Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the “AI-proof career” advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then there’d be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
Sparky's with apprenticeships (in Australia at least) have the advantage of earning while learning while also segueing into the interstitial Hardware / Software zone.
A good many I've known have pulled cable and slogged for several years, invested in shitty old house after another (renovating and flipping), transitioned into running electrical subcontracting companies, and "retired" out of trades and into software careers (in GIS or other domains) in their mid thirties to early forties.
Neither trades nor university education are lifetime commitments or mutually exclusive.
r/electricians is a good place to lurk to get more inside information about this trade. As you note, there are definitely sectors, like resi(dential), commercial, industrial, and they work by different rules.
The speed needed by a residential electrician is very different than the long-term outlook you hear from industrial electricians (“label that box because the next guy to service it could be you”).
Another recurring trope is the perceived hierarchy between the trades. I lose it when a plumber is described as a “turd herder.” And drywallers get no respect.
I find this especially unfortunate given that, in my experience, drywallers understand the rest of the trades far better than vice versa, since they're in the position of being able to see everyone else's completed work.
seeing someone else's work does not mean you really understand it. We've all seen Michelangelo's David, but none of us could recreate it. Just because you've seen the wiring/conduit in the wall does not mean you know the hows/whys about it.
rocket electrician, ... obviously they mean the one that comes and fix your house or breaker panel.
look my brother is an electrician. I do this work too, but for a different reason: in my area they make as much or more than mid level software engineers, so when it's about adding a breaker box they want 8k and if it's not absolutely perfectly easy they might still drop the job. enough of them do and eventually you do it yourself.
obviously, it's quite different for the ones that gotta go daily for a lot less pay, like my brother, and while it doesn't tax your mind as much as tech companies, you do have a tax on the body. plus, they always do quite a bit more than just the electrical wor
In my experience, datacenter industrial electricians seem to take a dim view of the skills of residential specialists as guys who just spend all their time pulling romex, but it's sometimes a lot more complicated than that... Residential has to deal with individual home owners, house flippers, renovation GCs and weird change orders in a way that people working in more technically structure and high-budget environments don't.
I met a professional electrician in college who was in charge of the electrical system in an old high-rise building. He told me that it was common for him to work on high-voltage lines that could not be shut off for service. He said that hearing the pops from the high voltage was not uncommon. He regularly put his life on the line as part of his job. Just hearing that made me want to make sure I got a college degree so I wouldn't have to get a trade job. All trade jobs will wear your body down, and you regularly have to put your health on the line. Saying that trade jobs are the future is easy to say, but there's a catch. You may sacrifice your health. The better route maybe a career where you help reduce the dangers of trade jobs.
On top of all this, electricians don't spend much time doing actual electrical work. Time is spent driving a van, doing metal work, cutting, drilling, crawling around tight spaces etc.
I recently switched to being an electrician in ship construction after a MSc in Computer Science and PhD in Data Science with heavy focus on writing software/services.
So far, I like it a lot. The work is physically demanding but the colleagues are nice, down to earth and come up with good jokes (I also see this a lot when I watch trades videos on YouTube). Also nice is the feeling of having made something at the end of the day and the lack of office politics. I didn’t do any extra education, they say I’m picking it up fast so it seems I can go without. I think that would hold for most programmers since it’s a very similar mindset that you use especially when you start troubleshooting.
The issue is "physically demanding", look at the guys that are 50+ in the trades, they have all sorts of physical issues from working in the trades. I say this as someone who has two JM qualifications.
I always wanted to help people and realized more and more that nobody ever needs a programmer apart from the medium to big corporations. I’d rather help individuals. That plays a big role.
Financially, it doesn’t matter that much. In the Netherlands salaries are much lower than compared to the US while taxation is very high. So I personally don’t care whether I get paid 5200 euro per month or 3200 per month since after correcting for taxes and government benefits the difference is a lot less. I also don’t need much anyway. I don’t mind living in a cheapish house with a cheap car and I also don’t like vacations (I don’t like change). Compared to programmer the salary isn’t that much lower anyway. I could go build my way through management positions in government or so for more bucks but then I would need to spend it on useless things to make me happy again so seems like a net loss too.
I am not this person but in some segments of the market there is significant demand for people who can build ships. The US and Canada are both about to throw dozens of billions of dollars at new domestic military shipbuilding programs, for instance. Somebody with his educational qualifications who can do something electrical in large/complex ships might be able to command quite a high salary.
> For instance, a future job site worker equipped with smart glasses and an earpiece might receive continuous direction via an AI interpreting and providing feedback on their actions.
I see this happening very soon- already, in some cases, for some applications. And I worry that it will be another way for capital to deskill and disempower labour; see Doctorow's "chickenized reverse centaurs" with Amazon drivers and warehouse workers being the classic example.
this is already happening in several nations' military for high value equipment. the tech knows how to use most tools, but does not have full expertise on the specific equipment. Smart glasses not only guide the technician but allows remote expert assistance through the glasses.
I look forward to the future where employers can demand employees to have brain implants so their "smart helmets" can directly wire into their motor control centers. Voila, self healing and self maintaining robots.
Even if the tech was there today, I imagine it would take a couple of generations to socially condition people to not prefer killing themselves to subjecting themselves to this.
I’ve worked trades. I loved a lot about it! But I’m so glad this article pointed out the range of status: not all trades, or roles within one are equal. If you are an incredible welder who can run a perfect seam every time you can command a huge salary. For the rest of the welders it is quite different. If you can handle customers and a crew you can run a quite lucrative electrician shop, for the rest of construction it is quite different. Repeat.
I’m not saying it should be that way, but people need to be clearheaded that a top blue collar job is not as easy as showing up. There are real performance differentiators - reliability, judgement, skill, etc - and the numbers touted often belong to the top performers.
And anyone who thinks office politics go away in a family owned shop is extremely naive. Nepotism is default (and frankly reasonable. Why wouldn’t someone leave their business to their daughter if they were interested?). Large places are like that, too. Someone on a union job asked me point blank who I knew, the implication being that I’d have to know someone to get hired on.
I loved the camaraderie, being on the move, and building something physical. But it wasn’t a nice relaxing stable existence, either.
The other aspect I think people are missing is that, for the right person, the choice isn't between a white collar office job and trades, it's between struggling in retail and service work with a (possibly bad) degree and no upward mobility, where your only escape is into either management or retraining.
For those people, trades are absolutely a better choice - it's not like becoming an HVAC dogs body prevents you from later going to school if you decide it's not for you.
Being wealthy is better than being poor, and being able to pay for college is better than working in construction. However, when choosing a specialty it is important to consider one's preferences. If your child don't want to be a lawyer it doesn't matter whether you can afford paying for the degree, and if he insists he would rather be fixing cars than dealing with documents, helping with a student loan is not really the best thing you can offer as a parent.
The part about blue collar jobs being inherently more deadly doesn't feel right to me. For one, I want to believe we have collectively gotten better in avoiding "dumb" deaths and injuries, these, that could have been prevented by inventing and following safety procedures. The health risks certain profession implies is certainly to be considered when choosing one, white collars included. Desk job kills slowly, but surely.
So, answering to the title, which doesn't seem to be related to the article contents, I absolutely do. Qualified engineer knows enough to be able to double off as a technician, and missing monthly payments is much scarier than high voltage, so if my entire job field was to become obsolete due to AI or any other reason, I would absolutely consider getting out of desk and getting my hands dirty.
>For one, I want to believe we have collectively gotten better in avoiding "dumb" deaths and injuries, these, that could have been prevented by inventing and following safety procedures.
better, yes, but there will always be inherent risk. even if you don't die, there will often be injuries from years of strain
You can only get so much better at reducing "dumb" deaths and injuries when you spend all day every day around things that will kill you if you touch them.
I think the most important aspect of high salary is job demand.
Perhaps once there was a high demand for good SWE coming out of 4 years of $$ tuition uni.
Personal anecdote: Got a buddy who dropped out of Bible school, worked at a auto shop while getting his certs. After 2 years about any dealership would hire him.
He moves, lands a 100k+ job. 2 years later, switches to a dealership in San Jose, earning 150+.
6 months later, he gets an offer to become foreman at a dealership in gilroy with a $5/h raise + foreman benefits. How it works is techs are paid flat rate: Paid per job, not per hour. So if youre good, you can really rake in the money.
Its been wild to see his career arc in real time.
He's highly trained, very handy, Nd he's damn smart at debugging.
Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
He earns more than me who got a MS in ECE.
On the flip side, his job is physical and he works more hours than me.
I get to so R&D, think about cool math, and code. But in another life I'd love do be a tech.
All that said, there's a lot of demand for good auto techs.
> Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
I'm skeptical about this; I can run my 'scope on the CAN bus and decipher the output, but there's no point. I'll use the CAN bus diagnostic reader to determine which of the 27 or so modules are sending malformed messages.
And that, itself, is theoretical - a broken module or poor wiring is still not going to result in messages so fucked up that the diagnostic reader can't read them.
It's like pulling out the 'scope to diagnose your LAN issues; you can do that, but you'd be a moron not to use a network packet sniffer instead.
There's demand but for all but the most specialized stuff (maybe NVH), the work is brutal and the flag hour system sucks ass. Got a warranty job? Better be happy with half pay. Got something that's an absolute bitch to get apart or something goes wrong? Yeah you're still getting paid the same even if it's not your fault. There's a good reason Ford can't find enough auto techs. There's no way I would go back to earning money as a mechanic over something like HVAC or being a millwright.
No, when all the tools fail, they buy back the car or you lemon law it. Story over. It would not happen, does not happen, cannot happen.
I agree with the below poster, this reeks, no one is doing o-scope level debugging on a production vehicle. It's what someone would say that has no idea how cars are designed, built, and serviced in reality.
A few years back, we hired an electrician to do some relatively small things for us—things I could do like replacing light switches with timer switches and the like, but didn’t have time to do. The thing that really blew me away was when I asked him if he wanted me to shut off the power at the breaker box and he said no and did all the work with live current in the wires. Yes, I know, gloves, rubber soled shoes, he was fine, but it still was somewhat terrifying to watch.
I know some electricians who would call this man an idiot. PPE is for when a hazard cannot be avoided, which in this case it could easily have been avoided. Though of course the safety culture and laws differ from place to place.
Have done this too (and am not a professional electrician either) --- you use insulated tools and make sure you stay out of the way of any possible current paths.
Live feedback without additional expensive and buggy test tools. May be marginal, but if you are trying to guarantee a certain income/payrate, it’s easy to take shortcuts in a system you’re comfortable in.
I grew up on a farm. I don’t care what the author says, manual labor is very rewarding. I built my own office, carport, horse stable, chicken coop and many other projects in the evenings after already exhausting work, and if I could make more in construction, I’d pick that over an office job any day of the week.
If you take good care of your body and health, it doesn’t have to be as bad as you think. But a lot of tradies think eating healthy, stretching, eye protection, gloves, etc. are “gayyyyy”.
I had some time and decided to renovate my kitchen. I'm doing everything myself: plasterboard/drywall, flooring, electrical, plumbing, cabinets, painting, etc. I had time to learn the standards and do it all the 'right' way, and I'm almost done.
On one hand it's been incredibly enriching and rewarding. I'll never look at a room the same again. Some areas, like woodworking, also surprisingly required much more deep thinking than I'd anticipated.
On the other hand, I couldn't imagine going through half the nonsense I went though for someone else, especially an ungrateful/fussy/penny-pinching customer.
> The trades are more physical than working in an office, and some people find this — and working outdoors, where much trades work is performed — liberating. Some derive great pleasure from achieving a flow-like state of mind from performing specific physical tasks. Some people find it deeply rewarding to physically make things and to see progress and improvement in doing so over time. Some people derive a deep sense of camaraderie from physically toiling with other people. It could be that any of these, especially when combined with a low sensitivity toward financial compensation or status, makes the trades a better fit than white-collar employment.
Simple enough, one group will be living in houses falling apart, the other group will be renovating distressed cheap housing into relative mansions to live in or flip at cost or less.
There is a much larger number of people who can do electrical work than those who are "electricians". We will instead see more people doing their own work, mostly with success.
Regardless, dry walling, stud framing, roof trussing, foundations, plumbing, gas fitting, electrics, etc are all umbrella's under "blue collar work".
Those who can, will, those who can't won't - and in response to the question posed, those who can no longer afford will either have to learn how or put up with decay creep.
Well, in principle the economy scales to the labor constraint.
Obviously there are practical limitations to how fast things can rearrange but there's no reason in principle you couldn't have an economy where everyone retrained into blue collar work, and all white collar job needs were handled by the magic internet box.
I'm an electrician. I used to be a programmer. I still program for fun and sometimes get small gigs.
In my city the pay scale for the first 5-7 years of a grad software engineer and grad electrician careers are comparable and I expect that to be the case in most of the world outside the handful of American bubbles. One thing I enjoy is that the minimum pay is regulated by a union so I don't have to hop job every year to make sure I'm not underpaid.
After that the salaries diverge quite quickly and the ceiling is much much lower as an electrician.
It's still pretty good money, though, so I don't think that's really a con to this career.
What was the transition like? How did this article's description of union electrical work as like the "McKinsey partner" of the trades world strike you?
The article literally admits is first point was misleading.
My carpenter buddy sets his own schedule, spends his time pulling his camper, works extra when he wants to, floats in and out of his union asks (exploiting their rigidity).
He’s been at it for years, so he’s a qualified instructor for anything he can get his hands on, even esoteric stuff like pouring concrete for nuclear facilities.
His job is hardly comparable to an Amazon driver, like this article conflates. Bro makes more than an equiv exper and age software dev, but with no glass ceiling.
There is the house wirer, the panel builder, automotive electrician, HV, marine, drilling, industrial, maintenance etc etc.
Some kinds pay better, others yield work almost wherever you go, others lend themselves to starting your own business better.
It is nowhere near as homogenous as often described.
A good many I've known have pulled cable and slogged for several years, invested in shitty old house after another (renovating and flipping), transitioned into running electrical subcontracting companies, and "retired" out of trades and into software careers (in GIS or other domains) in their mid thirties to early forties.
Neither trades nor university education are lifetime commitments or mutually exclusive.
The speed needed by a residential electrician is very different than the long-term outlook you hear from industrial electricians (“label that box because the next guy to service it could be you”).
Another recurring trope is the perceived hierarchy between the trades. I lose it when a plumber is described as a “turd herder.” And drywallers get no respect.
I find this especially unfortunate given that, in my experience, drywallers understand the rest of the trades far better than vice versa, since they're in the position of being able to see everyone else's completed work.
look my brother is an electrician. I do this work too, but for a different reason: in my area they make as much or more than mid level software engineers, so when it's about adding a breaker box they want 8k and if it's not absolutely perfectly easy they might still drop the job. enough of them do and eventually you do it yourself.
obviously, it's quite different for the ones that gotta go daily for a lot less pay, like my brother, and while it doesn't tax your mind as much as tech companies, you do have a tax on the body. plus, they always do quite a bit more than just the electrical wor
However the main point is: just pay attention to who is telling you to get a job in the trades instead of a knowledge one.
He had to spelunk under the house to run new lines, cut concrete, dig trenches, and scuba (yes, SCUBA!) with tools to get everything done.
Maybe 5% of his time had to do with electricity. In my mind, I really paid him to dive into 55f degree water.
So far, I like it a lot. The work is physically demanding but the colleagues are nice, down to earth and come up with good jokes (I also see this a lot when I watch trades videos on YouTube). Also nice is the feeling of having made something at the end of the day and the lack of office politics. I didn’t do any extra education, they say I’m picking it up fast so it seems I can go without. I think that would hold for most programmers since it’s a very similar mindset that you use especially when you start troubleshooting.
Financially, it doesn’t matter that much. In the Netherlands salaries are much lower than compared to the US while taxation is very high. So I personally don’t care whether I get paid 5200 euro per month or 3200 per month since after correcting for taxes and government benefits the difference is a lot less. I also don’t need much anyway. I don’t mind living in a cheapish house with a cheap car and I also don’t like vacations (I don’t like change). Compared to programmer the salary isn’t that much lower anyway. I could go build my way through management positions in government or so for more bucks but then I would need to spend it on useless things to make me happy again so seems like a net loss too.
I see this happening very soon- already, in some cases, for some applications. And I worry that it will be another way for capital to deskill and disempower labour; see Doctorow's "chickenized reverse centaurs" with Amazon drivers and warehouse workers being the classic example.
I’m not saying it should be that way, but people need to be clearheaded that a top blue collar job is not as easy as showing up. There are real performance differentiators - reliability, judgement, skill, etc - and the numbers touted often belong to the top performers.
And anyone who thinks office politics go away in a family owned shop is extremely naive. Nepotism is default (and frankly reasonable. Why wouldn’t someone leave their business to their daughter if they were interested?). Large places are like that, too. Someone on a union job asked me point blank who I knew, the implication being that I’d have to know someone to get hired on.
I loved the camaraderie, being on the move, and building something physical. But it wasn’t a nice relaxing stable existence, either.
For those people, trades are absolutely a better choice - it's not like becoming an HVAC dogs body prevents you from later going to school if you decide it's not for you.
The part about blue collar jobs being inherently more deadly doesn't feel right to me. For one, I want to believe we have collectively gotten better in avoiding "dumb" deaths and injuries, these, that could have been prevented by inventing and following safety procedures. The health risks certain profession implies is certainly to be considered when choosing one, white collars included. Desk job kills slowly, but surely.
So, answering to the title, which doesn't seem to be related to the article contents, I absolutely do. Qualified engineer knows enough to be able to double off as a technician, and missing monthly payments is much scarier than high voltage, so if my entire job field was to become obsolete due to AI or any other reason, I would absolutely consider getting out of desk and getting my hands dirty.
better, yes, but there will always be inherent risk. even if you don't die, there will often be injuries from years of strain
Perhaps once there was a high demand for good SWE coming out of 4 years of $$ tuition uni.
Personal anecdote: Got a buddy who dropped out of Bible school, worked at a auto shop while getting his certs. After 2 years about any dealership would hire him.
He moves, lands a 100k+ job. 2 years later, switches to a dealership in San Jose, earning 150+.
6 months later, he gets an offer to become foreman at a dealership in gilroy with a $5/h raise + foreman benefits. How it works is techs are paid flat rate: Paid per job, not per hour. So if youre good, you can really rake in the money.
Its been wild to see his career arc in real time.
He's highly trained, very handy, Nd he's damn smart at debugging.
Basically doing CAN bus diagnostics with an oscope and logic analyzer.
He earns more than me who got a MS in ECE.
On the flip side, his job is physical and he works more hours than me.
I get to so R&D, think about cool math, and code. But in another life I'd love do be a tech.
All that said, there's a lot of demand for good auto techs.
I'm skeptical about this; I can run my 'scope on the CAN bus and decipher the output, but there's no point. I'll use the CAN bus diagnostic reader to determine which of the 27 or so modules are sending malformed messages.
And that, itself, is theoretical - a broken module or poor wiring is still not going to result in messages so fucked up that the diagnostic reader can't read them.
It's like pulling out the 'scope to diagnose your LAN issues; you can do that, but you'd be a moron not to use a network packet sniffer instead.
I feel bad for mechanics in the rust belt getting paid what another mechanic gets paid for much more effort
They are using an OEM diagnostic tool and following approved shop procedures.
I agree with the below poster, this reeks, no one is doing o-scope level debugging on a production vehicle. It's what someone would say that has no idea how cars are designed, built, and serviced in reality.
What gloves? For 110V? Bah!
Unless you’re a complete idiot and try to cut both wires at once with a conductive cutter, nothing happens when you snip them one by one.
And selection bias means we don’t see those guys around for long.
2. You are thinking of survivorship bias, selection bias is a different thing.
If you take good care of your body and health, it doesn’t have to be as bad as you think. But a lot of tradies think eating healthy, stretching, eye protection, gloves, etc. are “gayyyyy”.
On one hand it's been incredibly enriching and rewarding. I'll never look at a room the same again. Some areas, like woodworking, also surprisingly required much more deep thinking than I'd anticipated.
On the other hand, I couldn't imagine going through half the nonsense I went though for someone else, especially an ungrateful/fussy/penny-pinching customer.
Fortunately, the author says:
> The trades are more physical than working in an office, and some people find this — and working outdoors, where much trades work is performed — liberating. Some derive great pleasure from achieving a flow-like state of mind from performing specific physical tasks. Some people find it deeply rewarding to physically make things and to see progress and improvement in doing so over time. Some people derive a deep sense of camaraderie from physically toiling with other people. It could be that any of these, especially when combined with a low sensitivity toward financial compensation or status, makes the trades a better fit than white-collar employment.
Those who can, will, those who can't won't - and in response to the question posed, those who can no longer afford will either have to learn how or put up with decay creep.
Obviously there are practical limitations to how fast things can rearrange but there's no reason in principle you couldn't have an economy where everyone retrained into blue collar work, and all white collar job needs were handled by the magic internet box.
In my city the pay scale for the first 5-7 years of a grad software engineer and grad electrician careers are comparable and I expect that to be the case in most of the world outside the handful of American bubbles. One thing I enjoy is that the minimum pay is regulated by a union so I don't have to hop job every year to make sure I'm not underpaid.
After that the salaries diverge quite quickly and the ceiling is much much lower as an electrician.
It's still pretty good money, though, so I don't think that's really a con to this career.
My carpenter buddy sets his own schedule, spends his time pulling his camper, works extra when he wants to, floats in and out of his union asks (exploiting their rigidity).
He’s been at it for years, so he’s a qualified instructor for anything he can get his hands on, even esoteric stuff like pouring concrete for nuclear facilities.
His job is hardly comparable to an Amazon driver, like this article conflates. Bro makes more than an equiv exper and age software dev, but with no glass ceiling.