[bardan]

At this point in time trades seem like a pretty good bet. They pay well (in my country at least), you will always have work, and the skills you develop are very practical. Nice to be able to look at an issue with your own living space and comprehend what it will take to get it fixed.

But that isn't a very hacker news response. I guess you would also develop these sorts of skills in eg. industrial engineering.

There are plenty of other options if what you're spooked about is automation and language models erradicating all of our jobs. If you enjoy baking you might consider getting into it.

On the other hand, it might be best to ignore all the hype about LLMs and automation and go into whatever you feel most passionate about. Learning and working in whatever field will always lead to growth. It may eventually be GPT'd away, but then I know a lot of people who have completely changed career later in life and achieved success and satisfaction.

[dimmke]

If you pick a trade pick one of the less physical ones. Like plumbing or electrician. Every homeowner wants a reliable plumber in their contacts, and they’re expensive as fuck in the United States. It’s not just dealing with poop either like some people think. There’s a pretty big variety of things plumbers do.

I live in Mexico now and from what I’ve heard from every person I know who owns a house or manages a rental it’s just as hard to find a reliable one here, so it’s not like immigration or AI will have a huge effect.

Don’t get into tree cutting. It’s extremely dangerous. General contracting can be very lucrative but is much broader.

With these trades you can eventually “hang your own shingle” and become a business owner.

As I was writing this I was thinking “fuck maybe I should become a plumber”

[dimmke]

I would also say - if you do go into trades, consider still doing 2 years of community college and going to a trade school. It really depends on your situation - would your parents support you during that time? If the pressure is on, then just do trade school and start working straight off.

But just be aware it's going to put you in a different social class (blue collar) than others your age who go to college. There's a lot of 18 and 19 year olds who go this route and brag about how they're making 50k a year, but fail to see the bigger picture. You only get to be those ages once, don't piss them away working 60 hours a week unless you have to.

And guard yourself - a lot of people who do this type of labor are into heavy drugs (especially meth) or have criminal pasts. Alcoholism is also rampant. Just be aware of those things as pitfalls and try to stay away from it. Stick with the "winners" - form relationships with the people you find who don't have these issues. If you have another social "group" to draw from in the form of college friends, it'll be easier.

[fsociety]

Plumbing and electricians can be a great career but “one of the less physical one” denies the fact that it still wears out your body all the same. Speaking from a family of manual labor + friends in trades.

[dimmke]

Agree - but the trajectory is to become a "Master Plumber" (this is an actual title/license) then you can operate your own plumbing business and the harder physical stuff can be done by younger employees.

Getting to this level takes 7-10 years (from a cursory Google search), so he could have it by his early 30s.

Usually the worry blue collar/trades people have is when their body starts breaking down in their 40s/50s and they are still having to directly perform the manual labor. This happens even in kitchens in restaurants. But putting in 10 years in his youth if he stays in shape in a less physical trade mitigates that a lot.

Another alternative if you don't care about making a lot of money is military/USPS. You'll be retired with pension by 40. And with the military, you will have the opportunity to train as a knowledge worker on their dime if your interest skews more in that area than physical labor. Even with those, there's ways to finesse things. Even if you wanted to go that route, it'd probably be better to try to be an officer rather than enlisted. So you'd have to get a bachelor's degree from somewhere, and make sure they will pay off your student loan debt.

But it really just depends on what you're trying to optimize for. All of this advice assumes OP doesn't have any kind of safety net (like a trust fund/inheritance that will vest when he turns X age like 25 or 30 or parents willing to bankroll whatever he wants to do), and that he lives in the US and is solely concerned with having a career where he can eventually make six figures that is unlikely to be made obsolete during his working life by technology.

If he does have those things, then the question becomes a lot harder more philosophical and harder to answer. You can try and fail at a lot of different stuff and it won't matter. So pursue whatever interests you.

[giraffe_lady]

The "pay your dues then run the business" approach has a couple problems. One you're gambling that you won't get injured in ways that will end or set back your career before you've done the time that will allow you to move past that risk. The odds are in your favor if you're sober, careful, and attentive but low level work in those fields doesn't particularly teach or reward that mindset either so a great deal of personal discipline is helpful. Even then it just takes one mistake and it doesn't even have to be your mistake either.

The second is that running a business is a different skillset from being a plumber or whatever, one that you won't have learned organically on the way up. And there's still the risk that you launch your business into some 2008 recession shit or whatever just through bad luck and now you're as broke as you were starting at 22 years old but without a body that can do physical work for 15 h/day anymore.

If you're american suggesting people join the military is socially normative but frankly obscene. Look what they've been into the last couple decades. "Assassinate civilians for twenty years and you can retire" is a harsh but realistic rephrasing of that recommendation. That's even aside from the very real risk you'll be sent off to get a life changing TBI, or be gang-raped by your colleagues and then blamed for it by the institution.

If someone is in the situation of needing to figure out their career from the beginning without any sort of support, money, or connections to get it started, I'm not sure what I would suggest either. The trades are maybe a good gamble but be realistic: the opioid epidemic is ground from the souls of the unlucky ones on that path.

[dimmke]

>low level work in those fields doesn't particularly teach or reward that mindset either so a great deal of personal discipline is helpful. Even then it just takes one mistake and it doesn't even have to be your mistake either.

This is a good point, but everything in life carries risk. You could make the same argument about cars, but people still drive every day (and some for a living!) Also, this is labor that has to be performed for society to function. The way you're talking about it makes it seem like an absurd proposition.

You can mitigate risk by choosing a safer and less physical trade (plumbing vs. tree service) and by being aware of the other dangers (like avoiding hard drugs.)

If he's a hard worker, sober, and attentive to detail it is likely he would be promoted quickly anyways.

>The second is that running a business is a different skillset from being a plumber or whatever...

The is true for every kind of proprietorship. It's just as true when a lawyer starts a law firm. Starting a business does mean assuming some amount of risk, but a proprietorship generally doesn't require any startup capital. The only adjacent business I can think of is property development, but those companies raise financing for their projects they don't just pay for them out of pocket.

It's also worth pointing out that even without starting your own business the wages that come when you are at the experienced level of a trade are livable and roughly commiserate with a lot of office jobs (obviously not talking about software engineering here.)

Regarding your comments about the military, there are many jobs in the different branches of the U.S. armed forces that would never see combat or even deployment to a combat zone. Unless you're saying that serving in any capacity puts you at that level of culpability (this is not something I care to debate about, it's too tangential.)

You would receive decent pay, a free college education, many other government related benefits, a path to retire by 40 and you get to choose from a wide variety of jobs to do (including many IT/Computer related) if you do well on the ASVAB. Like you pointed out, joining the military can be very risky, but those risks can be mitigated just like with trades. Someone who joins as an infantry soldier is much more likely to die than the person who joins the Navy to cook on their ships.

It's like you're looking for something perfect with no potential downsides to contend with, but I don't think that exists. The fact that the kid posted on here asking for advice shows he's clearly thinking about his future.

Personally, I wouldn't go for programming if I was his age at this point. Not because I think the job will be replaced by AI, but because the field is such a pain now. Entering it will be hell, even if you get a degree you're going to have to grind LC and you will face completely disparate hiring standards at every company you ever work for. Not to mention the multitude of bootcamp people. All to work in a field that has basically devolved into dealing with ever more complex abstractions on top of other abstractions. I'm sure AI will enter the stack at some point and it will truly be a black box. Programming these days just isn't very much fun anymore IMO.

[juve1996]

Owning a business is a different thing than doing a trade and requires a lot of different skills. Most plumbers don't do this. It's not something you can just "oh wow look how easy this is." It requires investment and risk, as well.

[mattmanser]

Trades is a bit of a brutal profession on your body. Plus, there's a shortage at the moment but there's no guarantee that will continue.

[Nextgrid]

Trades are recession-proof though. Rich or poor, recession or not, people still need to shit and don't like doing so in the dark, so at least plumbing and electrical will still have work. People need housing, so anything construction and building work will also be fine. Same for heating and HVAC.

The fields mostly impacted by recessions are those that never had a business in the first place - lots of tech has been built on "growth & engagement" freeloading off VC money with no actual businesses paying for that "engagement", and now the free money ran out.

[juve1996]

They're certainly not recession proof - recessions are terrible times for trades. Trades do well when the economy does well - people spend more on non-necessity projects and that demand goes away in recessions. Sure, people still need a clog removed - but now there's more plumbers because they aren't installing new bathrooms.

It really gets old hearing software developers talk about trades yet none of them do them. I've seen what the trades have done to my dad, uncle, grandparents. They earned good livings - but it was real, hard work, and they paid for that hard work.