"many hours of overtime this summer."
I think the biggest misconception with any of the trades jobs is that yes, you can make 70K+, even 100K+, but that involves lots of overtime.
back
3 comments
At least in the trades the overtime is a well-understood part of the bargain. Plenty of white-collar employees work 60+ hour weeks with no additional compensation except the possibility of a larger-than-average bonus.
Physical labor is very different from white collar work.
Yes, continue and elaborate? Mental (white collar) work has more of that feeling of dread I think. Maybe physical “overtime” has a physical limit, not sure how often you push yourself into burnout in those fields? Curious and asking here, don’t read in too much here.
You can google "retirement age plumbers" and see stories of people's bodies giving out at age 50. There are some things you can do to mitigate that risk, but physical labor jobs frequently land you into unplanned early retirement, with the rest of your life in pain.
Completely anecdotal - but the guys I know in trades have a larger proportion that smoke/drink heavily compared to the office workers I know.
Would be curious if there’s a study that compares “health nut” physical trade workers with “health nut” office workers.
Still as you said, there’s a lot of risk with relying on physical capabilities for work.
If an office worker gets injured outside of work, you can still do the basic job.
If a physical tradeworker gets injured outside of work, you could be out of a paycheck.
I agree with that, the physical labor has been studied and experienced for quite some time now. But we need to look forward and see if there might be changes we cannot comprehend yet.
For example, we cannot yet google the software eng retirement age or the like. Assuming we started in 2005, average dude 25years old then hasn't retired yet and we don't know either where he/she's gone in 2035/45.
Software engineering as a popular career track goes back to the early 80s if I'm being extremely conservative.
There are plenty of retired software engineers that I know. Most of them retired because they wanted to do something different, and they had the money to do it. I don't know of any that have retired as a direct result of the physical effects on their body.
So…no back pain? :)
Purdue started CS degree program in the 60’s
Yeah I’m not talking about Kernighan & Ritchie et al. More like the big boom, zero interest rate and the huge demand of SWE that occurred 2010 onwards.
I’m sure the biggest early retirement factor is weight. Most guys in the trades were 50-150lbs overweight. That’s more ruinous to your back and body than anything you are likely to do at work. We had old guys working and one thing basically all of them had in common was being thin.
There are reasons the welding movement isn't going to spread to the UK. More general awareness of the risks, less cultural passion for the optics
https://breathefreely.org.uk/guidance-on-exposure-to-mangene...
>The WEL for Manganese (since 2018) in the UK for those small particles that reach the deep lung (known as respirable particles) is 0.05mg/m3 (8hr TWA), a tenth of the previous WEL.
This change is significant as much of the manganese in the fume will be respirable. It is likely that the respirable limit will be exceeded during many welding activities unless effective controls are introduced and used properly.
I think if you really want to make a proper living from the trades, you need to at some stage plan to move "off the tools" and into starting your own welding/plumbing/whatever business.
If you can do that successfully, you can get FAANG money.
Well there are around 130K plumbing businesses in the USA and around 400K plumbers, so I think that plan leaves around 270K plumbers snaking drains until they die.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472152.htm https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-busi...
They (270K) can still create new businesses though?
With overtime as a freelance software developer I felt my brain developing faster. With overtime as a mailman I felt it decaying faster.
Both jobs drained my will to live though. The mailman job was actually much nicer, just the pay was total ass.
Yes, but I don’t see why that means overtime is compensated in one but not the other. If anything blue collar workers are more upfront about their time being valuable, while in white collar work there’s an unwritten expectation that you’ll suck it up and get the job done. Talking about money is taboo, but who does that benefit?
This doesn't mean that the concept and value of overtime is different between the two
If you talk to someone in the trades yes, it's understood that overtime is required to make good money. When you see people promoting the trades to highschoolers though, they are not talking about that fact.
Yes, white collar jobs can require overtime but not all and not always but that is kinda besides the point. Why are we promoting work that requires 50-60+ hours a week to get by?
Yet I see tradesmen who have started their own contacting businesses and poorly paid software engineers who somehow just make Wordpress themes.
At the end of the day, people need to discover themselves and find what they excel at. Who am I to tell people that they’ll enjoy my job and be as good at it as I am. No one should tell me to start a career in chemistry or playing an instrument. I’ve already tried it.
Yeah, is it really a good indicator if you need to work 20 hours overtime every week to make the median household income? That's just exploitation.
We also just know that, blue or white, there is no raise structure in society anymore. You can't just do honest work or even be loyal and expect it to pay off financially.
Median household income is household income, not personal income. Median personal income in the US for all people with an income is (as of 2022) $47,960. [1] For those in full time year-long employment, it's $60,070. And note because that is for all employed persons, that's including people with years of experience in their respective fields.
Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
HN comments are so out of touch with reality that you see people sneer at someone running a business in Russia that earns them $100k annual profit.
I'm "out of touch" for not accepting 1.5x overtime in order to have a median income? Meanwhile 60, 70+% is going off to rent.
I don't care if someone compensated highly chooses that lifestyle, but not someone "average".
$70k isn't a median income, it's much more than it. Which is to say it's much more than 50% of full+ time American workers, with years of experience on average, earn. And overtime is typically time and a half. So somebody earning $50k and working 60 hour weeks would be earning $87,500 which would put them in the top quarter of all earners in the US [1], straight out of high school, and with 0 debt.
You are right that doing this in the Bay Area would be unusual due to an unreasonable cost of living, but it's possible he's still living with his parents. If not, the great thing about the trade is that they're in high demand everywhere - including offshore where the pay skyrockets, especially for a welder who can get underwater work. Those gigs enable one to comfortably retire, if they want, a multi millionaire well before 40.
But the interesting thing about trades is that people end up enjoying them. A friend works the rigs and makes a stupid amount of $$$ thanks to doing 2 on 2 off and spending his offtime in places like Thailand. So he's taking home a healthy 6 figures, gets 50% of the year off, and is having a total cost of living in the low thousands per year. He still has no intention of retiring though, even though he could live off simple interest alone at this point. It ends up being a lifestyle and not just a job.
@>70k isn't a median income, it's much more than it.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
>Median weekly earnings of full-time workers were $1,194 in the first quarter of 2025.
Extrapolates to 62k/year. I don't know what else to say here.
>. So somebody earning $50k and working 60 hour weeks would be earning $87,500 which would put them in the top quarter of all earners in the US
Yes, work 50% more than the median and you hit the 75% mark (above 50% of the top half). The math seems to math out. But thought we wanted to not worm ourselves to death these days?
>straight out of high school, and with 0 debt.
Well, no. Not straight out of high school. You need to compete for a role among unions (which seems to be a hurdle the poster above passed, or is confident of passing), then complete an apprenticeship for a few years that may either be unpaid or pay significantly less. Then after that you become a journeyman and start to get that pay.
There's still a near college level of training where you need resources to survive that your apprenticeship isn't covering. Resources that may or may not include parents covering room and board (and in that case, sure. You can survive on anything That pays anything if the biggest expense is paid for). That's sadly a growing luxury in modern society, though.
>But the interesting thing about trades is that people end up enjoying them.
I work in games, so yea. I get it. You sacrifice comfort and maybe even health for furfillment. But I can still recognize in my industry when that passion and engagement is being exploited while still choosing to participate it.
Well, eventually I recognized it. Gaining 60 pounds and having an emergency room visit finally knocked some sense into me.
Most people don't work 52 weeks a year so yearly earnings are different than weekly earnings times 52. Beyond that it's important to consider what you're comparing here. You're looking at the wages of (and only of) all full time+ workers in America - meaning you're comparing the earnings of somebody fresh out of high school to somebody who's been working for years on average. And of course plenty of those people are also working overtime. In spite of all of this, the high school kid is still earning 20% more! And the OP that started this thread conversation made it clear his kid has already received this offer, so yes it's literally straight out of high school. His earnings in a few years will be even higher.
Games and trades are complete opposites. If you still think you enjoy game development (and aren't independent), then it's almost certain that you haven't been in the industry long. With games, you start with a passion and the games industry will just completely beat it out of you. The games industry will make you hate game development and even games. The trades are different in that somehow that passion is enabled to be born for those that didn't already have it, and fostered and grown in those that did. In software you end up in a scenario (I'm speaking outside of games here - where you don't even get good pay) where people mostly hate their job, but love the pay. And in welding you end up in one where people mostly love their job.
>Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.
I'm scoffing at a kid needing to work 60 hours a week in order to earn an income barely above the median. I'm scoffing at the idea that people think 70k is liveable in high COL areas without sharing multiple roommates.These aren't things we should normalize.
If you really think this isn't bad, you're the ones out of touch with how expensive it is to survive these days.
Not everything that is hard or unpleasant is exploitation. 50% of jobs will pay below the median income. That's what median means. The existence of jobs paying below the median income is a mathematical certainty, not exploitation.
That's fair, but if you want to frame a job as a "good" one, you'd expect to be on the other side of median.
"Good" is always going to be relative. Is it good if your other option is to be a programmer? Probably not. Is it good if your other option is working retail for minimum wage? Yeah, then it's probably pretty good.
yeah but their point is 60+ hours workweek for a median income
So it's a below median income job (as 50% of all jobs necessarily are) with the option to increase your income by working more. Still not exploitation.
There are salaried employees making less who also work 60 hours a week and don't even get overtime (granted, their jobs are likely less physically demanding).
I don't think you're understanding the long term implications of this, nor how expensive it is these days to simply live. People don't understand that soke areas can barely live on median income to begin with and that these aren't just "nice to have" hours, but needed to survive. I will call that exploitation.
>There are salaried employees making less who also work 60 hours a week and don't even get overtime
Those are called exempt jobs and they tend to start at 80k for that to qualify. I still don't like it but baby steps.
If you're non-exempt and have unpaid overtime... How is that not exploitation?
Exempt jobs in no way shape or form start at $80k. You can be making $35k and be exempt. It has to do with the nature of the work, not a salary.
You can't be non-exempt and have unpaid overtime. Non-exempt means you are required to be paid overtime for working over 40 hours per week. That's the entire point of the exempt / non-exempt designation. If you're non-exempt and not getting paid overtime, you need to report your employer to the DoL.
Yes, some areas are expensive, those areas also have higher wages. The median wage in that area will be higher than the overall median for the whole country. If you can't afford to live there...live somewhere else. That isn't complicated.
Okay sure. Your state will vary. California's exempt status requires a certain salary, among several other clauses:
https://www.calchamber.com/california-labor-law/exempt-nonex...
>Exempt employees in California generally must earn a minimum monthly salary of no less than two times the state minimum wage for full time employment.
So as of now that floor would be $34/hr to even be considered.
>Yes, some areas are expensive, those areas also have higher wages
Given federal minimum wage, it's likely to be the other way around. $25/hr in CA may go down to $11 in a low COL. You can see some abysmally low compensations flr jobs that "require" advanced degrees.
>If you can't afford to live there...live somewhere else. That isn't complicated.
Spoken like someone who's never tried to get housing out of state without a job offer. Let alone moving long distance.
> or even be loyal
What's loyalty got to do with this? I'm not "loyal" to my employer and I don't know anyone who is. If I find a job that pays better, and offers better conditions, I'll take it. Why would anyone do anything else, and why would anyone put any value on that?
I actually don't believe it.
Most people work not only for the pay check but also for some concrete project they want to see completed (or a customer problem they want to see fixed, etc). Omo economicus is a very simplified theoretical model of only one aspect of work.
There are options other than "loyal to the company" or "always choose option which pays most"
For example someone might like their co-workers, enjoy the projects they work on, and want to see the current product (that they have invested so many time into) succeed. But at the same time, they might not care about company itself at all. If the project got closed and co-workers left, they will move to a new company with no hesitation.
I don't believe in loyalty to an employer but I've had and seen numerous employers who said they valued loyalty. Those employers didn't pay for that loyalty and didn't deserve, yes.
But that is the point of the GP. Ostensibly, employers once paid for loyalty by offering consistent raises. That is done now.
Thanks for agreeing with me. Older generations have a notion of "be loyal and reliable and you'll move up". The last few decades broke such a social contract.
It probably deserved to be broken but the point overall is thst job progression isn't just a given built into most structures anymore. You gotta fight or bounce around and keep proving your worth.
Tribal knowledge and company familiarity should justify the employer in offering raises to keep the employee around. Hiring someone new almost assuredly costs more in both the front-end and the back-end.
GP is suggesting that the lack of loyalty nowadays is part of the issue.
Yes, loyalty is a two way street. If they aren't loyal to you, you're not getting any payoff by being loyal to them. Times have changed (IMO for the worse).