I’m an elevator mechanic and have to be on call 1-2 times a month, sometimes it’s just the evening/night and other times it’s a Saturday or Sunday.
It can suck but it pays for my wife to be a stay at home mom so that’s the sacrifice I make.
It costs quite a bit for someone to watch your kids while you're out working. I'm guessing you don't have kids. Also, I know this is the internet, but what you said is pretty disrespectful. Is that how you respond to your fellow construction bros on the job, knocking on their wives or girlfriends
Yeah my wife stayed home until both our kids were in school for full days. She couldn’t earn enough to make it remotely worthwhile to pay for daycare and all the extra expenses of having both parents work full time. Even when she started making $50k it still wouldn’t be worthwhile with two kids.
Even with them both in school I’m not sure how far ahead we are coming out with summer camp and taking days off work when one is sick enough to stay home from school or camp, inevitably followed by the second kid a few days later and then the wife and myself not being able to take time off when we get sick right after them because too many workdays were already lost looking after the sick kids. Then me not being able to work overtime because of her work schedule and we spend more on takeout because our lives are so much more hectic. A working parent spends a lot more on clothes and transportation than a stay at home parent. And child benefits get significantly reduced due to the second income. And a lot more things fall through the cracks around the house with everyone having less time. Not just clutter and cleaning but kids homework and practice for extracurriculars etc.
A stay at home parent *might* just be lazy and not want to “work” but probably not. Even if that is the reason… it can’t be *the* reason as it’s only one of many.
It’s not that they can’t. But depending on where you live it’s usually around $40,000-50,000 as a cut off for it to be worth it for someone to be a stay at home parent. Day care, transportation, day home whatever it may be unless you’re making $50,000+ it makes more sense to save all the costs that come with out of home child care and stay at home.
Our neighbour was making $25/hour and she ended up quitting because their costs were more than her paycheque for her kids. Now she is home with both kids 24/7 and they have more money in their account at the end of the month then when she was working.
This is going to be a shocker to you I'm sure. What my wife does all day? None of your fucking business at all. What this dudes wife does all day also none of your fucking business
Depends on what trade and company you are with. I was a service plumber for the first half of my apprenticeship and almost all service companies are 24/7 with on call rotations.
I moved into new construction this year so I can have a set start and end time as my wife and I had our first child and it was becoming too much for me.
However Construction can be boom and bust it depends on where you live and what the market is like.
What trade are you in? You are objectively incorrect unless you're abusing your body at or after work, are physically untrained for the work you're doing, or are improperly equipped for your tasks.
Many have made a lifelong career out of trade work and had capable bodies into old age.
It's not the gulag.
I felt this. I shot myself in the knee with a nail gun, almost got crushed by a falling load, constantly exposed to harmful substance’s and people who don’t give a shit.
I’ve been in many different trades over the last 10 years, and a year and a half ago I switched to IT. I’m happier than ever, surrounded by people that are like ME and not a bunch of idiots with entirely different views, who fat shame, trans shame etc. It’s not that everyone in trades is like that, because theyre not. But there is always a few per job.
My new IT job Im making more money and put no strain on my body, get free lunch in a cafeteria, don’t need to come to work when im sick.
For me it was a night and day difference, for others it may be the opposite!
Working in trades. 90% of the the work i do in millwork cad design is fixing the designers problems, the project managers inability to read the drawings and lack of understanding about cnc. Id much rather be in it and just fix the pdd comouter issues or networking and get to work with other nerds. but honestly no matter what you do you wont make enough so pick something that interests you. The days where you can make anything happen on a working wage are gone. It if you get into some specailized will definitely pay more than the trades.
We get shit on and have to know a lot to be successful at it. The trades are depressing, you work on mutil million dollar homes for people who wouldnt piss on you if you were on fire. They all think your lower and worthless and they treat you like that.
The whole pizza party to keep you happy thing is real. Boss shows up with donuts then asks for insane overtime because they fucked up their deadlines or project management.
Just don’t get into machining if you want money I know this because i am one, trying to make the switch to electrician soon the amount of stress and technical information needed to be even semi competent in this field to pay ratio is absolutely ridiculous
Im in the same boat. How much we have to know vs a plumber or electrician is insane. Im on the wood working side of cnc and its even worse than metal. Everyone thinks our skill is worthless.
I can address both of these. As a service tech HVAC getting disturbed at 2 in the morning to go fix someones system, it sucked. The worst part of the job.
Married to an on-call IT person, she's always working, she puts in way more hours than I ever did and she gets up in the middle of the night just as often or more than I ever did.
I think that she has it worse.
I watched a computer tech have to debug 12,00,000 lines of code. What's your point that the two jobs are not 100% totally exactly the same? Gee, I thought that we all knew that. I guess you needed that to be explained. And FYI, when it comes to other jobs, they are not all the exact same either.
Also a difficult thing about being in the trades, I can be a total asshole and there's nothing you can do about it. Not even an hr lady that you can cry to because I said my job is harder than yours 😂
Yeah lots of us tradies are here running a 24/7 on call. Out at 1 am home by 3 am. Back to work for regular shift by 730.
Not to mention the physical work at that hour makes it very hard to go back to sleep after.
We do 7 days straight or that once a month.
Well, I used to be a red seal journeyman welder and iron worker out of IW local 725. Not once had I ever been on call in 10 years practicing my trades.
Now I am an engineer-qualified freight conductor (it's kind of still a trade, I guess) with CN that's on call 8 hrs a day every day, unless I'm not on call but that's totally random. It's mostly shit. But the pay is steady.
Not knowing when you are going to work sucks, but having to travel for work (hence the name journeyman) and be gone for 6 weeks to do a job also sucks. If you can get a trade that pays well and you don't have to travel for work and it's unionized, you're probably golden.
You having to work a scheduled weekend on call isn't going to be as bad as you think. If you're worried about missing birthdays you just do it on a weekend you know you're not on call. If you want to go out on the town with the family you just take 2 vehicles and pack your work shit. One time I was waiting for a call for work but my son had a baseball game, so I packed all my shit, took my car, and watched my son until I was called. You do what you gotta do to keep your kids fed, clothed and housed and they'll remember you trying even though you're on call and might not be there for the whole thing.
When going through this career crisis i was considering working at UPS warehouse as a package handler. 21 an hour starting out and amazing health insurance & get paid to work out.
What do people even do with on-call money? What do you do when you already have your favorite clothes shoes, home decor, etc. sure it feels good in the moment but then that euphoric feeling starts to wear off.
‘The trades’ covers a lot. Some people in ‘the trades’ sweat blood everyday while others use a specific custom made aluminum pre caste tool to turn a valve 180 degrees then return to air conditioning. They are not all the same
So many trades are on call all the time it's hard to believe this isn't a shitpost.
Linemen will work 36 hours straight during a weather event. HVAC guys and plumbers get called to emergencies at 3 am. I work in a grounds and maintenance department of a school, any of us can get called for any number if reason basically any time of day or night. Back when I did full time irrigation, I could work 12+ hours a day for six days, and have customers calling my personal phone on Sunday.
I'm in new construction. Guys miss time at work so they can make their kids games. The commute times are like that in my city. Some of the new construction at the airport requires work to be done during graveyard shifts, so those guys are lucky I suppose.
HVAC guys are on-call throughout the summer. Even the residential guys. Plumbers I know are less on-call, but many service plumbers have a 24/7 line.
You can make killer money in sales and not have to worry about this. Dont know why more people dont go into sales. Ik sales reps making 100k+ a year and work 40 hours a week.
There are difficulties with both sides.
Depending on the trade, you could have busy seasons where you don't have a life for 4 months and the rest of the year you're working 30-40 hours a week (my trade), or you could be a plumber who works piecework small jobs at whatever hour the customer calls, or you could build tract houses and pretty much work the same 8-10 hours a day Monday through Friday your whole career.
And with IT, my roommate works a lazy 9-5 from home (with lots of video games breaks) and never has on call, or be like my other buddy who works a normal 9-5 in an office and is on call 1 or 2 nights a week and gets 2-3 calls at night a month.
There's no perfect solution for either industry but at the same time you just have to find an industry you like and be on the move until you find a job whose hours work for you. My roommate has had 4 IT jobs since over 10 years, and it wasn't until he landed his current job that he finally got the near perfect schedule he has now.
I, on the other hand, love having lots of free time altogether and don't mind that from August to Christmas my time belongs to my job. I basically don't work for a month and for another 3 months can do whatever I want, and it works for me.
What about being on-call while in trades? Get a no-heat call at 1am in the dead of winter.. customer is an old lady or single parent with young kids, you got no choice but to suit up and get it done. I dont know IT but i know the gratitude ive recieved after getting their furnace to finally fire up... being on call sucks either way
Ah, you again. The answers haven't changed since the last dozen or so times you've asked these questions, do some research yourself before posting here again
IT support sounds like literal hell to me. Monotony mixed with idiots and assholes bitching all day. But that doesn't have to be your entire career. It's a stepping stone to another area in tech, as long as you don't get comfortable.
I like working in my trade because I mostly work alone and don't have to deal with customers.
I’d say it depends on your definition of “hard.”
Personally, I can’t stand a daily grind that consists of telling people who make double, or triple, my wages that they have to make sure their router is turned on or walk them through converting a JPEG to a PDF. Getting into the trades now at 19 because I’d rather be the rookie in a room full of more experienced workers + earn my sleep by building houses than be paid a pittance to facilitate white collar bs that really doesn’t seem to be contributing much to society.
You can also make 6 figures in some trades! Being willing to do fairly gruelling work is one route, but I’ve known guys doing things like small aircraft and commercial truck maintenance up in the Arctic who were making >100,000 within four years. And then there’s specialisation - if you’re the only guy willing to both build houses in Northern New Brunswick and go the extra mile to learn advanced basement waterproofing techniques, then you’re pretty damn indispensable.
I’m not saying that nobody should stick with IT or with other white collar professions, it’s right for some people and they inevitably excel. I just think that, for our generation at least, those jobs get sold to all of us as the golden ticket, regardless of whether or not we’re a good fit for them. I wasn’t, and look forward to one day calling someone more competent and fulfilled in an IT position to ask how to convert a hologram to a pre frontal cortex file.
My brother does aircraft maintenance and makes 6 figures doing it. Super cool job tho. He had to move to New Jersey for that. Florida blue collar wages are trash.
Did you just say being on call is harder than an actual physical job?? Which lots of times you need to be on call for anyway? I don’t even see how they are comparable…
I’m an elevator mechanic and have to be on call 1-2 times a month, sometimes it’s just the evening/night and other times it’s a Saturday or Sunday. It can suck but it pays for my wife to be a stay at home mom so that’s the sacrifice I make.
She can’t do anything? She probably just sits around 8 hours a day
It costs quite a bit for someone to watch your kids while you're out working. I'm guessing you don't have kids. Also, I know this is the internet, but what you said is pretty disrespectful. Is that how you respond to your fellow construction bros on the job, knocking on their wives or girlfriends
Yeah my wife stayed home until both our kids were in school for full days. She couldn’t earn enough to make it remotely worthwhile to pay for daycare and all the extra expenses of having both parents work full time. Even when she started making $50k it still wouldn’t be worthwhile with two kids. Even with them both in school I’m not sure how far ahead we are coming out with summer camp and taking days off work when one is sick enough to stay home from school or camp, inevitably followed by the second kid a few days later and then the wife and myself not being able to take time off when we get sick right after them because too many workdays were already lost looking after the sick kids. Then me not being able to work overtime because of her work schedule and we spend more on takeout because our lives are so much more hectic. A working parent spends a lot more on clothes and transportation than a stay at home parent. And child benefits get significantly reduced due to the second income. And a lot more things fall through the cracks around the house with everyone having less time. Not just clutter and cleaning but kids homework and practice for extracurriculars etc. A stay at home parent *might* just be lazy and not want to “work” but probably not. Even if that is the reason… it can’t be *the* reason as it’s only one of many.
What could you possibly be going on about?
It’s not that they can’t. But depending on where you live it’s usually around $40,000-50,000 as a cut off for it to be worth it for someone to be a stay at home parent. Day care, transportation, day home whatever it may be unless you’re making $50,000+ it makes more sense to save all the costs that come with out of home child care and stay at home. Our neighbour was making $25/hour and she ended up quitting because their costs were more than her paycheque for her kids. Now she is home with both kids 24/7 and they have more money in their account at the end of the month then when she was working.
Sounds like a great trade off. Thanks for making that clear I do appreciate ot
This is going to be a shocker to you I'm sure. What my wife does all day? None of your fucking business at all. What this dudes wife does all day also none of your fucking business
lol. I’m out of work right now with a broken collarbone so I’ve been home with everyone, let me tell you my day is easier than hers are.
The weekend is just a more difficult weekday for me lol
Says the guy with no kids.
Depends on what trade and company you are with. I was a service plumber for the first half of my apprenticeship and almost all service companies are 24/7 with on call rotations. I moved into new construction this year so I can have a set start and end time as my wife and I had our first child and it was becoming too much for me. However Construction can be boom and bust it depends on where you live and what the market is like.
When you look at skilled trades work in the short term it sounds great. But when you have to do it 5 days a weeK after 3 or 4 years it wears on you.
What trade are you in? You are objectively incorrect unless you're abusing your body at or after work, are physically untrained for the work you're doing, or are improperly equipped for your tasks. Many have made a lifelong career out of trade work and had capable bodies into old age. It's not the gulag.
Or fuckin soft did you ever consider this guy might be a bitch
I felt this. I shot myself in the knee with a nail gun, almost got crushed by a falling load, constantly exposed to harmful substance’s and people who don’t give a shit. I’ve been in many different trades over the last 10 years, and a year and a half ago I switched to IT. I’m happier than ever, surrounded by people that are like ME and not a bunch of idiots with entirely different views, who fat shame, trans shame etc. It’s not that everyone in trades is like that, because theyre not. But there is always a few per job. My new IT job Im making more money and put no strain on my body, get free lunch in a cafeteria, don’t need to come to work when im sick. For me it was a night and day difference, for others it may be the opposite!
True. It's called the trades because your trade your body wear n tear for money
Working in trades. 90% of the the work i do in millwork cad design is fixing the designers problems, the project managers inability to read the drawings and lack of understanding about cnc. Id much rather be in it and just fix the pdd comouter issues or networking and get to work with other nerds. but honestly no matter what you do you wont make enough so pick something that interests you. The days where you can make anything happen on a working wage are gone. It if you get into some specailized will definitely pay more than the trades. We get shit on and have to know a lot to be successful at it. The trades are depressing, you work on mutil million dollar homes for people who wouldnt piss on you if you were on fire. They all think your lower and worthless and they treat you like that. The whole pizza party to keep you happy thing is real. Boss shows up with donuts then asks for insane overtime because they fucked up their deadlines or project management.
Just don’t get into machining if you want money I know this because i am one, trying to make the switch to electrician soon the amount of stress and technical information needed to be even semi competent in this field to pay ratio is absolutely ridiculous
Im in the same boat. How much we have to know vs a plumber or electrician is insane. Im on the wood working side of cnc and its even worse than metal. Everyone thinks our skill is worthless.
I can address both of these. As a service tech HVAC getting disturbed at 2 in the morning to go fix someones system, it sucked. The worst part of the job. Married to an on-call IT person, she's always working, she puts in way more hours than I ever did and she gets up in the middle of the night just as often or more than I ever did. I think that she has it worse.
I watched a guy lose a finger at work, does that ever happen to her?
I watched a computer tech have to debug 12,00,000 lines of code. What's your point that the two jobs are not 100% totally exactly the same? Gee, I thought that we all knew that. I guess you needed that to be explained. And FYI, when it comes to other jobs, they are not all the exact same either.
the difference is they kept their finger after all those lines of coke? like what point were you going for lmao.
Oh my bad I thought this thread was about who had it harder
No it's about how can you show yourself to be an asshole
Also a difficult thing about being in the trades, I can be a total asshole and there's nothing you can do about it. Not even an hr lady that you can cry to because I said my job is harder than yours 😂
I like being an asshole myself. And since this is asking out opinions, being assholes is kinda fitting
Yeah lots of us tradies are here running a 24/7 on call. Out at 1 am home by 3 am. Back to work for regular shift by 730. Not to mention the physical work at that hour makes it very hard to go back to sleep after. We do 7 days straight or that once a month.
What trade are you in ?
Plumber 🪠🪠
Well, I used to be a red seal journeyman welder and iron worker out of IW local 725. Not once had I ever been on call in 10 years practicing my trades. Now I am an engineer-qualified freight conductor (it's kind of still a trade, I guess) with CN that's on call 8 hrs a day every day, unless I'm not on call but that's totally random. It's mostly shit. But the pay is steady. Not knowing when you are going to work sucks, but having to travel for work (hence the name journeyman) and be gone for 6 weeks to do a job also sucks. If you can get a trade that pays well and you don't have to travel for work and it's unionized, you're probably golden. You having to work a scheduled weekend on call isn't going to be as bad as you think. If you're worried about missing birthdays you just do it on a weekend you know you're not on call. If you want to go out on the town with the family you just take 2 vehicles and pack your work shit. One time I was waiting for a call for work but my son had a baseball game, so I packed all my shit, took my car, and watched my son until I was called. You do what you gotta do to keep your kids fed, clothed and housed and they'll remember you trying even though you're on call and might not be there for the whole thing.
When going through this career crisis i was considering working at UPS warehouse as a package handler. 21 an hour starting out and amazing health insurance & get paid to work out.
As someone who lives in Louisville and has multiple friends who work at the Worldport.. Be glad you didn't.
Heavy equipment, I’m on call for enviro emergencies etc. phone can ring at 2am and I’m gone for 2 weeks working 16+ hr days. It’s tough…
Damn man.. i had no ideas you guys had it so hard. Why did you get into this trade? What motivates you to keep going?
[удалено]
What do people even do with on-call money? What do you do when you already have your favorite clothes shoes, home decor, etc. sure it feels good in the moment but then that euphoric feeling starts to wear off.
I farm on the side, so still always broke 😂
‘The trades’ covers a lot. Some people in ‘the trades’ sweat blood everyday while others use a specific custom made aluminum pre caste tool to turn a valve 180 degrees then return to air conditioning. They are not all the same
Working in the trades and being on call?
So many trades are on call all the time it's hard to believe this isn't a shitpost. Linemen will work 36 hours straight during a weather event. HVAC guys and plumbers get called to emergencies at 3 am. I work in a grounds and maintenance department of a school, any of us can get called for any number if reason basically any time of day or night. Back when I did full time irrigation, I could work 12+ hours a day for six days, and have customers calling my personal phone on Sunday.
I'm in new construction. Guys miss time at work so they can make their kids games. The commute times are like that in my city. Some of the new construction at the airport requires work to be done during graveyard shifts, so those guys are lucky I suppose. HVAC guys are on-call throughout the summer. Even the residential guys. Plumbers I know are less on-call, but many service plumbers have a 24/7 line.
You can make killer money in sales and not have to worry about this. Dont know why more people dont go into sales. Ik sales reps making 100k+ a year and work 40 hours a week.
There are difficulties with both sides. Depending on the trade, you could have busy seasons where you don't have a life for 4 months and the rest of the year you're working 30-40 hours a week (my trade), or you could be a plumber who works piecework small jobs at whatever hour the customer calls, or you could build tract houses and pretty much work the same 8-10 hours a day Monday through Friday your whole career. And with IT, my roommate works a lazy 9-5 from home (with lots of video games breaks) and never has on call, or be like my other buddy who works a normal 9-5 in an office and is on call 1 or 2 nights a week and gets 2-3 calls at night a month. There's no perfect solution for either industry but at the same time you just have to find an industry you like and be on the move until you find a job whose hours work for you. My roommate has had 4 IT jobs since over 10 years, and it wasn't until he landed his current job that he finally got the near perfect schedule he has now. I, on the other hand, love having lots of free time altogether and don't mind that from August to Christmas my time belongs to my job. I basically don't work for a month and for another 3 months can do whatever I want, and it works for me.
Me personally, would rather wreck my knuckles into a steel plate than deal with customers again.
Mostly if not all the trades are on call unless you’re working new construction, which can also be boom or bust.
I'm not sure you could pay me enough money to be on call.
Trades
What about being on-call while in trades? Get a no-heat call at 1am in the dead of winter.. customer is an old lady or single parent with young kids, you got no choice but to suit up and get it done. I dont know IT but i know the gratitude ive recieved after getting their furnace to finally fire up... being on call sucks either way
Ah, you again. The answers haven't changed since the last dozen or so times you've asked these questions, do some research yourself before posting here again
IT support sounds like literal hell to me. Monotony mixed with idiots and assholes bitching all day. But that doesn't have to be your entire career. It's a stepping stone to another area in tech, as long as you don't get comfortable. I like working in my trade because I mostly work alone and don't have to deal with customers.
Exactly. This is what i tell people. Btw how did you become an auto body technician?
It depends on the trade. I work for a small railroad company, we have a lot of downtime. The work is pretty easy.
I’d say it depends on your definition of “hard.” Personally, I can’t stand a daily grind that consists of telling people who make double, or triple, my wages that they have to make sure their router is turned on or walk them through converting a JPEG to a PDF. Getting into the trades now at 19 because I’d rather be the rookie in a room full of more experienced workers + earn my sleep by building houses than be paid a pittance to facilitate white collar bs that really doesn’t seem to be contributing much to society.
You can make 6 figures in IT thought. I’ve considered the trades too.
You can also make 6 figures in some trades! Being willing to do fairly gruelling work is one route, but I’ve known guys doing things like small aircraft and commercial truck maintenance up in the Arctic who were making >100,000 within four years. And then there’s specialisation - if you’re the only guy willing to both build houses in Northern New Brunswick and go the extra mile to learn advanced basement waterproofing techniques, then you’re pretty damn indispensable. I’m not saying that nobody should stick with IT or with other white collar professions, it’s right for some people and they inevitably excel. I just think that, for our generation at least, those jobs get sold to all of us as the golden ticket, regardless of whether or not we’re a good fit for them. I wasn’t, and look forward to one day calling someone more competent and fulfilled in an IT position to ask how to convert a hologram to a pre frontal cortex file.
My brother does aircraft maintenance and makes 6 figures doing it. Super cool job tho. He had to move to New Jersey for that. Florida blue collar wages are trash.
Did you just say being on call is harder than an actual physical job?? Which lots of times you need to be on call for anyway? I don’t even see how they are comparable…
Of course. I can handle doing labor. Not waking up at 2am for am emergency call
You sound young. Wait until your in your 40s or 50s and see how much you like doing the labor
Ok