programmer, then also?

Programming also is kinda iffy as a trade in the “I just got dropped off in the middle of BFE and I need to eat” kind of way. It sort of requires a bunch of fragile situational trimmings that are not really under individual control … so I’ve looked at software as a profession, really. It doesn’t quite pass the doctor test. Not everyone needs a programmer, but everyone needs shelter.

It gets close when you incorporate hardware as well. Now you can make tools with a software component, sort of a technical blacksmith, but you are still reliant on a fragile supply chain. Perhaps the technological handyman or tinker is as close as can be achieved inside this scope?

Lots of grey areas with many skills.

You say that programmers need a lot of societal components but so does every one of those professions. Unless your kids are learning how to harvest and dry their own lumber along with classical carpentry with nothing but wood joints, they will need a massive supply chain for the lumber and fasteners - unless you expect them to hunt down bog iron and bootstrap all of civilization themselves. Same with plumbers who need PVC/copper/solder and a modern sewer/water system or septic tank. Or the electrician who needs copper wire and power infrastructure (or solar panels, which require semiconductor manufacturing). What good is an electrician without the power plants to feed their customers?

I like your approach but I can't help but feel that unless you’re going full apocalyptic prepper, the practical skills are an illusion.

Traditional woodworking and blacksmithing like that is now mostly a novelty in the developed world. No one really knows how to make their own tools from scratch which is what it’d take to bootstrap carpentry. The best realistic set of skills would probably be knowledge of how to work with fibers to make rope and gather pitch for adhesive. Then you could make a primitive axe that can do most of the hard work in bringing down and hewing trees.

I’m not an especially good carpenter, and I can work with limited tools. A chainsaw and an auger drill would be really nice, especially if I had to make lumber.. but an axe , drawknife , and chisels will do.

That’s like being a programmer that can’t write software without a framework and libraries. The idea is that tools make the job easier and faster, not that you don’t even understand how to do the job, but only how to staple code together. We all start out there, and while we may rarely if ever work that way, we can when it is needed, do something no one has done for us.

Obviously, different trades have different utility if you are talking about the breakdown of society, but I’m not really leaning into that particularly hard, more leaning into the breakdown of one’s plans or expectations, the failure of a company or the evolution of an industry, those kinds of force majure events that one can reasonably expect to have happen during a life lived.

Even so, there is some comfort in knowing that your personal knowledge and value to society is robust and resistant to black swan events, I suppose.

Deserted islands don't have libraries.

Carpentry offers limited applicable skills if they're stranded 1000 miles away from the nearest Home Depot.

These companies are running on fumes. They cut to the bone, through the bone, and everything is being held together by a thread.

But security research is really far removed from the skillset of a startup app developer. Realistically, even if you were capable of learning, which most aren't, it'd take longer for you to get up to speed than it would take for the market to improve.

The more relevant answer would be to bootstrap an MVP and pitch it to investors to get funding to scale. There's no piecework model for consumers like "install can lights" or "build a she-shed."

Mental capital is still capital.

Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things, while the tech industry loves to re-invent the wheel frequently.

That depends on where you are. In the US, it's rare, but our Japanese office actually had a pretty rigorous system for career growth, that involved what is, for lack of a better word, "apprenticeship."

> Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things

I wouldn't say that. I know a lot of mechanics, and they have experienced a big change, over the last decade or so.

One of the things about being a mechanic (or appliance repairman), is that you are responsible for maintaining a huge range of stuff; including things that are decades old.

I have a friend that sets up and maintains professional sterile stuff. This is big juju. These aren't little autoclaves, and they incorporate pretty much every trade you can think of, like plumbing, electrical, metalshop, mechanical, etc. Many of these units are huge. They also tend to be run by fairly advanced computers.

These units cost six- or seven-figures, and the customers like to keep them going for as long as possible. I often hear him talking about having to work on a decade-old sterilizer, in the sub-basement of some research lab.

If I’m bored I sometimes freelance as a field repair technician for service contractors. It’s typically opening up a machine I’ve never seen, and finding the combination of mechanical, electronic, and/or software fixes it needs to come back online. It can be a lot of fun, and the pay is not terrible. But you need to understand some analog electronics, strong digital electronics skills, basic programming paradigms, SQL, networking from the physical layer on up through the application layer, and also how to read between the lines on poorly written manuals and find the hidden truth that the various contradictions point to.

I’ve worked on everything from CT scanners to cutting lasers to ATMs, and done more server swaps, PDU replacements, and field upgrades than I care to count. It’s great when I need a break from the sea of bytes, and I get to see an inside view on a lot of cool stuff, and some pretty concerning things going on behind the scenes as well. I could say, I’ve seen some shit.

I’ve watched a 27 year old pentium pro boot up off the arm of Michelin, the sparkle of the token ring LEDs twitching furtively in the twighlight of an abandoned server room, screens blaring static amid a tangle of drooping cables and fallen raceways. Shit still gives me nightmares.

Thanks for that!

Setting up websites for people/small businesses? Give them each a virtual host/directory with mod_php if you need some CRUD. No k8s or AWS or react or anything needed. Your client's site is all in a tidy directory you could zip up and give to them if they want (e.g. you're going to move out of the business, or they want to work with someone else). I despise working with PHP, but it's the obvious choice if you were going to be a "trade web programmer" doing small jobs for people.

Writing custom software for someone? Do it with Qt's drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor and deliver it as a .zip or .apk or whatever.

It probably won't be as easy money as a SaaS megacorp, but I'm sure there is plenty of demand for programmers' services out there in the same way that you can find people looking for contractors for home renovations. If you're doing custom work, you can use whatever tools make you productive.

Tradeskills are also not scalable.

It's still possible, even if for some you need to swap the entire engine controller, to take that control back. Ultimately all these damn modules have to eventually switch bare copper conductors to make all the stuff work in the car, and if we have to, we can swap ALL the silicon involved.

I would love some actual right to repair legislation but our government is too occupied undermining people's civil rights and pissing off every other market on the face of the Earth.

I will never ever pay a subscription fee for my fucking heated seats even if I have to bridge the 12V across a big toggle in the dashboard and wire the stupid thing myself. You gotta draw a line somewhere and that's mine. Fuck ALL the way off with subscription gating features in the machine I already bought.

As far as the “track” available in high school, I’ve found it trivial to basically ignore it. You can pick and choose, but you may have to demonstrate ability to skip prerequisites, so that means independent study -a critical skill anyway. Also, summer school or community college in the summer can move a student ahead significantly.

Having raised 5 kids under this pattern it hasn’t been problematic or expensive. If the plan is to go to a prestigious university, you will need to do some extra academics or work yourself into a university program to make it obvious that going to a trade school doesn’t define your potential, usually completing a year of community college or participating as a research assistant etc by high school graduation is sufficient.

As far as tools cost, being a mechanic is the pricey one, with basic set of tools around $3000 these days because of the technology component.

But the other trades are not so bad.

If you don’t try to buy all new and vanity brands, you can get set up around $1000. Used tools are generally nearly as good as new ones. If you need advanced tools they are nearly universally available for rent, and often the first time you need to rent a tool, the job you do will pay for you to buy one for next time.

I think most people overvalue the dominant paradigm and pattern copying. It’s fine (even desirable) not to look like the usual applicant as long as your lumps are interesting or signal value to an institution.

$10-15k is a more realistic number for an auto mechanic, and many of them have $50k+ into their tools.

But you don’t need every tool to work on every car.

Plenty of mechanics work with a single toolbox that you can carry by hand.

It will handle 90 percent of the jobs. The one semi-specialty tool you need for the job is a phone call to Napa away.

Before long you have 99 percent of what you will actually do covered. If you look at a mechanics toolset you will find that 20 percent of the tools get 99.9% of the use. A lot, maybe more than half, basically never get used at all.

In many things, a full set consists of perhaps 16-20 sizes, but for many types of tools, there are 3 sizes that get used all the time, and two that get used once or twice a year. The rest not at all.

Also, you can buy a “$10,000” set of tools for around $2000 if you are patient, less if you identify where you need really good tools and where middle of the road will work fine, and don’t let it become a vanity hobby.

Over time, you will likely have a lot invested in tools.. but you don’t need that much to start, unless you are talking about opening a full service shop from scratch, not just being a mechanic.

My optometrist wants to retire. Nobody wants to buy the (very successful) business. New graduates (only two took the state boards last year. Two.) want to work regular hours and go home. No interest in running the business, hiring and firing, purchasing and rent and all the rest.

They just want a gig. Do their expert thing and go home.

At the art fair downtown I noticed many of the stall operators are quite old. I quizzed a couple - same answer. They can get a partner in the (kiln, woodshop, metalshop etc) but not in the business side, selling at fairs. Nobody wants to do that.

Even retail - my sister had a chocolate shop. Her employees were business students! But when she wanted to retire, none of them, zero, wanted to take over the business. They wanted to exercise their speciality at some big firm.

The western world of business has changed beyond recognition since I was young.

If you have 6 figures of student loan debt just to get an optometry degree, you don't want to double or triple that to buy an established business. Your interest cost will eat any hope of profit.

For small businesses, its the same issue. A pottery shop or fabrication shop isn't really worth a lot more than a used kiln or set of tools, but I'm guessing that the owners want to be bought out for a lot more than they can sell their old stuff for. There is a serious mismatch going on. At the same time, the work itself is devalued. Fewer people are going to lay out $1k on a handmade dinnerware set from their local ceramics people when they can pay 1/3rd the price from an importer.

Just like everything else these days the middle option is rendered economically useless by cost (time or money or both) of all the overhead and the juice isn't worth the squeeze unless you're employing dozens.

Renting a bay is the kind of thing a business owner does. Like a gas station with a 2-bay garage will be owned by a landlord who leases it to a tenant business. Perhaps the same or different business than is operating the convieience store.

Want to live in a van and surf all day? You do actually need money for that, particularly if you want to do it indefinitely.

For example;

If you have a “good” job, but it is trending toward a flat trajectory, and you have a set of skills that requires a complex set of circumstances to be employed, it may be too risky to move to a new location simply because the downside is so severe. It can be a 1:4 bet paying 10:1 odds, a bet you definitely should take, but if losing means your family doesn’t eat, you can’t take the risk.

If you know you can find a way to get by even with day labor if things go badly until you can stabilize your situation, you can take those beneficial risks.

It’s a matter of being prepared to roll with the inevitable punches, and being able to make decisions based on the knowledge of that readiness. Being less fragile, even antifragile.

I've hired all of these trades for my basic needs and I've never seen their licenses. They don't need no stinking license to get lots of residential work around here, just word of mouth that they are competent.

The guy who came out to install a generator is licensed, and he needed one for the inspection, but that's an exception not the rule. The claim was that all you need is the skill to make a living, and around here that's demonstrated daily. Sometimes they don't even have the tools and use mine. Frequently they require cash, and that's standard procedure here.

Place I live in Europe, it would also be outright illegal. Biggest city or rural, folks here respect their local communities and only get official pros for any serious work.

I could literally rebuild it 3x for the all the bullshit insurance and regulatory costs were it I got inspections, licensing, and insurance.

They've been brainwashed into "safety" since they were 3 years old, so anything outside of that box is literally unthinkable to them. Their mind literally shuts down trying to process it.

So it's workable for a niche group of people but not the majority.

I also got my land incredibly cheaply that way. No one wanted to take a risk on an unproven plot of land, everybody wants some place where they can already legally get water/power/electric. By doing all the legwork and legal to prove utilities I basically made $30k profit in a year just by passively testing and connecting water/electric/septic at my own risk.

I built this place for ~1/3 the price of anything else available because even a completely burnt out husk of a trailer is more expensive than DIY building a house due to the weird dynamics of the housing market that places a gigantic premium on being the guy who takes all the risk of connecting utilities and getting a permitted residential structure.

Your thesis that I can't sell an actual house for the price of all the unmortgagable burned out trailers that sell like hotcakes is interesting but false. I don't expect this dynamic to change much until most of those ~0% mortgages expire or a massive new supply of housing emerges.

And then you have companies like my old one-- they didn't have a fire protection license, so they hired an old dude to come in once a year for $40k and borrowed his so they can now do sprinkler and standpipe work legally. It's the same idea everywhere, except more fraud is involved in the cities.

Ok so in your small rural town, where people take up trades because they’re struggling to make ends meet, and where you have to settle for whoever is available, and where if someone screws you over word of mouth on its own is enough of a deterrent and is easily enforced, you can get by without relying on licenses. As far as giving general advice to young people, the original point still stands that you generally need to jump through some additional hoops to make a living off of many of the trades. Yes there are exceptions but most young people aren’t looking for answers that require you move out to the boonies and where you’re going to be scraping by.

No, it might only be an exception that the person didn't break the law and got the inspection. Pretty much any electrical work that would require an electrician requires an inspection by code.

Just because some of the people around you aren't following the law doesn't mean that you can really make a living that way. All it takes is one mistake and you get wiped out because you didn't have insurance and were operating illegally. I've lived in rural areas and people doing stuff as a business without the proper permits is the exception.

People who trade this way with one another aren't going to want to wipe the other guy out because it is mutually assured destruction.

Sounds great! I love libertarianism!

OTOH we’d be better off living in well built wood huts than in the conditions that people with a high degree of specialized education but no practical education can provide. I have a great respect for knowledge, science, and learning in general… but the “incompetent intellectual“ stereotype, so effectively weaponized in the culture wars, exists for a reason.

In the end, individuals and societies benefit from well educated people who have a well rounded education in not only the arts and sciences, but also in practical physical affairs of urgent application, AKA applied engineering or applied science.

You could caricature libertarianism, or you could engage with understanding what it actually is, whether or not you choose to agree with it.

Why is it that 99% of people arguing for libertarianism do a much better job making a caricature of it than anyone else that's intentionally tried?

I've tried to engage with them in good faith but ultimately all their arguments devolve into abolishing taxes and keeping track of existing bureaucracy on an individual level. Every. Single. Time.

It's not a practically tenable position. It's a youthful fantasy on the opposite side of the spectrum of property rights (the other side of the spectrum is communism).

I think it’s also good to push back against this flow of structure, because just as much as the idea that freedom and self-interest are the ideal drivers of society is a dangerous and intoxicating illusion, so is the idea that cooperation and goodwill can be legislated.

The reality is, of course, much more nuanced and poorly distributed. Incentives alignment to the common good is an effort that is a struggle to even properly define, much less to implement.

The fact that people seem to not understand that incentive alignment is the goal, rather than mothering or oppression, doesn’t help.

The problems of the state are much less tractable and congruous with personal experience than most people, including most politicians, appreciate. Relatable analogies such as running a business or a family used in appeals to “common sense” are farcical in their relation to the state, and often disastrous in application.

Statecraft is something that requires not only a deep understanding of political theory and practice, but also of psychology, economics, game theory, statistics, and a solid dose of intuition and luck. In short, it is demanding to the point of nearly being a fools errand, yet the electorate seems to favor simpletons, paternal figures, and shiny things that smell like upper class. I really don’t know if there is a way forward with democracy unless we lean in hard to education.

I'm decidedly out of the trades as an adult.

Mostly, this is because of my folk's parenting in general. I was not good, due to the stresses of said work and business. But I imagine that's true of most small business owners.

But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body. I'm fully not kidding here when I say that my jeans were so dirty that they stood up on their own. Again, kid's jeans, and it wasn't every day, but at least twice a week. Heavy machinery like lathes will literally tear your arms off and beat you to death with them. I've grabbed 220V before and my Dad had to break the circuit with a broom handle, leaving quite the bruise on my arms, not to mention the near death of that kind of shock. Don't get me started on car exhaust and brake cleaners.

Auto repair may not be very exemplary of the trades as a whole, but I choose to take showers after work now.

The reason why I stick with engineering is I do not want to work in a licensed field. You are then always at the mercy of the government, to keep granting your license, and youmay lose/suspend it if you are ever convicted of a crime. Not to mention if for whatever reason, intended or accidental, you lose the license men with guns can be sent to rough you up and put you in a tiny cage, probably at the direction of other license holders who are eager to protect their little castle that requires 4 years of slave work to (surprise who? them!) get beyond the moat.

Then there's the case that trades are subjected to heavy protectionism, so usually carrying them to another country is unviable, so you are now locked into whatever state/country your license is in and face incredible hostility if you end up a refugee/asylee or your country goes to shit and you have to leave.

The advantage of software, electrical, and the unlicensed parts of mechanical and chemical engineering fields is that you can carry on for the most part without assholes from the state or deranged voters constantly threatening to shut you down for whatever genius idea they have next, often enforced by some annoying code enforcement inspector who only has 1% the knowledge you do as to when physics dictates whether their half-witted rule book even makes any sense.

Most of my friends are blue collar, and aged 20 years in the last decade.

One can't hear as well as he used to from impact guns hammering away, back problems, knees, and more.

You can deal with it at 25, but time comes at you fast.

Roofing might be relatively worse than electrical, but both are definitely harder than sitting an air-conditioned desk.

your other option is mentally drained, potentially depressed, probably anxious - especially if/when something breaks on you

i went with the desk job, yearn for something else.. would rather have become a machinist or welder looking back. do both as hobbies now to clear the head from the desk job

Like, tying rebar is really hard to do by hand, but they make a gun that will do it for you in seconds: https://amsalesinc.com/products/rebar-tying-gun-makita-xrt01... . You can do a whole pad of concrete in an hour that would take you days otherwise. But that gun is thousands of dollars (supply and demand baby). So having a truck of these time saving gadgets for a bunch of job types isn't feasible. Hence the specialization.

[0] who then never shows up on time and charges too much. But that's a whole nother story about where I live...

Those trades mostly pay their dues when they are younger and then the next batch of journeymen and apprentices take over that part of the job as they move up into the less physically demanding parts of the job. Even fairly physical jobs like bricklaying, they'll have the older dude doing nothing but slapping the bricks in place, they get carried over to him by one guy, one guy is mixing up the mortar, one guy is unloading the truck, another is touching up the joints, etc. It's one of those things that explains why union jobs have so many extra people too. It's not one dude doing everything, it's 3 guys doing different parts of the job and learning how to do the next part.

My family is the 'petite bourgeois'(owners that labor alongside their workers[0]) that Marx said were the only people that actually had a choice in the class war and were the breeding grounds for fascism.

We did management too, but labored with the employees all the same. Did we get paid more? Sometimes, but we had to go without pay a lot and pick up other jobs. Still, my sibling and I went to college debt free, none of the employees' kids did that [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...

For every anecdote of a plumber making $20k/month in a HCOL area, there are probably 3-4 plumbers who are barely pulling $70k/year in M/LCOL and end up having health problems.

The real question, per the WSJ article here, is: How does a kid go about getting this back up? I got it by virtue of birth. But some other kid would have to go seeking it out, at the expense of time they could spend studying or, you know, just being a teenager. I'm not sure that teenage me would have taken the 'learn a trade as a backup plan' route. In fact, I know I would not have done that.

Anyway, he seemed very interested in being a part of the FBLA and went to the various functions and conventions that the organization had. I encouraged him to keep in the back of his mind that one day he's not going to be young anymore, he's going to be tired of someone else's shit, every person in their mid 50s and over he knows who is in a trade has needed multiple surgeries just to function on a daily basis, and he's going to be frustrated that his boss is buying a motorcoach to drive to his vacation home while he's struggling to pay the note on his truck. Learn a trade. And then learn to run a business. So that you can run a business while working your trade.

I think one or the other is ok. My main thing is that you have to have some sort of plan. You can plan to be a software engineer or a hairdresser or whatever else, but you need to have some sort of plan. You can always update your plan, but you should at least have some vague idea of what it is. The 'failure to launch' folks that I know are all the ones that didn't have some sort of plan so they end up bouncing around from one low paying job to another without any sort of career progression. Even if they end up doing OKish as an office administrator or assistant retail manager, if/when they lose that job (often due to economic realities outside their control) they end up starting back over at the bottom.

I believe a professional skill is an important educational goal, and insofar as a person is capable and interested they will more likely thrive with a professional skill.

But: professional skills tend to require a lot of dependencies and connections, can be heavily reputation based, and you can find yourself in a dead end of many kinds.

Having a trade gives you an opt-out so you can always move laterally and reposition yourself, probably to get back into your profession or a related one. Also, it creates a way to take a “break” to avoid burnout. And being skilled in trades, you can easily “earn” tens of thousands of dollars a year as a homeowner by not having to pay a premium for life’s demands unless you want to.

Just being able to credibly walk away is a huge advantage in negotiation. And even if you won’t, knowing that you could, really could, is a huge boost to well being.

It all boils down to plotting a course based on options rather than only constraints. Empowerment.

Thing is, most people won’t use that fallback, but it still provides a great advantage. With a fallback, you can take risks that can position you ahead of more timid strategies. Same as owning a little land with a simple cabin on it, outright.

For a few thousand dollars or even less, the worst that can happen is that you might have to go “home” and recoup. You always have a place to be. Even if you rarely go there.

They think some higher power will magically drop a plan into their lap.