brain 24/7. It also caused a good deal of stress I was unaware of at the time.

I think the ease of leaving work at work is probably a better proxy for age and commitment to your job. If you know it is a short term job or career, it is easy to leave there.

If you need the job, you start to care. Even with manual labor, there are problems that didn't get solved that need to be worked out before 7 AM tomorrow. I would say it is even harder to leave it at work. If a pipe breaks, and water is pouring out, sleeping on it isnt an option

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#337

Post by dspillett »

jedberg wrote: post #64

This last summer/fall really put things in perspective for me. We did a major outdoor renovation at our house, which involved landscapers, plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. Every day these guys would show up at 8am and long sleeves and jeans and hard hats, work super hard, pee in a port-a-potty, and be exhausted by the end of the day. They worked out in the 100 degree heat as well as the rain as the job got nea…

I currently work with people¹ who quit construction & plumbing to retrain in tech for pretty much the reasons you describe. The two I work with right now are a dev manager and a support tech, another I'm no longer in contact with was a senior dev, none of them to my knowledge hanker to return to their old working lives.

None of them were top-level contractors, those who plan and hand out work to others, instead being people on the ground working on sometimes physically demanding tasks in all conditions and being the public face of the operation so sometimes interacting with difficult members of the public. Maybe if you get one of those management/middle-management jobs in construction the dynamic would be different, but then again you'll have a lot of the same problems that make me avoid management/middle-management jobs in our industry.

[1] and have known others

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#338

Post by civilized »

artemonster wrote: post #298
civilized wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you don't believe what you just said you did? I'm genuinely asking what you believe, as opposed to what you assert for the sake of argument. For me, it's not an easy topic but I would say when negative generalizations escalate to exclusion and dehumanization, that's probably where to draw the line. I know some people with Audis and I don't think worse of them or anything like that. It's just a funny th…

Thank you for the insight on where you draw the line, that explains a lot. Still, a hard terrain to navigate on when you can say something and when you can't, even if you make correct statements backed up by data. Just to be clear we're on the same page: I've made absolutely same observation about other bmw drivers. and we, humans, do exactly that: observe and generalize. Regarding my personal beliefs, as I've stated…

On the difference between making these generalizations along racial lines vs other things - it mostly comes down to the fact that our ancestors ruined the fun. After humanity had used certain type of statements to justify mass dehumanization, slavery, Holocaust, etc., people don't want to see that happen again. Then it's just a question of how big a red circle we want to draw around that kind of talk. Most people found a simple ban on racial generalizations relatively intuitive and practical. I'd prefer a more freewheeling culture but it's above my pay grade at this point.

Side point - in general an important thing to remember here is the big, big difference between P(A|B) and P(B|A). It could be the case that all aggressive drivers I ever encounter are BMW drivers, and yet the rate of aggressive BMW drivers could be very low and of little practical predictive value on any individual BMW driver (e.g. 1% of BMW drivers versus 0% for non-BMW drivers).

People are already bad at distinguishing an implication and its converse, and they're quite a bit worse at the statistical version of the same.

Arguably this is a reason we should keep our generalizations to ourselves, even if they're accurate. A lot of people will take them to mean a lot more than they do.

It's not my style, but I do recognize the risk.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#339

Post by Denzel »

mcbishop wrote: post #228
Denzel wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you still doing software while training to become an electrician? I'd like to become a licensed electrician. After completing a few successful projects around the house, and studying the 2020 NEC inside out, I looked into becoming licensed. The required 4 year apprenticeship, before I'm able to take the exam, turned me off. How would I ever be able to satisfy that requirement while keeping my day job. It's like a…

I do field work 3-4 days a week. In the other 1-2, I set aside time to do software. Relying on electrical work for income, the pressure is off to monetize the software work. ...This has made it more fun. Yeah, people learn / master at different rates so it's too bad they require so many hours to qualify for a license. Once you're a journeyperson and have your chops, you could arrange a profit share (or something) und…

Props to you for designing the life you want and thanks for the reply :) Happy to hear you're having more fun in this arrangement.

Re: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?

#340

Post by hgomersall »

e4e78a06 wrote: post #279
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar idea was expressed by Marx, who referred to it as estranged labour . Forgive the lengthy quote: > the object which labor produces – labor's product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these…

Very ironic that the USSR ended up forcing most people into state-chosen jobs. I think it's nice to think of some ideal future where everyone works on what they want to work on but society needs people to do the dirty work that nobody wants to do. Janitor, garbageman, sewer maintenance, warehouse worker, etc. A lot of Marx's ideas are just ideas, not anything that could ever be realized in the real world.

In said hypothetical world, the crappy jobs would come with the highest prestige, because nobody would want to do them, so the payoff would need to be something other than reducing the risk of starvation.
Post reply on HN