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Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of

Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of "go into trades" rhetoric is that most trades people either get into management as fast as they can, a small amount start their own business and a share of that small amount are very successful, or a large amount of people trade $$$ for future health problems (not just joints, many of the materials used in trades are awful and many never wear proper PPE). It's important to look at the trades without the veil of blue-collar romanticism; the trades can be lucrative but tradesmen will be very quick to give you the tradeoffs.

ashoeafoot 1y ago
I actually wouldn't be suprised, running your own shop in a trade or in software bootstrap day to day mode has to be remarkable similar. Including consulting gigs to keep yourself afloat.
Balgair 1y ago
For my family it really wan't a trade off. This jobs was the only one we could do to make end meet. My family is the 'petite bourgeois'(owners that labor alongside their workers[0]) that Marx said were the only people that actually had a choice in the class war and were the breeding grounds for fascism. We did management too, but labored with the employees all the same. Did we get paid more? Sometimes, but we had to go without pay a lot and pick up other jobs. Still, my sibling and I went to college debt free, none of the employees' kids did that [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93managerial_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
- Gothmog69 1y ago
  Karl Marx died 40 years before fascism was invented so I would be surprised if he said anything at all about it. Fascism is just repackaged marxism anyways with more nationalism.
  - Balgair 1y ago
    Yeah, my grammar was bad there. Thanks for catching that. The wikipedia link goes into better detail about what I was trying to relate.
antisthenes 1y ago
Yes, all of this is very easily seen by the BLS statistics about the average/median wages of trades. For every anecdote of a plumber making $20k/month in a HCOL area, there are probably 3-4 plumbers who are barely pulling $70k/year in M/LCOL and end up having health problems.

ashoeafoot 1y ago

I actually wouldn't be suprised, running your own shop in a trade or in software bootstrap day to day mode has to be remarkable similar. Including consulting gigs to keep yourself afloat.

Balgair 1y ago

For my family it really wan't a trade off. This jobs was the only one we could do to make end meet. My family is the 'petite bourgeois'(owners that labor alongside their workers[0]) that Marx said were the only people that actually had a choice in the class war and were the breeding grounds for fascism. We did management too, but labored with the employees all the same. Did we get paid more? Sometimes, but we had to go without pay a lot and pick up other jobs. Still, my sibling and I went to college debt free, none of the employees' kids did that [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93managerial_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...

Gothmog69 1y ago
Karl Marx died 40 years before fascism was invented so I would be surprised if he said anything at all about it. Fascism is just repackaged marxism anyways with more nationalism.
- Balgair 1y ago
  Yeah, my grammar was bad there. Thanks for catching that. The wikipedia link goes into better detail about what I was trying to relate.

antisthenes 1y ago

Yes, all of this is very easily seen by the BLS statistics about the average/median wages of trades. For every anecdote of a plumber making $20k/month in a HCOL area, there are probably 3-4 plumbers who are barely pulling $70k/year in M/LCOL and end up having health problems.