I threw my degree in the toilet, I closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic.
Greatest choice I've ever made. The pay is great, the work is steady, the coworkers are relaxed and not trying to one up each other. I'm now being paid to go to school, and get raises every year until I'm fully ticketed (way more than I ever made in the entry tech positions).
I've heard non-stop my whole life that if I join a trade it's going to be grunt labor and I'll be paralyzed in 5 years. Maybe some are, but this isn't hard at all. I lay on a creeper and turn wrenches. Anything over 50lbs we have lifts for.
Tech has become fun again, I'm just making projects because its what I wanted. I come home and relax by writing on my projects.
Now, I'm watching my tech friends from a distance and my only regret is not doing this sooner.
"Sometimes you gotta give in to win"
I accept the trade off, as the alternative is going back to linkedin and begging for a job all day.
This is why I try to hoard all my money. I don't want to do this when I'm 50. I've always thought about doing this for 10-15 years and then building a semi and doing some owner operator long haul trucking. I could easily fix anything on the truck and save major money.
I install heavy machinery for a living and I forbid them on site.
Use regular spanners, ensure adequate cross tightening and final tightening with torque.
Love it! A score of years ago, I considered being an auto mechanic after graduating HS but then ended up back in CompSci.
Did you have to go back to school? Did you find a shop that would take you in as an apprentice? And if they did, how did you convince them you can/will be good at the job?
However, the bar has never been lower.
I didn't want to do automotive, the piece work is a cancer. You'll do 12 hour days and get paid for 8. Not my cup of tea. I was interested in the big stuff. Offroad equiptment sounded cool too.
I wanted a nice car, so instead of racking up mega debt on a $70,000 mustang I bought an old classic car and learned everything. After 5 years I fully restored it on the cheap (less than $10k) and now I've pivoted my career to that.
Anyone currently with a tech job can pay for it out of pocket and barely notice. If it’s something someone thinks they may want to do, they should just do it. Nobody says you have to switch jobs at the end.
The first sentence is what I'd think too.
Have you considered if the fully ticketed salary includes risk of serious injury if something bad happens (like, knock on wood, lifts failing)?
The far higher risk of injury and death is one thing that keeps people away from physical jobs.
It's not perfect. I risk crushing my hands everyday. Or falling. Or causing 10s of thousands of dollars in damage because I didnt tighten a bolt. Arthritis is likely.
But it's still incredibly rare, and mainly in your control. All my coworkers are major injury free.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
I feel we are getting the worse of “both worlds”.
Fiction has sold AI in the form of Data from Star Trek. A robot with perfect recall of information over a wide range of topics and flawless reasoning.
Today’s AI is nothing like Data with its hallucinations but are taking jobs anyway because it’s “good enough” for many corporations.
P.S. Haven’t been keeping up to date but let’s say I have a story where I retcon a previously an established fact midway through the story with no explanation. If I feed it into AI as part of its training data, will it “challenge” this contradiction? Or will it just blindly accept it? What if the story is part of a prompt, will it “challenge” it in anyway?
I mean even a young child will point out that “that wasn’t what you said earlier”.
Then literally nothing is safe.
Besides, unless we build physical robots to trace airlines and replace them, I'm safe.
AI didn't "come" for software either. This is just a rerun of the 2000s outsourcing boom with a different kind of dirt cheap slop code.
That one ended with execs patting themselves on the back for hiring "only the best" software engineers- almost as if slop actually was a problem.
It makes me wonder if I would be happier doing something else, but (because of my personality) I’m very doubtful.
Since you see yourself as also being a computer guy I’m assuming that lack skill or intuition was not why you left the industry, so don’t read the rest of my comment as talking about you.
But I’ve definitely seen plenty of people in the software development industry where they may get by “okay” at their job, but things don’t tend to “click” as easily (in terms of intuitive understanding) for them the same way they do for me.
So I feel lucky and deeply happy to be at a company I enjoy working at and doing what has always been my passion.
It’s not that the computer industry is completely terrible (although plenty of parts of it certainly are), it’s just that for some people it’s not their true passion (which is fine).
This. People tend to underestimate the joy that steady progress brings. A quick peak usually just leads to a long, depressing decline. Many people would rather take a career that grows a few percent every year for four decades over one that spikes and crashes any day. It’s better to be a slow grower who stays valuable than a flash-in-the-pan who burns out by 35[1].
[1] Honestly, I think there is a reason for this decline that has nothing to do with AI: the IT industry has just matured. Aside from the classic GoF patterns and Enterprise patterns and their variations, what new popular and deep design patterns have we actually adopted lately? Or look at all those must-know data structures and algorithms that are all over the web. How many of those were invented in the last ten years? Even in open source, where are the new platform-level projects invented in the last 5 years that every major company is pouring resources into? There are not many.
In other words, we are just eating our own tail at this point. It is just CRUD to death. When things get this stagnant, tech departments inevitably turn into cost centers. Even without AI, we were already heading toward a dead end. AI just happens to be the tool that makes it easy to automate everything because, at the end of the day, most of our work is just rearranging the same old code patterns anyway.
That's exactly what the corporate IT world has always been once you leave SV.
Paying about 10M/yr for a team of 50 people makes perfect sense. It doesn't really make a dent in payroll to keep daily operations going while their people get paid competitively to work from home in an affordable suburb.
In this world, AI is not a threat. It just auto-transcribes meeting notes and sucks at code review. There's very little to delegate to AI because everyone is maintaining services that have to stay in prod for years if not decades. You wouldn't replace them in the same way you wouldn't replace your lawyers and accountants.
1) How long were you in software? 2) How did you get your break in the trades? Did you go to school etc? 3) Did you have to start on an apprentice program?
Thank you very much
I didn't do any schooling but thats because I've always liked cars and would tinker at home. So I was very advanced for an entry level. They get government kick backs for hiring apprentices and the less of a burder you are to them, the better. However, the bar has never been lower. Before this, I tried electrician but didn't like it. I have zero experience as an electrician.
Your employer signs you up after you pass probation. Then every year you do a 2 month schooling course which is all government paid.
Utilizing it for business purposes is certainly an option too. Possibly in the far future, having the highest quality website with good SEO would help me stomp out competition.
I really wanted to go into tech because I've been told the trades were the boogie man my entire life.
Would have taken grunt labour any day over the latter.
But it gave me a thick skin in the long run and made me a much better (nastier?) negotiator when I had to run business groups.
Happy to be out of it now. Kind of rose at the right time and left before LLMs showed up.
