getting licensed as an electrician has been on my mind recently. i’m so tired of the whole industry
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
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Computer, I need software please!
Why won't it work? I asked for software!
I'm thinking cake decorator. Or florist. Maybe grave digger.
florist
This sounds nice. Working with something green and alive. Arborist too.
Granny worked as a florist, not her own shop though. She had incredible strong hands.
As a pupil I did a work experience day in the shop. It was really chilly (Germany usually has not Air Con), we consistently had to clean the floor in the back room to not slip on the leaves, it was tiny in there and we were four people. I got to wash a fake flower decor and rearrange it for a doctors office. That was nice.
We have diggers.
I think manual labor that needs creativity (e.g. pattiserie or florist) has the best post-AI future.
Wood carver! Oh they have mostly automated that with CNC machines...
There are also coffee art robots that can print something on the milk foam.
But it still requires the creativity.
And for sentimental stuff (e.g. pattiserie and florist) I would like to believe that humans value hand made stuff more than machine produced.
you'll either be needed to extract dead systems after this all falls apart, or to build new systems for people that don't want slop service in dead space.
Oops, requirements were written by ai too
For real.
I recently lost half a morning having to go through a slop requirements document and making a list of questions like "are you sure you want this? why do you want this? what does this even mean?", to which the answers were all "I don't know, ChatGPT wrote it".
Like why did you even bother sending me this, you could've just sent me the prompt instead and saved me 2 hours of my life
People do stupid things when they don't know any better but want to look like they know what they are doing. Enter LLMs now people think they look even smarter in an area they don't know things.
I'm a few weeks from graduating in software engineering, I think I'm going back to my old plan of finding a strong rope and a sturdy tree.
Nothing wrong with being an arborist.
I work in software but I have a side job working for an arborist, and you might have been joking but it's legit a great industry to have a backup plan in.
Most arborists near me have more work than they can keep up with. You see, the thing about trees is, you trim them, wait a year, and the bastards grow back! It's like a giant scam and the trees are all in on it!
It's a pretty fun job too, if you're relatively fit. You get to climb trees, throw logs into giant scary chippers, and you get first dibs on all the best gun and sword shaped sticks.
I was half joking. 😅 Of all the tradesfolk I've hired to do work on my house, my arborist is the only one who's job I could see myself actually liking. He gets paid to be a nerd about something (trees, tree health, tree care), the work itself seems a lot more pleasant than dealing with plumbing or electrical repairs, and at least my guy is a one man band who just shows up and does his thing, which is certainly appealing after a career of various EMs, PMs, TPMs, and other people who need to be appeased when doing work. Also the fun tools.
You could learn farsi and arabic and join the military. They are always hiring lately and they have lowered their standards a lot I hear. Medical, maximum enlistment age, drug history, criminal background, fitness, intellgence, all lowered. You can start your first enlistment at 42 now. As long as you get in before your 43rd birthday you're gold.
Ah so you're a black man in a predominately racist white county with a strong police force?
For real though. If life sucks, try something else. Teach English abroad, move to another state or country. Not much to lose if you're struggling.
I know this is a haha community, but software isn't dead. Most corps are going to insist you use AI. Especially as a junior dev. Look for places that say things like "engineers make the decisions". You need to find a place where you can get experience learning how software is built, even if the bot does the typing. People have been getting laid off and that sucks but software devs aren't going anywhere. Ai writes bad code. They need us to make sure bad code doesn't go to production.
They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
what worries me: that's not something a junior can do.
I see it with the local lawyers office, they have stopped hiring junior lawyers and are replacing the junior's tasks by AI. Fine for now, but I wonder what happens when the others retire, who's going to replace them if no juniors are trained?
Bet on it, there will be (or are already) big revolutions in engineering/programming and art (and music), especially these 2 areas.
Instrinsic/individualistic expression (also motive) is going to become a new form of rocketfuel in that vacuum being created by clankers. Human potential and what really defines existence scales faster than boring exponential growth of calculation power.
I got a degree in development a few years ago and couldn’t find a job. There was nothing out there for a junior dev. I was persistent for about a year then, I just gave up.
Now I work in Commercial Real Estate but I can see this industry is about to be decimated by AI also. They are slowly starting to figure it out and build AI tools that do their job.
Bold of you to think they wouldn't replace AI with more AI and lie to their own face in the mirror that their company collapsing is good just because, AI.
Yeah, I suggest following the age old wisdom of rats on this. Abandon the sinking ship before it sinks with you in it.
Only people having no idea of what engineering even is would write such bullshit, worse than slop
I worked in IT support for 15 years. Now I work on a dairy farm. Cows are way better than people. Go into farming, fellow lemmings. It's so rewarding.
Atleast cows dont need cloud storage
"Cows are way better than people" said the prison guard.
I mean, he's keeping cows prisoner and we're posting passive aggressive shit online. I'd say cows are 2/2 so far.
I just fucking work there. For minimum wage. I'm the one kindness those cows get so fuck your judgement.
One day... I must still fix the machines. The normies still won't know what the power button or ram stick are, even with help.
The McDonald's frycook of IT
Fuck the normies
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With all the food recalls, I'm sure plumbing is a high demand job.
Jokes aside; trades suck. If you like hot ass heat, cramped places, constant injuries, buying your own tools, ruining your body before you reach forty, and annoying customers; then it's the job for you. This is an anecdotal take but yeah it's not fun. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I say I wish I did anything else for the last ten years. The money was good but the added pain isn't worth it.
Don't do plumbing, join us in HVAC-R. There is way less training and fewer certs required. The bar is so low it's derailing subways.
Refrigeration?
I sent this to my plumber to congratulate him on his career choice.
Turns out now he’s an electrician and his company got hired to help build an AI data center. 💀Sixty electricians from his company alone on one job. Drones surveilling the repetitive work overhead.
So much for escaping the impacts of AI.
lol, you're joking
We've been predicting the demise of the coding career since the dawn of the coding career, but even if it's not dying, being proficient in coding and becoming proficient in one other trade is a good way to find opportunities to make software that makes that trade easier. The bar for quality in trade-specific software is shockingly low and money can be made in those niches.
Yep, the real money you make when being able to combine 2 different skills, because the amount of people having studied exactly this combination will always be a very small group. Coding and a learned trade is one of the rarer combinations - most coders (in my experience) acquire management or business skills to climb the corporate ladder.
I've spent my entire career as a professor advocating that students should pick a minor, certificate, or double major if they're capable.
My rationale is remarkably similar I think. Literally ever field, hobby, and area of study involve some form of technology. Many of those disciplines lack the sophistication of the tooling and that we have in more programming related fields, which makes people with an additional specialized skill set extremely valuable.
Hell, look around at fintech, bioinformatics, computational arts, etc. We have emerging Fields all the time that are essentially computer science combined with another field.
This is basically me.
I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.
My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).
In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.
I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.
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