And unfortunately it's difficult to scale your work. You get paid for the hours you put in, and there's only so many hours. Of course, if you're lightning fast you could increase volume, but that's about it.
I know lots of people in trade jobs that make a good salary, not too far away from what their company engineers make - but the downside is that they work 12 hour days, 6 days a week to earn that kind of money. While the engineer has a cushy 8 hr workday, 5 days a week.
Work and overtime culture completely depends on the owner. I've been at shops where you were expected to work OT every single day. Start 7, 30 mins lunch 12, 45 min dinner around 3-4, then back to work and keep working until 7-8-9 in the evening. repeat. 6 days a week, sometimes 7.
It's one of the few places where people have pissing matches over who's worked the most. Guys would come in and brag about only getting 3 hours of sleep, or working 16 hr days the whole week. Weird culture.
> It's one of the few places where people have pissing matches over who's worked the most.
Probably once the work is not intellectually challenging people need to create a challenge somehow.
In my experience, when you are used to intellectual challenging work, trades feel like a downgrade and becomes unbearably boring. Conversations fall to high school level. However, if you can deal with it and the physical risk, there's money in there.
Trades are probably more measurable, if someone lays 400 bricks in a day you know they have built a wall and can quickly see whether it is straight.
If I write 400 lines of code in a day it's quite hard to evaluate the quality or even if it satisfies the requirements.
This is why intellectual work tends to create more political problems. People know good work can't necessarily be measured so they start engaging in games to get ahead.
Also you don't get to brag in trades that you spent the week removing 200 of the 400 bricks, and the wall is still as straight & as strong, while being easier to repair later.
Yep Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and google and the rest of those money hating software companies are just in it for the good of free speech and democracy. :S
Trades are OK when you're young. If I'd been a carpenter at 18, i'd be bored of it by 26 and probably be thinking about starting my own company or time to pivot into a new thing. The big downside of trades is they aren't jobs you can do forever.
I did that carpentry thing too for a year, a long time ago. Hanging down head over by the knees from the ridge, and banging nine inch nails into the rafters from below. Up to 8 floors high. Looking like an animal. What can i say? In retrospective it was much more satisfying than much of anything i did afterwards. I really built something to last, immediately visible, tangible.
Though of course it would have been hard to do that for more than five to ten years. And it WAS dangerous. Many alcoholics there also.
edit: But i really learned to use a hammer from some functional alcoholic which needed two bottles of beer first to get his shaking under control. So...prejudice be damned!
2nd edit: He, in traditional carpenters clothes, coming from Berlin and speaking that dialect. Lying in the shade of some wall, upping his level of beer.
Me, mostly clueless but agile rookie, stylelessly in military surplus chlothing somewhere in the 'Ruhrpott' in North-Rhine-Westphalia, slowly doing his thing up there.
He, 'Dude! I can't stand nor hear and see how you are hammering!'
Me, 'Wassup?! Show me then you lazy old fart!'
And he did. Effectively 'teaching in' hands on at first, then by constantly giving voice feedback from his shadow behind the wall. Like, 'Too slow, better, Jaa!, like that, go on!'
And so i did, happily banging away heads down and bare chested in the morning sun, not minding his lazyness at all.
There was more to it. It had something zen-like, because his voice from the shadow also said snidely 'Not like that, i can hear how you are holding it wrong!' , and instructed me to hold/bend my wrist this and that way. And my arm, elbow, shoulder, body. He masterfully knew the kinematics of hammering and could apply that to teaching you in an almost eerie way.
That's the thing; there are very few ways to go up in those businesses. Either you become a manager or foreman, or go back to school and return as an engineer, project manager, or similar. Or maybe start your own company if you have the papers / certs / connections. Going from a regular skilled worker to those positions can take 10 years, easy.
The guys I worked with almost 15 years ago still work in the same company. Still toil away in the same positions as before, while occasionally inquiring me about engineering school or similar.
I noticed that as soon as they started getting close to 30, got wife and kids, they started to ask around for better options.
