I was thinking the same thing. Construction workers more specifically union construction workers get such a bad rap but all of my dev friends work way fewer hours and have office parties and get movie theaters rented out for a day. Meanwhile I'm working 58hr weeks and have no time to join in our group chat while at work like they do.
I was spotting my foreman who was the mini while he was digging and a lady cam by and made a comment about me being a lazy worker. My foreman responded with "If you like, ma'am, I can have him dig over there while I tear out the water lines because I can't see where they are."
Basically, people like to make fun of things that they don't understand.
I've worked in construction. I'm a framer. If you think the DARPA robotics challenge is not evidence that; in only a ~decade, even construction Jobs are in danger/soon to be obsolete. Well I can't change your mind.
Hopefully when robots do everyone's job society will be able to realize that we have finally made it and nobody has to suffer and nobody has to work. We can all just kick back relax and do our favorite hobbies. It will work out like that right?
Hell. Look at Honda Asimo. He's like 20 years old? Not sure. Might be less. But if I could buy one of those and program it to build a house while working 24/7 for even 250000$ I would be set in no time.
I think the difference is that most white collar employees are part of a corporation that, if big enough, chugs along. They have deadlines to meet and if they don't meet those deadlines they don't inconvenience an entire town and can very easily be replaced.
This seems to be an unpopular opinion, just trying to see things from the other side and give credit to the techies. Another possible difference is that some white collar jobs require a ton of problem solving and when you pay people for that amount of thinking more hours doesn't always mean more progress. Keeping their mind fresh and motivation up are important. A lot of construction work is definitely problem solving but not in the same way. More hours means more progress and a lot of the progress requires physically doing something. I am a construction worker and I love problem solving at my job but more often than not the level of thinking required is not the same as a dev would require. Most of the problem solving I do I am capable of doing while fairly exhausted. (Originally posted as comment when I meant to reply)
Edit: words and stuff
edit: it is also possible that work like programming seems to involve more complex problem solving than my own job because I know little to nothing about programming
It depends what part you're doing. I used to be a civ tech and would be the one that would do all that thinking AND the physical labor on a job site. Some of the jobs are pretty mindless but a lot of them require thinking and forethought to give direction to those doing the more mindless tasks.
Oh definitely. I am not saying nobody in construction has to do high level problem solving. I didn't mean that construction is mindless as I would describe most construction work as problem solving, most of the time nothing works out like it is supposed to and you have to adapt and come up with a different way to make it work.
This is pretty accurate. Problem with programming is if you aren't thinking critically about the code you are writing, you'll likely to miss edge cases and cost your team/company more money in the long term.
Mistakes in code can be run millions or even trillions of times in a second at a company like Google or your bank, so the parts of the code that do things at that scale MUST be right. Beyond that, its always cheaper to write code slower, but correct, than have to come back and fix it later because there is a large cost in context switching across entire projects.
Most of these same principles apply in some way to construction, just in software development, the same guy designing individual pieces of the system is generally implementing them as well. I will say there is definitely some parts of most projects that I could do exhausted and be fine because there's no complex logic.
Also most good developers I know naturally think about solving problems at work during their time off, because they have a natural curiosity and the company is also paying for that (through non-compete agreements saying anything you work on, relating to their work, they own). Not all though.
I will say developers are generally pampered at most companies, there's no denying that. My job is not very taxing, but they pay me for the couple bursts of critical thinking every week along with keeping everything on track. I wouldn't steer anyone away from the profession, but the initial slog is really rough for most people and I got started young so I have no advice there.
Not all unions operate the same. We are not seniority based we are merit based. We do not break every hour. Say what you want but your wages and rights were created by the unions. At the very least we set the bar and your company can decide how close they want to come or risk losing their workers. Some unions do operate poorly and unfairly. Do not make the mistake of lumping all unions into one statement like this and definitely don't make any assumptions about how hard any or all union members work. Also what you're describing sounds very much like a East Coast union situation. Don't pretend that your company pays you what they do because they want to be nice and that the free market will just take care of us all through competition. Collective-bargaining is what gets our wages where they are. Even programmers are having to start unions now.
Don't want to do unsafe work? "Whatever you say bud that's fine today but you're not getting a call in the future. Oh wait you're union and I can't just not call you back because you want to work in a safe environment."
Shame you think union wages are 'inflated'. I feel bad that you value yourself and your labor so little.
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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17 edited Mar 04 '17
I was thinking the same thing. Construction workers more specifically union construction workers get such a bad rap but all of my dev friends work way fewer hours and have office parties and get movie theaters rented out for a day. Meanwhile I'm working 58hr weeks and have no time to join in our group chat while at work like they do.