you’ll either be needed to extract dead systems after this all falls apart, or to build new systems for people that don’t want slop service in dead space.
I’m a few weeks from graduating in software engineering, I think I’m going back to my old plan of finding a strong rope and a sturdy tree.
Nothing wrong with being an arborist.
I know this is a haha community, but software isn’t dead. Most corps are going to insist you use AI. Especially as a junior dev. Look for places that say things like “engineers make the decisions”. You need to find a place where you can get experience learning how software is built, even if the bot does the typing. People have been getting laid off and that sucks but software devs aren’t going anywhere. Ai writes bad code. They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
Bold of you to think they wouldn’t replace AI with more AI and lie to their own face in the mirror that their company collapsing is good just because, AI.
Yeah, I suggest following the age old wisdom of rats on this. Abandon the sinking ship before it sinks with you in it.
I worked in IT support for 15 years. Now I work on a dairy farm. Cows are way better than people. Go into farming, fellow lemmings. It’s so rewarding.
One day… I must still fix the machines. The normies still won’t know what the power button or ram stick are, even with help.
Supply managed?
With all the food recalls, I’m sure plumbing is a high demand job.
Jokes aside; trades suck. If you like hot ass heat, cramped places, constant injuries, buying your own tools, ruining your body before you reach forty, and annoying customers; then it’s the job for you. This is an anecdotal take but yeah it’s not fun. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I say I wish I did anything else for the last ten years. The money was good but the added pain isn’t worth it.
Don’t do plumbing, join us in HVAC-R. There is way less training and fewer certs required. The bar is so low it’s derailing subways.
Refrigeration?
I sent this to my plumber to congratulate him on his career choice.
Turns out now he’s an electrician and his company got hired to help build an AI data center. 💀Sixty electricians from his company alone on one job. Drones surveilling the repetitive work overhead.
So much for escaping the impacts of AI.
I don’t know what I did, but I’m definitely about to get beat for it
We’ve been predicting the demise of the coding career since the dawn of the coding career, but even if it’s not dying, being proficient in coding and becoming proficient in one other trade is a good way to find opportunities to make software that makes that trade easier. The bar for quality in trade-specific software is shockingly low and money can be made in those niches.
I’ve spent my entire career as a professor advocating that students should pick a minor, certificate, or double major if they’re capable.
My rationale is remarkably similar I think. Literally ever field, hobby, and area of study involve some form of technology. Many of those disciplines lack the sophistication of the tooling and that we have in more programming related fields, which makes people with an additional specialized skill set extremely valuable.
Hell, look around at fintech, bioinformatics, computational arts, etc. We have emerging Fields all the time that are essentially computer science combined with another field.
This is basically me.
I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.
My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).
In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.
I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.
That rules. I hope you use your powers for good.
I’d rather be an electrician than a plumber. It’s like a simpler, deadlier Ethernet.
👴 my first PC in the mid-90s had a 10mbit coaxial network card that my brother and I used for a 2 PC LAN connection, and let me tell ya - you wouldn’t want to handle that while the PC was turned on.
Although the zap was less hurtful than an electrical fence.Looking it up, it was most likely 10BASE5.
Also if you become an electrician then you have an excuse to run Ethernet poorly. Gotta love when the electrician runs unshielded cat6 cable through 100ft of conduit containing 480V wires. Talk about POE, you could probably run a toaster off that Ethernet cable.
And electricians don’t have to interact with human feces nearly as often.
Three phase PoE anyone?
Powerline networking is a thing and a great choice for bringing hardline connections to remote parts of a house.
I had a shed that had electric but my WiFi couldn’t reach and a cheap powerline kit and a spare OpenWRT worked a treat.
I think all power lines should have a communications protocol. Not every device has to use them, and they’d be lower bandwidth than data-only lines, but I think the era of data-communicating appliances is here to stay, and it’d be better they go over the wires we have rather than clogging up the wireless spectrum.
Within a single building for sure, but even neighborhood lines could carry some data I bet. I wonder if and how that would work. Gonna have to learn some more about electricity and grid infrastructure.
We have several good standards for power-line networking.
All of them fail for the usual problems, like all companies making sure every connector you can buy is proprietary and incompatible with each other’s.
Yeah. I know it’s possible to have a backward-compatible network over regular residential wiring, I have a pair of those ethernet ports that plug into standard outlets, but there would need to be a broadly accepted networking standard for devices that have that feature built in.
Maybe a starting point would be an open hardware, open software server device that connects to the electrical grid and the regular ethernet (via cable or wireless) that manages all the active devices on the power network. If a device implements a protocol the hub recognizes, it registers the device and makes it available for management via a web interface. I think I’d want some kind of manual confirmation before new devices start communicating with the ethernet anyway, as well as a way to grant and revoke internet privileges for devices on the fly, e.g. I might want to upgrade the firmware on one appliance to fix a bug, then close it off again until the next update. There could be switches / dimmers etc. that implement the standard and act as passthroughs for legacy devices to give them a bit of centralized control too.
If it gets good enough for hobbyist / diy electronics makers to start baking the standard into their devices, it could become a defacto open standard. I think it would be cool to have networked devices that won’t brick once the manufacturer goes bust / decides to shut down the servers that make the hardware work. I think that should be the bare minimum we demand from hardware manufacturers: that they don’t build implicit or explicit killswitches into the devices the sell. But that’s a separate ramble and I feel I’ve gone on long enough here 🙃
They already do. There’s ripple signaling for electrical infrastructure and power company disconnect boxes. If you’ve ever seen those power company boxes hooked up to HVAC equipment that’s what those are for. They let the power company use ripple control to selectively disable high power draw equipment during peak load times.
The cybersecurity specialist in me really doesn’t like the idea of having enough wire in public spaces that it’s essentially impossible to monitor, sending infrastructure related data.
But then again, a weekend playing around with a flipper zero and a walk through town is enough to realize that it probably doesn’t matter.
Think some intelligent opsec is needed when acquiring a flipper?
In these grand United States, that is
I don’t think so. Ultimately, it’s a low power computer with a software defined radio in it. Nothing inherently nefarious.
I am Canadian however, so jury’s out about the US
Yeah I imagine for lines outside the home, or in public places, it would be best to assume that the channel is untrustworthy and the data is public. Essential comms would need to have redundancy of course. But for an oven reporting its at temp, or a thermostat reporting its room’s temperature to a central HVAC controller, I think it would be nicer than running everything over wifi.
You could even have a signal smoother at the main so nothing inside the house can get out. The way I’m imagining it, all the household power would come from the home battery, which would be fed by a combination of solar panels and grid power. If the battery’s full and the sun is shining, power feeds back into the main. If the battery’s low, power is drawn from the panels, and if that doesn’t meet demand, power is drawn from the grid. But the whole house is buffered (electrically and informationally) by the battery.
Started carpentry work this week. It’s alright if you don’t work with assholes
So many assholes though. So I bought a lawnmower and a trailer, cutting grass and gardening by myself is really nice
That’s unironically a good idea if you are just getting into it. The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
But you’ll pay for it with crippling back pain at 45. Maybe some nice cancer as a bonus, from all the exposure to weird chemicals. Oh, and 90% of your coworkers racist, sexist, homophobic MAGA-heads who’ll make sure you hear about it at every opportunity.
The trades can still be good, but go into it with eyes open. It’s no paradise.
Anyone going into the trades for money is going to be fucking miserable. The pay is nice but the pay is nice for a damn good reason. You will have no time, be perpetually tired, and wind up working in some really shitty conditions. Also a lot of that money will constantly be getting spent on tools. Sure most companies provide their techs with some tools and a stipend, but that stipend is never enough and you’ll wind up wanting to replace most of the provided tools with your own anyways once you find ones that work better for you.
If you’re going to get into the trades it better be because you like working with your hands and beating your head against brick wall problems. In that regard though going from software to the trades isn’t that weird of a move. I’m a tradesman now but I nearly got my bachelor’s in Computer Science. I loved how coding made me use my brain. I only dropped out when I got a desk job and realized that I wouldn’t be able to stand working a desk job. In the trades I get the same intellectual fun without having to sit at a desk all day.
Woman here, can confirm. Worked as an aircraft mechanic for a year and a truck driver for another, you will encounter the scum of the earth. So glad to be back to working with civilized humans.
People whine that women wont enter the trades, theres a reason they dont want to and its not because the work is too hard.
I agree that the trades can be hard on the body and there is a decent risk that your career can be cut short due to injury. However, the characterization of tradesmen as all ignorant MAGA types is unfair. I imagine this varies a lot by region and market but I live in a fairly liberal-leftist area and happen to know a bunch of folks in the trades and they are not like that.
FWIW I am in a fairly affluent city and my friends will sometimes complain about working with subcontractors who come in from the exurbs who will throw fits about not being able to easily park their giant trucks wherever they want or make sideways comments about crime in the city. The response to that is usually something like “oh, you don’t have all these annoying parking rules in your rural town? Maybe you should go work on building multimillion dollar projects over there then? Oh, what’s that? There are no multimillion dollar projects in the middle of fucking nowhere? Hmmm”
There are also trades and regions where unions are still highly regarded.
Joke’s on you, I’ve already got crippling back pain before turning 45.
They’re gonna stay like that unless a bunch of woke people join them out of nowhere for several years and convert/push out all of the weirdos
Then you just have the crippling back pain and cancer!
Tell me about it. Giving thought to retraining as an electrician given how in demand they are.
I want to get training as an electrician so I can take my house completely off the grid (or at least, be independent with the grid as a redundancy) one day without accidentally burning it down. Then I want to make free software to monitor and manage home power usage, and share it with the world so we can all have nice, efficient, futuristic homes without some corporate combine demanding a monthly fee and invasive surveillance for the pleasure.
Depending on where you live, home owners can often legally do as much of their own wiring as they want. If that’s the case where you live then you don’t need the license, you just need the knowledge. That’s still a big hurdle but it’s a smaller hurdle than 4 years as an apprentice and then another 4 years as a journeyman.
I also want you to do this
It’s coming along slowly. I don’t have any formal training yet, still trying to find a coding job that pays the bills before I commit to a paid educational course, but I’ve been out of work for a while now and it may be time to take the plunge.
So far my education is mostly just watching youtubers who are doing things similar to what I want to do, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectsWithDave He seems legit to me, but I am very new to the field so I feel like I’m the kind of person who could be taken in by correct-sounding nonsense.
There’s jobs that will put you through apprenticeships as part of the first 2 years of employment. You do the course work at night (which should be pretty easy if you’ve already trained as a software engineer).
Saaaaaaaame
I was looking around for active electricians’ comms and found this:
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/akunohana_learning_electricity
It’s new and small, but akunohana is actively posting as they’re learning about electricity; I’m going to follow along and see if I can contribute.
*Unless you’re in the south.
Everyone and their Dad is in trades of one kind or another, and they hire their kids.
How do you do it? I wouldn’t mind being a plumber but I have no idea how I’d get started. I don’t even know what tools I’d need.
A lot of community colleges either double as trade schools or have active relationships with local trade schools.
Another option is to talk to your local employment office. They usually have more programs than just unemployment insurance. Depending on your financial circumstances and your location, you might even be able to have the government pay for your training program/certification. At the very least, they’ll have useful points of contact and information about training for various jobs.
Your local plumbers union can probably help you get an apprenticeship and get going.
Seems I do have a local plumbers’ union, and it looks like they are accepting applications. Thanks!
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get picked right away. Sometimes they have a year or more backlog on apprenticeships.
If you stick it out, it can be a great career!
Thanks, I don’t know if they’ll want me, seems like they’re mostly looking for new high school grads and I am well-removed from my high school years. But maybe my experience with coding will be an asset, somehow.
You could also look into becoming an electrician. That touches on more high tech stuff than plumbing. And you get to flex your math skills as a master electrician. I think (hope) that there is a fairly rigorous certification for getting into electrical apprenticeship programs in every region. In the city where I grew up, they had to sit for exams in order to get to specific levels.
Edit to add: while both jobs have too much crawling through spiderwebs in crawlspaces for my tastes, electricians encounter orders of magnitude less poop than plumbers.
Every job gets a little more techie every year. I’m sure the master plumbers use some pretty sophisticated software to plan out the plumbing in a house.
Heck, just a simple job needs planning, billing, and more. All of which use computer systems.
Even just knowing logic and high end math is showing that you’re not just a knucklehead looking to do the bare minimum.
Every bit of experience you had in a previous role can be used in the current one. Just spend a few minutes thinking of how it would work and use that in any interviews you get.
Just remember, even though most of these folks didn’t go to university, doesn’t mean they’re any dumber than you are. If they’re doing high quality work, they’re probably just as smart, or smarter.
You need to find someone who is a) cool and not a bad teacher and b) a good plumber and c) willing to take you on to teach you and d) work your butt off till you’re useful.
I suppose my question is more how do I do A B and C? is it all just knowing someone?
Can I get a copy?
Learn the essential skills and tools to become a confident plumber.
And then discover that plumbers won’t even take on an apprentice without three years of experience.
Easy: just lie about your experience.
About 10 years ago I bent the rod for the floatie thing in my toilet to stop it from running all the time, so I have 10 years of field experience.
Exactly!
It’s fascinating that we all come up with plumbing as the future jobs
Let’s be real, by the time AI is actually capable of doing residential plumbing work, it will be capable of refusing to take the job.
Well… We got used to work with other peoples shit for years.
Actually I’ve been considering a shift into mushroom farming.
Hemp for me. No but seriousely i have been looking into architectur
