At least in the trades the overtime is a well-understood part of the bargain. Plenty of white-collar employees work 60+ hour weeks with no additional compensation except the possibility of a larger-than-average bonus.
Yes, continue and elaborate? Mental (white collar) work has more of that feeling of dread I think. Maybe physical “overtime” has a physical limit, not sure how often you push yourself into burnout in those fields? Curious and asking here, don’t read in too much here.
You can google "retirement age plumbers" and see stories of people's bodies giving out at age 50. There are some things you can do to mitigate that risk, but physical labor jobs frequently land you into unplanned early retirement, with the rest of your life in pain.
I agree with that, the physical labor has been studied and experienced for quite some time now. But we need to look forward and see if there might be changes we cannot comprehend yet.
For example, we cannot yet google the software eng retirement age or the like. Assuming we started in 2005, average dude 25years old then hasn't retired yet and we don't know either where he/she's gone in 2035/45.
Software engineering as a popular career track goes back to the early 80s if I'm being extremely conservative.
There are plenty of retired software engineers that I know. Most of them retired because they wanted to do something different, and they had the money to do it. I don't know of any that have retired as a direct result of the physical effects on their body.
Yeah I’m not talking about Kernighan & Ritchie et al. More like the big boom, zero interest rate and the huge demand of SWE that occurred 2010 onwards.
I’m sure the biggest early retirement factor is weight. Most guys in the trades were 50-150lbs overweight. That’s more ruinous to your back and body than anything you are likely to do at work. We had old guys working and one thing basically all of them had in common was being thin.
>The WEL for Manganese (since 2018) in the UK for those small particles that reach the deep lung (known as respirable particles) is 0.05mg/m3 (8hr TWA), a tenth of the previous WEL.
This change is significant as much of the manganese in the fume will be respirable. It is likely that the respirable limit will be exceeded during many welding activities unless effective controls are introduced and used properly.
I think if you really want to make a proper living from the trades, you need to at some stage plan to move "off the tools" and into starting your own welding/plumbing/whatever business.
If you can do that successfully, you can get FAANG money.
Well there are around 130K plumbing businesses in the USA and around 400K plumbers, so I think that plan leaves around 270K plumbers snaking drains until they die.
Yes, but I don’t see why that means overtime is compensated in one but not the other. If anything blue collar workers are more upfront about their time being valuable, while in white collar work there’s an unwritten expectation that you’ll suck it up and get the job done. Talking about money is taboo, but who does that benefit?
If you talk to someone in the trades yes, it's understood that overtime is required to make good money. When you see people promoting the trades to highschoolers though, they are not talking about that fact.
Yes, white collar jobs can require overtime but not all and not always but that is kinda besides the point. Why are we promoting work that requires 50-60+ hours a week to get by?
