[stickhandle]

No argument with the premise or results. That said, if I were to advise a 16 yo self, I would include consideration for skilled trades. A plumber/electrician/hvac specialist with decent business/accounting/bookkeeping skills can pretty much write their own ticket past apprenticeship.

[morgante]

I don't think anyone who can cut it as a top maths/eng graduate should consider a trade. It's a gross misuse of their skills and will definitely lead to lower returns over their lifetime.

Skilled trades are a great option for a mediocre student with no real interests, but it's not really an ideal alternative to tech.

[Spooky23]

I've seen plenty of talented devs slinging shitty enterprise crud apps or building Facebook for hamsters. The average dev does ok until he hits 40, unless you embed in the right enterprise.

A smart, ambitious person in a skilled trade (or even not so skilled) can can make a lot of money and have rewarding work. My neighbor prints money as running an excavation & dumptruck business. He uses the cash to buy property and find his wife's fledgling business.

Every time a building burns, floods, etc in my city, he has a 1/5 chance of making about $75k at 80% margin. And that is a tiny part of the business.

[morgante]

A smart, ambitious developer will make an order of magnitude more than a smart, ambitious tradesperson over their lifetime.

Work at Google for 10 years and you'll have plenty of money to buy any property you want.

It's not like this is something we have to debate. The average developer easily makes more than the average plumber, with a lot more potential for upside. [1] [2]

[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Developer/S...

[2] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Plumber/Hourly_Rate

[actf]

The problem with those statistics is that they don't account for location. Software developers may indeed make more salary than the average plumber, but to do so they're mostly required to live in a tech hub, with a high cost of living. I would hypothesize that to maintain a comparable standard of living (i.e. housing, food, etc) to plumbers their average disposable income would actually be lower.

[declan]

Quite right. I posted the below grafs in a discussion a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10761048) and it seems relevant again.

The median home value in Palo Alto is $2.5M per Zillow; in neighboring Menlo Park with comparable schools it's $2M. If you cross I-280 for larger lot sizes (and generally, though not always, more house square footage) you'll see the median home value in Portola Valley is $3.8M. If you don't like those figures, you can look at Trulia's, which says the median sales price for Palo Alto is $2.5M and the mean listing price is $3M.

Note these are generally not luxurious properties at those prices. Many are small postwar ranchers or Eichlers (beautiful but a pain to update) that have not been renovated in decades. Some houses have negative value because they're teardowns; you'd buy the property for the land.

After taking into account housing costs and California's aggressively progressive tax regime, you may find that $250K salary does not go as far as you like. You may make 2x-3x as much--but your cost for comparable housing may be 10x-15x as high and your tax burden will be more oppressive as well.

[morgante]

Yes, home prices are insane but it's not going to wipe out all your gains. I worked a programmer in NYC and could still easily save 50% of my after-tax income.

Not to mention that as a programmer you have the option of working remotely (for a healthy 6-figure salary) for whatever low-cost place you like.

[Spooky23]

You're using industry wide figures. Making $200k in SFO isn't very meaningful. And to achieve top outcomes in IT, you need to live in SFO, BOston or NYC.

You can build a $5M plumbing/electrical/etc business in any location and live a much better quality of life.

[morgante]

> You can build a $5M plumbing/electrical/etc business in any location and live a much better quality of life.

If the average outcome for plumbers is owning $5M businesses, it's amazing how that doesn't show up in any statistics I've seen.

Both of my parents work in the trades. People on Hacker News glamorize it far too much. It's much more frequently a case of intermittent employment and low wages—even when you do own your own business (as both of them have at various times).

[tonyedgecombe]

I think you are probably wrong, I've met quite a few trades people who pursue their intellectual interests outside of work and without the encumbrance of having to make a living from them.

[rwallace]

You say "maths/eng graduate" - are you sure you didn't mean to say "programmer"?

It's an important distinction. Computer programming is just about the only white-collar job left on Earth that still has a healthy demand relative to the supply so you can get a decently paid job where you aren't abused all that much, so if you have an aptitude for it, by all means go that route (whether via college or not, is a separate question).

But what's the job market like these days for mathematicians, physicists, mechanical engineers? I get the impression it's bad enough that if you put the same ingenuity and effort into a blue-collar trade you'd get better returns.

[czbond]

I used to think that too (as a comp sci guy). But the old adage is true "A students work for B students, who work for the owners - C Students". What I've found in life is that the smartest make intellectual advances, but rarely take life risks due to over-rationalization.

[chongli]

"A students work for B students, who work for the owners - C Students".

The problem with this adage is the numbers game. A students may be rare and C students plentiful, but owners are rare too. So while some C students may become owners, most will be far less successful.

[morgante]

I'm not sure what your point is.

I'm not much of an academic type myself. I was talking about careers: you're going to make a lot more money and have much more impact as a developer/software guy than as a tradesman.

I don't know of (m)any software developers working for plumbers.

[douche]

There's some other considerations that might come into play there:

Do you take great satisfaction and pleasure in working with your hands and working on concrete projects?

Do you want to live someplace outside the big-money tech bubbles?

Maybe you don't care about impacting the world - you just want to make a nice living and hang out with your family.

I'm sure there's others.

[morgante]

I'm not saying that everyone should be a developer. Plenty of people are well-suited to a skilled trade if that's what they enjoy.

What I was arguing against is this idea that someone becoming a plumber is the economically superior option.

[gaius]

Pure snobbery when you consider the actual day-to-day work of a typical CS graduate. Oh look another intranet, another shopping cart, another way to show people ads. A new Javascript framework to learn, woohoo! Who says being a plumber or an electrician isn't more intellectually satisfying than that?