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I work for a home builder. Our single biggest problem is finding and hiring quality contractors that have enough skilled tradesmen. There are dozens of electri

I work for a home builder. Our single biggest problem is finding and hiring quality contractors that have enough skilled tradesmen. There are dozens of electrical contractors in my area. But only two that perform work to our standards. There is only one HVAC company that can meet our standards. Same for all of the other skilled trades. Our framing crew is the best within a 75 mile radius. Other builders are constantly trying to poach them from us. We keep throwing money at them to prevent them from going to another builder. Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. I just fired our main pesticide and herbicide contractor today because they couldn’t get it together. Of course I had them replaced before I fired them but I had almost 20 options to choose from. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about all of the skilled contractors.

msgodel 1y ago
Well yeah you've practically done the same thing that's been done with software where juniors need education plus three years of experience for their first job so you have no juniors.
- HeWhoLurksLate 1y ago
  I think the difference is that the pipelines for becoming a junior software developer are well-documented online, where the pipeline for being a "Junior Developer" in the trades is generally accomplished by calling and walking into places and asking for a job still.
  - Loughla 1y ago
    Not accurate, even slightly. You might get hired as a gopher and spend 5 years trying to do other work if you just blunder in without training or skills. Now, there are certificates and other training that most places expect for blue collar workers starting as apprentices. The days of walking off the street to get an apprenticeship in the trades is over. You'll get one after proving you're not on drugs, can show up, and are willing to do bullshit jobs for minimum wage for a three to five years beforehand.
    - spaceguillotine 1y ago
      nah, i went from apprentice to lead installer in under 3 years, there is full training programs for the trades, but you will most likely get injured out before retirement so a lot of people won't even go that route. Until the trades are capped at 30 hours a week, you're going to injure out most of your workforce. It is really hard on bodies.
  - idiotsecant 1y ago
    The HN crowd sure has some well informed opinions about people who work for a living.
    - nine_k 1y ago
      Many of us do the same. I'd say most. Millionaire founders past exit are not the majority of the HN crowd by a long shot.
- hollywood_court 1y ago
  Uh no. Our culture and society have told folks to go to college for so long like it’s their only chance for success. I put on a tool belt as a kid because I didn’t have the opportunity to go to school. It was either learn a trade or fail into the pit of despair that is the hospitality industry. I’m in the south so we don’t have the benefits of union training. A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.
  - jaredhansen 1y ago
    > A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training. Can you elaborate on this point? What is it about the union that makes their on the job training so effective? Veteran carpenters with 15-20 yrs of exp have, in general, a very strong skill set -- what is the union doing that makes people catch up so fast? And if that's true, why do more people not defect from the union?
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  The contractor is supposed to train their tradesmen. There's no hypocrisy in insisting on good contractors.
  - vl 1y ago
    How in the world general contractor can train tradesmen? Contractor organizes and manages, every particular tradesman is better in their respective field than contractor.
    - hollywood_court 1y ago
      A good contractor will recognize new employees with potential and try to point them in the right direction and give them guidance. My first construction job ever was in the Caribbean. I got placed with a group of Haitians, and we were all laborers. We never had a tool in our hands. We simply carried materials, loaded things onto the roof, set up scaffolding, etc. On my third day on the job, the leader of the Haitians became angry at me and kept telling me to slow down. I kept pushing and the lead carpenter on the job noticed. The next day, the general contractor (my boss) pulled me aside and said "when you come in on Monday, make sure you have a tool belt, a hammer, a pencil, a speed square, a tape measure, and a razor blade." I showed up that Monday with all of the required tools and the GC let me work alongside the lead carpenter. At the end of that first week, the lead carpenter lent me a book that he used to learned carpentry while he was in a union in Wisconsin. I spent all weekend reading that book and I had tons of questions for him when I returned to work the next week. I never looked back. I have since worked professionally in every single residential construction related trade. I am confident that I can perform each trade at a professional level with the exception of welding. I can weld. I welded everything on my Land Cruiser and I've welded scores of hip plates over the years. But I'm not confident enough to say that I could perform at the same level as a good professional welder. But HVAC, electrical, plumbing, roofing, siding, millwork installation, finish carpentry, landscaping, and irrigation are all things that I can perform at a top level. That lead carpenter ended up being my best friend I have ever had and he taught me about a lot more than carpentry.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
benreesman 1y ago
I doubt you meant it this way, but that last bit hits a little rough. It's good that you are able to hire people when you have vacancies, and it's good that you don't have to be at the mercy of some insane rent-seeking because one crew in town has managed to monopolize one of your inputs. But saying it's unfortunate that you can't just whack anyone at will with 20 people lined up behind them jobless is wishing for a pretty bad situation right? If all your positions were filled by someone with 20 jobless people standing behind them, who would buy the homes you build?
- viraptor 1y ago
  I'm not sure what's it like in the GP's area, but here I'm happy there are landscapers and other contractors who aren't part of the builders teams. There's lack of people available for odd jobs and for example it was hard to find a painter who wasn't busy with new houses. Unless it's a pathological situation on the market, those people are not idle/jobless. There needs to be a good mix of both.
- vrosas 1y ago
  I’m guessing you’ve never hired a general contractor, or any other kind of home contractor for that matter? I’ve hired over a dozen at this point in the 1.5 years of owning my home, and I’d say, of those, about 2 have been any good. The construction and contracting landscape is a trash heap - a straight race to the bottom filled with lies, shoddy workmanship, and illegal labor. I’m suing 2 of mine for bad workmanship/abandoned projects. I do 100% of my own home renovations now, regardless of the cost of time, tools or materials.
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    If 2 have been good why not stick with them?
    - vrosas 1y ago
      Because my stone mason, as good as he is, doesn’t do plumbing.
toomuchtodo 1y ago
Appreciate you highlighting the need for unions. Hopefully the skilled trades shortage persists indefinitely, otherwise they’d be treated just as you mentioned: disposable and interchangeable. The scarcity is the only thing protecting these folks at the moment. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rebuilding-construction-trades-workforce https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rebuilding-construction-tr...
- sobellian 1y ago
  There is so much work for skilled tradesmen that they would rather see more automation so they can take more jobs. Even many unions, e.g. carpenters' unions, think this way. I mean no large group is a monolith so I'm sure one can find opinions either way among tradesmen. But IMO the problem is so big that it's no longer revenue maximizing for anyone, even the workers. By some measures productivity has actually been declining for construction. If that was good for workers then we should just set them to digging a second Panama Canal with spoons.
  - earnestinger 1y ago
    Real men would dig Route 66 canal instead of Panama.
- nine_k 1y ago
  Software engineers have recently had a chance to taste how does it feel to be plentiful and disposable, after decades of shortage.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Scarcity also creates automation and efficiency pressure. You either get more of that human resource, or you make it so you use less of it, productivity increases also allow for the resources used to make more money without increasing project costs. This is also a very boom/bust industry, so the 2008 bust washed a lot of people out, especially juniors who would be experienced seniors today. A union is not going to protect labor from a building bust, they will stop hiring and the pipeline stalls.
britzkopf 1y ago
Framing is skilled, but landscaping and pest control are unskilled? Are you living in a well framed house overrun with mice and a terrible yard? I've done some framing. With a communicative foreman and a straightforward building design I did not find it that hard.
- hollywood_court 1y ago
  If performing quality framing was so easy, I imagine I’d have less trouble finding folks who want to earn $125k+ per year to do it for me. Instead I just have a group of ~30 Guatemalans who do it while I listen to my American friends and neighbors complain about immigrants “taking all the jobs.”
  - epicureanideal 1y ago
    Folks may not know about the jobs, or there might be other details that aren’t mentioned here that make them less interested, for example are there occasionally big chunks of being unemployed, is the work dangerous, is the work stable, etc. 20 years ago, before I started making good money as a software engineer, if someone had offered me a similar opportunity, and training, I would’ve taken it assuming there were no big gotchas.
southernplaces7 1y ago
>Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. As a former landscaper, I can tell you that you either aren't taking the time to understand at least one of these professions at all, or simply have some very low standards for good landscaping. It is not a dime-a-dozen field that requires minimal skill, at all, and given all I've seen of GOOD pest control, the same applies, fully. You might have dozens of small contractors out there claiming to be either of these things but knowing little, sure, but those that actually know the technical balances at work and can apply those to what they're doing so that it creates durable results for your building/land/home, are people who need to know quite a few very fine nuances of their work. I mean, unless you think that constructing external landscapes that soon collapse, flood or fill with dead plants is irrelevant, or have no problem living in a building riddled with rats, mice, cockroaches and easy domicile to all of these pests and sundry.
- bigbacaloa 1y ago
  [dead]
babyshake 1y ago
I'm a layperson and this touches on my greatest fear about hiring contractors, that I'm not able to quickly enough determine who does meet the quality standard or even what the quality standard should be for a given job. How are average people supposed to navigate these things? I suppose I would just ask Claude/ChatGPT these days but there is surely a lot of tribal knowledge that they don't have.
- bolobo 1y ago
  And chatgpt is going to pull the data from an random UK website when you are in the US and vice-versa, and will augment it with knowledge from its model that come from a reddit thread from 2010 written by an italian plumber. I saw that on the DIY Uk subreddit where people were confused because ChatGPT was answering question using american standards. It's really hard to answer questions based on regional tribal knowledge. Apparently a good source are the tradesmens shop? THey might know their customers? Word-of-mouth?
  - eecc 1y ago
    poor prompting then. One should narrow down the question to the particular circumstance it should apply.
    - bobro 1y ago
      this is exactly what you can’t do as an amateur though. You don’t know enough context to provide your relevant circumstances.
      - eecc 1y ago
        Well no, not really. I’m replying in the context of the parent comment, that was painting a scenario where the GPT would reply with information relevant to different countries. It doesn’t need to be advanced prompting, it’s enough to provide enough information and ask to “provide advice relevant to the current and applicable codes and regulations” It’s the first question a forum dweller would reply to a poorly articulated post.
torginus 1y ago
This. I live in a very different place from you and I'm just a humble homeowner, but contractors here are less than competent and I as a layperson can often do better after reading up on the thing and watching a couple Youtube videos. I know it's meme tier and horrible when a guy who watched some videos tells the tradesmen how to do their jobs, but unfortunately I often end up being right and prove them wrong. For example one of the last things I experienced was one of the electricians needed to get a cable through the concrete upper floor, and just couldn't do the calculations on where to drill and ended up drilling into the middle of the wall instead of right next to it. These kinds of fuckups are constant and the contractors are pretty good at hiding these unless I stand next to them. I've yet to meet a roofer that could properly do trig to calculate the sloped roof area.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Abekkus 1y ago
  ....There's no trigonometry in common roof-slope-area calculations and designations, only pythagoreans. Rise over run, 6ft for every 12ft, etc. I do feel your pain about vetting "professionals", especially living in a place that tries to prevent me from making my own improvements.
  - alt227 1y ago
    Arent sloped roofs just rectangles?
    - ncallaway 1y ago
      The intersections of the joists/beams and the rafters require you to cut angled cuts on the rafters to sit appropriately on the joists/beams. See: https://www.structuralbasics.com/rafter-roof-design/ https://www.structuralbasics.com/rafter-roof-design/ and imagine how you would get a rectangular piece of wood for the rafter to sit flush against the rectangular joists/beams.
simpaticoder 1y ago
This is a little bit tangential to the conversation but I was wondering how you find the best skilled contractors? Do you use Google maps like everyone else and look at the ratings? Or is it information you glean by trial and error over time? Or do you check in with trade schools to see who their best graduates are? Or perhaps something that I haven't mentioned?
- pjm331 1y ago
  For me it’s personal references from other people via local Facebook/whatsapp groups - since I have kids that’s almost always parent groups
- hollywood_court 1y ago
  Mostly from people at supply houses and lumber yards. They know how to tell if a contractor is good or not. Or if we catch wind of a good contractor doing great work for another builder, we'll go inspect their work and then try to get them to jump ship and work with us. Trade school information won't help us any because we're hiring contracting companies. We don't hire individuals unless it's for something specific that can be handled by one individual like kitchen installs. Highly skilled tradesmen are often like really good lawyers. Just because they're good at their craft doesn't mean they'll necessarily be good at running their own contracting business (or law firm). So being a successful contractor really boils down to being able to properly manage your skilled labor (and keep them content) while also keeping things on budget and following the critical path. The single most common mistake I see with most contractors (and most all small business owners in general) is the fact that they think "hey, I own this business, therefore I should be the highest paid person here." So they don't take care of their labor and they end up losing them to someone who will take better care of them. They think that they own the business so they must provide the most value to the company and should earn the most. That's rarely the case in real life though. When I was a contractor out on my own, there were plenty of times when I was paying some of my employees more than I ever took home. The President of the company I work for now isn't the highest compensated member of our team.
mclau157 1y ago
Is this a symptom of every teacher and parent telling kids to get college degrees?
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
A lot of this is a result of how trade licensing works. In most states it's not about whether you know how to do something -- you can't just take a licensing exam and get a license even if you know the material -- it's about having access to someone who already has a license to sign off on you. From which you get two consequences. First, if you know someone who already has a license but doesn't know what they're doing or isn't a good teacher, they sign off on other people without actually teaching them how to do a good job, and then you get even more people with a license who don't really know how to do the job. And second, because the existing license holder has to sign off on several years worth of hours for someone new to get a license, you deter people who would do a good job but -- because of that -- have more opportunities in other industries where you don't have to spend a large chunk of your adult life beholden to someone else because it's still prohibited by law for you to strike out on your own, in an industry that people would otherwise want to enter because they want to do exactly that. Which both lowers the average quality of the candidate pool and creates shortages by lowering the number of candidates.
dehrmann 1y ago
Do you have any advice for how homeowners can screen tradesmen?
- hollywood_court 1y ago
  Go to the lumber yards and supply houses. Go to the sales counter and ask who they would recommend for a certain job.

msgodel 1y ago

Well yeah you've practically done the same thing that's been done with software where juniors need education plus three years of experience for their first job so you have no juniors.

HeWhoLurksLate 1y ago
I think the difference is that the pipelines for becoming a junior software developer are well-documented online, where the pipeline for being a "Junior Developer" in the trades is generally accomplished by calling and walking into places and asking for a job still.
- Loughla 1y ago
  Not accurate, even slightly. You might get hired as a gopher and spend 5 years trying to do other work if you just blunder in without training or skills. Now, there are certificates and other training that most places expect for blue collar workers starting as apprentices. The days of walking off the street to get an apprenticeship in the trades is over. You'll get one after proving you're not on drugs, can show up, and are willing to do bullshit jobs for minimum wage for a three to five years beforehand.
  - spaceguillotine 1y ago
    nah, i went from apprentice to lead installer in under 3 years, there is full training programs for the trades, but you will most likely get injured out before retirement so a lot of people won't even go that route. Until the trades are capped at 30 hours a week, you're going to injure out most of your workforce. It is really hard on bodies.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  The HN crowd sure has some well informed opinions about people who work for a living.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Many of us do the same. I'd say most. Millionaire founders past exit are not the majority of the HN crowd by a long shot.
hollywood_court 1y ago
Uh no. Our culture and society have told folks to go to college for so long like it’s their only chance for success. I put on a tool belt as a kid because I didn’t have the opportunity to go to school. It was either learn a trade or fail into the pit of despair that is the hospitality industry. I’m in the south so we don’t have the benefits of union training. A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.
- jaredhansen 1y ago
  > A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training. Can you elaborate on this point? What is it about the union that makes their on the job training so effective? Veteran carpenters with 15-20 yrs of exp have, in general, a very strong skill set -- what is the union doing that makes people catch up so fast? And if that's true, why do more people not defect from the union?
Dylan16807 1y ago
The contractor is supposed to train their tradesmen. There's no hypocrisy in insisting on good contractors.
- vl 1y ago
  How in the world general contractor can train tradesmen? Contractor organizes and manages, every particular tradesman is better in their respective field than contractor.
  - hollywood_court 1y ago
    A good contractor will recognize new employees with potential and try to point them in the right direction and give them guidance. My first construction job ever was in the Caribbean. I got placed with a group of Haitians, and we were all laborers. We never had a tool in our hands. We simply carried materials, loaded things onto the roof, set up scaffolding, etc. On my third day on the job, the leader of the Haitians became angry at me and kept telling me to slow down. I kept pushing and the lead carpenter on the job noticed. The next day, the general contractor (my boss) pulled me aside and said "when you come in on Monday, make sure you have a tool belt, a hammer, a pencil, a speed square, a tape measure, and a razor blade." I showed up that Monday with all of the required tools and the GC let me work alongside the lead carpenter. At the end of that first week, the lead carpenter lent me a book that he used to learned carpentry while he was in a union in Wisconsin. I spent all weekend reading that book and I had tons of questions for him when I returned to work the next week. I never looked back. I have since worked professionally in every single residential construction related trade. I am confident that I can perform each trade at a professional level with the exception of welding. I can weld. I welded everything on my Land Cruiser and I've welded scores of hip plates over the years. But I'm not confident enough to say that I could perform at the same level as a good professional welder. But HVAC, electrical, plumbing, roofing, siding, millwork installation, finish carpentry, landscaping, and irrigation are all things that I can perform at a top level. That lead carpenter ended up being my best friend I have ever had and he taught me about a lot more than carpentry.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago

benreesman 1y ago

I doubt you meant it this way, but that last bit hits a little rough. It's good that you are able to hire people when you have vacancies, and it's good that you don't have to be at the mercy of some insane rent-seeking because one crew in town has managed to monopolize one of your inputs. But saying it's unfortunate that you can't just whack anyone at will with 20 people lined up behind them jobless is wishing for a pretty bad situation right? If all your positions were filled by someone with 20 jobless people standing behind them, who would buy the homes you build?

viraptor 1y ago
I'm not sure what's it like in the GP's area, but here I'm happy there are landscapers and other contractors who aren't part of the builders teams. There's lack of people available for odd jobs and for example it was hard to find a painter who wasn't busy with new houses. Unless it's a pathological situation on the market, those people are not idle/jobless. There needs to be a good mix of both.
vrosas 1y ago
I’m guessing you’ve never hired a general contractor, or any other kind of home contractor for that matter? I’ve hired over a dozen at this point in the 1.5 years of owning my home, and I’d say, of those, about 2 have been any good. The construction and contracting landscape is a trash heap - a straight race to the bottom filled with lies, shoddy workmanship, and illegal labor. I’m suing 2 of mine for bad workmanship/abandoned projects. I do 100% of my own home renovations now, regardless of the cost of time, tools or materials.
- vlovich123 1y ago
  If 2 have been good why not stick with them?
  - vrosas 1y ago
    Because my stone mason, as good as he is, doesn’t do plumbing.

toomuchtodo 1y ago

Appreciate you highlighting the need for unions. Hopefully the skilled trades shortage persists indefinitely, otherwise they’d be treated just as you mentioned: disposable and interchangeable. The scarcity is the only thing protecting these folks at the moment. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rebuilding-construction-trades-workforce https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rebuilding-construction-tr...

sobellian 1y ago
There is so much work for skilled tradesmen that they would rather see more automation so they can take more jobs. Even many unions, e.g. carpenters' unions, think this way. I mean no large group is a monolith so I'm sure one can find opinions either way among tradesmen. But IMO the problem is so big that it's no longer revenue maximizing for anyone, even the workers. By some measures productivity has actually been declining for construction. If that was good for workers then we should just set them to digging a second Panama Canal with spoons.
- earnestinger 1y ago
  Real men would dig Route 66 canal instead of Panama.
nine_k 1y ago
Software engineers have recently had a chance to taste how does it feel to be plentiful and disposable, after decades of shortage.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
Scarcity also creates automation and efficiency pressure. You either get more of that human resource, or you make it so you use less of it, productivity increases also allow for the resources used to make more money without increasing project costs. This is also a very boom/bust industry, so the 2008 bust washed a lot of people out, especially juniors who would be experienced seniors today. A union is not going to protect labor from a building bust, they will stop hiring and the pipeline stalls.

britzkopf 1y ago

Framing is skilled, but landscaping and pest control are unskilled? Are you living in a well framed house overrun with mice and a terrible yard? I've done some framing. With a communicative foreman and a straightforward building design I did not find it that hard.

hollywood_court 1y ago
If performing quality framing was so easy, I imagine I’d have less trouble finding folks who want to earn $125k+ per year to do it for me. Instead I just have a group of ~30 Guatemalans who do it while I listen to my American friends and neighbors complain about immigrants “taking all the jobs.”
- epicureanideal 1y ago
  Folks may not know about the jobs, or there might be other details that aren’t mentioned here that make them less interested, for example are there occasionally big chunks of being unemployed, is the work dangerous, is the work stable, etc. 20 years ago, before I started making good money as a software engineer, if someone had offered me a similar opportunity, and training, I would’ve taken it assuming there were no big gotchas.

southernplaces7 1y ago

>Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. As a former landscaper, I can tell you that you either aren't taking the time to understand at least one of these professions at all, or simply have some very low standards for good landscaping. It is not a dime-a-dozen field that requires minimal skill, at all, and given all I've seen of GOOD pest control, the same applies, fully. You might have dozens of small contractors out there claiming to be either of these things but knowing little, sure, but those that actually know the technical balances at work and can apply those to what they're doing so that it creates durable results for your building/land/home, are people who need to know quite a few very fine nuances of their work. I mean, unless you think that constructing external landscapes that soon collapse, flood or fill with dead plants is irrelevant, or have no problem living in a building riddled with rats, mice, cockroaches and easy domicile to all of these pests and sundry.

bigbacaloa 1y ago
[dead]

babyshake 1y ago

I'm a layperson and this touches on my greatest fear about hiring contractors, that I'm not able to quickly enough determine who does meet the quality standard or even what the quality standard should be for a given job. How are average people supposed to navigate these things? I suppose I would just ask Claude/ChatGPT these days but there is surely a lot of tribal knowledge that they don't have.

bolobo 1y ago
And chatgpt is going to pull the data from an random UK website when you are in the US and vice-versa, and will augment it with knowledge from its model that come from a reddit thread from 2010 written by an italian plumber. I saw that on the DIY Uk subreddit where people were confused because ChatGPT was answering question using american standards. It's really hard to answer questions based on regional tribal knowledge. Apparently a good source are the tradesmens shop? THey might know their customers? Word-of-mouth?
- eecc 1y ago
  poor prompting then. One should narrow down the question to the particular circumstance it should apply.
  - bobro 1y ago
    this is exactly what you can’t do as an amateur though. You don’t know enough context to provide your relevant circumstances.
    - eecc 1y ago
      Well no, not really. I’m replying in the context of the parent comment, that was painting a scenario where the GPT would reply with information relevant to different countries. It doesn’t need to be advanced prompting, it’s enough to provide enough information and ask to “provide advice relevant to the current and applicable codes and regulations” It’s the first question a forum dweller would reply to a poorly articulated post.

torginus 1y ago

This. I live in a very different place from you and I'm just a humble homeowner, but contractors here are less than competent and I as a layperson can often do better after reading up on the thing and watching a couple Youtube videos. I know it's meme tier and horrible when a guy who watched some videos tells the tradesmen how to do their jobs, but unfortunately I often end up being right and prove them wrong. For example one of the last things I experienced was one of the electricians needed to get a cable through the concrete upper floor, and just couldn't do the calculations on where to drill and ended up drilling into the middle of the wall instead of right next to it. These kinds of fuckups are constant and the contractors are pretty good at hiding these unless I stand next to them. I've yet to meet a roofer that could properly do trig to calculate the sloped roof area.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Abekkus 1y ago
....There's no trigonometry in common roof-slope-area calculations and designations, only pythagoreans. Rise over run, 6ft for every 12ft, etc. I do feel your pain about vetting "professionals", especially living in a place that tries to prevent me from making my own improvements.
- alt227 1y ago
  Arent sloped roofs just rectangles?
  - ncallaway 1y ago
    The intersections of the joists/beams and the rafters require you to cut angled cuts on the rafters to sit appropriately on the joists/beams. See: https://www.structuralbasics.com/rafter-roof-design/ https://www.structuralbasics.com/rafter-roof-design/ and imagine how you would get a rectangular piece of wood for the rafter to sit flush against the rectangular joists/beams.

simpaticoder 1y ago

This is a little bit tangential to the conversation but I was wondering how you find the best skilled contractors? Do you use Google maps like everyone else and look at the ratings? Or is it information you glean by trial and error over time? Or do you check in with trade schools to see who their best graduates are? Or perhaps something that I haven't mentioned?

pjm331 1y ago
For me it’s personal references from other people via local Facebook/whatsapp groups - since I have kids that’s almost always parent groups
hollywood_court 1y ago
Mostly from people at supply houses and lumber yards. They know how to tell if a contractor is good or not. Or if we catch wind of a good contractor doing great work for another builder, we'll go inspect their work and then try to get them to jump ship and work with us. Trade school information won't help us any because we're hiring contracting companies. We don't hire individuals unless it's for something specific that can be handled by one individual like kitchen installs. Highly skilled tradesmen are often like really good lawyers. Just because they're good at their craft doesn't mean they'll necessarily be good at running their own contracting business (or law firm). So being a successful contractor really boils down to being able to properly manage your skilled labor (and keep them content) while also keeping things on budget and following the critical path. The single most common mistake I see with most contractors (and most all small business owners in general) is the fact that they think "hey, I own this business, therefore I should be the highest paid person here." So they don't take care of their labor and they end up losing them to someone who will take better care of them. They think that they own the business so they must provide the most value to the company and should earn the most. That's rarely the case in real life though. When I was a contractor out on my own, there were plenty of times when I was paying some of my employees more than I ever took home. The President of the company I work for now isn't the highest compensated member of our team.

mclau157 1y ago

Is this a symptom of every teacher and parent telling kids to get college degrees?

AnthonyMouse 1y ago

A lot of this is a result of how trade licensing works. In most states it's not about whether you know how to do something -- you can't just take a licensing exam and get a license even if you know the material -- it's about having access to someone who already has a license to sign off on you. From which you get two consequences. First, if you know someone who already has a license but doesn't know what they're doing or isn't a good teacher, they sign off on other people without actually teaching them how to do a good job, and then you get even more people with a license who don't really know how to do the job. And second, because the existing license holder has to sign off on several years worth of hours for someone new to get a license, you deter people who would do a good job but -- because of that -- have more opportunities in other industries where you don't have to spend a large chunk of your adult life beholden to someone else because it's still prohibited by law for you to strike out on your own, in an industry that people would otherwise want to enter because they want to do exactly that. Which both lowers the average quality of the candidate pool and creates shortages by lowering the number of candidates.

dehrmann 1y ago

Do you have any advice for how homeowners can screen tradesmen?

hollywood_court 1y ago
Go to the lumber yards and supply houses. Go to the sales counter and ask who they would recommend for a certain job.