9 ms·

Not sure how it works in the US, but in some parts of Europe, blue collar trades are currently much better, for several reasons: - Price of housing and associa

Not sure how it works in the US, but in some parts of Europe, blue collar trades are currently much better, for several reasons: - Price of housing and associated maintenance keeps rising, and so do small jobs like fixing plumbing, gardening, etc; - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase, or even more, if you can benefit from social services (e.g. since you don't earn a lot, you pay less for several services); - Doing the fixes yourself saves lots of money; - Avoids several burn out and mental health issues related to stress such as academia, bullshit jobs, etc; - No need to spend years in school, so you can save money earlier and invest it. One disadvantage is that the barrier to entry is somewhat low; but the PhD students also have to compete with cheap international labor, so in the end, someone 25 years old that just left grad school is happy to earn, say, 2000€, while someone in the trades can easily make 200€/day with just one appointment. So, if you're physically fit for blue collar work, there are currently few reasons not do it.

funki 7mo ago
"You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to" Interesting. Would you care to enlighten us on a legal way to do this ?
- stdbrouw 7mo ago
  You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. This is in fact a kind of (legal) tax avoidance, but not (illegal) tax evasion. Given the cost of housing, being able to build your own house or even just doing small fixes here and there, leads to a big increase in perceived income. The tradies I know can afford whatever kind of car they want, whatever kind of holiday experience, and they live in a nice home. Mind you, they typically work 50h+ a week so there's that. Of course, the parent may also have been referring to getting clients to pay in cash and not putting anything on the books, at the expense of getting barely any pension in the end, but that's not how I read it. This is getting somewhat less common because people are more likely than 20 years ago to get a loan from a bank to pay for renovation work, and the bank will want to see invoices.
  - falcor84 7mo ago
    > You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. Just to be clear, if you're a VAT-registered tradie doing a job for yourself, you are obligated to pay VAT for the materials. Diverting vat-reclaimed materials for self-supply is tax evasion (which can be identified by auditing invoices). So legally speaking, the only money saved is the VAT on your own work hours. Slightly ironically, self-supply is much easier and almost impossible to identify when devs use work-paid subscription services (e.g. Claude Max) on personal side hustles.
    - lb1lf 7mo ago
      -Besides, in some jurisdictions, the taxman thought of that. If a Norwegian tradesman works on his own home, he's supposed to pay VAT on the value of the work he's done - not only on the materials used. I suspect such work is being under-reported, though.
      - KellyCriterion 6mo ago
        > If a Norwegian tradesman works on his own home, he's supposed to pay VAT Do you have a link here?
        lb1lf 6mo ago
        Sorry, not VAT - but the value of the benefit you gain from working on your own property (presumably also if you're, say, a car mechanic and work on your own car, etc.) is subject to taxation. Mea culpa. The obligation to pay tax only kicks in (as far as I can tell, IANAL) if the work is substantial and of a nature which requires professional skills. Here's a recent link, though in Norwegian, I'm afraid: https://www.fvn.no/abito/i/GM86x4/skatt-ved-arbeid-paa-egen-bolig https://www.fvn.no/abito/i/GM86x4/skatt-ved-arbeid-paa-egen-...
        KellyCriterion 6mo ago
        Jesus! Spinning this forward, this means: If I'm a professional wealth manager and I manage my own wealth during working hours (because office not busy right now), then I would have to pay taxes because I'm a finance pro applying my own skills on my own stock portfolio?
- IdiocyInAction 7mo ago
  Most of it is just blatant tax evasion.
- KellyCriterion 6mo ago
  In EU, you can declare a business and go to wholesale sellers and buy stuff with your business-ID without VAT and use this stuff for your own usage in your house.
Amezarak 7mo ago
You would be highly advised to learn how to do basic plumbing, electrical, and renovation tasks yourself in the US as well. The cost savings is enormous. Finding a quality contractor, in addition to being expensive, can also be very hard - there's plenty of people doing plumbing or electrical who might be licensed and everything but are grossly incompetent or never finish jobs. A lot of stuff in the US is absurdly easy, as well. For example, in my area, pretty much all plumbing is PVC or PEX. Anyone on HN can learn very quickly how to work with this stuff and it's very cheap. There are very few repairs, for example, you could ever need to do that would cost more than having a plumber just show up and look at it - even accounting for buying tools.
- alistairSH 7mo ago
  In my area, DC Metro, it's $200 for a plumber to show up. That's before they do any work - just the cost to schedule them. And they don't do drywall - they'll hack a nasty, over-sized hole in the wall or ceiling to get the plumbing and leave you with a $600+ bill and needing a drywalled and painter next.
  - adabyron 7mo ago
    In my experience, it's really hard to get someone good who can do a plumbing job, or electrical job, then patch the drywall & match the texture well. You need to search for a "Handyman" service for this & often you're getting a jack of all trades, expert at none. If they really are amazing, they're booked solid & no one will ever recommend them to you as they're already hard to get an appointment with. For a lot of specialists like drywall, the really good people seem to never want to deal with small jobs. They get paid better & it's easier to do large jobs.
- bodhi_mind 7mo ago
  Cutting pex to remove old shutoff valve and crimp on a new 1/4 turn valve took me probably 2 min and a $15 tool from Amazon.
- WarmWash 7mo ago
  Yeah, generally if you even have a mild disposition to learning how things work and building stuff for fun (i.e. you tore open things and played with legos as a kid). You can generally crash course most home servicing work in a afternoon and very often end up with a better result than paying someone $500 or even $5000 to do it. Especially nowadays with AI, you can really quickly consolidate what you need to know for your specific job. Though of course, trust, but verify.
rwyinuse 7mo ago
Yea, at least over here in Finland many university degree programmers are hardly worth it, even though there are no tuition fees. A plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business. I know lots of people with master's degrees who have started studying something practical after graduation, as they were unable to find any job with their degree. Of course the general economic situation (highest unemployment in the EU) is having an impact on everyone, but it's hitting those with higher education particularly badly this time.
- gambiting 7mo ago
  >> plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business. And every single plumber and electrician I know is completely worn out(physically) by the time they hit 50. Both are these are incredibly demanding on the body, more than most people imagine. So they get to that point where they actually can't move and they need double knee replacements before they even hit retirement, and suddenly can't work anymore. Some of them try to hire people, but that's hard and not everyone is built for it - so actually (at least in my experience) you go from being very well off to practically destitute, because like someone else pointed out - people in these professions are typically cash only to avoid taxes, they spend it, they don't put it in retirement funds to avoid having to explain the source of income, and they get to a point where they can't work and don't have any income. It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option.
  - menaerus 7mo ago
    > It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option. Why? I am sure we can agree that SWE domain has its own set of disadvantages, no? Many people I know have been burnt out in their 30s on their jobs and are unable to continue with the same capacity in their 40s, not to even mention 50s, and later ages. What company wants to hire a 40+ or 50+ year-old SWE? Not many. I am not sure how is that any better than being physically worn out? Physically worn out you can organize work, and hire other people to work for you, but when you're mentally worn out there's not much you can do really. Avoiding the burnt-out syndrome trap alone isn't enough. You can also easily become unemployable because (1) you're either not good enough for hi-profile jobs demanding maybe 95th percentile skills on the market, (2) you cannot work 50-hour long weeks under high stress continuously because of social and existential aspects of your life (family), or (3) you're simply over-qualified for many other jobs on the market so there's a real risk attached to employing you. Being a plumber or electrician OTOH does not bear these type of costs or risks so, with things put into a ~20 year context, and given the today's picture of the market, I am also not really sure I would favor SWE over being a plumber or electrician or carpenter. Many of those folks over here where I live earn 6 figures, and mind that this is only what they report (!), the actual figure is likely 2x as much since the preferred way of paying for the bill is cash (without invoice). OTOH to break into the 6 figures territory as a SWE over here you need to become a recognizable domain expert - for me it took ~15 years to build the expertise other people believe I am exceptionally good at, and are therefore willing to pay for it. This is far from being easy and there's only of handful such people (in my area) since it takes an unreasonable amount of time and stubbornness to reach that point, barring some other factors of course too. SWE domain might have been lucrative ~15 years ago but the dynamics in SWE changed dramatically in the last ~20 years. And as we see now with the AI, the change seems not to be declining.
KoolKat23 7mo ago
Here the barriers to entry are high imo but artificial, you need to complete an apprenticeship paid for through opportunity cost of lower wages and less working freedom for a few years.
- lukan 7mo ago
  For gardening jobs as well?
lb1lf 7mo ago
Time for a classic, Soviet-era joke: A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment, and calls for a plumber. The plumber arrives, does his thing, and hands over the bill. The engineer is shocked. -'What, this is like a quarter of what I make in a month - for half an hour's work???' Plumber shrugs. -'Well, why don't you come join us? Easy work, well paid, no responsibility - just remember to keep mum about your degree, as we're not supposed to hire academics.' Our engineer contemplates this for a while, applies for a job as a plumber - and gets it. All is well, good money, no responsibilites - until management requires that they take evening school classes to gain new skills and thus better build socialism. So, grudgingly, our engineer enrolls in a math class and, upon arriving, finds that the teacher wants to establish what the plumbers already know. -'You over there - could you please come to the blackboard and show us the formula for the area of a circle?' he asks our engineer. Standing at the blackboard, he suddenly realizes he can't for the life of him remember the formula; while a bit rusty, he soon figures out how to reason it out - furiously writing out integrals on the blackboard, only to find the area of a circle is -(pi)*r^2. Minus? How did a negative enter into it, he thinks, going over his calculations once again. No, still gets the same result. Sweat building, he turns away from the blackboard for a moment, turning to the other plumbers watching. As in one voice, they all whisper -'Comrade, you must switch the limits to the integral!'
- strofocles 7mo ago
  thank you
baud147258 7mo ago
> - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase You mean by how VAT is not paid on materials a company is going to use (at least that's the case here in France, no idea what the rest of the UE does it). Or by doing undeclared work?
- edwcross 7mo ago
  Doing undeclared work. Just had it happen to a friend: needed a plumber, impossible to find anything reliable (no one in town knows of a reliable plumber; it's a rare find). All Google Maps results contained lots of paid 5-star reviews (ratings with a full, typo-less phrase, praising the company in very generic terms, and the only review for that profile), so he had to pick one of them anyway. Guy shows up, doesn't present a quote before doing the work (mandatory for >150€), does a mess but fixes the issue in less than 30 minutes, bills 200€, or 250€ if you want a receipt. No paperwork whatsoever, and in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse. And that's a "good" one. Locksmiths that charge 500€ or more for 10-minute jobs are a dozen a legion. Then, these same people start buying cheap houses here and there, and in 20 years they'll be worth so much money that they'll become rich landlords and live on rent alone. Several friends during PhD were renting cheap apartments whose owners were truck drivers, electricians, etc. The point is, concentration of wealth and never-ending property values going up is only going to make becoming renter a better and better deal. And every profession that caters to renters is going to get some share of that money.
  - wiether 7mo ago
    > Doing undeclared work > No paperwork whatsoever > in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse So it's not "blue vs white collar jobs"; it's being a law abiding citizen or not. I know a lot of people who matches what you're talking about, but they all have in common to have their own interpretation of the law. There's not a single thing they do by the books. They're just "blue collar crooks". Of course they can "win" if they cheat.
    - gambiting 7mo ago
alistairSH 7mo ago
Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true. In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be physically worn out before minimum retirement age (65 in the US to get health coverage as a retiree).
- trollbridge 7mo ago
  Yes. It’s relatively straightforward to work on a fixer upper house during which time you are drawing no salary relative to that, and then you can turn around and sell it (or just enjoy being in a nice house which otherwise would have cost hundreds of thousands).
  - xhkkffbf 7mo ago
    And this is often taxed at capital gains rates which can be lower.
    - trollbridge 6mo ago
      Yes, up to $125k per year per person excluded from capital gains.
  - alistairSH 7mo ago
    But if you're not drawing a salary/wages, how the heck are you buying groceries or paying the mortgage? You'd need to turn houses over very quickly/regularly for this to work...? I'm not debating that tradespeople can make good money - that absolutely can. But, that's the exception not the norm... The average plumber or electrician in the US earns about $65k/year... that's about 2/3 (or less) of an entry level programming job. Even if that isn't capturing side work/income, that's still less than a mid-career developer (earning $150-$200, more if they're on the west coast on NYC). Put another way, even at retail consumer prices, I can buy a lot of plumbing or electrical service and still be money ahead on my fairly average engineering manager salary.
smcg 7mo ago
The EU has better healthcare and safety regulations than the US. Blue collar work is risky.
abc123abc123 7mo ago
Yep. The ability to work without paying taxes in this profession is of enormous value. It keeps prices lower for the consumer, and income higher for the handyman. I seen many handymen with the latest and greatest luxury cars, and the demand is endless. On the other side, it seems technologists salaries are stagnating, and the new guys on the market get lower and lower salaries, so it does indeed seem as if the best and quickest way to retiring early is the handyman approach coupled with a high level of non-taxes work.
- ForHackernews 7mo ago
  If you're willing to commit fraud anyway, just run a crypto scam. The payout is a lot higher, and it will use the white collar tech skills you already have rather than forcing you to learn a trade.
  - indoordin0saur 7mo ago
    But then you have to feel bad that you're not contributing to society. The plumber is doing far more for society than any crypto con-artist is.
  - altruios 7mo ago
    I mean, or you could help build houses instead of drain electricity. One is clearly less lazy and helping humanity more.
    - Larrikin 7mo ago
      Not paying taxes is a drain on society
      - altruios 7mo ago
        It's for certain a drain on the military industrial complex, but building houses while not supporting the current regime is certainly better than draining a bunch electricity to enrich only yourself and paying money to a bunch of authoritarian wannabe's. I am impressed with your compression of the entirety of this conversation down to two values of right/wrong. /s

funki 7mo ago

"You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to" Interesting. Would you care to enlighten us on a legal way to do this ?

stdbrouw 7mo ago
You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. This is in fact a kind of (legal) tax avoidance, but not (illegal) tax evasion. Given the cost of housing, being able to build your own house or even just doing small fixes here and there, leads to a big increase in perceived income. The tradies I know can afford whatever kind of car they want, whatever kind of holiday experience, and they live in a nice home. Mind you, they typically work 50h+ a week so there's that. Of course, the parent may also have been referring to getting clients to pay in cash and not putting anything on the books, at the expense of getting barely any pension in the end, but that's not how I read it. This is getting somewhat less common because people are more likely than 20 years ago to get a loan from a bank to pay for renovation work, and the bank will want to see invoices.
- falcor84 7mo ago
  > You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. Just to be clear, if you're a VAT-registered tradie doing a job for yourself, you are obligated to pay VAT for the materials. Diverting vat-reclaimed materials for self-supply is tax evasion (which can be identified by auditing invoices). So legally speaking, the only money saved is the VAT on your own work hours. Slightly ironically, self-supply is much easier and almost impossible to identify when devs use work-paid subscription services (e.g. Claude Max) on personal side hustles.
  - lb1lf 7mo ago
    -Besides, in some jurisdictions, the taxman thought of that. If a Norwegian tradesman works on his own home, he's supposed to pay VAT on the value of the work he's done - not only on the materials used. I suspect such work is being under-reported, though.
    - KellyCriterion 6mo ago
      > If a Norwegian tradesman works on his own home, he's supposed to pay VAT Do you have a link here?
      - lb1lf 6mo ago
        Sorry, not VAT - but the value of the benefit you gain from working on your own property (presumably also if you're, say, a car mechanic and work on your own car, etc.) is subject to taxation. Mea culpa. The obligation to pay tax only kicks in (as far as I can tell, IANAL) if the work is substantial and of a nature which requires professional skills. Here's a recent link, though in Norwegian, I'm afraid: https://www.fvn.no/abito/i/GM86x4/skatt-ved-arbeid-paa-egen-bolig https://www.fvn.no/abito/i/GM86x4/skatt-ved-arbeid-paa-egen-...
        KellyCriterion 6mo ago
        Jesus! Spinning this forward, this means: If I'm a professional wealth manager and I manage my own wealth during working hours (because office not busy right now), then I would have to pay taxes because I'm a finance pro applying my own skills on my own stock portfolio?
IdiocyInAction 7mo ago
Most of it is just blatant tax evasion.
KellyCriterion 6mo ago
In EU, you can declare a business and go to wholesale sellers and buy stuff with your business-ID without VAT and use this stuff for your own usage in your house.

Amezarak 7mo ago

You would be highly advised to learn how to do basic plumbing, electrical, and renovation tasks yourself in the US as well. The cost savings is enormous. Finding a quality contractor, in addition to being expensive, can also be very hard - there's plenty of people doing plumbing or electrical who might be licensed and everything but are grossly incompetent or never finish jobs. A lot of stuff in the US is absurdly easy, as well. For example, in my area, pretty much all plumbing is PVC or PEX. Anyone on HN can learn very quickly how to work with this stuff and it's very cheap. There are very few repairs, for example, you could ever need to do that would cost more than having a plumber just show up and look at it - even accounting for buying tools.

alistairSH 7mo ago
In my area, DC Metro, it's $200 for a plumber to show up. That's before they do any work - just the cost to schedule them. And they don't do drywall - they'll hack a nasty, over-sized hole in the wall or ceiling to get the plumbing and leave you with a $600+ bill and needing a drywalled and painter next.
- adabyron 7mo ago
  In my experience, it's really hard to get someone good who can do a plumbing job, or electrical job, then patch the drywall & match the texture well. You need to search for a "Handyman" service for this & often you're getting a jack of all trades, expert at none. If they really are amazing, they're booked solid & no one will ever recommend them to you as they're already hard to get an appointment with. For a lot of specialists like drywall, the really good people seem to never want to deal with small jobs. They get paid better & it's easier to do large jobs.
bodhi_mind 7mo ago
Cutting pex to remove old shutoff valve and crimp on a new 1/4 turn valve took me probably 2 min and a $15 tool from Amazon.
WarmWash 7mo ago
Yeah, generally if you even have a mild disposition to learning how things work and building stuff for fun (i.e. you tore open things and played with legos as a kid). You can generally crash course most home servicing work in a afternoon and very often end up with a better result than paying someone $500 or even $5000 to do it. Especially nowadays with AI, you can really quickly consolidate what you need to know for your specific job. Though of course, trust, but verify.

rwyinuse 7mo ago

Yea, at least over here in Finland many university degree programmers are hardly worth it, even though there are no tuition fees. A plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business. I know lots of people with master's degrees who have started studying something practical after graduation, as they were unable to find any job with their degree. Of course the general economic situation (highest unemployment in the EU) is having an impact on everyone, but it's hitting those with higher education particularly badly this time.

gambiting 7mo ago
>> plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business. And every single plumber and electrician I know is completely worn out(physically) by the time they hit 50. Both are these are incredibly demanding on the body, more than most people imagine. So they get to that point where they actually can't move and they need double knee replacements before they even hit retirement, and suddenly can't work anymore. Some of them try to hire people, but that's hard and not everyone is built for it - so actually (at least in my experience) you go from being very well off to practically destitute, because like someone else pointed out - people in these professions are typically cash only to avoid taxes, they spend it, they don't put it in retirement funds to avoid having to explain the source of income, and they get to a point where they can't work and don't have any income. It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option.
- menaerus 7mo ago
  > It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option. Why? I am sure we can agree that SWE domain has its own set of disadvantages, no? Many people I know have been burnt out in their 30s on their jobs and are unable to continue with the same capacity in their 40s, not to even mention 50s, and later ages. What company wants to hire a 40+ or 50+ year-old SWE? Not many. I am not sure how is that any better than being physically worn out? Physically worn out you can organize work, and hire other people to work for you, but when you're mentally worn out there's not much you can do really. Avoiding the burnt-out syndrome trap alone isn't enough. You can also easily become unemployable because (1) you're either not good enough for hi-profile jobs demanding maybe 95th percentile skills on the market, (2) you cannot work 50-hour long weeks under high stress continuously because of social and existential aspects of your life (family), or (3) you're simply over-qualified for many other jobs on the market so there's a real risk attached to employing you. Being a plumber or electrician OTOH does not bear these type of costs or risks so, with things put into a ~20 year context, and given the today's picture of the market, I am also not really sure I would favor SWE over being a plumber or electrician or carpenter. Many of those folks over here where I live earn 6 figures, and mind that this is only what they report (!), the actual figure is likely 2x as much since the preferred way of paying for the bill is cash (without invoice). OTOH to break into the 6 figures territory as a SWE over here you need to become a recognizable domain expert - for me it took ~15 years to build the expertise other people believe I am exceptionally good at, and are therefore willing to pay for it. This is far from being easy and there's only of handful such people (in my area) since it takes an unreasonable amount of time and stubbornness to reach that point, barring some other factors of course too. SWE domain might have been lucrative ~15 years ago but the dynamics in SWE changed dramatically in the last ~20 years. And as we see now with the AI, the change seems not to be declining.

KoolKat23 7mo ago

Here the barriers to entry are high imo but artificial, you need to complete an apprenticeship paid for through opportunity cost of lower wages and less working freedom for a few years.

lukan 7mo ago
For gardening jobs as well?

lb1lf 7mo ago

Time for a classic, Soviet-era joke: A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment, and calls for a plumber. The plumber arrives, does his thing, and hands over the bill. The engineer is shocked. -'What, this is like a quarter of what I make in a month - for half an hour's work???' Plumber shrugs. -'Well, why don't you come join us? Easy work, well paid, no responsibility - just remember to keep mum about your degree, as we're not supposed to hire academics.' Our engineer contemplates this for a while, applies for a job as a plumber - and gets it. All is well, good money, no responsibilites - until management requires that they take evening school classes to gain new skills and thus better build socialism. So, grudgingly, our engineer enrolls in a math class and, upon arriving, finds that the teacher wants to establish what the plumbers already know. -'You over there - could you please come to the blackboard and show us the formula for the area of a circle?' he asks our engineer. Standing at the blackboard, he suddenly realizes he can't for the life of him remember the formula; while a bit rusty, he soon figures out how to reason it out - furiously writing out integrals on the blackboard, only to find the area of a circle is -(pi)*r^2. Minus? How did a negative enter into it, he thinks, going over his calculations once again. No, still gets the same result. Sweat building, he turns away from the blackboard for a moment, turning to the other plumbers watching. As in one voice, they all whisper -'Comrade, you must switch the limits to the integral!'

strofocles 7mo ago
thank you

baud147258 7mo ago

> - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase You mean by how VAT is not paid on materials a company is going to use (at least that's the case here in France, no idea what the rest of the UE does it). Or by doing undeclared work?

edwcross 7mo ago
Doing undeclared work. Just had it happen to a friend: needed a plumber, impossible to find anything reliable (no one in town knows of a reliable plumber; it's a rare find). All Google Maps results contained lots of paid 5-star reviews (ratings with a full, typo-less phrase, praising the company in very generic terms, and the only review for that profile), so he had to pick one of them anyway. Guy shows up, doesn't present a quote before doing the work (mandatory for >150€), does a mess but fixes the issue in less than 30 minutes, bills 200€, or 250€ if you want a receipt. No paperwork whatsoever, and in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse. And that's a "good" one. Locksmiths that charge 500€ or more for 10-minute jobs are a dozen a legion. Then, these same people start buying cheap houses here and there, and in 20 years they'll be worth so much money that they'll become rich landlords and live on rent alone. Several friends during PhD were renting cheap apartments whose owners were truck drivers, electricians, etc. The point is, concentration of wealth and never-ending property values going up is only going to make becoming renter a better and better deal. And every profession that caters to renters is going to get some share of that money.
- wiether 7mo ago
  > Doing undeclared work > No paperwork whatsoever > in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse So it's not "blue vs white collar jobs"; it's being a law abiding citizen or not. I know a lot of people who matches what you're talking about, but they all have in common to have their own interpretation of the law. There's not a single thing they do by the books. They're just "blue collar crooks". Of course they can "win" if they cheat.
  - gambiting 7mo ago

alistairSH 7mo ago

Is it actually true that the savings on home maintenance and social services offsets the higher salaries of white collar work? That's kind of crazy if it's true. In the US, you can make pretty good money in the trades, but generally, there are many caveats - you have to be your own boss, preferably with a few employees; you pay your own benefits; you don't get any paid leave; and depending on the trade, you could be physically worn out before minimum retirement age (65 in the US to get health coverage as a retiree).

trollbridge 7mo ago
Yes. It’s relatively straightforward to work on a fixer upper house during which time you are drawing no salary relative to that, and then you can turn around and sell it (or just enjoy being in a nice house which otherwise would have cost hundreds of thousands).
- xhkkffbf 7mo ago
  And this is often taxed at capital gains rates which can be lower.
  - trollbridge 6mo ago
    Yes, up to $125k per year per person excluded from capital gains.
- alistairSH 7mo ago
  But if you're not drawing a salary/wages, how the heck are you buying groceries or paying the mortgage? You'd need to turn houses over very quickly/regularly for this to work...? I'm not debating that tradespeople can make good money - that absolutely can. But, that's the exception not the norm... The average plumber or electrician in the US earns about $65k/year... that's about 2/3 (or less) of an entry level programming job. Even if that isn't capturing side work/income, that's still less than a mid-career developer (earning $150-$200, more if they're on the west coast on NYC). Put another way, even at retail consumer prices, I can buy a lot of plumbing or electrical service and still be money ahead on my fairly average engineering manager salary.

smcg 7mo ago

The EU has better healthcare and safety regulations than the US. Blue collar work is risky.

abc123abc123 7mo ago

Yep. The ability to work without paying taxes in this profession is of enormous value. It keeps prices lower for the consumer, and income higher for the handyman. I seen many handymen with the latest and greatest luxury cars, and the demand is endless. On the other side, it seems technologists salaries are stagnating, and the new guys on the market get lower and lower salaries, so it does indeed seem as if the best and quickest way to retiring early is the handyman approach coupled with a high level of non-taxes work.

ForHackernews 7mo ago
If you're willing to commit fraud anyway, just run a crypto scam. The payout is a lot higher, and it will use the white collar tech skills you already have rather than forcing you to learn a trade.
- indoordin0saur 7mo ago
  But then you have to feel bad that you're not contributing to society. The plumber is doing far more for society than any crypto con-artist is.
- altruios 7mo ago
  I mean, or you could help build houses instead of drain electricity. One is clearly less lazy and helping humanity more.
  - Larrikin 7mo ago
    Not paying taxes is a drain on society
    - altruios 7mo ago
      It's for certain a drain on the military industrial complex, but building houses while not supporting the current regime is certainly better than draining a bunch electricity to enrich only yourself and paying money to a bunch of authoritarian wannabe's. I am impressed with your compression of the entirety of this conversation down to two values of right/wrong. /s