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It might be a bad area. There aren't better employers in the area. He knows he is being abused. He used to live and work as an electrician in another country wh
by UncleMeat 4y ago
It might be a bad area. There aren't better employers in the area. He knows he is being abused. He used to live and work as an electrician in another country where he was treated considerably better. He spends his days wiring new homes that sell for 1.5M+ and gets treated like crap. Moving is unfortunately not an option because my sister's career is very location-dependent.
"Well if you aren't in one of the good areas you'll get fucked" doesn't tend to make it into articles like the linked above and I think it is worth knowing.
- SoftTalker 4y agoNew home/residential wiring jobs are basically the entry point for electricians. It's about as mindless and simple as it gets. I'm not sure what the licensing requirements are but those are the sorts of jobs that an electrical contractor puts their new/junior people on.
- nullsense 4y agoI know nothing about the industry, but out of curiosity... what are considered the more interesting jobs?
- jasondigitized 4y agoHigher voltage = Higher wages
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoAnd a perk, in casse of on-the job death, free cremation service included!
- prottog 4y agoI only know a bit more than nothing, but I'd wager anything industrial is considered more interesting. Single-family residential wiring, especially for new construction where there's nothing in the way, is so simple that even I, using just what I've learned being a homeowner, could meet code with it.
- baremetal 4y agoIndustrial.
- SoftTalker 4y agoYeah, industrial/institutional, high voltage, multi-phase, transformers, utility-level stuff e.g. generation and transmission, etc.
- baremetal 4y agoIndustrial automation as well.
- alvah 4y ago24V / 4-20mA isn't really the same job though.
- quartesixte 4y agoTalk to contractors in any city with a hardware startup scene and they absolutely are making a killing. Lots of 220V, 480V, miles of 120V. Transformers, machine hookups. You name it.
- Infernal 4y ago220, 221, 222… whatever it takes!
- systems_glitch 4y ago208 and 277 as well!
- jxramos 4y agocommercial sites are supposed to be good; I know a commercial electrician and he'd talk about the many tech company headquarters and new buildings he and his team would wire up and do all the equipment for. This includes outlets, infrastructure like AC and any special equipment like fire alarms smoke detectors, any everything in between. He'd say working for government jobs were too slow, they took forever to complete, it was always more lucrative to go for private industry large construction sites like new malls, big buildings with large square feet footprints. Basically commercial real estate stuff.
- datavirtue 4y agoCommercial....wayyyyy different. Need to know a lot more. Employment sucks. I knew HVAC people and flooring people who had it made but they worked for themselves.
- quartesixte 4y agoIndustry and commercial construction got mentioned. But also, the film industry can be an interesting one. Really crazy voltages over there too.
- chrisdhoover 4y agoLineman, controls, fire alarm, even commercial is probably better then stapling romex and ruining joists.
- Spooky23 4y agoA guy I went to high school with was dangled from a crane to do stuff with a new turbine in a power plant. Sounded pretty crazy.
- UncleMeat 4y agoThat's where all the jobs have been in the last five years in his area. His teams are also doing commercial wiring as well, but new builds dominate the work. And they are supposed to complete jobs fast - even if the work is simple doing it fast is not easy. And so what? "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles" is a very different narrative than what is usually presented.
- thrashh 4y agoCS obviously makes way more but I hear tons of stories of people working overtime or having shitty bosses in developer jobs too, and yet the narrative I hear a lot is get a FAANG job, make 400k then retire by 30 There isn’t any automatic get rich easy scheme. To some extent you have to keep your wits about and make sure you are getting your worth
- SoftTalker 4y ago> "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles" Everyone I know in the trades "put in their dues" with at least 10 years of working for someone else, doing the shit jobs, working outside in the rain, in the mud, in the heat, in crawlspaces, in attics, etc. The smart, driven ones learn all they can, advance, build relationships and reputation, and start their own businesses. The lazy or dumb ones continue to do the crap jobs for their entire career.
- watwut 4y agoBasically, you described that it is pretty bad job. And the only way out is to stop doing that job and start being manager who pressures others to be faster at the bad job. Also, work is pyramid. You have one manager/business owner for many ordinary team members no matter how "smart" all of them are. And even that, management and business skills are not the same thing as being good tradesman. Just like with programming, you can be smart and driven and not be management material. The question was whether trades arw good occupation. Not whether you can be better off by stopping being tradesman and going into management.
- 4y ago
- ummonk 4y agoI’m skeptical of the narrative that trades is some great career choice, but "Well if you aren't in one of the good areas you'll get fucked" applies to pretty much every career choice.
- frankreyes 4y agoFor example being a software engineer outside the US, working for a local business, selling to local customers. In Latin America, programmers can make about 10 or 20 times less than in the US.
- acover 4y agoWhy does this happen?
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoMost software ultimately automates menial labor. If the menial labor that's being automated is highly paid, the software engineer is highly paid. If the menial labor is lower paid, the software engineer is lower paid. Adjusting also for the amount of menial labor which is automated. In a poorer society equivalent menial labor is more poorly paid than in a richer society. Edit to add: And in a poorer society some of the highly paid menial labor that exists in richer societies may just not exist, or at least not in the same amount.
- somenameforme 4y agoWages are generally controlled almost entirely by supply/demand. In an area where there are more people interested in doing a job than there is in demand for that job, wages for that occupation will trend towards the lowest possible value. In an area where there is more demand for a certain skillset than exists, wages will trend to the maximum affordable cost for anybody with that skill. All the other stuff like expertise and value is, counterintuitively, near irrelevant. For instance postdocs are some of the most highly educated and ostensibly highly skilled individuals - and many have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get to where they are, yet they earn about as much as a plumber does, because there's far more supply of postdocs than there are jobs/positions for them. So putting all the theory into practice. There are usually three possible reasons. Supply is too high = excessively high rates of software training/education. Demand is too low = not many roles for software developers. Or the companies that are hiring aren't making much themselves so the "maximum affordable cost" is relatively low.
- Bloating 4y ago$1.5M+ homes is not a bad area
- acdha 4y agoIt can easily be a bad area for freelancing: imagine if it’s an area where you have big developments and maybe some large commercial or agricultural sites but not a ton of smaller places. The bigger contracts tend to go to the big companies who can handle a ton of work so there might not be that many people looking for small jobs - someone who just bought a new $1.5M home probably isn’t going to be doing much electrical work for years.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> someone who just bought a new $1.5M home probably isn’t going to be doing much electrical work for years unless its UK, then the house with that pricetag was last fixed in the 60's, needs total rewiring, and has energy efficiency of a damp tent.
- brewtide 4y agoOften these houses will have immediate renovations to suit the new owners aesthetic --- oftentimes major. Lots of trades needed for such things. Fair point about scale of jobs however. Things need done and eventually a real world timeframe.
- jfk13 4y agoWhat this says to me is that the society/country in which he's living -- yes, I can guess which one it is -- is pretty broken.
- xenadu02 4y agoHe should start buying some cheap tools of his own (to start with) and do weekend/night jobs for himself. If he's working on 1.5m homes I guarantee you there are a ton of homeowners who need electrical jobs done. Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business. There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it. Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoIf there's one thing that I've learned hanging out on /r/freelance, it's that most people are not cut out to be business owners.
- incongruity 4y agoSeems like a startup niche - a more idealized Uber for electricians - abstract the worst parts, help tradespeople keep more of the money their work produces.
- macNchz 4y agoThat is basically franchising, you exchange some cash upfront and ongoing royalties for a brand name and some level of support with training/business planning/marketing/leadgen/software etc. There’s a franchise for just about anything you can think of, and a surprising number local businesses in the US these days are actually franchises, not just fast food restaurants. Some are excellent and some are scams!
- lionelw 4y agoCan you elaborate why?
- michaelt 4y ago