I’d rather be an electrician than a plumber. It’s like a simpler, deadlier Ethernet.
Three phase PoE anyone?
Powerline networking is a thing and a great choice for bringing hardline connections to remote parts of a house.
I had a shed that had electric but my WiFi couldn’t reach and a cheap powerline kit and a spare OpenWRT worked a treat.
Also if you become an electrician then you have an excuse to run Ethernet poorly. Gotta love when the electrician runs unshielded cat6 cable through 100ft of conduit containing 480V wires. Talk about POE, you could probably run a toaster off that Ethernet cable.
That’s unironically a good idea if you are just getting into it. The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
Tell me about it. Giving thought to retraining as an electrician given how in demand they are.
How do you do it? I wouldn’t mind being a plumber but I have no idea how I’d get started. I don’t even know what tools I’d need.
Your local plumbers union can probably help you get an apprenticeship and get going.
Seems I do have a local plumbers’ union, and it looks like they are accepting applications. Thanks!
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get picked right away. Sometimes they have a year or more backlog on apprenticeships.
If you stick it out, it can be a great career!
Thanks, I don’t know if they’ll want me, seems like they’re mostly looking for new high school grads and I am well-removed from my high school years. But maybe my experience with coding will be an asset, somehow.
You could also look into becoming an electrician. That touches on more high tech stuff than plumbing. And you get to flex your math skills as a master electrician. I think (hope) that there is a fairly rigorous certification for getting into electrical apprenticeship programs in every region. In the city where I grew up, they had to sit for exams in order to get to specific levels.
Edit to add: while both jobs have too much crawling through spiderwebs in crawlspaces for my tastes, electricians encounter orders of magnitude less poop than plumbers.
Every job gets a little more techie every year. I’m sure the master plumbers use some pretty sophisticated software to plan out the plumbing in a house.
Heck, just a simple job needs planning, billing, and more. All of which use computer systems.
Even just knowing logic and high end math is showing that you’re not just a knucklehead looking to do the bare minimum.
Every bit of experience you had in a previous role can be used in the current one. Just spend a few minutes thinking of how it would work and use that in any interviews you get.
Just remember, even though most of these folks didn’t go to university, doesn’t mean they’re any dumber than you are. If they’re doing high quality work, they’re probably just as smart, or smarter.
You need to find someone who is a) cool and not a bad teacher and b) a good plumber and c) willing to take you on to teach you and d) work your butt off till you’re useful.
I suppose my question is more how do I do A B and C? is it all just knowing someone?
A lot of community colleges either double as trade schools or have active relationships with local trade schools.
Another option is to talk to your local employment office. They usually have more programs than just unemployment insurance. Depending on your financial circumstances and your location, you might even be able to have the government pay for your training program/certification. At the very least, they’ll have useful points of contact and information about training for various jobs.
I sent this to my plumber to congratulate him on his career choice.
Turns out now he’s an electrician and his company got hired to help build an AI data center. 💀Sixty electricians from his company alone on one job. Drones surveilling the repetitive work overhead.
So much for escaping the impacts of AI.
lol, you’re joking
managers have been into “remote work” long before workers have.
No.
I know an electrician who moved beyond doing it day to day, he was telling me he knows of data center job sites that are paying regular electrician wages + $250/day. I think the data center boom might be bigger and crazier than we even realize somehow.
Economic news sites for a while have been noting that data-center-related economic activity - electricians, other contractors, chips and other electronic component manufacturing and assembly, transportation (Marketplace has the owner of a barge company on regularly, and for a couple of years now he has said business is good even though all his normal customers are down because he’s transporting so much data center construction material) - is probably the only reason the tariff-related trade disruption hasn’t pushed the US into recession.
It is huge and crazy, was huge and crazy last year, and looks on track to continue the huge and crazy at least through next year.
Computer, I need software please!
Why won’t it work? I asked for software!
You asked wrong! You forgot “no mistakes”
Don’t do plumbing, join us in HVAC-R. There is way less training and fewer certs required. The bar is so low it’s derailing subways.
Refrigeration?
Edit: Wait, refrigeration is just full stack where HVAC isn’t.
Yep. When it comes to HVAC and refrigeration, refrigeration techs tend to have far more variried work and be the more expensive to hire. More expensive doesn’t mean better though, refrigeration is just more generalized. HVAC tends to be pretty standardized as far as operating conditions and equipment goes so HVAC techs can get pretty specialized as far as tools and training goes. But with refrigeration you do all the standard HVAC work while also working on basically everything else that gets hot or cold.
The best comparison I can make is probably to automotive mechanics. A HVAC tech is like a dealership mechanic, where a refrigeration tech is closer to a diesel truck mechanic. That diesel truck mechanic could probably work on your Honda Civic, but they’d be way more expensive, they aren’t going to have the special factory tools, and that really isn’t what they’re there for. Similarly a refrigeration tech can do HVAC work and we often do, but we tend to be more expensive and less specifically tooled for HVAC than a dedicated HVAC tech. The less specifically tooled part can be kind of funny at points because some of the guys I know who work in dedicated HVAC will go so far as to have different manifolds that they use for different refrigerants, meanwhile I’ve seen a refrigeration tech patch a 100 ton industrial chiller barrel with basically nothing but the tools in their pockets, a tube of quick set JB weld, and a vacuum pump. If it’s stupid and it works then it’ll just have to keep working until the right parts come in.
IT guy here, not a programmer per se, but I have given up and am re-training into fraud detection. I want to take down some of the fuckers that ruined the industry before I die
I was in IT 20+ years.
I quit 4 years ago and opened an arcade. My only regret is I should have bailed out 10 years ago.
I’m a non native English speaker , what do you mean by an arcade ? ___
It’s a place with a bunch of games like pinball, video arcades, billiards, etc.
who are the people that ruined the industry ? who do you blame ?
I don’t know what I did, but I’m definitely about to get beat for it
You added the wrong vowel to consonant-ending words while doing a faux Italian accent
Oh-a no!
getting licensed as an electrician has been on my mind recently. i’m so tired of the whole industry
I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I’m 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I’ll do after I’m replaced with AI I don’t know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I’m more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.
you’ll either be needed to extract dead systems after this all falls apart, or to build new systems for people that don’t want slop service in dead space.
Oops, requirements were written by ai too
For real.
I recently lost half a morning having to go through a slop requirements document and making a list of questions like “are you sure you want this? why do you want this? what does this even mean?”, to which the answers were all “I don’t know, ChatGPT wrote it”.
Like why did you even bother sending me this, you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead and saved me 2 hours of my life
you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead
AI discovers compression algorithms.
People do stupid things when they don’t know any better but want to look like they know what they are doing. Enter LLMs now people think they look even smarter in an area they don’t know things.
yeah it’s not a great idea, I’ve been seeing a crap ton of AI ads for relatively bland services online, like insurance and weight loss, some known brands mixed in, and I keep thinking, what does this benifit the company other than not paying someone more than the AI to make an ad, and I feel it mostly just let’s less legitimate business look more sleek, but the bounce back from that is going to be people associating AI ads with garbage and scam businesses, which is plush the bigger corporations away from it. Anyway, yeah it’s all to try and get the user of the AI service to look more polished in intent.
AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read)
My new favorite abbreviation
Call me a Karen, but that gets an angry email to their boss.
I wish. Sadly it was from the boss.
I’ve gotten fired for going over heads before and will do it again!
With all the food recalls, I’m sure plumbing is a high demand job.
Jokes aside; trades suck. If you like hot ass heat, cramped places, constant injuries, buying your own tools, ruining your body before you reach forty, and annoying customers; then it’s the job for you. This is an anecdotal take but yeah it’s not fun. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I say I wish I did anything else for the last ten years. The money was good but the added pain isn’t worth it.
I worked in IT support for 15 years. Now I work on a dairy farm. Cows are way better than people. Go into farming, fellow lemmings. It’s so rewarding.
Atleast cows dont need cloud storage
Supply managed?
“Cows are way better than people” said the prison guard.
I mean, he’s keeping cows prisoner and we’re posting passive aggressive shit online. I’d say cows are 2/2 so far.
I just fucking work there. For minimum wage. I’m the one kindness those cows get so fuck your judgement.
> the end of software engineering
> looks inside
> overhyped slop generator
To be fair having been in software for awhile, plenty of people were slinging slop before AI as well.
The difference is back then, we could block the PR, now management demands velocity at all costs.
It will catch up eventually.
Didn’t management always demand velocity at all costs? This is really not new.
In the last few years prior to widespread coding llms (at least at the shops I worked at then) there was an appreciation for reducing incidents and defensive, clean code.
Now the expectation is if the AI causes an outage, the AI will fix it quickly, so code quality doesn’t matter and just yeet everything into production.
Slop back then was using Electron at all cost, since it allowed them to hire cheaper web devs instead. Now it’s vibe-coded Electron apps.
Started carpentry work this week. It’s alright if you don’t work with assholes
So many assholes though. So I bought a lawnmower and a trailer, cutting grass and gardening by myself is really nice
I’m thinking cake decorator. Or florist. Maybe grave digger.
florist
This sounds nice. Working with something green and alive. Arborist too.
Granny worked as a florist, not her own shop though. She had incredible strong hands.
As a pupil I did a work experience day in the shop. It was really chilly (Germany usually has not Air Con), we consistently had to clean the floor in the back room to not slip on the leaves, it was tiny in there and we were four people. I got to wash a fake flower decor and rearrange it for a doctors office. That was nice.
She had incredible strong hands.
Maybe you should be a writer. Well placed, evocative, Hemminginway-esque sentence. You’re in the wrong neighborhood.
I never really understood the appeal of arranging severed plant genitals. Sure, it looks nice. But boobs also look nice, and I don’t cut them off and put them in a pretty bowl on my living room table.
You make a good point, but maybe no one had thought of severed boobs as decoration yet. AI will think of it for us, soon. What are the real dollar value of peasant boobs anyway-- I hear people arent generally worth very much if you do the math. And the rich + AI are doing the math.
We have diggers.
I think manual labor that needs creativity (e.g. pattiserie or florist) has the best post-AI future.Snatch anvil thief.
I used to think I could give hand jobs in alleyways if things got bad, but I hear AI is being trained to give those. Because of course it is.
Learn the essential skills and tools to become a confident plumber.
And then discover that plumbers won’t even take on an apprentice without three years of experience.
