Sometimes I think I should have stayed in the trades. Then I remember having to tear hundreds of HVAC smoke dampers out of a new building and replace them with fire and smoke dampers because the boss decided he was just going to whatever instead of what the blueprints called for.

Then I'm good for a while.

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 20 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

HVAC

I remember when I just graduated from college

STEM degrees.

Looking in the newspaper of my major US city.
All the ads were for HVAC techs. Nobody was looking for Comp Sci or Chem Engineering.
Almost switched to HVAC.

Glad I held out for an actual debugging software job

Pity young people today. Don't be programmers; there's no future in it.

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 16 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Tbf, those types of jobs have a higher degree of turnover and thus need slots backfilled more frequently. Trades jobs can be pretty fuckin miserable, especially ones that are incredibly physically demanding as you age.

[–] EvilHankVenture@lemmy.world 13 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I got laid off from my software job then took a physical labor job to make ends meet. I got promoted to management and used my software skills to automate most of my job. This is my recommended career path.

[–] echindod@programming.dev 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Software skills plus domain knowledge is a good combination, and I think it will remain viable in the future. But who the fuck knows?

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 0 points 9 hours ago

Software skills plus domain knowledge

Software skills --> Anyone will be able to vibecode a good-enough app within 2-3 years

Domain knowledge --> Top LLMs already have domain knowledge comparable to specialists in whichever field, and are getting less hallucinatory & more accurate every year.

Not being a doomer, no idea what policies make sense going forward, but this is what I observe

[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 5 points 12 hours ago

It really used to piss me off when the older techs would make me crawl around in nasty crawlspaces while they stood around and smoked cigarettes.

I get not wanting to be there but I'm not not about to leave some poor kid who doesn't know what the hell he's doing fumbling around in the dark by himself for half the day.

[–] salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 1 points 54 minutes ago

Pity young people today. ~~Don't be programmers~~; there's no future in it.

Fixed