This comment is why I love HN. Once you sort through all the kiddos who don't know anything about anything, you get golden nuggets like this.
In my middle (almost upper-middle) class neighborhood we have a bunch of doctors and psychologists, a bunch of lawyers, a few retired professionals, a couple professors and.... me in tech.
Trade work can be a fantastic way to earn a living, but it is HARD work. It will break your body if you do it for your whole life. There is a reason plenty of people jumped to office work the first chance they got.
Don't go into the trades blind, take care of your body, or you'll be like my grandpa and need help uncurling your fingers if you fall asleep making a fist.
An off the shelf commercial or residential trade sounds like a nightmare, especially in an area with bad weather part of the year.
That said, if you can deal with employees of that type as a business owner, you can clean up.
This is honestly where it is hitting. When I moved to the bay area ~10years ago I asked myself 'why are they paying me usd500k to move here when I could just work from my home country for a fraction of that'.
Meanwhile in my home country there's a tech boom. In fact my current big faang company is hiring there and closing jobs here.
Can't say I'm surprised except that it took this long for the realization that you don't need to have your staff move to the bay area and thus you don't need to pay bay area wages.
I live in the Brazil, currently earning ~USD50/hour (at a US company) as a web developer. Not as a contract dev though, I prefer to be employed by a company.
Here, neither nurse nor tradesman are well paid jobs, quite the contrary.
Rich neighborhoods here have: doctors, lawyers, medium company owners, big company executives.
None of them is possible to get to that level of paying within 10 years (medicine is 8 years at least only to have a specialization). An exception might be entrepreneurs, but there is a lot of luck involved.
That's my angle, but there are plenty of other fields too: healthcare (nurses make as much as most SWEs and can live anywhere in the country), government, certain employee tradesmen (electrician, etc.), basically anything that requires some sort of license or training. Life is long, spending a couple years to get 10+ years of good returns is a wise investment.
I've never been to the Bay Area, so what I'm about to say may not apply, but look in any middle-class neighborhood: maybe 5% of the people are in tech -- what is everyone else doing? The above is a sampling of careers that have provided people in my neighborhood a comfortable American Dream style of life.