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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Tradesman is sort of an option. It's not as bad as coffee barista, but breaking six figure incomes seems pretty difficult.

HVAC tech here. In general, tradesmen make similar money to average college educated workers(so less than six figures but not a bad salary), or to law enforcement, once they’ve been doing it a few years. First year apprentices live with their parents, but second year can live on their own. Six figure jobs are either for the union(more like a guild in this case- the plumbing or electricians union is technically a temp agency that lets out workers to employers) or at the top of the trade(meritocracy, yes, but also seniority and people skills), or just have an insane number of hours/travel requirements. It happens and is by no means rare but it isn’t a default.

I'm in situation with kids and wife's earnings that anything less than 80k will probably lose us money as we would have to hire additional childcare help. And that additional expense would eat all my take home income. Unless I can find something part time or work from home with flexible hours.

But it sounds like tradesman salaries are topping out around where software developer salaries start. Unless just living in an expensive area ups those salaries significantly.

Done any installs of r32 units yet?

No, and I haven’t had ‘installer’ as a job description since I was an apprentice- it’s shit work for newbies and jailbirds, you might have a full tech doing a little when it’s slow, or showing up to finish technical parts or something like that, but you don’t do a lot of it in your career with experience unless you screw up.

Most jobs still use 410. The industry in general won’t switch until actually forced to do so.

Ah, that explains why Barclay says "installer" with a hard r, and how they manage to install units with casings live at 240v to earth.

Yes it does.