An electrician finishes up a wiring job for a lawyer and presents her with an invoice.

The lawyer looks at it and says, "Wow, I don't even charge that much per hour and I'm a lawyer"

The electrician says, "Tell me about it. I didn't charge that much when I was a lawyer either"

Two confounding factors:

1. billed hours in the trades don't include travel to or from the worksite; if the plumber is 30 minutes from you and the job takes an hour, they're already down to $75/hr.

2. software contracting can be done from anywhere. You can live in rural Kentucky and charge a high rate. But plumbers and electricians in rural Kentucky probably aren't charging $150/hr for house calls.

I assume your plumber isn't getting 8 hours per day though. A lot of time in wasted in commuting and paperwork (I assume).

I’ve interacted with probably close to 50 contractors of various trades for my house. They all insist on physically coming to give an estimate and a good chunk end up completely ghosting you. Most of them could have done an estimate over zoom -- definitely an interesting bunch of folks.

I found thumbtack to be pretty good for small jobs.

The reason for the physical visit is because a lot of trades work is the computer equivalent of "hey, I just want to get Okta retrofitted to this web app", where that the web app is 25,000 lines of php and perl written at various different times by developers of varying skill levels.

Ghosting is because they don't need your work right now and are kind of dumb or ADD with bad "back office". The ones who don't ghost want onsite estimates too, because they want to size you up as a legit client, and make a sales impression. (Smooth talking white guys for the estimate, Latin Americans for the work, possibly day laborers not employees)

Small ones like leaky pipe or drywall, when the owner (or sole proprietor) is the laborer, they just come out and do on first visit.

That seems to be changing. I've had a couple give me an estimate over text/email and when I ask if they want to come look at it, they are obviously reluctant to do so.

They're probably also being ghosted by their prospects and don't want to waste the drive time.

My neighbor will have 4-5 contractors come over to quote a job. Half the time he ends up doing it himself.

I can't decide if the plumber should be charging more or less. It's hard to put a value on not having to go outside to an outhouse.

Are they dealing with blackwater or copper or pex? Because any fool can do pex and soldering honestly doesn’t take much skill, and no amount is too much for dealing with some stranger’s blackwater.

I get the not having to part, but I wish it was acceptable to have one in our backyards.

If it’s well built, they’ll be less odourful than a standard toilet/bathroom by drawing air away from where it’s the worst.

In my country in Europe the guys who put bathroom tiles make more hourly than java developers.

As he should; tiling is highly skilled labor -- closer to applied art than construction, really -- and destroys your body.

We work with Java devs in the Balkans and $70-130/hr is normal.

Where in Europe do tile guys make more than that? (I’m assuming that Java rates have some global or at least EU stickiness)

Java dev pay is far far more variable than tile laying: $20-$130/hr

$20-130/hr seems to be a reasonable range for tile laying (at least in California). A semi-skilled day laborer may charge $150/day and $100/hr is reasonable or even hard to find for a highly skilled artisan.

Similar in Chicago. Electricans as well