Ask HN: Career in trades for possible ex-programmers
Heya HN, I was wondering. What trades jobs would best fit someone with 10 years of experience in software engineering, mainly fullstack web. The hard truth about the trades is you need to start young, while you're body is able to take the punishment, so you have time to learn the skills to take a less punishing senior/ownership role by the time your back/legs/arms start to give out. This isn't insurmountable, but it needs to be planned for. Look for jobs where your background gives you more of a leg up, and are done indoors, with a stronger emphasis on health and safety. Things like: Industrial Electrical Automation Technician Machine Operator Millwright Avoid jobs done for small crews with a more cowboy attitude, like most residential trades. This is absolutely true. I spend some time in trades before tech. I recall my first day, squeezing into a rocky and mildewy crawl space with barely enough room to flip over, only to fix up some busted plumbing using some very strong smelling chemicals with little ventilation. I knew then this wasn’t going to be a long term fit for me. Trades work can absolutely destroy you. It’s also not really avoidable with good ergonomics - there are no good ergonomics. Some situations are just going to require you to do really physically awkward uncomfortable things to get the job done. There’s also the general slow erosion of health. Exposure to chemicals, saw dust, metal shavings, things getting in your eyes, getting poked by random nails, rolling over onto a bit of glass, tweaking your back trying to prevent a piece of lumber sliding off the roof, being constantly dehydrated and sunburned, etc. There is a reason tradesmen look like tradesmen. It’s the toll they pay. You shouldn't be getting down voted, residential trades will wear your body down. Look, a job is a job and work is well, work. As noted in the other comments trades are hard work. Far harder than a desk job. I would suggest not romanticizing the trades as some replacement for a desk job. Go do some trade work in your free time (go build a fence in the middle of the summer as an example) and really find out how much hard work it is. If you still enjoy it after being in 95 degree heat for 8+ hours while hauling thousands of pounds of concrete, then a job change might be right for you. But first try it as a hobby. I say this with lots of experience. I do a lot of trades work as a hobby, but the reality is in most cases it is labor of love. I'd be more efficient with my time and money by hiring it out. I second this. I've performed many jobs around my house, and while I don't regret any of them, there are many I would never do again. This kind of work has turned out, in almost all cases, to be far more difficult and time consuming than I expected. My advice. Take a year off. Renovate a house and see if it is what you want. If you are burnt out. This is a good way to recharge. But the work is hard and it doesn't get easier. Did this a few years ago and I it helped me get back to software engineering. I agree with the core of your advice: a friend of mine wanted to restore bikes. I gave him mine as a test, and the experience taught him that he doesn't really want to restore bikes. That said, I'll proudly wear my "off-topic" downvotes to nitpick that "find a spare house" sounds to me as affordable as "find a spare Ferrari". Sent from my balcony-less apartment you are looking at it in terms of minimum effort needed. it can cost less, but you would have to give more. you are in an apartment without a balcony, it is a relatively safe assumption that you are in a high cost of living area. at least relatively. your bike anecdote near confirms it. if you were to look for a “spare house,” or rather a somewhat rundown but plausibly restorable house, without leaving your current location, you would likely be hard-pressed to do so. if you were to expand your search, look in less valued areas, more rural, less desirable, you might be surprised the “finds” that are out there. for some, touring such a find may be enough to convince them that this is not actually their path. a year without a job, by choice, is much more the measure of privilege here. Second this,
Slightly different, but I dropped out of university and worked on a small farm for a season. Turns out I'm a terrible farmer, but electrical engineering is actually a pretty good fit for me. Finished up my degree easily when I went back to school. > But the work is hard and it doesn't get easier. I agree, low paying hard work is not a good solution for boredom or a midlife/existential crisis. During the pandemic I was going stir crazy. I decided to immerse myself in some hands-on activities in the garage. Initially, I focused on restoration of antique tools. Then I had a small bit of blacksmithing. Then I learned the basics of welding. These activities were all great fun, very interesting to me, and gave me something to really look forward to for the weekends. Not quite 2 months ago I launched a residential handyman business (no website yet). My day job is in software engineering, but I also have the handyman work as a part-time thing. So far, it's working out pretty good. My weekend work is completely different from my M-F day job. One of the things I like about handyman work is that it's not all the same. It's a bit of carpentry, plumbing, and electrical combined in various ways. I'm not a licensed plumber or electrician (nor a contractor), so I steer clear of jobs that require them. I wonder how HN would respond if I asked "heya HN, what programming jobs would fit someone who has 10 years of TIG welding" This is effectively what the OP is asking. The most interesting thing about programmers is our unshakeable confidence that we could easily do any else's job. Where does that even come from? Coding is not even the hardest job I've done. Continually hopping between varying levels of abstraction and different problem domains. Programming instills one with a decent universal ontological model for understanding things in general. And honestly, I haven't met many things that I can't do when I put my mind to it. The real difficulty is doing them quickly. My pet theory is that programmers are exposed to many business areas during their career, either directly or hearing it from other programmers. This desacralizes these jobs, and since we spend most of our days working though complexity (requirements, bugs, ...), you end up with "what's so hard about X?" statements. this tendency is even worse for us physicists... I like this thought exercise, but I also think the analogy would be more accurate if we asked "heya weldingnews.com, what programming jobs would fit someone who has 10 years of TIG welding". The answers would be bad I guess, which I believe is your point :) The cut in pay is likely to drive you back to software pretty quickly, but: the debugging and problem-solving involved in electrical work on old houses bears a striking resemblance to working with legacy software systems. (New installation work is maybe less interesting, but if you're the sort of developer who enjoys logic-ing their way through understanding why a complicated, undocumented system is behaving the way it's behaving, and why did the last guy decide to connect this to that, a hundred year old house that's been gradually updated from knob-and-tube might be just the thing.) My first question is why? But I won’t judge and I think I can help! I would recommend HVAC or electrical work for a programmer. I manage the software team of a relatively large trade company which specializes in these fields. Many of our electricians are hobbyist programmers. Having done field work with both electricians and HVAC technicians I can say that both fields will provide you with challenging problems, and a familiar diagnostic and repair process to fixing software. I think HVAC is much easier to jump in to compared to electrical work (and you will still work on low voltage electrical components) so I would recommend looking for work in that space. HOWEVER this is extremely hard work. I would not willingly trade places with any of our electricians. While it can be very fulfilling and enjoyable for the right type of person, what you’re talking about is essentially taking less pay to do more and harder work. And in that sense I would urge you to reconsider. But if it’s something that truly truly interests you, HVAC should be really easy to get into as long as it’s an active industry in your area. Less pay and harder work sounds great, and I don't understand why people are so quick to knock it. There's nothing quite as soul-draining as staring at a computer screen for 8 hours a day doing pointless, easy, busy work that actively makes the world worse and feels like being a slug. What about permaculture/gardening? IMO working with nature is a lot like programming. The genetic material (seeds) are like packages, the soil cycle is like memory management, and the water and sun are like your system's resources. You get the satisfaction of building something beautiful (and eating it). You are constantly learning about genetics, variants, processes and the language of plants. There are role models and teachers creating new processes and testing theories (just like programming). You are involving your entire body, puts you outside, and is amazing on your mind. If you're looking to make money doing it, you could pick a high-value product like mushrooms, sprouts, or hot sauce and bring it to the farmer's market. Amateur gardener here. The hardest part about this is time. One thing I love about software is that I write it then run it and see the result. My turnaround time is often measured in seconds. My garden? Weeks, at minimum, before I begin to see what results my work has wrought. Iteration takes months, if not years, depending on your climate. However, it does feel very rewarding, doing something with your hands that results in something very tangible. Bringing in a bowl of lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes that you can immediately toss into a salad feels great. The way I see it (admittedly, as a 24 year old working in tech for the past 7 years), manual labour is okay, but definitely not something I’d do as a means to get by. My dad worked in construction for most of his life (mainly motivated due to debts incurred while he was locked up and taken up by my “mother”) and it has had an immense toll on his body, mostly back injuries and other non-reversable issues it has caused. But there were still many occasions where I went along with him to Finland, Sweden, and Norway as a “helper”, which have all taught me the value of hard work and dedication, pushing through whatever hardships you might have, and have generally been great for father-son bonding. Now that he however has exited that fieid (to work as a trucker which he loves because it’s basically “getting paid to travel long distances” which he loves), although I value the work done by tradies and have an immense respect for them (or at least the ones working as hard as my dad did), I still don’t see myself ever wanting to do that as a “job”. Since my dad has those skills, he still puts then to good use for personal needs (remodelling the house, fixing the roof, building a gazebo in his yard, etc), I still love going there to help him with all that, but much more as a father-son activity than as work. stop developing for web and you'll probably enjoy programming again lol How do you get out of the loop? Recruiters seem to want lots of experience for embedded roles for example. The embedded world is crying out for people experienced in modern software teams. A big chunk of it is one man bands who know C and maybe some C++. Most embedded projects could benefit from unit testing, automated build systems and modern memory safe languages. If you're interested in a job in embedded you could learn it on the side. Buy a dev board (from one of the main vendors - ST, NXP or TI) and write an application for it. Learn the detail of developing for microcontrollers - setting up peripherals and clocks, debugging over JTAG, handling interrupts etc. If you manage to get in front of a hiring manager with a couple of well executed open source low level projects along side experience in higher level languages, you'd have a good chance of getting the job. > A big chunk of it is one man bands who know C and maybe some C++ The parallel here to "enterprise development" is the small companies that have one guy who knows C# or VB. Pay's also about the same, as is the (non-existent) level of process automation. I agree with your point, but I don't want compare apples to oranges. The "embedded world" that's "crying out for people experienced in modern software teams" is the one that's doing large projects with teams of 5-20 developers, not the ones with one or two. If you want to find those teams you'll need to look at the projects that require lots of people like Defense or complex medical devices, etc. I've been doing embedded systems for my entire career and TBH, I don't much care if a candidate has ever seen a dev board or used a logic analyzer. It's a nice to have, don't get me wrong, but I care a lot more that they understand SOLID, version control, unit testing, can speak intelligently about why they love or hate TDD, etc. We typically already have people with enough low-level experience to build hardware abstractions that the "enterprise people" can program to. These days, someone who understands software security on interconnected systems is a much more interesting candidate than one who can bit-twiddle on an 8051. > The embedded world is crying out for people experienced in modern software teams. The embedded world refuses to pay through. Hi, one man band here doing firmware at a small company. Could you elaborate on any particular skills, or tips for this sort of thing? Right now I'm trying to learn how to integrate unit tests into our newer/future projects, and setting up a Jenkins server for builds. I'm learning a lot, but it's difficult since I'm the only guy that understands firmware at my company, and these are fairly large projects to take on as a single person when there are other things I need to be managing. The things I've found are productivity and reliability multipliers are: Unit testing - and the modularisation that it forces you to do. It's great to unit test C not just because it tests your code well before it runs on hardware, but also because it's basically impossible without embracing dependency injection and modular "object oriented" C. Personally, working with a bunch of higher level languages - Rust, C#, Scala, Python - and the tooling that they have gave me a much better understanding of how things can be done. I'm a big fan of Ceedling - http://www.throwtheswitch.org/#download-section Writing firmware which can target a desktop environment. The hardware dependencies should be a small part of the project, and easily replaced with fakes or simulators. Having a CI pipeline which runs tests/linters/builds for you. Those aren't necessarily easy to insert into an existing project though. Honestly I think the most useful thing is just building projects using other languages, and taking the best parts back into the low level code. It depends a bit what kind of projects you're working on - if it's mostly just glue between peripherals then these approaches are a lot less useful than if you're doing complicated maths or json parsing or higher level stuff. Short answer, as someone who has BTDT (although as the tech. lead): you need to get management buy-in to upgrade your processes. Doing it yourself either leads to failure or resentment at working too hard for too little appreciation. > The embedded world is crying out for people experienced in modern software teams. The embedded world requires VERY specialized skills, and pays significantly less than enterprise webshit (let alone FAANG webshit). I'd LOVE to get into embedded, but I can't afford to make 2/3 to half of what I make now. For me, I can do frontend and I do it during my job but I put backend engineer on my resume to find jobs that aren't "move the button over 3 pixels". Take a job at a worse company than you’re used to in the new domain, then job hop back up. (This assumes you aren’t currently at the very bottom tier of companies) Electrician should be your first option. Pay is often better than other trades and it is more intellectually demanding and less physically demanding at the same time. There’s a shortage now too. Most electricians easily work into their 60s so age should not be a factor. You will need to start off as an apprentice but given your demonstrated technical ability, I would hope you’ll be able to identify niche jobs within the profession that you will give you leg up for more rapid advancement. I worked as an electrician in the military, albeit for aircraft. I do miss getting my hands dirty in that regard; however, the civilian side aircraft electrician pay is not remotely comparable to my SE salary (in fact it'd be a more than 50% pay cut). Is residential/commercial electrician pay closer to SE pay? Not until you're a master electrician. And that comes after years of ditch digging and other labor intensive apprentice tasks. I'm late-30s. About to start working on a personal project involving cement: making planters for small fruit trees. The reason: to learn more about cement, since my plan is to set up concrete piers for a future cabin. And, to eventually learn masonry for making a concrete + rock house. I do have a bit of back pain already from a desk IT job. However I am relatively fit and I think with more calisthenics I'll improve my back & ab muscles to reduce my back pain. I've been watching https://www.youtube.com/@HVACRVIDEOS quite a lot. The troubleshooting and diagnosis, as well as a combination of tech skills and curiosity is intriguing. However, like most trades it is gated on years being an apprentice and being an apprentice at an older age is not easy because of the tasks given to apprentices. CNC seems like a potential intersection of programming and trades. 3d printing etc might let you carry over some skills. It is. But head on over to the CNC forums at PracticalMachinist.com to hear the machine programmers bitch about how little they're paid and being nothing more than babysitters for large machine tools. There will be a lot of opportunity in semi-automating residential/commercial property maintenance. Think robot mowers, smart irrigation/fertilization, smart composting ect. Lot of adoption potential from high-income Eco-conscious people that have already bought EVs. > There will be ... How does this help someone today? Being an electrician always seemed interesting to me. I imagine this job to be ever more in demand as we move more and more from legacy energy sources (coal, oil, gas) towards electricity. The job can be dangerous though so that's a thing to consider