Personally I sometimes wonder if I'd have enjoyed plumbing water more than plumbing code as I'd be meeting more people face to face, physically active, and it can get surprisingly complex (Berkeley, I think, offers a postgrad cert in plumbing buildings like sky scrapers which I saw advertised the other day)

Unfortunately, other states in the US have much weaker unions or none at all, especially in the south.

Then there was that famous failed attempt at unionizing the Amazon warehouse in Alabama? I think? Yeah there was a lot of shady stuff going down but it just does not look good among all the other failures.

Unions might exist, but they might not have the same teeth they'd have in states with friendlier organizing laws.

My brother in law lives in SC where unionization and labor protection is especially weak. I don't think that the balance of power is going to shift away from the bosses and towards him any time soon.

It's probably not as bad as tech support, where you can guarantee that the person on the other end of the phone is angry. But it's probably at least as bad as retail, and nobody ever says "I love meeting people so I'll go handle cash from strangers".

I know that there are extroverts in the world who get a charge out of meeting new people every day. And there's a big bonus to not sitting in a chair in front of a screen, especially if you're one of those. But I've got a feeling you're a lot happier with coding-level salaries and meeting strangers after you clock out.

I get it, trades are important, but let's not glamorize them.

Depends on the type of plumber.

Plumbers doing boiler installs or hydronic heating systems aren't dealing with toilets at all, they are doing applied engineering and math however.

I've know trades folks who are electricians, plumbers, carpenters, work in road construction, etc. They typically work reasonable hours, have medical, and are paid at or above the median income for where they live. They didn't rack up debt getting into this either. This is not a bad deal for many people.

Outside of big cities, there may not be enough demand, esp. consistent demand, to justify good pay and bennies.

My uncle is a welder, has a lot of specializations including some underwater stuff. No shortage of offers... for 6 weeks of work in nowhere-ville, often requiring you to supply your own transport and housing. 3 months in FL, 6 months in NC, 8 weeks in GA. And they all pay crap.

I guess that depends how far outside cities. In the suburbs there is demand.

There is a shortage of trades and many trades folks are older in age. When they retire there isn't the back fill behind them. And all of this is happening as the population is growing.

Largely for residential, which is relatively cheap and lower-skilled. (Not low-skilled, but the barrier to entry is lower.)

And those people are filling trade skill jobs. [3]

> More than one-third of construction laborers (686,000 workers), at least 30 percent of carpenters (382,000 workers), and 45 percent of painters and paperhangers (264,000 workers) are immigrants.

And without them the population long term would decrease (which is obvious from the low fertility rate). [4]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/us/immigration-census-pop...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

[3] https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/covid19-immig...

[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/census-finds-us-population-will-de...

The person that does travel welding usually has a setup like a big truck and a pull behind RV. They jump from job site to job site staying campgrounds, county / public property where overnight parking was allowed (previously Walmart parking lots).

As long as the job site is further than 50-100 miles from home you get paid a per diem which granted won't pay for a 4 star hotel, but at 65$ a day (rate depending on location) x 30 (6 5 day work weeks) $1950 then another $25 a day for food $750. This is untaxed and on top of your normal hourly rate. These jobs tend to need to be done on a quick time frame so most do not only work 40 hour work weeks but most are working 60-80 hours. So there is also an insane potential for overtime.

You're selling your health and body as a tradesman. If you can make the transition to running a trades business, then you're selling your brainpower more than your body.

Success stories in the trades are fairly consistent in this matter.

Selling your brainpower meaning managing the people who will sell their health and body as tradesmen. A minor racket.

A racket? He just became a 'wealth creator'! How dare you compare a visionary entrepreneur to a pimp!

What ambiguity? A pimp IS an entrepreneur! And in many cases here the investors are pimps - selling teams of people with questionable output to the public via IPO!

Then there is also someone that is 100% sarcastic and that if you look at society closely, that exchange is probably one of the least exploitative in present day society. I mean we take the healthiest demographic on the planet, force them to be sedentary for 8+ hours per day, submitting themselves constantly to eye strain, and we make them pay for it. Now that's a racket.

If you don't like the current breed of disaster capitalism, and the fact that most of your productive output belongs to someone else, you have failed in life and must be a jealous socialist.

If you are successfull and wealthy, you are even worse - Champaign socialist.

If you are actually Schumpeterian, tou are still gonna be called a socialist because they are economically illiterate.

I mean, yeah, on balance I’d rather be an API plumber than an actual physical plumber — code smells are less nauseating than poop smells — but there are advantages to jobs that keep you moving around.

I don't think most employers would fire an employee for taking drugs to improve their performance.

Regardless of safety (and I say this as someone who used to take prescription Adderrall myself) there are negative side effects, and long-term effects.

Also couldnt help but laugh at you reporting people to HR. That is cute.

"Well if you aren't in one of the good areas you'll get fucked" doesn't tend to make it into articles like the linked above and I think it is worth knowing.

And so what? "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles" is a very different narrative than what is usually presented.

There isn’t any automatic get rich easy scheme. To some extent you have to keep your wits about and make sure you are getting your worth

Everyone I know in the trades "put in their dues" with at least 10 years of working for someone else, doing the shit jobs, working outside in the rain, in the mud, in the heat, in crawlspaces, in attics, etc.

The smart, driven ones learn all they can, advance, build relationships and reputation, and start their own businesses. The lazy or dumb ones continue to do the crap jobs for their entire career.

And even that, management and business skills are not the same thing as being good tradesman. Just like with programming, you can be smart and driven and not be management material.

The question was whether trades arw good occupation. Not whether you can be better off by stopping being tradesman and going into management.

Imagine this for software engineers. "Yeah, SWEs get paid shit and have a bad working environment but some of you will become managers and get paid bank." That wouldn't exactly be a "wow software is an incredible field to be in" situation.

If people want to say "we need more tradespeople - going into the trades will be good for your career" then it better be the case that the actual laborers are getting decent pay.

Ah, the social mobility of the american dream.

In a poorer society equivalent menial labor is more poorly paid than in a richer society.

All the other stuff like expertise and value is, counterintuitively, near irrelevant. For instance postdocs are some of the most highly educated and ostensibly highly skilled individuals - and many have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get to where they are, yet they earn about as much as a plumber does, because there's far more supply of postdocs than there are jobs/positions for them.

So putting all the theory into practice. There are usually three possible reasons. Supply is too high = excessively high rates of software training/education. Demand is too low = not many roles for software developers. Or the companies that are hiring aren't making much themselves so the "maximum affordable cost" is relatively low.

unless its UK, then the house with that pricetag was last fixed in the 60's, needs total rewiring, and has energy efficiency of a damp tent.

Fair point about scale of jobs however. Things need done and eventually a real world timeframe.

There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.

Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.

> There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.

> Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.

Did you think about possibility that his current employer will crush him like an egg for competing with him on weekends?

sometimes licenses are different between working for yourself vs someone else. Other times your employer can't take on jobs without you and your license present.

Then there's insurance differences between self-employed and employed ______ tradesperson.

From other specialist non-trade business I'm familiar with, people are normally aware of new employees coming to town before they even start working. People talk to each other.

> Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.

You can’t do a good business without leaving visible traces - permits, customers, suppliers, etc. all provide ways for information to leak. If his employer is exploitative, he has above average odds of correctly fearing retribution and depending on the area that could mean unemployment. It’s not exactly uncommon for companies to discretely agree not to hire certain people.

This is the key reason why for most jobs, small town America is flyover country, an economically inefficient, exploitative, broken system. Without a large labor & employment market within easy commuting distance, your skills aren't portable if you get fired, and your boss can't readily find a replacement, so most employment relationships end up in a reluctant, often abusive state from one or the other.

This is why the normal trajectory, for a skilled tradesman, is apprenticeship -> experience -> accumulate clients -> go independent.

If you want to go independent in something like software you need, among other things, a good idea. If you want to go independent in the trades, all you need is a good reputation and enough people with your card. You don't even need to try either really. Do a good job and people themselves will proactively ask for your contact information. Finding a good and reliable tradesman is not easy.

A jobbing plumber just needs to text his buddies asking if they've got any work for him this week, do the job and leave with cash in hand the same day.

If you're good at plumbing but disorganised or don't have great self-discipline, the latter is a much simpler way of working.

Going into freelancing, the first thing you should be thinking is "I am a business that employs one person: me."

Plumbers, HVAC, Electricians, General Contractors, etc

"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.

But there is a finite end to the career - when your body gives out.

That's the biggest problem with the trades, you're selling your health and body. And eventually the body parts will wear out, on a schedule decided as much by genetics as how you live.

this actually brings to mind something else:

I think the idea of a career is dead for a lot of the 40 and under set. The idea that you'll have the same job for decades is just nonsense so any job that feels too specific also feels like a it'll bite you in the ass in 5 years.

I'm more talking about situations where it's not mostly for the money but rather continuing the things people have enjoyed doing professionally without doing it full-time and without most of the downsides.

We're probably just nit-picking over definitions but a career, in my opinion, is not "having the same job for decades." A career is a decision to specialize in a particular craft, trade or profession. The opposite of a career is someone who takes odd jobs. Hospitality one day, transportation the next, might dabble in manufacturing. These jobs pay the bills, and there's nothing wrong with "just" doing that, but they are disconnected jobs; not a career.

I consider myself to have a career in software engineering but I have had multiple "jobs" over the decades that have contributed to that career. The career is the knowledge, the experience, the speciality, the reputation, the time spent focusing... all accumulated over my time developing that career. A career could be made by having a single job lasting from graduation until retirement, or it could be a handful of jobs that put to practice and develop the same skillset and knowledge.

No, that's fair. Like "carpenter" and "programmer" are both very broad professions of course. I think there's something about the way various industries get hit by down turns more or less visibly (like when construction goes down it feels like it's everybody, and so every framer, every concrete layer) that creates an (often false to be sure) sense of narrowness.

But also Plumber, Electrician, Carpenter, etc. are very broad trades and even though articles get written using those words because everyone knows what they do, the articles are often really talking about the lack of elevator technicians, crane operators, industrial HVAC, PLC programmers, train conductors, air traffic controllers those more niche trades. A lot of machine operators end up so niche that their current company is the only one in a state that could employ them. My sister makes M&Ms, other than company policies about like sanitation she'd be no better than a new hire on the Twix line.

Blame Reagan. Seriously. I am not joking. Blame Reagan. These need to be union jobs. These used to be union jobs.

For a more nuanced history read https://wwnorton.com/books/Invisible-Hands/

^ 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?

Generally, the more specialized labor is, the higher wage and benefits they can demand in a capitalist labor market. Supply and demand. For less skilled labor like general electricians I can understand the role of the union in negotiating for wages, benefits, and safety standards. For highly skilled labor like an HVAC tech, I don't see it.

Back in the day you could live a comfortable life off of your 40-odd year job, nowadays the advice given is to change jobs every few years because the increase in wage will outweigh any raises at your current job. Cost of living is going up faster than annual wage increases. Minimum wage in the US hasn't been updated since the 2000's, and if you do get paid minimum wage, it's your employer saying "I'd pay you less if I was allowed to". But a lot of wages will be based on minimum wage, so if that stagnates, so will other wages.

ON THEIR BREAKS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXh1tW16V-8

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/False-E...

Those meat slicers give me the heebie jeebies.

Sorry about your thumb.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYLAi4jwXcs

Still better than my grandfather who lost all the fingers on one hand to a hay bale elevator chain. It was after dark so while his wife drove him to the hospital the kids had to go look for them.

And then NPR writes insipid think pieces wondering why nobody wants to work in the trades anymore. If only we could put a finger on it…

(Edited for spelling)

I think it's different for "unskilled" labor, such as working in a warehouse, but it's not like being a plumber or an electrician is that hard on your body.

I mean part of that can be blamed on themselves - a lot of people seem to pressure themselves to stay busy, to work 14 hour days, to do all the things, keep up with all the things, have a day job and a side gig and passive income and contribute to open source while reading X books per week and doing meditation to try and compensate for not taking downtime.

But others can be blamed on the industry / environment; think excessive meetings so that the non-developers feel useful, forced social events, or piling on more and more responsibilities onto people (just think of how many languages, environments, frameworks, applications, etc you're expected to know at your current day job.). Under the cool names of "full-stack developer" or "DevSecOps teams".

Football players ruin their bodies through accumulated injuries, not wearing their bodies out.

Do athletes wear their bodies out? I've never heard of that. How does doing plumbing/electricioning wear your body out?

Edit: Downvote me all you like. I've done yoga, I've done plumbing, I've done electrical. Yoga takes the cake by a mile for most painful contorting.

And yet I know an 86 yo woman who has been doing yoga 3 time a week forever and is fit and sharp.

When you're doing an electrical job, you might have to put your body in strange contortions that don't follow any harm reducing "correct" forms.

There's your speculation and incredulity, and then there's all the people I've talked to who do it. They disagree with you.

I found out when waterskiing that you don't get strong waterskiing, you get injured. You have to spend a lot of time in the gym so you don't get injured waterskiing.

Back when I was younger in Seattle, lumberjacking was still a thing. They told me that the limiting thing was injury. They'd work into their sixties. There aren't many jobs harder than lumberjacking. I wouldn't mess with any of them, either, they are freakin' strong and I'm sure they could cleave me from head to toe with a casual swing of the axe.

I'm not in the least surprised that people working in trades mess up their backs, nor do I doubt that they do. But injuring one's back is not the same as wearing it out.

>Do athletes wear their bodies out? I've never heard of that.

Isn't "[ruining] their bodies through accumulated injuries" the same thing as wearing their body out?

Not taking precautions, for instance, when driving over potholes can wear certain facets of the car down without doing significant immediate damage, the same way that taking certain falls or hits can wear a body down. You don't need a crash.

Edit:typo

Via cumulative tissue, bone, and sensory damage. Also known as workin' hard.

On the car side, every time you bend a piece of metal it gets weaker. It cannot repair itself. It cannot get stronger from use.

No, I'm not lifting 400 lbs. Weightlifters lift insane weights, does that compares to what physical laborers lift?

I'm a cyclist and a lot of other cyclists are ex-runners whose joints are shot from running. They prefer to cycle because it's easier on the joints but it offers the same headspace as a long run. I also do some climbing and frequently hurt my joints (shoulder and elbow are frequent ones, wrist from time-to-time.) I have lots of friends who also climb who have had to take short or even long breaks from climbing due to the effects on their joints. Lifting on a jobsite is more dynamic than weightlifting and closer to climbing.

It's not about actually wearing out your joints (which can probably take crazy amounts of load and stress over years if you use correct form and rest appropriately), it's more accumulated injury from incentives to use bad form.

I've been running for 40 years. I suffered from knee and hip pain from it, until I read about the biomechanics of running. I ran doing the "heel strike", where the heel hits first. I could feel the shock in my knee and my hip with every stride.

I decided to switch to "ball strike" where I landed ball of the foot first and then rolled onto the foot. I did not feel the shock in my knee or hip after that. A couple weeks later, the joint pain began to subside, and for the last decade has not bothered me.

It takes a while to switch to ball strike, now it feels perfectly natural. Try this experiment. Run with your shoes on, and note your heel strike. Take your shoes off and run again - you'll run on the balls of your feet. This was the epiphany for me.

Running also builds up your heart, lungs and muscles quickly, but the tendons and joints and bones need years to adapt. A lot of people get into trouble by feeling strong and overdoing it. Ya gotta hold back and give it years.

I agree that if you're still having trouble with running, biking is a great alternative.

With your back, take the time to do proper back strengthening exercises. They greatly helped reduce the rate and severity of my repeated back injuries. I strongly recommend talking to a doctor to get a regimen of these exercises. They paid off for me big time. More that once I thought oh crap, I hurt my back again. But nope! Woo-hoo!

I'm not at all suggesting that tradesmen don't get injured on the job and the accumulation of such can be crippling.

Any good resources on this? Getting into running in my early 30s. Already switched to zero-drop, I think I'm ball-striking.

But most of us are way less than that, more like 10 hours a week. And if you are careful your body rebuilds stronger each time.

My knees are not shot from running. In fact I’d wager they are in better health than a desk potatoe that never exercises.

Irrespective of job or sports people can randomly develop degenerative diseases as they age that can be exacerbated by work.

Compare to someone that lifts for 1 hour 3x a week. He will have stronger bones and joints than either a desk potatoe (no stress = no buildup) or the tradesmen (too much stress without rest = failure)

Respectfully, pedantically limiting the phrase "wearing out" to some subset of conditions that conveniently excludes accumulated injuries, the deterioration of cartilage, and other load/repetition-induced joint debilitation adds nothing to this conversation.

Climbing ladders. The knees go.

Electrictions can work over their head with screw drivers for weeks at an end. There are plenty of bad working positions for their body.

But I did figure the electricians knew what they were doing, so I watched them. I bought the same tools they used, and went to work.

Not to mention major injuries are still a big risk factor. Broken fingers, destroyed shoulder joints, missing fingernails, deep burns, scarred cuts, etc. Often never seen by a doc too and never healing properly.

massibe ignorance of basics of life, and anything outside their bible

An intelligent man lacking empathy and the ability to put themselves in someone else's shoes.

And like lots of people have damaged their knees running. It isn't obscure.

Joe Thomas, one of the greatest left tackles of all time, retired because he was going to need a new knee. His back also had a lot of issues. Losing a bunch of weight has allowed him to put off some of the surgeries, but he said his knee was bone on bone by the end.

Get a hobby that isn’t focused on making money. HN isn’t the real world.

Man, this bothers me in software, where physical human safety isn't even on the line. I can't even imagine dealing with that when somebody could actually die.

Doesn't the career path in the trades lead to owning your own business? Obviously, not for everyone. But the scope for advancement and riches is certainly there.

If you stay as a line worker in a union you will do OK but won't be rich (unless you live frugally and save/invest a lot).

Is he doing residential wiring? That’s the bottom of the barrel for electrical work, unfortunately. The commercial market is where the bulk of the good work is.

First I thought the person you were referring to was self-employed but if they're an employee, why don't they get vacation or health insurance?

They are charging for their time to drive to and from you, the possibility that the job is more involved than described, and the liability from doing the job. And the opportunity cost of not accepting a different job due to your job.

If I hired one to come out and do one socket, I'd be sure to get a $200 site visit charge added on.

He's probably got a backlog of large jobs he can make more money on. So if he's going to come out and do outlet installation on one house, he's going to bid an amount that is worth delaying other work.

For small/simple household jobs, you should call a handyman not a trade contractor.

In some jurisdictions you may be able to get away with one GFCI outlet per circuit, but then you're paying for their time to map out which circuits are which.

As in, they're probably not working steadily, 40 hours a week, every week, but they still have bills to pay, and this down time must be factored into their rates for the profession to be sustainable.

On the other hand, if they DO work 40 hours a week, every single week, they can probably afford to raise their rates...

Have not been an electrician, but I have been a software contractor, and the idea is the same.

But the reality is they've also got the businesses expenses of maintaining their work vehicle, their insurance, their healthcare, etc. That $50 probably only translates to $20 into usable income.

He gets the bill and says "That's outrageous, that's more than I make as a doctor".

The plumber replies "Yeah that's more than I made as a doctor too."

I was pretty happy to pay the 4 or 5 times what the day rental for machine would have been. Took em about 25 minutes.

You rarely see older guys going for cheap and it's because they know it's a foolish thing to do.

Large corporations are already legalised collusion. Allowing those with competing interests to "collude" at the same level is a necessary counterbalance to that.

He is working for the wrong people! I was given the option for both when I was in the trades, and I wasn't even part of a union!

Sounds like software contracting.

The more realistic scenario is less pay in exchange for slower hours.

Quality and availability. Fewer better paid jobs in the pipeline means they can decide to pay extra for less waiting and a not-rushed job.

Low barrier to entry means if prices rise, more people join the industry and drive prices down again. When overtime and overworking becomes too much, people exit or don't join and prices rise.

For example; for two weeks they need 60 hours each, the next three week only 40.

It's cheaper to have one employee with overtime then hire two employees.

Yes, the CEO was going down to yell on the blue collar workers making pennies.

Tell him to look at moving to New Zealand. Good salary (for NZ), 4 weeks paid vacation and plenty of paid public holidays (mandatory) and a lot of jobs going. No health insurance but few people here have health insurance, and anything accident related is covered by a mandatory insurance (basically a tax) scheme.

https://www.seek.co.nz/sparky-jobs

He joked about it but, ya, no thank you.

Linesmen do it quite a lot.

Linesmen is also one of the most dangerous jobs

Not to mention, 735kV, yes kilovolts, is a lot of juice.

2 things that make welding relatively safe from electrocution are: (1) the steel you're welding on makes a much better path for electricity flow than your body (especially when you're wearing heavy welding gloves), (2) welding in a dry environment (not raining, not standing in water, not drenched in sweat, etc.).

I've also heard that there are a lot of electrocuted singers. I was never sure if that's a myth though

Please don't take that as "Citation needed!" but rather genuine interest.

Someone can be a part time office worker, part time tradesman.

This part-time aspect was one of the appealing aspects of ride-sharing apps when they first appeared. People with cars could have 9-5 jobs and before and after the job, exactly during rush hour, give a lift to a few people. Of course, they turned into the new taxi but controled by multinational corps and almost impossible to hail without a smartphone.

We are speedruning Tolkien's law of decay.

Health is the opportunity cost otherwise, but it's hard to price health. And I don't mean that it's priceless; the price is ambiguous - is my health worth less or more than what half my salary buys me?

For software engineers, this is a difficult question to answer. If I were working an entry-level job, my health would be more valuable to me. If I were at the peak of professional development (a figurehead at a massive company or someone whose work changes the world), my work would be more important. SWE work makes a lot of money, but somewhere in the range of where I value my health.

How much $ a year is your health worth to you? Not a rhetorical question, would be interesting to see some answers if anyone can come up with a figure.

Right, I think you would need to check stats on how many people dropped out over the years due to health issues leaving behind these super healthy old guys to get an accurate picture.

https://time.com/5159857/amish-people-stay-healthy-in-old-ag...

https://time.com/5159857/amish-people-stay-healthy-in-old-ag...

It might not compensate all the sitting and typing fully but it's pretty good - I don't miss doing a day of physical labor.

I would probably be in better shape if I was moving all day everyday but I'm pretty sure my body would start to break down as well. I know not everyone has as much freedom but if you work from home it isnt that hard to squeeze in a pretty decent amount of exercise during the work day.

I’d love to talk with any of the millions of voluntary and involuntary manual laborers from the past 200 years and learn about how they made it through their lifetimes working in fields and factories in stress positions under substandard conditions.

To be honest, I guess we could just interact with and ask present day laborers across the globe cranking out products for Western mass consumption.

It’s got to be about the same I’d guess 1822 to 2022, no?

Lets imagine a hypothetical a job like unloading 50 kg bags from trucks and say you carry them up stairs to the 3rd floor. Or let them be 20 kg bags, 1 floor.

You can find a person who can do one 50 kg bag + 3 floors, lots of people can do multiple 20 kg bags. But how many can you expect an employee to do in a day? How fast is a reasonable demand? The answer is simple if you look at it from a training program perspective: If you can do 1 bag (of either kind) you keep doing it until you are tired or until it starts to hurt ever so slightly. You do this 3 days per week. You grow and grow until eventually you can hurl bags easily for hours. You could in theory keep training until you can comfortably do 50 kg bags, 3 floors, 8 hours long. It would take forever ofc. 20 kg, 1 floor is doable. You train until you can do a whole shift 3 days per week. Keep at it for a while then add a 4th day and eventually a 5th.

If you however push yourself a bit harder than you should, by not quitting when you had enough and/or going for 5 days to early you don't grow! You just destroy your body and if you destroy your health sufficiently you wont get used to the work in this life time. One slightly to long vacation might break you.

The moral of the story is that in some places you see these seemingly impossible mountains of men do absolutely insane amounts of absolutely insane work and it doesn't seem to bother them.

The bean counters understand non of this. They want 8 hours, preferably on a salary that doesn't afford a perfect diet and adds extra units of stress that should be subtracted from the training results or added to the injury list.

In many countries you cant even take employees blood pressure, measure heart rate or test their blood for nutrients. Some guys driving a desk decided that is a violation of peoples privacy.

Manual laborers 200 years ago spend a good amount of time outside and got a good amount of vitamin D.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15050-vitamin... > Vitamin D deficiency is a common global issue. About 1 billion people worldwide have vitamin D deficiency, while 50% of the population has vitamin D insufficiency. Approximately 35% of adults in the United States have vitamin D deficiency.

If you are looking to push the human body to the limit the year round getting out of the deficiency zone is not enough. About 100% gets insufficient D the year round.

I tell our bean counters that if they want to see more work done they have to give us a solarium with UVB lamps and pay people to use it.

There is nothing like seeing people hold 2 contradictory thoughts at the same time. They all know I'm 100% right and they know it 100% cant happen.

Unless ofc they subscribe to the official pseudoscience: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/indoor-tannin...

Good level D is positively correlated with endurance performance, muscle strength and with a lower rate of injuries. Anything less and you become fragile or a jellyfish. If you see someone do hard work your limbs snap off.

I also suggest they serve the employees meat (protein) during work to avoid them eating something stupid like sandwiches during lunch then a pizza or mcdonalds after work.

It honest to god feels like talking to a different species.

Recently they tried to explain to me the concept of working harder because they cant find employees. I tried to explain them being unable to find employees means I'm going to do less work and go home early. We all have our tasks. I did a great job. They couldn't find employees? It seems so simple? Give me more money, I will do more work, others will come if the price is right?

It's a lovely job, I bust my ass, pay is crap but my thoughts are my own and the employer has to put up with my bullshit. I can just walk away, there is plenty of grunt work and I can jockey a desk too! I drive a really fast desk. It's lovely to see a plan come together or to slap a bunch of code together and see it do its thing. It's all the same really, you get to be impressed by your own abilities, accomplishment or if both fail by the compensation :)

I could imagine the trades being more attractive in countries with better labor laws and social safety net.

They even joke about having to learn portuguese if you want to work in construction due to the massive number of portuguese tradesmen across Europe

Other fact fewer kids are getting born with muscle area which forma carpal tunnel. Evolution in progress.

Skilled trades are not limited to back breaking labor. Some and most of it is labors of love like farming. You have the right equipment it isn't back breaking.

I'm pretty sure not enough people have died/failed to reproduce due to carpal tunnel syndrome for that to be true.

your brother in law sounds stout, and at risk of getting into a bar fight i gotta say it: it just doesnt sound like hes there yet. if he had trade certifications, state certs and experience on his own, there isnt a shop i can think of in the midwest that wouldnt offer everything the HN hacker crowd gets at a white collar interview. hell, skilled cert welders in the midwest pull down enough to pay off a new f250 in a couple of years. electricians ARE a valid and important trade, and linemen are the pornstars among their ranks. he needs to seek out a better shop too, but that goes without saying.

the progress is: work hard, get promoted to job captain or foreman, and eventually if you want start your own shop. if not you eventually wind up a shop manager or something with more pay than title.

Making journeyman in most trades around here means a comfortable middle class salary, sending you kids to the less expensive private schools, a boat if you save up. Beats what you’d make being a teacher, social worker, or librarian.

Strong bank profitability and lending are basically the bedrock of our economy, people's homes have appreciated so much they're able to borrow obscene amounts to renovate, and the construction industry as a result is incredibly strong.

In state with occupational licensing for trades, they do have decent wages. In states without that licensing, hiring immigrant workers is the way to drive down wages/costs.