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But you are doing exactly same stuff as software developer - sitting all day at computer is not healthy for body or mind either.
You can mitigate that by taking frequent breaks, and getting a standing desk. How can you mitigate wear to your body while working for the trades?
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Especially if you are remotely trustworthy and have good people skills. The good tradespeople I know are recommended by everybody else I know and constantly backlogged. Plumbers, HVAC, Electricians, General Contractors, etc
I'm a house painter, and I'm about a year out from now. It's better than no work, but it's rather insane. "I'd love to but it will be 8 months or so and I can't imagine you'd want to wait that long". "Oh no, well wait!". And the list grows longer.
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There is another aspect too. It completely breaks your body. Electricians get carpal tunnel worse than information workers by constantly squeezing lineman pliers, knees get shot. Your career path is work like that and hopefully before you get older, start your own company and hire younger people to do the body breaking work. But not everyone in the field will end up doing that so many end up in bad shape
And you have to go do it. I love working behind a computer. I sit in a chair. Waking up at 5am to go to a client site to do some physical labor 40+ hours a week for my entire life sounds like hell. Even if the money was incredible it would suck.
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I am unable to follow your logic from the first sentence to the second please elaborate.
The way you guarantee job stability would probably be to pay union members a salary even when they're temporarily not needed right? Then you pay this salary out using union dues. Union dues end up garnishing take-home wages which removes the incentive to specialize. ^ That was how I was imagining it. Am I wrong in thinking this way? Or is the argument that the urge to specialize is independent of wage?
Let's look at ATC as an example:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/a...
> Their work can be stressful because maximum concentration is required at all times. Night, weekend, and rotating shifts are common.
Well, maybe there could be better agreements than rotating shifts on a very stressful job, don't you think so?
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But you are doing exactly same stuff as software developer - sitting all day at computer is not healthy for body or mind either.
You don’t have to do this and let yourself degrade. Many engineers I know including myself don’t. You have to prioritize your health and there is definitely room to work on software and stay healthy if you make it a priority. The first step is not to work for a hellish company that wants you slugging away 80+ hours a week.
"We need more tradespeople" seems to be an evergreen news article. My brother in law is an electrician. He is paid alright, enough to live on. But there are HUGE downsides. He does not receive health insurance. He does not get paid vacation. In order to match decent white-collar pay, he needs to work overtime. His company pushes hard to get jobs finished fast, causing people to cut safety corners. Many of his coworke…
> America needs carpenters and plumbers. Try telling that to Gen Z Look, as long as we have a market economy, here's how you tell it to Gen Z: raise the wages for carpenters and plumbers (and if necessary shift some of that forward into subsidies and incentives for people to train as carpenters and plumbers) until you get as many as you say you “need”. If America isn’t willing to pay enough to get X carpenters and Y…
There is a psychology problem with skilled trades and younger generates in the US. I've known Gen Z folks who thinks it's better to work at a sandwich shop or small restaurant than skilled trades. They were raised up (through the schooling environment) to look down on trades. Even if it pays them significantly more with better benefits. Many places in the US school system they only prepare people for college. Schools…
I make most of my money now doing odd side-jobs of my choosing, the combined trades knowledge is useful but its not true trades work. Building someones home hobby aquarium or researching and installing high efficiency grow lights pays far more than doing plumbing or electrical trade work does. But if i didn't do this work? I would still go back to a sandwich shop for a minor pay decrease rather than fucking around with tradework that will cut 20 years off my life with inconsistent and unpredictable hours and jobs and constant boom and bust cycles of construction and trade work.
How much of this is class signifiers in the age of increasingly tenuous existences on anyone but the wealthy? I wouldn’t own a farm even with existing subsidies on agriculture specifically because it will destroy my body and then I’ll be on the hook for all that healthcare.
If you own the farm its your farmhands that are breaking their body while you sip coffee and order seed.
Owning a “family” farm basically doesn’t make economic sense anymore and hasn’t for awhile. The cost of equipment, maintenance, fertilizer, seed, and chemicals have all gone up significantly and at the same time are now offered under more and more one-sided terms to the detriment of farmers without mass capital backing.
Operating a farm is a game of desperation to cash flow your payments for everything while still eeking out basic subsistence, and the payback periods run most of a lifetime to sometimes effectively infinite (a lot of modern farming systems are subscription based).
Most farms don’t even have farmhands. You have kids, kids who hate being stuck in the middle of nowhere as they’re exposed to idealized city life through media and the Internet. Kids who leave as soon as they’re able so they don’t get stuck in a dying small town, scraping by, with no relationship prospects, and no positive future in sight.
You are unhinged if you think farming is easy.
- Signed, one of the kids who fled to the city/tech.
It's a completely legitimate given those two roles carry far more social capital than being a plumber or electrician.