[bsder]

Here's what look like some real numbers: https://ibew11.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Residential-wa...

Those rates are nothing to sneeze at, but the work is often hard work out in the beating sun (not everybody is installing data centers in air conditioning). And the work takes a toll on your body.

Those are certainly not numbers that would make people genuinely qualified for software jobs think once let alone twice.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the work takes a toll on your body

It doesn’t need to. Not for welding.

[bsder]

> Not for welding

What? Where? All the welding jobs I have ever known were terrible for your body. Between the exposure to high UV, all the bits of toxic crap that you are breathing/ingesting, and the noise from heavy machinery, it's quite bad. And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal.

My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father. My grandfather died from a weird cancer from all the crap he was exposed to. My father quit working at the mill precisely because it was doing so much damage just by wear and tear. They both made a point to make sure that my job would be based around my brain and not my body.

Electricians, by contrast, at least don't have anywhere near the same level of exposure to toxic crap.

[defrost]

> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father.

A company from 1857 that scarcely advanced it's Health & Safety practices.

> And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal.

Exactly - modern metal fabrication workers, fitters, turners, machinists, et al use forklifts, overhead cranes, eye protection, breathing rigs that filter out toxins and cool the face, and essentially work smart .. and that's been my experience since I first TA'd in a mining locomotive shed back in the late 1970s.

You can see examples of this in the heavy industry repair domain here:

https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering/videos

[bsder]

Erm: https://youtu.be/NZf-fTK7q7E?t=592

Sure, he has eye and ear protection. But he's just inhaling the dust from that stuff.

Even worse, he's using old school stick welding that's actually been banned in multiple places because it was so stupidly toxic.

All your video did was reinforce that, yeah, industrial work looks exactly like what I expect it to look like and it still sucks.

[defrost]

He's descaling with his mouth shut. Not inhaling.

> Even worse, he's using old school stick welding.

Can you show an example of that? (You linked to him using a needle gun not a stick welder)

He's got top of the range spooled feed welders and does jobs at a scale that take hundreds of metres of feed .. these are not the jobs you spend all day swapping sticks for.

If you watched more of the channel you might pick up a lot of discussion about what is and isn't toxic, what are safe and unsafe practices.

The same job | video you linked, different time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZf-fTK7q7E&t=592s

That's gouging out metal wearing a closed system breather as that's actual toxic residue.

Welding a nut on to help separate the metal sleeve - not a stick welder: https://youtu.be/NZf-fTK7q7E?t=438

> All your video did was reinforce that, ...

It honestly seems as if you saw what you wanted to see without paying attention to detail about what was actually happening.

[bsder]

He's gouging via stick. No breathing apparatus. https://youtu.be/NZf-fTK7q7E?t=253

[JumpCrisscross]

> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father

How do they view modern eye, respiratory and skin protection every welder I’ve seen on an industrial site clad in?

[bsder]

So, your hands have no oil or dirt on them after working a welding shift? Wow, I'd love to take a tour of your workplace.

Even if you've got protection on, you still get exposed little by little. If someone is welding next to you on a site, you get exposed. If you have slag, you are breathing vaporized chemicals and heavy metal ions unless you a wearing a closed system breather. Any solvents or fluids tend to be some level of toxic. etc.

Welding is more than just putting rod to metal. You cut things. You grind things. You apply chemicals in preparation. Nobody is dressed in an environmental hazard suit all day--lack of mobility and peripheral vision is its own industrial hazard.

If you're covered in grime at the end of the day, well, all that crap is toxic to some degree.

[JumpCrisscross]

True, didn’t think about grime like that. I’d be curious to see actual health outcomes comparing the risks of a sedentary occupation with one that has some toxic exposure.

[close04]

Probably the same way they’d view the young tech startup billionaire. They’d understand they’re just seeing snapshots of an industry they don’t fully know so they’d avoid generalizing to “all young tech workers are billionaires”.

Why you’d think you can characterize an entire industry based on a few snapshots is not clear to me.

A few more things I’d add to the health risks of welding: the inevitable toxic crap on the hands even just by taking off the protective equipment, or the occasionally extremely uncomfortable body posture that needs to be maintained for hours on end while welding. And there are more extreme welding environments that put almost any job on earth to shame, like hyperbaric welding.

Over years things add up. If office work is hard on the body for too much sitting which is natural and fine is smaller doses, imagine work where even the small exposures are terribly bad.

Source: only welded once in my life but worked for a company that did a lot of it, from the mountain top to the bottom of the sea. All the safety avoids acute issues but the chronic ones will build up.

[kbar13]

your eyes

tho i guess staring at a screen for 90% of your day is probably also bad for the eyes