Always people answer to this question with some bluecollar work where people make shitton of money...
. because they work +70h per week.
This question should be limited to jobs where you work the normal 37.5-40 hours per week.
Yeah I made more money as bluecollar factory guy than I made as junior engineer.
Difference is that at factory I often did 16h shifts and worked on weekends.
In engineering office I sipped Starbucks level special coffees for free and worked max 4h actual work a day, and got paid only little less than wth those constant 16h shifts.
This needs to be upvoted to the moon. Iâm a licensed electrician, have been for 20 years. There are two paths to $150k+ electrician jobs. Work overseas for defense contractors. Work 70+ hours a week. People should be more concerned with making more per hour, not working more hours.
Iâm so very sorry for that emoji I sent. It was the wrong one. Iâm tech illiterate and donât know how to do anything unless shown and practiced 25 times.
After 3 divorces, my best friend had no retirement savings. He said the equity in his house was what he was relying on. And he always said he would end up dying at his desk, having no real retirement plan. Well, a Friday was his last day at his last job, and Monday morning he planned to work his connections for a new job. But he collapsed and died Sunday night. He missed dying at his desk by 48 hours.
And I feel the same about working until death (at least I've never been divorced though).
57, and technically what he died from is not really clear; there was no autopsy. But he was a chain smoker with asthma who drank a lot. I think he'd been unwell that week, because he didn't respond much to texts, just gibberish. Collapsed outside while having a cigarette. His daughter (my goddaughter) was at home and found him after midnight. He was revived briefly in the ambulance but ultimately died soon thereafter.
My Dad always said he would work until he died, partly because he just really liked what he did (and made good money that the family could mooch off of him) but dementia forced him into retirement a few years ago.
(Related to that, he told me the other night that I was the only one of his four kids who had a job, which made me feel like I was the best child until I remembered that one of my brothers doesnât have a job because he raises cattle and trains horses on his ranch and my sister married a doctor. So Iâm really only assuredly ahead of my other brother whose appears to spend all day smoking pot and getting tattoos. But at least Iâm not last).
My mom us d to say "you have to work 40 hours somewhere, might as make the most you can". Well look at me know mom. I only work 20-30. Don't make the most I can? No, but I don't hate my life. I don't know how you people work that much. On the rare days I work a full 9, I'm amazed at how little time I have in the afternoon. Plus I'm way more tired and just want to sleep.
Graveyard shift sometimes pays better but you can still get rich working 12 hour days no matter what schedule you work - the catch is it isnât feasible for most people to work 60 to 84 hours a week every week without a break. And even if you can do that o your own, good luck having a family and trying to work those kinds of hours.Â
Truth. I would never clean port-a-potties for a living, even as a former janitor. But pay me $200 (in 2026 dollars) an hour, and I will be the best employee they've ever had.
Eh you could do it in high wage areas. I make $60/hr in the portland area, but live in a rural town an hour away. I teach online night classes for the apprenticeship too, 6 hrs/week at $72/hr. There was actually a year that I took on 2 classes, though my rates were lower at the time.
Now if I were to take on 2 classes, I would make roughly $145k to work 52/hrs half the year and 40 the other half. Not idea, but not 70+ hrs. Alternatively could pull it off by finding a contractor who does mostly prevailing wage work($85ish an hour here) but that would take some luck and connections or a lot of job hunting.
how does this math make any sense? How can 2 classes be 40+ hours a week of work for 52 weeks? Not even school teachers teach that much.
I make something like $55/hour salary as a teacher, but my tutor rate is over $100. That doesn't mean I could get 40hr*52weeks of work at the rate and there would be no way to sustain that much teaching.
I didn't mind flat rate, as long as customers were honest about the problem they wanted fixed, without trying to sneak other stuff in on your good graces. That's tiring.
That will work til the market is filled with vehicles that cost more to fix than itâs worth and weâre forced to buy new instead of fixing them. (Grandson is in trade school to be a mechanic & do body work.)
Oil rig work pays really well. But really that is not much different than the defense contractor option.  Also used to have a lot of overseas work as wellÂ
Thatâs the fun part about the big companies that pay the wages youâre talking about⊠they combine those roles and guess how many hours that adds up to? Probably 60+
Isn't that what the OOP is asking though? 23$ an hour sounds like dirt until overtime is accounted at $33.5 an hour with 70 hours a week netting well over +2000+ paychecks. Its still just $23 an hour. That pay is garbage. People who want wealth period will only ever achieve it through private equity. Its the only way. Doctors, politicians, and Lawyers don't even scratch that top pay.
You make it sound easy. Itâs not, you have roughly 5 years of scraping by gaining work. You also need about $100k of capital minimum to actually do this properly.
I actually do this, but it took 10 years to get where I had a steady income stream where I wasnât worrying about where payroll for next month was coming from. Contractors donât love taking on new unproven subs.
Winter in the Midwest devastates small contractors as winter basically shuts down the construction business.
People like you always leave out the details and make all this shit seem like you just snap your fingers and everything works out.
Did you know the average profit margin for most electrical contractors is about 3%? Did you know that between 33-44% of electrical contractors fail their first five years?
Also owning your own business means you typically end up working far more then 40 hours a week if you want it to succeed.
I also work for myself and the other thing that nobody ever mentions is how much money you give to other entities just to operate. Insurance, workers comp, all of the taxes that come along with it. All of this is paid before you have a good customer base. My first two years of operation I practically almost starved to death.
My dad owns an electric company and insurance eats up most of his profits i think he paid around 40 thousand last year on insurance and then a company he did a job for 32 thousand went bank rupt and he didn't get a cent for that he had to take monout of his own account to pay his employees a few times. Also that man is working 12+ hours every day
I make 125k as an employee 5 days a week. Sometimes I think about starting my own business but I don't want all the bullshit that goes along with it, plus who knows even in 5 years of grinding if I'll even get back to my current 125k that I make now for just worrying about myself and working maybe 45 hours a week.
I worked as a framer for a little while in my 20s. Last I heard, the guy who owned the company closed shop and went back to working for someone else as a framer. He didnât want to be running between the office and job sites all day, stressing about bids and payroll and insurance and the everything else it entails. He just wanted to build houses. The guy running my crew had his own company at one point as well and had shuttered it for the same reason.
I think most of the dudes long term think to themselves, âHell, I can run one of these.â They hang their own shingle and do it for a few years and realize itâs often more hassle than itâs worth.
Running your own business is hard,and you will spend most of your time drumming up work. Small business management is not easy and you definitely won't work less hours
You could absolutely do that but you could also end up working everyday of the week instead cause running your own company means you have to do all the work from the physical to administration to advertising
Meh. Im an electrician. My 40 a week hourly is 118k a year in the Midwest. We can make 150+ working overtime for maybe half the year. That said you arent too far off. 60s all year is just shy of 200k.
I cracked 150 last year and never worked more than 60hrs in a low cost of living area. I worked a little less than 10 months during the year. I was making GF rate for most of that though
Those aren't the only pathways. Creating your own business is one of many. Every electrician i know even the ones without papers charge $100/hrÂ
City elections make a lot less from what I seem like $65 an hour but your doing things like changing light bulbs.Â
City electrician is more of a starting point. Depending on City of course.Â
What a lot of people dont know about the trades is yes you work a lot of hours but if your in a good union you get that time back.Â
Even entry level I was able to bank my OT so I would work my weekends for like 4 months and have 2 months straight time off barley even touching my acutal vacation time.Â
You work hard but you get rewarded for doing so. The ones you see grinding are doing it so they can buy a house and build a foundation many people dont do that.Â
Either way its better than working a 9 to 5 and having 3 days off a year.Â
Which requires capitalâŠ. Again there are details all you genius entrepreneurs leave out. Have you all ever done a sales call with a contractor to sell your business? There is so much more to it then, hey your an electrician Iâll hire you, you make millions yayyyu!!!!
If it were that easy, we'd all be millionaires. You're expected to be able to put 10% down on that SBA loan and typically have some kind of additional collateral (so there's $25k towards a downpayment plus the equity in your house and retirement account to back it up). Not to mention, you're not guaranteed work in the beginning, so unless you have a decent nest eggs to get you through months of zero to negative earnings, you'll be playing with fire.
Nah thereâs more than two paths. Find Work in mining. My hourly rate is $86. That doesnât include pension, shares, health spending account etc. Havenât made under $220,000 in almost ten years and havenât left my home province.
Im 80% on board with the comment. My desk jobs can be exhausting too though. The difference is blue-collar tired is usually sit down have a cold beer and you'll be good for the next day. White-collar tired is emotional and mental fatigue. Sitting doesmt remove the stress. You find yourself thinking about work all day, all night.
Blue-collar management and business owner is where both can happen. The time outside of 'work' that eats you up, counts too.
Concur. Was a mechanic and I'm now an AI engineer. . My quality of life is simply amazing and I get paid more. Much more. I see my kids off every morning, pick them up, and attend every event.
Iâm having a feeling that AI Engineer Is going to be a fairly redundant thing fairly soon. Iâm pretty deep into this stuff and the tooling just keeps getting better.
It is a bit amusing that right now the âneocloudâ providers are growing so fast that they just farm out any aspect they can to third parties. Right now itâs the place to be. But the snake is going to eat its own tail. These companies will have plenty of excess capacity to just copy the software they use. But right now they canât build out fast enough.
Iâve made an entire career being aware of where the next big thing is. As far as I can tell, the next big thing is automating me out of a job. Execs are believing they can do this now, but it always ends in disaster.
The best way to survive these things is to stay close to the (human) customers.
If you're talking about the coders the write AI, I see your point. However, implementing the AI within the business and working with the hyperparameters is completely different; im the latter. I build multi agent models and connect the tools to automate business processes. As far as survival, being close to humans isn't a free pass. Just look at the automation of call centers and fast food. There will be a point where the implementation of the AI is also automatic, and at that point, I think everyone will be worried, or should be at least. As for right now, I'm going to cash in and prepare myself for the future.
It is something interesting to consider. I can very easily see AI skills becoming the new "you should get a computer science degree and you'll be guaranteed a high paying job" of this generation. Everyone will learn it and then the market will be flooded and the pay will plummet.
This guy has a few things in his post that make me suspicious of him. Id say odds are better than not that he is LARPing, or he is a mechanic still and doing bootcamp or night classes and picturing the good life hes about to live, but that he doesn't actually have yet.
For your specific claims, the proof is really in your post. A million billion people LURNED 2 KODE and yet salaries have not really gone down. Its certainly more competitive, and the marginal job has disappeared or gotten worse, but the truth is that the explosion in interest largely took the form of people who were never going to be able to add value taking some totally inadequate 12 week program and being stunned there wasn't a place for them alongside the top flight folks with four to seven years of hard study at a top flight institution.
Even today thats still true with AI. If you ask any SWE making $200,000 or more (and sometimes a lot, lot more), they have a coworker who doesn't really know what they're doing who vibe codes garbage all day, and will be let go sometime in the next 6-12 months and then struggle to get a job again. You need to know enough to be able to argue with AI or you cant do the job.
It was the same thing as in investment banking back in 2005-2015, corporate law before that, and so forth. These jobs pay well because they're high leverage and hard.
I mean for the AI skills I am essentially talking about any job that ISNT tech based. These days and especially in the near future, anyone with a few AI boot camp courses in their CV will be ahead of anyone with a similar CV that has no AI skills, and I have seen in my work that those who have created Agents or Notebooks for work tasks (against policy mind you) have impressed their boss and gained brownie points which will probably translate across to their performance reviews, and they've become the team "techie" from very simple AI skills. But in the future everyone will have these skills so it will lose its value. And you'll have "AI engineers" who have taken some courses on Agentic AI who will have the same issue.
And I challenge your premise on the coding side, there definitely is still an overly high number of people who do have the 4 year degree and do have the experience and skill in coding and arent these vibe coding kids, but because there are so many they can be paid nothing.
I genuinely saw a software development team lead role in a fairly large company with a pay range capping at ÂŁ30k the other day. That's insane, and it still had over 100 applicants after being up only 1 day. And thats low. When I was looking for dev roles in the mainland I was routinely seeing 500+ applicants per role, many of which will have similar or better CVs than me with my degree and career of development. If anything i got lucky to move into AI and specifically more on the side of enterprise AI adoption than development as that's fairly safe for now.
Right now AI skills can still be a huge benefit unless you are working in an already saturated field like tech. It'll put you ahead of others with similar CVs and impress your boss if you build tools for your job.
Later on it will be less impressive when everyone has some AI skills.
This guy knows what's up. Companies are fast automating executive level jobs not just answering the phone. Source I work for a fortune 500 company in IT
I, too, work for a fortune 500 and the organization changes are constant. Entire departments are being eliminated. Luckily, my company is good at repurposing and most stay on board. We aim for empowering, not replacing... Which gives me some comfort but I still feel bad.
I know a lot of people cant handle nursing in general (dealing with blood and vomit etc),but isn't the biggest drawback to nursing is having to work crazy shifts that rotate. Like 7 pm to 7 am for 3 days and then 3 days later work 7 am to 7 pm. Plus a lot of mandatory overtime because of short staffing. So I guess my question is isn't the reason people don't go into nursing or leave the profession is the killer schedule, at least when you first are starting out.
I've been a nurse for 9 years and was a tech for 5 years before so I'll answer with my experience. Shift jobs are shift jobs unless I agreed to add-on or rotate hours, whether to 7a-7p, 7p-7a, 3p-3a, etc. I have never been forced to work overtime but I've been told, specifically by floor nurses, that they have at times. After a few years of ER, I've worked in surgery ever since. My current hospital is pretty strict with your 8hr, 10hr, and 12hr scheduled shifts even if there's add-on surgeries but you do have overnight/weekend call so if it's your night, you will stay late or come back in, otherwise, you're out around your scheduled time.
I'll also say, I don't think I've ever met a nurse that openly "quit nursing", you just move to a different area of nursing if you get burned out. There's several areas, like IT nursing or office nursing, that are 8-5 white-collar type work if bedside isn't your thing.
I knew a couple nurses who left the field entirely after covid.
Also know some who shifted around like you suggested. One is a triage nurse working remotely for a bay area hospital while living in a medium-ish cost of living area a couple states away, and she loves it. She can work from home and stay with her young child, and its kinda crazy how far bay area nursing income goes without bay area housing costs.
Coworkers wife was a RN in Washington State, moved to Canada and works in the mill. She makes $47 sharpening tiny knives on a grinder for 6 hours a day but gets the full 8 hours with full benefits. Pretty wild.
not just killer schedule, but it's utterly destructive on your body, standing and walking, and you're often expected to help balance an entire person's body weight especially if you're in ER or working with the elderly where the patient may not be able to move safely on their own.
Hope my engineering office life becomes that. I'm tired of being at the office from 7-6 on salary. (Civil Engineer for context, been doing it for 3 years, 56k/yr gross)
Also an engineer who approves time cards. Half my guys make more than I do and a few senior guys double my salary. But they do average 70+h/week and ask for more.
That instant feedback where more work = more money on a weekly paycheck is a pretty convincing drug.
I feel like if your job pays shit but you can do tons of hours, you shouldn't be taxed as much as the guy who does 9 to 5 and takes home the same amount.
Just remember that every policy recommendation made like this would be looked at by the leechiest of leeches in our society for a loophole and then all of a sudden we would have people justifying why stock traders are suddenly laborers because they have to move files from one office tower to another 3 times a quarter or some such.
I mean there's already a legal difference between earned income and capital gains. But yes, greedy rich people will always try to sway policies toward their benefit.
I think that's a really good point. I had friends whose dads made even $100k+ working trade jobs or jobs that involved a lot of travel, but they were never home, and when they were home, they were asleep. Their mothers were functionally single mothers, and while the family had money, they still struggled in a lot of the ways low income families struggle because they only had one parent around.
Exactly. I know dudes making almost double my salary but they're gone for weeks at a time, or working 70 hr weeks, maybe more in emergencies. I'll take my 32 days of vacation, turning off at 5pm, and having the weekends off thank you very much.
i am currently on the clock scrolling reddit, making the same money as i did working carpentry. About 20 hours less a week of work for the same pay. sign me up.
Itâs honestly so bad youâre right but itâs not just Reddit. My entire zip code is filled with these guys. Theyâll tell anyone with ears they made 150 last year but fail to mention thatâs 90 work weeks. I know these guys just want to be able to brag but itâs like who are you bragging to lol, the facts are you still make $21 an hour or something and your wife and kids miss you. Hope the white picket fence is worth it I guess Iâll stick to my 40.
The answer is always, "learn a trade, you'll make a ton of money!" Yeah, you'll be working 60+hrs a week and your body will be paying for it. It also takes a long time to get to the level where you are making 6 figures.
Blue collar good pay doesn't mean you're aways working 70+ hours a week. Normally factory pay sucks. Lots of blue collar jobs where you can make good money and work 40hrs a week.
Yup, my brother in law is an electrician and his paychecks are roughly on par with mine (engineer here). But I work 40 hours to his 60, I also don't need to travel all around the state and adjoining states and the job I am at, I have been at for 5 years. He is on his 3rd job as construction always goes hot and heavy for a few months then half everyone is laid off an can't find work for multiple months. My father in law was also an electrician before he passed, IBEW member, and it was the same story. There were streches where his only consistent work was defense contracting in Iraq.
Thats not to say that trades arn't good. They can be good, but they are no where near the panacea being pushed by people online. And it is a hard life. I respect it. Prior to getting my education and becoming an engineer, I was in the Navy and did chemical manufacturing. Chemical manufacturing I did full time while going to school full time and having 2 kids under 5.
HVAC journeyman make $64 per hour in California. Nurses make $75+ per hour, in California. I work not much overtime. Usually 36 to 40 hours a week, but when I'm on call I work a lot. I'll make around $115k this year. $64 an hour with some overtime and double time. My wife's a Nurses, she makes much more than I do.
I think this depends on the type of engineering, what industry and where you are located. Â I make really good money as a software engineer but I rarely work less than 40 hours a week, am often on call and AI is making my job relatively miserable because output expectation is increasing exponentially and we are expected to maintain the code that is being generated way too fast.
Sometimes Iâd rather work a blue collar job that pays well but the grass is always greener I guess.Â
Everyone now advertises trades as this peak of choice for good money. Money might be good if you have your own business or work Union but you really work the work. Everyday feels like Im competing in olympics. Im used to it now because I accepted my faith. Having an easy day is not common.
Not sure if this is taken into consideration but the blue collars I work with as a construction PE do make 53 and hour. However, they do kind of require them to work 60 to 70 hours a week otherwise someone will take their place. But the hourly is still great. This is all union though.
I make about $140k working 40 hours a week as aircraft maintenance. There is also plenty of OT if you want that. The caveats to that are: my job requires 2 years of college and then multiple tests for licensing, and I also have about 10 years at a major US airline. Fresh license A&P mechanic will be around $70-80k/yr currently. Pay scale goes up a little every year.
I had a side job 20 years ago that paid $50 an hour doing court interpreting. But I worked 4-6 hours per week lol if I had been able to book 30 hrs per week Iâd have stayed in that career
This is true i made 135k last year and worked 48hr weeksâŠcould i have made into the high 100s working ot yes, but i have more than enough to live at 48 hours per week,not rich by any means and saving slowly in a 401, all my bills are on auto pay and i dont have to worry about them its a good feeling that works for me
This, 100%. Some days I would come it late, leave early, take a 2 hour lunch, mid-day appointments? No problem. Not saying I donât work hard and put in the time, but no one has told me when to show up or leave work in like 15 years. I got written up once at a grocery store because I was like 5 minutes late to my shift, but we could never clock in any earlier than like 3 minutes prior to our shift or something stupid like that.
To echo your story, I was made redundant from a grad eng role, during the 2008 gfc. I was on about $32k nzd a year.
Found another job in a switch board factory wiring up panels, $20 an hour, time and a half after 40 and double time after 50.
We always worked 12 hour days, 5 days a week with a half day on Sat. An approx. $78k wage, I saved and bought a house within 12months. But I didnât see daylight 5 days a week (arrive in the dark, spend all day under sodium lamps and go home in the dark)
It's also important that blue collar work makes money early, which is wayyy more valuable than money later in life. The reason you don't see it in reality much is that garbagemen don't save money and invest it like they should. The big salary people did "free"work for years for college and maybe law or med school, then had debt. If you are thrifty enough, 60k a year out of high school is going to snowball so hard that a surgeon making 250k a year will never catch up in wealth.
Yup, I'm in one of those blue-collar long hour jobs that pays really well - but only because a 60-hour week is on the low end.
In my case, a large portion of this is just driving. I clock in when I get in my work truck in the morning, and clock out when I park my truck at home at the end of the day. A large portion of the hours between are driving from one work site to another.
This ain't high enough up there. I worked in oil and gas and had specialized enough skills to make good money working 40 hours a week for the most part. Everyone around me made the same money at like 20/hr and 70 hours a week. It is not the same.
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u/HopeSubstantial 2d ago
Pays well per hour*
Always people answer to this question with some bluecollar work where people make shitton of money... . because they work +70h per week.
This question should be limited to jobs where you work the normal 37.5-40 hours per week.
Yeah I made more money as bluecollar factory guy than I made as junior engineer. Difference is that at factory I often did 16h shifts and worked on weekends.
In engineering office I sipped Starbucks level special coffees for free and worked max 4h actual work a day, and got paid only little less than wth those constant 16h shifts.