My place has a large shipyard and as story I got told is that good welder lands there with a private jet, do their welding then fly to the next place. I am guessing good welders have a niche market as well.
Great story, because it demonstrates what people often fail to think about in salary: your hypothetical maximum salary is bounded by the amount of value you add to the finished product.
If you're a key component (welder) in a high priced product (ship), the builder can compensate you $$$$ and still win. So they do.
You can temporarily have unreasonably high pay (higher than value added), but eventually the market will figure it out. The only way to make outsized returns your entire career is to find a supply-limited, high-value-add niche.
> My understanding is that it's dangerous and few want to do it.
Yeah this is the part everyone is ignoring in the conversation. Many highly compensated physical labor jobs are highly compensated because of the associated risk. While being a developer (with exceptions) doesn't expose you to any physical risk.
Funny, this is my plan to get out of tech. I've been welding bicycle frames for five years (cumulative, over maybe a 10 year period). I'll probably leave tech for good at the end of the year and start a boutique bike frame company.
A decade later I sold a company and spent 3 months in Portland at https://bikeschool.com/. I took pretty much all of their classes. (Their wheel building seminar was fantastic, btw). Sadly they no longer teach welding, but the classes were fantastic. In each class you sized, laid out, machined and welded a bike. Started with lugged chromoly brazing, then chromoly fillet brazing, then chromoly tig, aluminum tin and finally titanium tig.
Unfortunately there are no bike schools in the world which have as comprehensive as a program as bikeschool did. I think they lost most of their teachers during Covid. Hoping they recover.
I ended up bringing 5 frames with me on the train home from PDX to Oakland. Over the next year I built another 15 frames for friends, then started a business building and selling custom, very durable bikes to overweight techies. It was great fun, we used to host weekend 25, 50 and 100 mile rides, nobody under 200lbs allowed. I lost $300 on every bike I made, but it was worth it.
Long story short: Go buy a couple of the cheapest throw-away bicycle frames you can. Get a brazing setup, then spend a few weeks cutting them up and learning how to join tubes solidly. Everything else is easy after that.