This reminds me of the excellent book: Making Things Right... "An enriching and poetic tribute to manual labour."
Just Your Handyman
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: Just Your Handyman
#32I run my IT business this way, and it feels very similar. Many times I say "yes" then I have to figure out how to make yes true.
Integrity is one of my targets. And I mostly sleep well at night.
Re: Just Your Handyman
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well said. Educators and parents don't do a great job of saying "if you want to be A, then you should work on your V skills" or "while you may be passionate about C, it is not a career.. have you considered D,E,F?". And also for those going off to college it would be useful to have the hard conversation early "while it may be fun to live in G HCOL city for 4 years, if you want to make a life there, you are going to n…
He didn't mean it in this way at all (it was really a reference to how to live in a racially discriminatory society) but I always liked James Farmer's > We do what we have to so we can do what we want to
The surprising thing, tho, is that even if you win the lottery, so that you end up not really having to do anything, you'll still find out that "work" is a requirement for a fulfilling life.
Re: Just Your Handyman
#34> My kids get regular doses of “No limits!” and “You can be whatever you want!” in school, and I resent it because it simply isn’t true. You cannot actually be whatever you want. That’s harmful, sentimental garbage. Fact is, the real world is chock full of limits. This is the danger of participation awards. It's how people end up in careers they aren't suited to. As a society, we owe it to our children to be honest w…
I agree with your sentiment, but I would add two caveats:
1) Its not obvious, and hard to predict, when something one enjoys would actually make an satisfying career. Many find that turning passions into means-to-put-food-on-the-table kills the passion, or warps it.
2) Its not obvious, and hard to predict, how the mental and physical health hit will be from a "financially challenging life". Some are fine scraping by, but on average, being financially insecure is highly correlated with depression, suicide, anxiety, substance abuse issues, divorce, etc etc.
All that to say, its good to be as realistic as possible with children, and as another suggested not only focus on high time frame decisions, and as you suggested avoid casting things as merely financial decisions.
Re: Just Your Handyman
#35Great read. Several parts resonated with me. This one early in the article stood out: > But the vast majority of what I know in my work has come from continuously saying “yes” to jobs I’ve never done before – I decided I could figure them out by being careful. I learned something like the above from my dad — watching him jump head-long into things he knew nothing about (or very little about). When I was a teenager an…
I think that there is a whole skill set in learning how to do what your father was doing, and it has been one that I've worked on a lot in my life.
One thing you may keep in mind is that "getting fired" or "hiring another contractor" aren't, in fact, the "worst that can happen".
I have been doing a certain amount of "entertainment rigging" (suspending $100K+ stacks of speakers in the air for concerts). I didn't have as great a perception of our responsibilities for the safety of other people until I started working on things that could easily kill someone if the job is done poorly. My standard went from "would I stand under that?" to "would I let my buddy's kids stand under that"?
In many things there are plenty of "even worse" outcomes- your water system could have lead in it, for instance. Or the wall could blow down and kill someone.
I don't say that as a criticism of your father; rather there are two motivations:
a) part (perhaps most) of the skill set of being willing to try and fail is knowing when to call someone else who does "know"
b) it's good to be kind with ourselves about being a little afraid when we are doing things because often we can't know what we don't know.
Re: Just Your Handyman
#36Wonder how many on HN are like this, but with software or other industries. I'm not building sky scrapers (next triple AAA game engine), I'm fixing the leak in the ceiling (bug with some in-house corporate gui). It can be a little soul-draining, but do it for the kids.
I’m always driven to reach for more, in my career. I don’t think that’s ideal for happiness. Maybe it’s not always even ideal for my career. Through COVID, I’ve had a lot of obvious gains. I used to commute four hours a day, and now I work from home. I’m paid more. I’m working with more interesting technology. Despite all of that, I still alternate between putting a lot of effort into finding my next step to a bigger…
> The handyman must be less restless.
Why? They may not have the next step as clearly "defined", but there are endless ways to "level up"
Re: Just Your Handyman
#37> My kids get regular doses of “No limits!” and “You can be whatever you want!” in school, and I resent it because it simply isn’t true. You cannot actually be whatever you want. That’s harmful, sentimental garbage. Fact is, the real world is chock full of limits. This is the danger of participation awards. It's how people end up in careers they aren't suited to. As a society, we owe it to our children to be honest w…
[deleted]
Re: Just Your Handyman
#38Neat article. If you squint, I don't think there is a ton of difference between what most handymen do and what most software engineers do: they both have some generalizable skills, and when they get asked to do something they say 'yes' and then figure out how to do it. I don't think the challenge level of most day-to-day software tasks is any harder than the "where'd that water stain come from" puzzle he described in…
the handymen, plumbers, and electricians of the world will be mostly unaffected. Their work is hard to automate.
It’s funny, when I started in ML 10 years ago people said the same thing about writers, artists, musicians. And yet here we are today. Robotics is just the next thing to be “solved” in AI field, the same way computer vision or NLP got solved - after decades of hard effort and little progress. Once the algorithms are ready people will build robots who will be much better than humans at any physical tasks: faster and more precise.
Re: Just Your Handyman
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly agree with you. I've been a full-time software engineer for the past 28 years and a part-time handyman for the past 5 months. One of the biggest differences that you don't mention is the use of your body. Software engineering is purely intellectual -- often to the detriment of your body (or mine, anyways) since it's often the case where I sit at the keyboard for hours on end, day after day. As a handyman, yo…
> One of the biggest differences that you don't mention is the use of your body. Oh, for sure. I was a dev for many years, then switched to product design. What I left out of my first comment was that my older brother is a maintenance guy for a hospital—basically a handyman with an office in the basement. Growing up, it was clear that he was at least as smart as me, but at a certain point he went one direction and I…
Having a lot more electricians is not necessarily a bad thing. I've seen some estimates of the number of new electricians the US would need in order to handle the electrification of the country if we want to stave off further climate change, and it was in the tens of millions.
This number will be very difficult to achieve, but that does mean that being an electrician should continue to be a good job for quite a long time, even if lots of new people go into it.
Re: Just Your Handyman
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
He didn't mean it in this way at all (it was really a reference to how to live in a racially discriminatory society) but I always liked James Farmer's > We do what we have to so we can do what we want to
The surprising thing, tho, is that even if you win the lottery, so that you end up not really having to do anything, you'll still find out that "work" is a requirement for a fulfilling life.
Work is a requirement for fulfilling life, not job.
Winning lottery you can do any work, not just grinding 9-5 pointless job.