Neat article. If you squint, I don't think there is a ton of difference between what most handymen do and what most software engineers do: they both have some generalizable skills, and when they get asked to do something they say 'yes' and then figure out how to do it. I don't think the challenge level of most day-to-day software tasks is any harder than the "where'd that water stain come from" puzzle he described in the article. The difference, of course, is in working conditions and payment.
But even if the AI technologies we're so nervously excited about replace all our jobs, the handymen, plumbers, and electricians of the world will be mostly unaffected. Their work is hard to automate. I hesitate to say we'll change places in terms of economic status—more likely, all the out of work engineers and designers will move into those industries and drive down the prices.
I mostly agree with you. I've been a full-time software engineer for the past 28 years and a part-time handyman for the past 5 months. One of the biggest differences that you don't mention is the use of your body. Software engineering is purely intellectual -- often to the detriment of your body (or mine, anyways) since it's often the case where I sit at the keyboard for hours on end, day after day. As a handyman, your body necessarily is a key part of the work you do. Lifting tools, materials, carrying them, getting into weird positions to access the problem area (under bathroom sink for example). The other aspect is the physical nature of the work. The work is tangible. You can take a photo of the thing that needs to be fixed before the repair/construction and then another at the end and compare the before/after photos. Even if you don't care about the photos, you can still see the tangible, physical end-result of your work. With software engineering, at best it's usually just a status update on a Jira ticket.
Regarding AI technologies, I agree that it's extremely unlikely that AI will take over the work. It's possible that may help in some diagnostic cases. I strongly disagree with "all the out of work engineers and designers will move into those industries". Why? Many (perhaps most even) software engineers that I've worked with are too lazy or too proud to do handyman type work. Some of the handyman work can be physically quite taxing and some of it can be quite humbling. Examples of taxing work - when you're doing a gate rebuild/repair in 107 degree temperature in direct sun. Example of humbling work - opening up p-traps under sinks and having some of the smelly, dirty water splash on you.
Those are good distinctions. I'm a 13-year software engineer, and a 4-year part time finish carpenter.
An important distinction that comes up for me a lot is that it's much harder to fix mistakes with physical stuff. I can rapidly iterate on software, try stuff, see what works, play with a concept. But if I do that with wood and nails, I'm going to be in for trouble. Each idea costs material, and if it's a repair, there can be no going back. "Iterative development" really isn't a thing. This has gotten me in trouble - my instinct is to explore a problem, but I find that physical stuff requires more intellectual planning up-front, counterintuitively.
> One of the biggest differences that you don't mention is the use of your body.
Oh, for sure. I was a dev for many years, then switched to product design. What I left out of my first comment was that my older brother is a maintenance guy for a hospital—basically a handyman with an office in the basement. Growing up, it was clear that he was at least as smart as me, but at a certain point he went one direction and I went another. Cut to 25-30 years later: his body is a wreck, mine is okay (modulo poor diet and lack of exercise), he's always broke, and I'm doing alright.
When I said that our jobs are very similar, I just meant that, like a handyman, much of what a SWE does is basically attaching one thing to another thing while cursing. That's a joke, but you get what I mean. My point was that neither are rocket science, but we shouldn't think we're especially smart for being programmers just because we get paid too much for it. Add the physical element of handyman work to that and that just underlines the point I wanted to make.
> I strongly disagree with "all the out of work engineers and designers will move into those industries.
This is timely. I said that because I was thinking about it yesterday, when talking to some friends about what they'd do if and when AI obviated their current jobs (which is in the realm of possibility). A common answer was that they'd become electricians. I think there are at least two problems with that: one is the physical aspect of being a tradesman, which nobody thinks about. The other is that there would certainly be more people going into the trades, not less, if those industries became a safe harbor from AI. Many of these people would wash out, sure, but at least some of them (like yourself) wouldn't. That, combined with all the upper-middle-class people being suddenly broke, would probably drive down wages for people who work with their hands. I can't imagine anything else happening, though of course I could be wrong.
For me the biggest difference is that handyman mistakes tend to tangible, and potentially worse to repair than the original problem. Software is easy to reset back and clean the slate for another go.
It's this kind of thing that deters me from taking on tasks, fear of making things worse, digging the hole deeper, etc.
Then there's the whole losing focus, leaving it half done, etc. issue.
I’m less concerned about the supply of handymen inflating and more concerned about demand falling. If AI really does replace a huge portion of the people with the money to hire handymen and plumbers and the property to need them where do they get the work from? More people will DIY out of necessity even if the results are worse because they won’t have another option and fewer people will have the property to maintain in the first place.
As a coder when I want to figure something out I can just try it an obnoxious number of times and ways within minutes, with almost no marginal cost. Even on the job. When a handyman wants to learn plumbing he has to do things like knock holes in the ceiling just to have a look. If a handyman gets it right only as often as I do in my REPL, he'll fail fast. Atoms are so much tougher than bits.
the handymen, plumbers, and electricians of the world will be mostly unaffected. Their work is hard to automate.
It’s funny, when I started in ML 10 years ago people said the same thing about writers, artists, musicians. And yet here we are today. Robotics is just the next thing to be “solved” in AI field, the same way computer vision or NLP got solved - after decades of hard effort and little progress. Once the algorithms are ready people will build robots who will be much better than humans at any physical tasks: faster and more precise.
“The reason is that, in other fields [than software], people have to deal with the perversity of matter. You are designing circuits or cars or chemicals, you have to face the fact that these physical substances will do what they do, not what they are supposed to do. We in software don't have that problem, and that makes it tremendously easier. We are designing a collection of idealized mathematical parts which have definitions. They do exactly what they are defined to do.
And so there are many problems we [programmers] don't have. For instance, if we put an if statement inside of a while statement, we don't have to worry about whether the if statement can get enough power to run at the speed it's going to run. We don't have to worry about whether it will run at a speed that generates radio frequency interference and induces wrong values in some other parts of the data. We don't have to worry about whether it will loop at a speed that causes a resonance and eventually the if statement will vibrate against the while statement and one of them will crack. We don't have to worry that chemicals in the environment will get into the boundary between the if statement and the while statement and corrode them, and cause a bad connection. We don't have to worry that other chemicals will get on them and cause a short-circuit. We don't have to worry about whether the heat can be dissipated from this if statement through the surrounding while statement. We don't have to worry about whether the while statement would cause so much voltage drop that the if statement won't function correctly. When you look at the value of a variable you don't have to worry about whether you've referenced that variable so many times that you exceed the fan-out limit. You don't have to worry about how much capacitance there is in a certain variable and how much time it will take to store the value in it.
All these things are defined a way, the system is defined to function in a certain way, and it always does. The physical computer might malfunction, but that's not the program's fault. So, because of all these problems we don't have to deal with, our field is tremendously easier.”
Wonder how many on HN are like this, but with software or other industries.
I'm not building sky scrapers (next triple AAA game engine), I'm fixing the leak in the ceiling (bug with some in-house corporate gui). It can be a little soul-draining, but do it for the kids.
I’m always driven to reach for more, in my career. I don’t think that’s ideal for happiness. Maybe it’s not always even ideal for my career.
Through COVID, I’ve had a lot of obvious gains. I used to commute four hours a day, and now I work from home. I’m paid more. I’m working with more interesting technology. Despite all of that, I still alternate between putting a lot of effort into finding my next step to a bigger career or feeling bad about not putting enough energy into it.
Although the overlap is minimal in many ways, I was strongly reminded of Wes Cecil's series on the Philosophy of Building a house[1].
Cecil's purpose is a bit different, but beyond the obvious theme of using the building of a house for philosophical reflection, I do think there's some cross-over in insights, if not in focus.
I recommend it to anyone, ESPECIALLY anyone thinking about, or in the process of, building a house. And his channel in general is excellent fun.
Thanks! I want to build a house in the future and I want it to anticipate my psychology and be functional and yet have a timeless design if that makes sense. Also needs fung-sui.
> My kids get regular doses of “No limits!” and “You can be whatever you want!” in school, and I resent it because it simply isn’t true. You cannot actually be whatever you want. That’s harmful, sentimental garbage. Fact is, the real world is chock full of limits.
I've long observed that modern culture and media seem to be really stuck on this idea that kids everywhere are having their dreams held back by evil adults who just want to crush their dreams, for no good reason in particular. The archetype in many movies is that some adult is telling some kid to abandon his dreams.
I always found this interesting because no one ever attempted this with me. As suggested, they attempted the opposite, and told me that I could be whatever I wanted. Ultimately I think this was well-intended, but harmful advice. Most of the things I like or care about aren't just infeasible careers -- they're not jobs at all. The things I'm "passionate" about are just not career-worthy. I like reading books, playing video games, doing house chores while listening to podcasts, and talking to friends. It might sound stupid, but as a younger adult (18-25) I really had the mistaken impression that I didn't enjoy work because I hadn't found a good job yet. Really, there was nothing I enjoyed in my life which could actually survive the transition to a career. What I just described is really all leisure, and can't count as work.
Yes, you can technically make a career out of the things I listed, but they cease to bear much resemblance to how I participated in them. Casually playing a video game occasionally is much different from developing or writing, or reviewing games. Occasionally reading a good book is much different from being able to write a book, or reviewing books for a living, etc. And a proclivity towards enjoying a book every so often says nothing about one's ability to make a career out of books. I suppose the point I'm trying to drive at is that there is a wide berth between what someone is interested in, and their ability to make that into a career.
I would have benefited from being forced into the workplace sooner so that I could realize that all jobs out there are "work," even if there are some enjoyable aspects to them. ie, that there are fundamental differences between work and leisure, and that a kid who enjoys some hobbies is totally incapable of identifying his "passions." But, no one really seems to want to tell that story, at least in popular media. They want an easy good guy and bad guy. They seem fixated on the idea that as a child I truly knew myself, and in some sense was pure -- and that the world was an adulterating influence, bitterly set on holding me back. The opposite was true: as a child I barely know myself, and the world was ready to teach me important lessons, but mentors and media kept trying to protect me from learning about the world.
Educators and parents don't do a great job of saying "if you want to be A, then you should work on your V skills" or "while you may be passionate about C, it is not a career.. have you considered D,E,F?".
And also for those going off to college it would be useful to have the hard conversation early "while it may be fun to live in G HCOL city for 4 years, if you want to make a life there, you are going to need a HCOL paying job like H,I,J.. so maybe don't pursue low ROI degree K".
I definitely interacted with a lot of younger millenials/GenZ in my career who were constantly changing jobs laterally because nothing was a "good fit". So they spent the first 5 years of their career churning water instead of doubling their salary. This is the kind of thing that sets a person back for life.
To me it's like "wow yeah you don't find working on a CRUD app / BI analytics / retail website to be the most life affirming thing in the world?" Guess what, as Mad Men said.. "that's what the money is for". People can have hobbies!
Consumption (passive) vs production (active). Only some are blessed to enjoy the latter, and even fewer in a useful niche that aligns with a well-paid career.
Effectively, we reached post-scarcity society. As such, current zeitgeist changed from “we all have to work to collectively survive” to “only few need to work and are rewarded for it and everyone else can just chill out and have their basic needs met”.
Our collective approach to education reflects this new economic situation.
It’s even harder to give any advice to children now, with AI massively disrupting everything in few short years.
That was not the article I was expecting! Really enjoyed it.
I think the guy is underselling himself. He's running his own successful business, something I cannot imagine doing. He's hitting new (even if similar) problems every day with real world settings and real world consequences, and helping people. Sounds pretty impressive to me. When it comes to DIY I don't stretch beyond fixing tap washers or replacing power switches with obvious problems for fear of causing expensive damage.
The fact he can do it while battling on going mental health hassles is impressive too.
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But even if the AI technologies we're so nervously excited about replace all our jobs, the handymen, plumbers, and electricians of the world will be mostly unaffected. Their work is hard to automate. I hesitate to say we'll change places in terms of economic status—more likely, all the out of work engineers and designers will move into those industries and drive down the prices.
Regarding AI technologies, I agree that it's extremely unlikely that AI will take over the work. It's possible that may help in some diagnostic cases. I strongly disagree with "all the out of work engineers and designers will move into those industries". Why? Many (perhaps most even) software engineers that I've worked with are too lazy or too proud to do handyman type work. Some of the handyman work can be physically quite taxing and some of it can be quite humbling. Examples of taxing work - when you're doing a gate rebuild/repair in 107 degree temperature in direct sun. Example of humbling work - opening up p-traps under sinks and having some of the smelly, dirty water splash on you.
An important distinction that comes up for me a lot is that it's much harder to fix mistakes with physical stuff. I can rapidly iterate on software, try stuff, see what works, play with a concept. But if I do that with wood and nails, I'm going to be in for trouble. Each idea costs material, and if it's a repair, there can be no going back. "Iterative development" really isn't a thing. This has gotten me in trouble - my instinct is to explore a problem, but I find that physical stuff requires more intellectual planning up-front, counterintuitively.
Oh, for sure. I was a dev for many years, then switched to product design. What I left out of my first comment was that my older brother is a maintenance guy for a hospital—basically a handyman with an office in the basement. Growing up, it was clear that he was at least as smart as me, but at a certain point he went one direction and I went another. Cut to 25-30 years later: his body is a wreck, mine is okay (modulo poor diet and lack of exercise), he's always broke, and I'm doing alright.
When I said that our jobs are very similar, I just meant that, like a handyman, much of what a SWE does is basically attaching one thing to another thing while cursing. That's a joke, but you get what I mean. My point was that neither are rocket science, but we shouldn't think we're especially smart for being programmers just because we get paid too much for it. Add the physical element of handyman work to that and that just underlines the point I wanted to make.
> I strongly disagree with "all the out of work engineers and designers will move into those industries.
This is timely. I said that because I was thinking about it yesterday, when talking to some friends about what they'd do if and when AI obviated their current jobs (which is in the realm of possibility). A common answer was that they'd become electricians. I think there are at least two problems with that: one is the physical aspect of being a tradesman, which nobody thinks about. The other is that there would certainly be more people going into the trades, not less, if those industries became a safe harbor from AI. Many of these people would wash out, sure, but at least some of them (like yourself) wouldn't. That, combined with all the upper-middle-class people being suddenly broke, would probably drive down wages for people who work with their hands. I can't imagine anything else happening, though of course I could be wrong.
It's this kind of thing that deters me from taking on tasks, fear of making things worse, digging the hole deeper, etc.
Then there's the whole losing focus, leaving it half done, etc. issue.
This cannot be understated. You can tell if a person has never cleaned a toilet in their life- you can hear it in their voice.
It’s funny, when I started in ML 10 years ago people said the same thing about writers, artists, musicians. And yet here we are today. Robotics is just the next thing to be “solved” in AI field, the same way computer vision or NLP got solved - after decades of hard effort and little progress. Once the algorithms are ready people will build robots who will be much better than humans at any physical tasks: faster and more precise.
And so there are many problems we [programmers] don't have. For instance, if we put an if statement inside of a while statement, we don't have to worry about whether the if statement can get enough power to run at the speed it's going to run. We don't have to worry about whether it will run at a speed that generates radio frequency interference and induces wrong values in some other parts of the data. We don't have to worry about whether it will loop at a speed that causes a resonance and eventually the if statement will vibrate against the while statement and one of them will crack. We don't have to worry that chemicals in the environment will get into the boundary between the if statement and the while statement and corrode them, and cause a bad connection. We don't have to worry that other chemicals will get on them and cause a short-circuit. We don't have to worry about whether the heat can be dissipated from this if statement through the surrounding while statement. We don't have to worry about whether the while statement would cause so much voltage drop that the if statement won't function correctly. When you look at the value of a variable you don't have to worry about whether you've referenced that variable so many times that you exceed the fan-out limit. You don't have to worry about how much capacitance there is in a certain variable and how much time it will take to store the value in it.
All these things are defined a way, the system is defined to function in a certain way, and it always does. The physical computer might malfunction, but that's not the program's fault. So, because of all these problems we don't have to deal with, our field is tremendously easier.”
— Richard Stallman, 2001: <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html#conf9>
Deleted Comment
I will actually then think that all this AI stuff is not smoke and mirrors, the way it currently appears to be.
I'm not building sky scrapers (next triple AAA game engine), I'm fixing the leak in the ceiling (bug with some in-house corporate gui). It can be a little soul-draining, but do it for the kids.
Through COVID, I’ve had a lot of obvious gains. I used to commute four hours a day, and now I work from home. I’m paid more. I’m working with more interesting technology. Despite all of that, I still alternate between putting a lot of effort into finding my next step to a bigger career or feeling bad about not putting enough energy into it.
The handyman must be less restless.
Why? They may not have the next step as clearly "defined", but there are endless ways to "level up"
Cecil's purpose is a bit different, but beyond the obvious theme of using the building of a house for philosophical reflection, I do think there's some cross-over in insights, if not in focus.
I recommend it to anyone, ESPECIALLY anyone thinking about, or in the process of, building a house. And his channel in general is excellent fun.
[1.1] https://youtu.be/GDg194s5tnQ
[1.2] https://youtu.be/iId98RogAIg
[1.3] https://youtu.be/-eXQZZsMAz0
I've long observed that modern culture and media seem to be really stuck on this idea that kids everywhere are having their dreams held back by evil adults who just want to crush their dreams, for no good reason in particular. The archetype in many movies is that some adult is telling some kid to abandon his dreams.
I always found this interesting because no one ever attempted this with me. As suggested, they attempted the opposite, and told me that I could be whatever I wanted. Ultimately I think this was well-intended, but harmful advice. Most of the things I like or care about aren't just infeasible careers -- they're not jobs at all. The things I'm "passionate" about are just not career-worthy. I like reading books, playing video games, doing house chores while listening to podcasts, and talking to friends. It might sound stupid, but as a younger adult (18-25) I really had the mistaken impression that I didn't enjoy work because I hadn't found a good job yet. Really, there was nothing I enjoyed in my life which could actually survive the transition to a career. What I just described is really all leisure, and can't count as work.
Yes, you can technically make a career out of the things I listed, but they cease to bear much resemblance to how I participated in them. Casually playing a video game occasionally is much different from developing or writing, or reviewing games. Occasionally reading a good book is much different from being able to write a book, or reviewing books for a living, etc. And a proclivity towards enjoying a book every so often says nothing about one's ability to make a career out of books. I suppose the point I'm trying to drive at is that there is a wide berth between what someone is interested in, and their ability to make that into a career.
I would have benefited from being forced into the workplace sooner so that I could realize that all jobs out there are "work," even if there are some enjoyable aspects to them. ie, that there are fundamental differences between work and leisure, and that a kid who enjoys some hobbies is totally incapable of identifying his "passions." But, no one really seems to want to tell that story, at least in popular media. They want an easy good guy and bad guy. They seem fixated on the idea that as a child I truly knew myself, and in some sense was pure -- and that the world was an adulterating influence, bitterly set on holding me back. The opposite was true: as a child I barely know myself, and the world was ready to teach me important lessons, but mentors and media kept trying to protect me from learning about the world.
Educators and parents don't do a great job of saying "if you want to be A, then you should work on your V skills" or "while you may be passionate about C, it is not a career.. have you considered D,E,F?".
And also for those going off to college it would be useful to have the hard conversation early "while it may be fun to live in G HCOL city for 4 years, if you want to make a life there, you are going to need a HCOL paying job like H,I,J.. so maybe don't pursue low ROI degree K".
I definitely interacted with a lot of younger millenials/GenZ in my career who were constantly changing jobs laterally because nothing was a "good fit". So they spent the first 5 years of their career churning water instead of doubling their salary. This is the kind of thing that sets a person back for life.
To me it's like "wow yeah you don't find working on a CRUD app / BI analytics / retail website to be the most life affirming thing in the world?" Guess what, as Mad Men said.. "that's what the money is for". People can have hobbies!
> We do what we have to so we can do what we want to
Our collective approach to education reflects this new economic situation.
It’s even harder to give any advice to children now, with AI massively disrupting everything in few short years.
I think the guy is underselling himself. He's running his own successful business, something I cannot imagine doing. He's hitting new (even if similar) problems every day with real world settings and real world consequences, and helping people. Sounds pretty impressive to me. When it comes to DIY I don't stretch beyond fixing tap washers or replacing power switches with obvious problems for fear of causing expensive damage.
The fact he can do it while battling on going mental health hassles is impressive too.
Sadly, this guy does not sound like any handyman that I've known, but then, I have not known any handymen with a theology degree.
But I have certainly known a number of fairly incongruous folks, in unusual vocations, so I'm not surprised.
Integrity is one of my targets. And I mostly sleep well at night.