Major in engineering and do both
Post AI, you only can stare at a chat prompt if you’re very lucky, and now you have to inhale even more toxic fumes for even longer, because your workplace’s CEO have bribed Trump with a million dollar. Also the datacenter in your neighborhood is humming at night, and you’re now supposed to entertain yourself by staring at Italian brainrot.
Do you want to get yelled at by a toxic boomer with a hard hat or do you want to get yelled at by a toxic boomer in a suit?
At least as far as the hard hat goes that depends on the trade. So many are so short handed that companies will practically suck dick to keep even shit employees. Toxic boomer managers in those trades tend to see their entire crew quit and find another job down the street practically overnight.
Why not do both and become a farmer?
I used to work (well still do, occasionally) at an engineering workshop, and many of those who worked in production, returned back to school, studied a few years and applied back for the office job.
And those are great employees, they usually know their shit and appreciate the office work, still understanding whats it like at the production side.
As a guy who used to work in soil remediation and now works in air quality monitoring, I say: why not both?
respirators can reduce fume ingestion, eye damage is unavoidable from over exposure to computer graphics
That’s…not a thing.
Worked in oil and gas, we dealt with spreadsheets. One coworker had a tumor that looked like a neck pillow. He couldn’t stop working because healthcare in the US requires you to have a job.
Trades pay a lot to look like tough guys and trades sell that tough guy image to sell the job for less than it’s worth.
i’ll take the excel, but i’m making some scripts to automate some shit so i can screw around at least half the time
2 smart guys apply for an IT position: do you hire the reliable, hard working guy who never takes sick leave, or the lazy guy?
Always hire the lazy guy. They will go out of their way to find a better way to do the same fucking task so they can go back to being lazy.
If both guys are smart, the hard working guy will find a better way to do the tasks and use the extra time to do other work.
The hard working guy will likely spend more time validating that the automation works correctly while the lazy guy won’t. Checking every detail, tracking down the source of any issues and fixing them so they won’t occur again is a lot of work. The lazy guy doesn’t do that.
What the lazy guy does could be done by an LLM, what the hard working guy does can’t be.
So the classic reasoning was the other way around but that was before LLMs so I do wonder if you might be right.
I’ve automated my self out of most the work on Windows installs. More time to doom scroll youtube or do a lap around the office if I’m feeling ambitious.
Shit gets fixed and users are set up fast so I can go back to doing nothing.
FOG servers are your friend.
Can confirm. I hate doing things twice, or in some job aspects 50 times.
We had a software and the next step in workflow was outputting the various files to the departments, often same file but multiple output formats.
My coworkers would run the translations manually, set the parameters manually each time, and sit and watch/wait.
I’d be at the coffee machine or chatting to a coworker.
The president stops by “do we need to get you more work, because you are never at your desk”
Me, “My computer is running multiple file translations, it should be done in 20 minutes”
Him: “Oh, OK, maybe we can get these other people setup like that.”
You can tell this story is bullshit because the manager was changed their mind.
Isn’t that Gates? It’s a solid take and one I’ve kept in mind for years as a lazy man 😆
I’ve made a career of automating excel (and away from excel all together).
I miss it sometimes, but then I need a bit of VBA again, and remember that I don’t actually miss it all that much.I remember when I thought being more efficient would result in less work.
The trick is to tell absolutely nobody then poke your mouse every few mins to make Teams think you’re still online while playing games or reading. Or so I’m told.
place your mouse on a analog watch, trust me
That’s pretty genius, and I happen to have one a foot away from where my mouse usually hangs out lol. I’ll…tell my friend.
The trick is to not let anyone know you’re being too efficient. Automate an 8-hour job down to a minute, say you finished it in 7.
you must’a made the mistake of finishing something early or showing-off your ‘optimizations’
at least you can wear forced air respirators for working with fumes
I mean, so you can while working with Excel
true. I had not considered that. I even wear it outside for allergies but I could probably wear it in the office so people get weirded out and dont talk to me
None of you have gotten high off acetone fumes and it shows
This comment is already handcuffed, move on, nothing to see here.
They’re just the simplest options. Just do something until you’re better than everybody else at it and sell your skills. Easy? Yes. Time consuming? Also yes. Worth it? Absolutely.
I’m in the physical security space, straddling electrical work and hardware with IT application/basic networking/database administration day to day. It’s way easier than it looks, but only if people put in a minimum amount of effort to learn and maintain the skill set.
I can confidently say that 95% of the techs for the three biggest companies in the industry (and many small groups) know absolutely nothing beyond what some old dude showed them when they started, and never understood why things are done the way they are or how to actually do things properly. Like setting hardware on fire levels of bad. And these aren’t just “bad techs”, they’re the “top guys in the area”.
Turnover is insane, there’s always an opening for a new field guy. That gets your foot in the door to then learn as much as you can independently and potentially being the one guy who actually knows this shit in the whole region. It only takes one or two times of saving a job from going totally south or fixing a problem nobody else could figure out (usually something fairly obvious) to look like a damn rock star. Then once the company just starts throwing you all of the bullshit jobs nobody else can do and declines when you ask for a raise/better position you take that shiny new resume and hopefully the contacts at the customer sites you worked and move to someone who appreciates the skills you bring. Repeat forever. Profit driven service business fucking sucks and none of this should be necessary, but here we all are using LinkedIn because we have to and picking up the slack for pennies.
I forget why I started writing this, and know the first step sounds like a tone deaf “just find a job” but I literally trained up brand new techs who went from bullshit entry pay to 6 figures in 2 years by being 10% better than the average old timer. If you’re looking for an industry that’s been very badly in need of competent skilled workers, physical security is something to look into and no matter how bad the market gets security is something all of these big ass companies will gladly pay for.
Related, if anyone is looking in the next few months in CA or WA hit me up, we could use another colleague and the company isn’t profit driven due to not needing to generate profit.
Imagine giving this advice to a struggling friend in the real world. Absolutely unhinged from reality, thanks for the laugh
literally survivorship bias
I am straight up gonna drink more tonight because I read that
But I bet you’re getting better than everyone else at drinking
people born on 3rd base lol
And then get no jobs because lack of recommendation/bad market/AI, etc…
there’s a couple of jobs where you get to do both!
Alternative path: become an online grifter, make millions from being a degenerate, eventually get outed as a pedophile, convert to Christianity/Islam, profit!
I hear this is the path to become president.
Ahh the Russell Brand pipeline
I worked construction and plant shutdowns when I was young. By the time I was in my mid twenties I had quit and went in to IT. The reason was simple. During my time in a union over ten of the old timers had died of cancer and other related illnesses. Only one of them was in their sixties. Over half were under forty. One of the best friends I will ever have died when he was fifty four. A month or so shy of when he was going to take early retirement.
When I was a student, I wasn’t really motivated and didn’t have any idea what to do with my life. But then I worked as a window cleaner during the summer holidays and that gave me a very clear idea about what I didn’t want to do with my life.
Sort of related, in my last year and a half of HS I started a commercial electrician assistant program which was supposed to be like an accelerated apprenticeship path. I kind of liked it, and it legitimately the best pay available to a 17 year old at the time, but it was the master electrician I worked with who convinced me to quit and go get an EE degree instead. I distinctly remember the conversation where he asked me how old I thought he was, and I guessed he was close to 60, nearing retirement. He was 43, and he’d fallen off a ladder a year earlier, which was why I was doing all work over 8’ for him way fucking beyond what your typical HS assistant would normally be doing. “Go to college” he told me. “I chose this instead of Mechanical Engineering and now I can’t do the job anymore, with 20 years to retirement.”
I work in the permitting side of the world and the only time I’ve ever seen a Master Electrician on a job site is when we specifically told them to be there for an inspection. Most of them essentially rent out their license.
Don’t underestimate the health risk of sitting.
Your telling me my hip and shoulders are supposed to be even?
You’ll need compression socks to stay healthy.
The good old ‘programmer socks’
fr. I have issues because of this, even though I’ve incorporated a standing desk for a decade.
you gotta actually move to make up for a sedentary job
Yeah but “just stand occasionally” is much easier than “don’t breath or get anything on your skin for 40 years”
While this is true, the risks from sitting pale in comparison to the risks of industrial work. Also, they can be easily mitigated. You can’t mitigate the damage done in an industrial setting much.
