[ryandrake]

This seems to be true with every trade shop in my area. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, appliance repair, and so on: Nobody picks up the phone, and when you do get someone, they don't seem to be very interested in your job unless it sounds like big money to them. Everyone already apparently has as much work as they want, and if you're a small fish you're out of luck.

[encom]

Electrician here. I had zero unemployment time between my current job and the last. Sent ~5 applications, had two interviews. Current employer called me in the afternoon offering me a job, after interviewing the same morning.

Y'all are in the wrong business :D

[shimman]

Median electrician in the USA makes ~$60k:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric...

Median software devs make over double that, ~$130k:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

The only way to make good money in the trades is to own a business, something not everyone can do (let alone be successful at).

[encom]

Danish electrician average is ~80k. Danish software developer is ~100k, but with much higher variance.

However there's also quite a lot of difference in training between Danish and American electricians. I specialised in telecom - part of my curriculum was configuring Cisco routers. The subject of my oral exam was TCP/IP. I love the variety. Yesterday I was chasing down a rogue DHCP server on a network. Today I was mounting a drainage pump controller.

But as they say, do what makes you happy. I would rather be happy at 60k than miserable at 130k.

  <img src="woodyharrelsonwipingtearswithmoney.gif">

[ryandrake]

Yea.. When people say "you can make great money in the trades" what they usually mean is that you can make great money by owning a trade business and/or hiring tradesmen. Which is kind of different than being a tradesman.

[6510]

True but electricians have a real system without bullshit, we wire something up and it just works, it keeps working too! You press the button, the light goes on, you press it again and it goes off! Except from audio all of the automatons come with the right plugs.

You would think after 50 years software devs build something similar but besides the <input type="submit"> button absolutely nothing works like that. Switching on the lights by clicking on a button using the mouse would already be a serious enterprise level undertaking. Then when you think you are done someone in Russia and someone in China are also able to control your lights.

There are no labels on our buttons, the dimensions are in exact mm. If you ask a software dev they will tell you mm have something to do with printing. On a screen a button can have any size, no one knows really how big it turns out regardless which of the 50 different units you use. pt rm rem px % vw etc etc

Sounds pretty unscientific? Can you at least tell me when it is finished and how much it will cost? Did I say something wrong?

Long story short, 130k isn't enough.

[cucumber3732842]

There's this giant no-man's land of more work for less profit they have to cross between "reliably profitable business run by its founders" to "reliably profitable business with a half a dozen or more employees". A helper you can keep tabs on but can work without often pencils out. A crew of 2, 3, 4, that's often less profitable per hour of the owner's labor (with a way higher labor minimum) than just working yourself or with a helper. Only when you have things humming along do you actually make more money than if you were working on those task yourself.

You almost certainly have to take out huge loans against the business to get across that gulf (your employees need those capital investments that you use to do your work). When you consider the long term outlook and the age of most business owners making such a decision it's no surprise that many choose to simply stay small rather than take on a huge amount of work and stress to maybe make more money years in the future.

Basically there's a ton of work for no reward between "I own my job" and "I own a business"