I've built a house myself and could probably be an electrician easily enough after spending part of my engineering career wiring large electrical power systems and also doing my own residential power extensions and residential electrical systems. I also very much prefer that work over engineering.

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.

> But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body.

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.

Totally depends on the trade. Concrete foundations, roofing, anything that uses a wheelbarrow, etc. will eventually break you. Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in, but digging post holes or hauling shingles up a ladder is not the same beating as hanging cabinets, or wiring circuit breakers. Just saying there are different kinds of hard.

It's all degrees of hard on your body.

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

but there's something to be said about doing something with your hands and going to bed physically tired...

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

That’s the thing though… a desk job often affords you the time and income to pursue those other things as hobbies. The reverse is less often true.

The plumbers that just fixed my slab leak were getting IT certifications because their knees and lower backs are shot. Labor fucks you up.

For this reason, maybe a handyman / jack-of-all-trades will have less wear and tear on their body? Diversity in tasks could mean a week of concrete followed by a week of cabinets, then a day or two of building a staircase, three hours of adding a new receptacle, and then two days of painting? Although in some ways, a handyman's job might be harder - they should be a quick learner, have good support / contacts in specific trades, and it might require better/more marketing to get customers.

Those are vanishingly small jobs these days in the US at least. Most companies and guys will specialize in electrical or drywall or something as they become faster at it and time is money in the trades. These skilled jobs typically require more than a single truck's worth of equipment to do quickly.

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.

Unless you live in a remarkably remote area, rental yards carry pretty much everything you can need. I've even rented $100,000 excavators I needed for a day quite easily, and it eats into the value of your labor maybe 20-30% at worst.

I mean, not a lot of handymen are able to eat 20%; that a pretty big cost.

Apparently you are not a homeowner--as they have large numbers of these small jobs.

Oh, I very much have a lot of these jobs at the house. It's just that I tend to call a specialist [0] as the handy men around me tend to, well, not really exist anymore. Besides, most of the smaller things that don't require the really tall ladders, I can do myself.

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

>Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in

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.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, my hearing is shot too. My spouse is always having to say things louder and slower to me. Not a lot of fun for them to do. I also can't smell certain smells; I suppose this is due to the aforementioned brake cleaners (spray acetone really), but am not very sure.

Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of "go into trades" rhetoric is that most trades people either get into management as fast as they can, a small amount start their own business and a share of that small amount are very successful, or a large amount of people trade $$$ for future health problems (not just joints, many of the materials used in trades are awful and many never wear proper PPE). It's important to look at the trades without the veil of blue-collar romanticism; the trades can be lucrative but tradesmen will be very quick to give you the tradeoffs.

I actually wouldn't be suprised, running your own shop in a trade or in software bootstrap day to day mode has to be remarkable similar. Including consulting gigs to keep yourself afloat.

For my family it really wan't a trade off. This jobs was the only one we could do to make end meet.

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...

Karl Marx died 40 years before fascism was invented so I would be surprised if he said anything at all about it. Fascism is just repackaged marxism anyways with more nationalism.

Yeah, my grammar was bad there. Thanks for catching that. The wikipedia link goes into better detail about what I was trying to relate.

Yes, all of this is very easily seen by the BLS statistics about the average/median wages of trades.

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.

For sure. I believe that a a person should work towards working more with their mind than their back, long term. A lot of professions are good vehicles towards that goal. But being able to do what you need to, and being able to make ends meet in a worst case scenario are both great sources of strength and significantly reduce your economic fragility.

Yeah, I agree with both your replies here. The certainty that I had when I was starting out in life that I could walk into pretty much any auto shop and have a job in a week, I dunno, I think I took that for granted. In that, I never really thought about it and my profession was more of a choice to me; I always had a backup. I guess a lot of my friends and coworkers really didn't have that sense about themselves, maybe.

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.

I prefer trades as a backup to a profession, for sure. A trade can give you the runway to put yourself through school or to ramp up your capabilities in other ways, leading to a better long term plan. Getting old Is a bitch, to be sure.