I program computers. I read books. I clean toilets, clean windows and presently am organizing myself to construct a house, everything from framing to finishing.
While at university I realized two things that caused me to drop out after three years of computers science.
1. I was never going to be paid very much (in the UK) for knowing what I did about computation, despite it being very difficult for a majority of the population and having a sunk cost, which was suspect to me.
2. My old summer cleaning job paid better than computer programming and I could 'level up' by buying my own equipment, hiring workers and pay myself at a much faster rate. I could also control my costs far more adeptly since I wouldn't have to live in a major metropolitan area with sky high rents/taxes.
All this I believe is indicative of the deep nature of Moravec's Paradox, probably the most important law nobody has heard of and that few programmers seem to understand.
I read books all the time, I love learning new things. I'm working through interesting old books on a kaleidoscope of topics.
Formal education for me was a complete and total waste of my time. It is a road to nowhere, just as the formal job market is. An actual intellectual behaves like Gwern or DredMorbius, not the hordes of semi-institutionalized people who actually inhabit today's universities.
I have decided to construct a house, a system really, that will enable my lifestyle to be extremely low cost so that I may recover my time and use it for what I will.
Don't get me wrong, I understand your point, it is true that on average blue collar workers are less bookish than white collar workers. However there exist 'traps' in both fields that consume people. For blue collar it might be the effort of exploring new things as Smith pointed out. For white collar it is much the same but in a different way. How many of your peers can build a house with their own hands? I don't think anybody looks at that Primitive Technology Guy and thinks "Gosh, what an unintellectual idiot".
tldr; Have a multifaceted model of reality and don't fall into cognitive traps.
Why do you think you couldn't get good salary as a developer in UK. Is IT market so low paid in there? I know at least one person who seems to be fine in there.
Yes, in comparison to the alternatives for somebody like the average programmer
Trigger Warning: Micro Essay coming up and one that may irk you. I understand that and accept my view is not the conventional one.
My view:
I have a negative view of the industry, but I think I can justify it. Don't read on unless you want to hear about the industry's failure modes. There are many positive things about our industry and people, but here I'm not going to focus on those.
With respect to the cost of living salaries are dismal. People who come to HN are likely to be in the top 1-10% of wages/capital in our sector because they are usually already upper middle class (did your parents buy a computer for you in the 80s-90s...?) so their experiences are likely not representative. Some subgroups like programmers in finance may make wildly more money than others although often at the cost of working twice as hard in hours than the average human being with the attendant burnout risk. Then there is a large subgroup of programmers making < 20k per year we don't talk about very much, often filled with people who merely had the bad luck to graduate after the credit crunch without a strong 'network'. They work long hours and are paid badly or work short hours and have little potential for advancement, often set against labour imported from other countries. One person I know who's done relatively well for himself has managed to do so by skipping from one industry with NDAs (preventing him from working in that sector X for Y years, effectively ever again) to another until he finally managed to land a good contract. This is what is sold to university students as the easy route. Sure doesn't look like it. Huge numbers of recruiters lusting for your talent, but poor pay all things considered, an intriguing paradox.
In Silicon Valley the salaries are partially high (relative to other cities) because the rents and taxes are also high. That is not a gain in of itself. Peter Thiel and Larry Page have made this point several times, although it usually falls on deaf ears because of Silicon Valley's glamour factor (reminiscent of actors in Los Angeles). The important thing is the take home pay. I do not think wages are especially high considering the rarity of the skills involved, even in Silicon Valley. I believe a good wage there should be about 150k. Crudely if your skill is actually rare then you should be able to command at least twice as much as the average industrial wage after taxes/rents and cost of living is subtracted. It is not this high, and that is partially because a wage cartel existed and likely still exists in Silicon Valley between all the major firms. This should not be controversial, it's publicly available information.
A good plumber, electrician or even a humble window cleaner with his own van can bring down just as much or more money than the majority of white collar jobs that most students enter from university today. That is a fact, obfuscated because those fields often contain foreign/welfare class labour who receive low wages i.e. the actual spread of wages is bifurcated, something which has been explained at length by Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution. There's a big pool of part-time poorly paid people (have no leverage because they can't afford insurance, tools, knowing the right people) and then a portion of the 'blue collar class' that are more like competent micro sized capitalists easily making > 70k even if it doesn't appear on the books. This is true across a wide spectrum of blue collar work, especially in the building trades.
Simple example: a typical cleaner makes just over 9 euros per hour, but I make 20-25 with flexible hours and will be making 35+ once my operation is set up correctly, making it easy to transition into being a business owner.
I can make > 40k per year with blue collar work with a cost of living that is about 10k per year, net gain of 30k. Most programmers I know who graduated since the Credit Crunch in England are not able to say the same thing.
Of course on HN one can wave a dozen programmers making 1 million dollars per year in my face, but the median and average are two very different things. I very much doubt the average programmer in San Francisco or London can afford to buy a house within five years of working and saving up - and that is something my grandparents or even parents could have easily done on blue collar wages in the past.
NDAs (underrated way of lowering wages!), Moravec's Paradox, location rents/taxes, Wage Cartels and Winner Take All Affects explain why 'going into STEM' and succeeding might be the worst decision you ever made as a 'smart person' unless you're getting stocks/options. I think most young people, most university students are getting mugged and most of them won't work that out for years.
The real TLDR here is "Don't compete with people like you", it might look and feel right but it is a bad notion, a Thielian observation and a right one.
I have not given up on computer science by the way, far from it. I think there's a bunch of not obvious ways blue collar insights into work can join with computation to provide value. I'm constantly reading relevant books and one day hope to open my own business that makes use of computers, that's why I'm here (and geek fellowship!).
I appreciate this essay and it's a really great read, but I'm not sure your estimate of the average programmer salary is spot on. You're likely right about SV: Wages there are high but costs likely end up eating most of it. But SV is not the only tech hub. I live in Denver, just graduated a year ago, and am currently making 75k USD with an additional 40k benefit package in the form of a benefit account and profit sharing plan. That's about average for the wages of my peers--many of whom came from one of the local 4 month long Java bootcamps rather than from a university.
I really like your TLDR. It perfectly captures that nagging feeling I get about this business whenever I fail an accursed tech interview. No amount of informed commentary about the craft will suffice when they want somebody who knows the difference between the STL's reserve() and resize() methods.
this is a ridiculous claim. I worked in London and with 5 years experience I was earning about 75k contracting, 10 years ago. And that was a pretty standard contract, nothing special. Your claim that I would have been better off with a blue collar job outside the capital is laughable.
I program computers. I read books. I clean toilets, clean windows and presently am organizing myself to construct a house, everything from framing to finishing.
While at university I realized two things that caused me to drop out after three years of computers science.
1. I was never going to be paid very much (in the UK) for knowing what I did about computation, despite it being very difficult for a majority of the population and having a sunk cost, which was suspect to me.
2. My old summer cleaning job paid better than computer programming and I could 'level up' by buying my own equipment, hiring workers and pay myself at a much faster rate. I could also control my costs far more adeptly since I wouldn't have to live in a major metropolitan area with sky high rents/taxes.
All this I believe is indicative of the deep nature of Moravec's Paradox, probably the most important law nobody has heard of and that few programmers seem to understand.
I read books all the time, I love learning new things. I'm working through interesting old books on a kaleidoscope of topics.
Formal education for me was a complete and total waste of my time. It is a road to nowhere, just as the formal job market is. An actual intellectual behaves like Gwern or DredMorbius, not the hordes of semi-institutionalized people who actually inhabit today's universities.
I have decided to construct a house, a system really, that will enable my lifestyle to be extremely low cost so that I may recover my time and use it for what I will.
Don't get me wrong, I understand your point, it is true that on average blue collar workers are less bookish than white collar workers. However there exist 'traps' in both fields that consume people. For blue collar it might be the effort of exploring new things as Smith pointed out. For white collar it is much the same but in a different way. How many of your peers can build a house with their own hands? I don't think anybody looks at that Primitive Technology Guy and thinks "Gosh, what an unintellectual idiot".
tldr; Have a multifaceted model of reality and don't fall into cognitive traps.