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America's new millionaire class: Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs

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185 points hhs | 2 comments | 13 Oct 24 15:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.498s | source
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SoftTalker ◴[13 Oct 24 16:38 UTC] No.41829404[source]▶
There are several tradespeople I know (electricians, plumbers, carpenters) who make more money than I do. But I don't begrudge them that, electricians do work where a mistake can literally kill you, and all of these jobs have high injury rates and will wear your body down much faster than sitting at a keyboard.

Edit: and there are no "open source" tools. You have to buy them, and good ones are not cheap.

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orwin ◴[13 Oct 24 16:44 UTC] No.41829463[source]▶
Carpenters too? I'm not from the US but this is a crowd I know and talked to quite a bit, at least in western Appalachia. It seemed to me they are shafted quite often, as big companies hire them as subcontractors 90% of the time and underpay them. The last 10% another tradesman/local architect get a contract and hire them directly and they earn almost twice their usual pay but that's a small minority of their contracts.
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frmersdog ◴[14 Oct 24 01:12 UTC] No.41833230[source]▶
Something I've been thinking about recently is how much of the economy is basically just trust-peddling. Jobs and entire companies that essentially only exist to vouch for the people who do the actual work (and take a healthy cut of the pay in the process). In some cases, this is probably a useful service. In others, it's clearly preying on the trust deficits that certain people, who are otherwise hard-working, upstanding members of society, suffer from. That's parallel to how big corporations have convinced us to trust them and their representatives over independent workers. Sadly, a lot of the attempts to disrupt this status quo just end up with a new middleman.
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1. ethbr1 ◴[14 Oct 24 01:45 UTC] No.41833435[source]▶
I'd think about it less as trust and more as risk. Specifically, risk arbitrage.

The originating buyer wants quality work, probably as a one-off, but doesn't know or want to know how to find someone like that. Everyone is high risk.

A matchmaker company in the middle has ongoing relationships with the end contractor, knows their work is decent, and provides a framework / legal liability / insurance on top. The contractors they know are lower risk.

So the matchmaker can charge {full cost of high risk - slight discount} while knowing they're actually only taking on {lower risk}.

Where it seems to go pear-shaped is when the matchmaker gets too large and can no longer individually vouch for their contractors (e.g. IBM Services and globally integrated service companies).

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2. frmersdog ◴[18 Oct 24 16:24 UTC] No.41880903[source]▶
Trust is an appropriate metric to consider. Often, the matchmaker company isn't being evaluated on material criteria like performance; they're contracted because there is some preexisting relationship (not always direct) between decision makers at the two firms, or because they hold a certain reputation. You could say that risk to firms are lowered because liability is transferred, but that's sort of orthogonal to my point that the point of existing from the point of view of the middlemen is not to trade in risk but it trust. Risk is a commodity, trust is scarce.