You don’t start at 80,000 a year. That’s such a lie. You make about 600 a week to start, roughly, depending if you get enough miles. You don’t get the good routes, staying in well populated areas like the i5 corridor, at first. You stay in the middle of no where Arizona, North Dakota, etc.

You spend a lot on food because you can’t buy bulk that easily like you would for an apartment. Want a hot meal? You have to eat at fast food restaurants or truck stops.

How’s your back? 7 months I went from never understanding back pain to 6 years later I still suffer from the back pain.

Family life? HA! How does that work when you VISIT home for 3 days out of a month and you get calls CONSTANTLY that you have to get back to the truck. It’s not likely the military where you are doing something decently important. You are wasting your life to ship clothes for the Gap or frozen pizzas.

You are constantly sleep deprived. Constantly sitting. The companies hound you constantly about speeding up and trying to break the law to get loads faster to their destination because they screwed up the logistics and didn’t do some simple math. Yes, they publicly say they don’t tell drivers to break the law. Bullshit. CR England is the worst about this. Knight wasn’t so bad.

Fuck driving jersey in a truck.

The industry needs MASSIVE reformation. Then, some of the arguements here by folks who never did it can be remotely valid. You ruin your personal life and your body for realistic 300 a week after you figure all the costs for not ever being home.

There IS money being made out there by large firms and small firms alike, but it is absolutely NOT based on merit or skill at all.

Whether a business is a failure or a success is 99% based on the relationships and contracts it forms. Typically, unskilled managers and executives will forge the deal FIRST, and then go get the expertise and skilled laborers after.

Startups are an exception to this rule, since the technology is all so new. But rapidly, we all see the "money guys" and the "business guys" coming in to the profession day by day, buying up tech, creating bogus certifications and so on that just add the cruft and bureaucracy that monopolies need to survive.

For every trucker making $130,000 a year, there's 100 truckers making $35,000 a year.

For every trucker making $30,000 a year, there's probably 10,000 unemployed or underemployed people begging for the chance to make middle class money rather than $10 an hour at Burger King

I know this is NH, so skills are viewed as technical with all other skills regarded as "unnecessary fluff", but at the end of the day business is built on human relationships, so I'd argue the ability to make and maintain relationships with the right people is one of the most important skills one could have.

In the ideal world, when you want to buy a product or a service, you would consider the value it brings to you based on hard facts, consider other circumstances impacting the costs - like e.g. product A is a bit better, but product B has support people in your country, speaking your language, etc.

Suddenly, comes product C. It's very much inferior compared to A and B, but the producers of C spent most of their budget on sales and marketing. Your boss knows all about C from on-line ads. A C salesman comes to you, promising you features they know they won't deliver, but also know they'll be able to weasel their way out of along the way. Oh, and he brings some nice "off-the books" benefits for you personally, as part of "building customer loyalty".

Sales and marketing as applied in practice distort the market. What a salesman says can be - and often is - completely disconnected from reality, so in presence of salesmen, products are no longer chosen based on objective value they provide. The incentive structure this creates makes everyone else have to lie too, or go out of business.

That's why many people don't like those skills and practices.

What you’re describing here, sales people lying about capabilities and then failing to deliver, is something that maybe happens in complex business to business transactions, where the product is a set of services and products that defy “apples to apples” comparison.

Again, the sales and marketing are integral to the product. I don’t believe companies will survive if they practice outright fraud on their customers. This is not an easy problem. For the example, simpleminded approaches like forcing government to accept the lowest cost bid on complicated products has tremendous downside.

FWIW, managing people, organizations, setting up deals, marketing...these are “hard” skills. What makes them hard is that the parameters of the “problem space” are almost infinitely complex, the work product is ambiguous, and often the involves the focused cooperation of people, who are notoriously unpredictable.

Managed systems comprises of “soft components” is a very hard challenge.

Personally, I simultaneously appreciate just how hard those skills are (I like tech partly because it's much easier than dealing with humans at scale), despise the way those skills are most commonly used, and understand how some dabbling in dark arts is necessary to even have a fighting chance on the marketplace.

> What you’re describing here, sales people lying about capabilities and then failing to deliver, is something that maybe happens in complex business to business transactions, where the product is a set of services and products that defy “apples to apples” comparison.

> I don’t believe companies will survive if they practice outright fraud on their customers.

Well, outright fraud is illegal, and therefore happens less often. But between that and being fair and straightforward there's a whole spectrum, and from my experience almost all companies lean far towards the dishonest side. Just listen to any discussion of marketing people about their strategies. Would you apply similar methods on your friends and family? Would you skinner-box your niece for extra change? Would you price-anchor your mother with a birthday gift?

I simply believe that, as a society, we have way too low standard for business interactions. We allow ourselves to be manipulated at every way without question, and even praise the master manipulators who are skilled at what they do. I'd love for that to change, but I have no idea how to help - so for now, I just resort to expressing and explaining my distaste for manipulative practices.

No. It does happen, not "maybe", every day and for every kind of decision, complex and simple. If something is "apples to apples", the sales work is to mud the waters.

... obviously unless you happen to work for the company with the good (or least bad) apples, in which case your jib is to spread the word that good apples exist.

Inventing something is a value-added game. If I make us a knife that lets us cut a cactus in the desert for water, and we both survive the day because of that knife, I've added value.

If another guy makes the same knife, and now we have to compete for your attention, distort deal terms and product features to "seem" better than the other knife, etc, then this is not adding value. This is destroying time and money.

Sales is a zero sum game. One company wins, the other company loses. That's ok, but the winner should succeed thanks to price + features (e.g. who makes the better knife), not who "promises" you their knife is "better".

In an ideal world, we all just have a spreadsheet of all the knives available out there, their price, what they're actually built to do, and you just hit buy.

This is old school Econ 101, but I think it’s relevant. Know we have multiple options for knifes. How do we decide the best one? We let people decide for themselves, and price is the signaling mechanism as to where resources should be focused.

So we have a “market mechanism” for discovering quality, thereby making “market” an integral part of the system.

It could be done otherways, and markets have known weaknesses, especially for certain categories of goods.

But for many categories of goods it’s a very powerful system to spur and support innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors. So to call an essential part of a market bases system valueless does not make sense.

Maybe - forming the relationships and contracts and forging the deal - is a valuable skill too, and since I've been on a lot of interview panels - getting the skilled laborers and expertise to work for you is also another very valuable "skill".

For example, "Rich people deserve to be rich because they showed the ability to accumulate wealth." - Well, that was easy...

Or another one "good enough" products are good enough because they are bought. Investing any more, e.g. into making a software have less bugs, or an electronic device, or anything, last longer, are useless, or the market would already have provided that outcome. What a nice and easy circular argument. Imagine Gillette produced razors that last ten years, including blades. Very bad for them! Would it be bad for the mankind overall? If you believe in "the market" then yes, it would be bad for mankind. You can take any other product and company, incl. all the "lemon market" stuff. If the market prevents you from voluntarily doing better (because you will be outcompeted) it must be what is good for everyone or the market would not have produced that outcome, Q.E.D.

I think that while the skill is obviously extremely valuable, also to society, what you can get with it is too much. It always leads to optimal outcomes if you already believe it does (because "market", magic word).

Just like in biochemistry a reaction can be enzyme-limited or substrate-limited, i.e. the path is too hard or there is not enough supply, I think the rewards for being well-connected are oversized because we don't have an issue with too few people desiring to be well-connected, but that the path is hard. Paying more does nothing to how hard it is to become well connected, and increasing the desirability of being well-connected doesn't do anything either.

I think there is a strong case to be made that they add value. One issue they solve is simply the communication of the existence and value of said product in an increasingly crowded and noisy world.

To take everyone’s favorite example, look how Apple has consistently worked on their image and marketing, and how that expense and effort serves as a signaling mechanism to consumer purchasers of very complex products. Of course, Apple delivers the goods, consistently, and has built up a symbiotic system of communication and technology.

The two big differentiators Apple has used are there focus on design and user experience. It’s not hard to see how these areas of attention blur into the boundaries of marketing, customer service, and product development.

There’s something I think of as “coherence” in created things. When it’s achieved, to end user it might seem like nothing, because the effort put into the subtle aspects of the creation become “invisible.”

If you’ve ever attempted doing something even as simple as writing marketing copy, the difficulty of bringing focus, clarity, and effectiveness quickly hits you in the face.

A company that can execute these “non-technical” skills well is at least a good bet for executing the technical apsects as well.

Can anyone think of counter examples? Companies that talk a good game, set up outstanding business structures, and then consistently deliver rubbish?

Edit: your comment about the contined existence of merely adequate products, wouldn’t you say that there is a real issue of cost? A company could dramatically reduce bugs in software putting more testing into the product, hiring better engineers, but if people don’t want to pay the price, the product is not “better.”

There is a fundamental issue in economics, which is how to “value” things. Price is used as a proxy, because it’s inherently quantifiable, and the alternatives lead to highly contentious differences of opinion.

In a perfect world, admin and delivery are nearly 0, the warehouse where it's made is once again as cheap as possible, and the materials and labor will decrease over time as more and more laborers acquire the skills necessary to make the product. This is why drone pilot income is rapidly plumetting, along with database administrators and so on.

Knowing this reality, major corporations and the government have colluded together to "regulate" and "standardize" many industries, as well as creating many burdensome and time consuming processes for all businesses (accounting, HR, compliance).

This admin cruft is the very secret sauce that keeps monopolies and oligopolies alive, while killing innovation and price competition. Essentially, this is the American health care system.

Sales is just part of that cruft. There's a reason I don't need a sales guy to buy a solar panel-- I just need customer support at the most.

Sorry, but you are wrong. The price of a good is not a function of these. Price is a function of demand and supply. And demand and supply are in turn also a function of price.

For example, you cannot demand a salary based on the cost of your education. The market will decide what is the value of your labour.

Also, if you try to find a job in a saturated job market, you will understand the importance of "Sales". If you can't market yourself you wont find a job in a high-supply labor market however qualified you might be.

In a nutshell I think those who think Sales is "cruft" are the those who had it easy all their life, and who never had to compete with 100 guys half their skill.

As someone who has set prices in a small business, that is not true.

Please don't take the simple - and simplistic - models used in trying to study an incredibly complex world as if they are reality.

You get some useful results from the Bohr model of the Atom - that doesn't mean it's "true" or "reality". It's a model. As some STEM professor (might have been physics) once said to the new students: If you want "truth" you are in the wrong lecture, philosophy is down the hall on the right.

So you get some useful results from assuming that this is what determines price, so that you are able to create a model. That does not mean that that's "how it is". The more closely you look the less it is true.

Humanity should not have to waste its time going through the dog and pony show of every company and every vendor.

Wherever possible, goods and services SHOULD be commodities that are interchangeable. A rune platebody will always be a rune platebody from the grand exchange, no matter who is selling it in Runescape.

Obviously there will be edge cases for custom products and services, that's totally fine. But imagine buying a water bottle or choosing antivirus software after being subjected to 8 different sales guys and their "funnels".

No thanks! Let's bring PRICE as close to COST as possible.

That was not what I said - at all! Of course it adds value. Reading through it, it seems you entire reply is premised on something I did not even remotely say?

I edited the post and added a new last paragraph.

That's a pretty broad generalization. I'm not sure I know how to frame that question in an answerable way, much less that I know the answer off the top of my head.

But in most unbanked areas like rural African villages or Brazilian favelas people have smartphones. That’s one thing almost all of them have.

But people don't. No amount of crypto 'disruption' is going to change that.

I would rather live in a system where no one legitimately begs for food, because they have an app that eliminates food insecurity for everyone.

Do you know how much money is donated around the world every day, to hard hit areas, universities and so on? This can be done way better. Look at what GiveDirectly does in Africa. We can do better than that.

Watch the video at https://intercoin.org — this is not theoretical! We are doing it.

Any job that pays $130k/yr will have these sort of dynamics.

Precious opportunities don't come along unless you have some serious leverage up management. That's not just true with trucking but with any job on earth.

I love how on big job sites, they would have their reps, banners and make sure all their guys have IBEW bling to ward off inspectors like garlic for vampires.

But yea, there are also ways that the Qualcomm doesn't "work". Thus, we "have" to run paper logs.

America vs Europe in a nutshell.

Also economical compensation for medical error is something you apply to the government to get. If you think they pay too little or don't pay then you go to court.

I've noticed that in the US almost everything seems to go to court straight away. In Norway and probably rest of Europe there are much more non-court systems to deal with problems.

E.g. if a company has behaved badly you contact the consumer ombudsman and they will make a ruling or advocate on your behalf. They kind of collect complaints from many consumers and will get more involved if more consumers complain.

Companies will usually follow a ruling by the consumer ombudsman. If they don't do anything then that is when you get into court.

It might be one of the reasons why there are significantly fewer lawyers in Europe than the US.

They can speed if there's a speed limit on the road (such as when you enter a populated area or get close to a dangerous crossing etc.). The tacho does not know about it. In Poland, truck drivers speed all the time.

Of course there’s a shortage. If pay was 200-300% higher and drivers could afford to work 2/3 of the time and get adequate rest/healing/family time, the shortage probably would not be so severe.

"Markets don’t work that way. You raise wages, trucking gets more expensive and demand drops, causing all sorts of unintended consequences." YES! That is EXACTLY how markets work! These "unintended" consequences you speak of are the whole beauty of the free market. When you get a shortage of one good, the price of the good increase. This sends a price signal out in the rest of the economy which means more resources gets allocated to produce more of that good. That is the so called "unintended" consequences you speak of.

"Trucking is so competitive that most companies would go out of business if they raised wages 200-300%." No, because they could raise prices. If all the competition got 200-300% higher wages, they would also be forced to raise prices, which means you are competing on a higher price.

Take McDonalds in my native Norway. They pay their workers about $25 per hour. How can they pay that without raising prices a lot? Yes they do have much higher prices than the US. But how can they then compete? They can because everybody else has higher prices. This isn't rocket science.

"The world is governed by reality, not wishes and hopes and mandates dictated by people that have little understanding of the economics of logistics — or the economics of anything for that matter."

Exactly, in a functioning market economy, prices of a good for which there is a shortage such as truck drivers, the price would go up. When prices don't go up, it suggests it is not a functioning free market. There could be many reasons for that. One would be e.g. collusion between companies or weak competition.

Oh no, a thousand times no. Individual trucks hauling goods around the world is awful to the environment (and to the roads) and if the pollution was somehow priced in you’d be scared. And that is the real cost - we just ignore a decent chunk of it and leave it to the next generations as debt.

The last thing we want is to encourage even more of this practice. Companies would immediately use the tax break as a competitive advantage and consumers would come to simply expect lower prices. We can’t keep destroying the planet like this.

In shorter-term economics, the roads are a MUCH bigger factor. Tractor-trailer trucks do an enormous amount of damage to the roads, due to physics (I believe the factor is related to weight to the 4th power). Basically, if we didn't have trucks like those, we wouldn't be spending even a fraction as much on road upkeep. Road maintenance costs governments a LOT of money, so it only makes perfect sense to have commercial trucking and diesel fuel taxes to pay for it.

Really, what they should be doing is making it easier for stuff to be shipped by train, and then only trucked the last few miles.

A lot more respect has to be thrown onto the driver's life. Trash truck drivers still go home at the end of the day. Yes, it's a shitty job too. But the biggest benefit, you go home at the end of the day.

Long haul, yea, you CAN'T get that luxury. But especially with these big companies, they can figure a 1-2 week on, 1 week off system. That would vastly improve the situation. Is that perfect? No. Needs some work. Sure. But 3-4 days home for every 30, and you have to argue and fight for that. No. Fuck that. But that'd take gov regulation to have happen so it's an even playing field for everyone. The trucking companies make really good margins for only paying most guys $0.45 a mile and charge over $5 a mile to the customer. The England bros (the owners) had 6 high end cars delivered to the main yard in Utah on one day. They looked like kids on Christmas Day. This was during the "Hard times due to high diesel prices and all of us had to do our part to save money for the company." Look, I'm a capitalist, from beginning to end. But don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining. At first I thought it was weird for them to deliver them there, but I later found out they store a few of their cars on the side of the HQ since it has 24/7 protection.

There are other things that can be done, but I'm calling it done reminiscing about those shitty months for HN.

There are a lot of truck drivers out there, they have families and friends. And I hope that there are unions.

I refuse to be cynical about the “unchangeability” of laws because that makes me powerless. Better go for it and fail until it’s done.

Such legislation is not impossible.

How many gap t-shirts does an 18-wheeler transport? Would it be insanely expensive to reduce the profit on each shirt with $0.05 and pay the driver double?

Is this really unthinkable to “economists”? Is maximizing profit for the few who don’t really need it the only unchange-able variable in this equation?

The owners probably make a little less.

You must be new to capitalism. Snark aside, I doubt most trucking companies will raise wages if their margins are increased. Most likely it will result in bonuses for management.

I was never a truck driver, but my father was. He was in the military for about 7 years, then got discharged for a severe injury. He worked as a truck driver for about 3 years, then did all he could to rejoin the military and upon doing so never went back to truck driving. This was about 20 years ago, but seeing how messy employment in America is today, I doubt treatment or working conditions for drivers is much better than it was then.

I know a few other guys who made the same decisions, military->truck driving->beg to re-enlist. Same guys who said, "I'll never go back to military".

Lol, you can pursue any career you want, lawyer or doctor. Other first gens know what I'm talking about. I was more of a math and history guy, so neither lawyer or doctor interested me.

Before you apply market theory between classical, Keynesian, supply-side, w/e, get these answered first to fix this issue.

1. Home time. Life isn't about working every day. It's proven by many psychologists and sociologists that general mental health degrades due to over working lifestyles. No one lays on their death bed and says "I wish I worked more." 3, maybe 4 days a month to see your wife and kids. Seriously? To haul clothes or frozen burritos to Laredo so they can go to Mexico... which was the funniest load I've ever done. Military is one thing. There's at least some sense of pride in that and different compensations

Disagree? Don't visit your family or home for 26 days out of every month. When you do visit, set your alarm for every 3 hours (even at night) to simulate logistics telling you to go back to the truck for a load. Let's see how long your girlfriend/wife stays with you. Bet your kids will have a nice relationship with you too after you miss their birthday so you can deliver clothes to some hipster store.

2. Health issues: You are sitting CONSTANTLY. Let's also put the fact that you're bouncing up and down, especially through Cali Hwy 99 and any Louisiana interstate. Do I have to mention how bad sitting for 11+ hours a day is bad for you? Then, all you do is sleep because you're so exhausted. Oh, how's your sleep in a loud truck stop? Sudden door slams. Assholes talking loudly as they walk around. Got a refrigerated trailer? HA! The motor to keep it running is literally 3 feet from your ears!

Disagree? I mean... I can't understand how you can imagine that lifestyle is healthy. No, you don't have a real opportunity to jog. I tried. I was a 2 mile every other day guy prior to truck driving. I got in 2 jogs total, only when I was in Ontario, California. Other truckers know what truck stop I'm talking about.

3. Government: Look, a lot of the regulations in place right now are actually God sends compared to the "good old days" old timers talk about. Because the companies abused the fuck out of drivers. Honestly, thank you Qualcomm for lobbying the fuck out your services. If it wasn't for digital logs, truckers would be forced into more shitty situation. Accidents statistics are low compared to then for very good reasons. But state patrol and weigh stations prey on truck drivers because any normal ticket is instantly double the price because it's a commercial vehicle. They make more money off truck drivers.

Disagree? Look at the 20s-40s. Truck flipped over and the driver is dead because he was forced to do a 30 hour trip in 20 hours? Does the truck still work? Yea? Cool. Put it back on its wheels, get a new guy. Companies taking advantage of employees and skirting the law is NOTHING NEW.

4. Terrain: Dude, the east coast is not really setup for 13 foot trailers. There are so many under 13 foot overpasses that you are in constant fear the moment you go off the interstate. The route planning is on the driving and a majority of intel you can get on that kind of info sucks. There's the garmin gps for truckers that's pretty good, but I ran into one mistake it had in NJ that I barely avoided. That would have been a Youtube "Dumb trucker driver" video. But again, constant exhaustion and bad information.

Disagree? Just drive around where you live (mostly east of the Mississippi river) and notice all the signs that are under 13'5". Need to get to your super markets and malls some how. Most of the straight forward routes are... well... wrong.

5. Companies: Unless you have money to buy your own truck and trailer, you're working for someone else. And if you have the money, you probably won't be the one driving because it's a shitty job and it's better to pay someone else peanuts to do it. To be fair to all of them, business is business. But it's still predatory. A majority of the people in truck driving can't get out once in. I'm lucky. I know that. Most of the guys didn't have parents that forced them to become educated. And the companies know this. Honestly, this is the industry that needs one of the old school unions the most. They make sure you are never near home, they keep your miles minimal to make sure you're dependent on sucking on their tit... it's a one sided situation.

Disagree? You know what. You do it. No one is stopping you. Do it. The bar to qualify is not high, at all. The pool of folks isn't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. You go signup for this great job of truck driving you think it is and do it for 6 months. Then we'll talk. No? You have a better paying job? One that's maybe fulfilling to your soul? You like seeing your family? See your kid's sports games? School projects? Maybe see their birthdays? Have dinner with your wife? You like your bed that's not made out of Styrofoam? You don't like smelling collective aged trucker piss at truck stops because instead of walking into the station, you just piss between the tractor and trailer?

Yea, talk is cheap. I love the one article from a few months back about there aren't enough women doing truck driving. Hmm... maybe they're not stupid. Think of that? What woman is dumb enough to "enjoy" all of that? Guys are known for doing dumb shit. Let's be realistic. And I've done really dumb shit in my life. Especially when trying to impress a girl.

I think that's a good start. Do you see how these are human problems? Not math problems. And I'm a math guy. I'm comfortable in code and numbers. But I'm well versed in history to understand when an equation doesn't apply. Get some of that crap figured out, then you can argue about market forces and other silver spoon conversations.

Are you going to apply that theory to software development also?

The unfortunate fact about this sort of freedom is that all reduces to personal enterprise. Don't have enough of it. The bad news is you are likely to do nothing no matter how easy things are made for you. Have good enough amount of it you see people doing all sort of good stuff in war zones and refugee camps too.

The thing about freedom especially in the modern context is its all on you.

In the software field these days you can learn and do anything you want with may be few hundred dollars worth investment. You have plenty of free/cheap books, chrome books, free linux and a lot of online mentoring should you want to learn and do something.

If the complain is that its hard. Then guess what, anything worth doing is hard. You are unlikely to do anything significant in any profession by just coasting around. And that's true for people of all identities not just a specific gender.

I have to wonder if folks like yourself ever give it a rest and just actually read what someone has written without spending every second of it looking for a reason to get self-righteous.

To be fair, the dev market has the luxury to be a forefront in addressing sexism issues properly. Essentially, we're all suppose to be level headed, contemplative, long term thinking, logical people. The fact a majority of companies have allowed ambulance-chasing, popularity contest politics to run the show instead of going, "You know what, let's figure out how to properly address and solve the issue", pisses me off. I get where you're coming from, but there is some truth to it. I just think the conversation has become to politically polarized and both sides are just regurgitating the same nonsense without wanting to accomplish anything. This is why I hate politics, so so much.

But on the other hand, there are dirty jobs and jobs of passion. Trucking is a dirty job, not a passion job. No one does it for fun or as a hobby. Lots of people are not pro devs, don't intend to be, but still do it for fun. That distinction must be made first. A job isn't "a job". Some are done just for the paycheck and that's it. Some are done because you truly enjoy or believe in what you do. Shit jobs for shit pay are typically for guys, let's be honest. I wouldn't want my nieces ever doing it. My nephew, that lazy bum needs hard work in his life. Once you realize "This is a shit job, with shit pay and a shit lifestyle", I think that gender ratio argument is kind of meaningless.

I'm laughing, especially with your description of Cali just above. (but I agree with what you've said, in this comment and elsewhere in the thread)

Maybe things have improved a little, but in the old days, programming meant sitting in the basement without natural light, staring at a screen most of the time. Yes, there are meetings, but meetings also suck.

These days, maybe it is not the basement anymore, instead you have open plan offices with hundreds or workers.

It's probably much more healthy to take a job with frequent human interactions. Surprise: these are the kind of jobs women tend to take.

Look at a standard office building. Check where the developers are sitting. Then check where the women from marketing and human resources are sitting. I wouldn't be surprised if even today, you'll find marketing in the well lit corner offices.

I know what career field you SHOULDN'T enter!

Here's a better example. No BS recruiter. Some salty old recruiter, on their last day before they retire. So they're just going to say it like it is. Here's the conversation to anyone:

"Alright, you have a high school diploma, no college, in decent shape as you like to work out, a misdemeanor and debt. I can give you a job where you shower every other day if you're lucky, eat nothing but fast food, get treated like crap by management, sit all day so you can develop back problems, visit home about 3 to 4 days out of every month, spend your time in middle of no where parts of America, get terrible sleep every single night and get paid around 500 dollars a week if you get the miles."

So again, women are generally not dumb enough to go "Sure". Most women are smart enough to go "I can make that same money elsewhere and still have a life without feeling like shit about myself." And this type of job is not available to single working moms since taking a kid with you is a general no-no. You can get passes for like a week stint from what I know. But that's it. Only authorized personnel are allowed in company vehicles. Most, no kids, period. Even if you're a guy.

It's not like there's prestige to being a truck driver either. No one goes "Mommy, daddy, I want to be a truck driver when I grow up!". The response would probably be, "Oh God... I've failed as a parent."

Look, as a software dev, yea, there are too few women in the field. Engineering in general. But this isn't about how to get women into engineering. It's about people thinking trucking driving is a fantastic job with lots of money just falling from the sky.

It isn't. There's a reason no one wants to do it.

If you want to have the discussion about the absolute need of dev teams needing to have women in them that goes beyond political rhetoric, I'm game. Because I'm fully for it. No immature obvious reasons either. Women bring vastly different mindsets and thought patterns that can take a mediocre team into ace level. I've seen it happen twice with about a 20/80 ratio. It more proves to my theory of the fact that good engineering teams are also more than their technical skill sets combined. Which, this also falls to there are different types and subsets of intelligence. I'm going to ramble on this because I'm writing a paper on this theory to try getting my company to test this out.

The family part, it is what it is. You can't force families to force what they want their kids to do. If that was true, I'd be a lawyer or doctor instead. Which I would have hated. Greatly. People have to be open and honest with themselves so they can do right to their kids. My nieces have me to introduce them to math, science, and engineering. I make sure not to be obnoxious about it, so they don't hate it. But I plant enough info about it in them so when they get into high school/college, they have a foundation to make the decision as to what to pursue and never be left behind. My nephew... yea, whatever. I think he'll end up living on his sisters' couch if he's lucky. But at the same time, the girls like to draw too. One's really damn good at it too. So I'm the one that buys them a fuckton of art supplies too. People like what they like. I know the whole issue with a lack of women in STEM+C, but I won't force it on them. I'll just make sure that they are comfortable with it if they choose to do it. But at the same time, the problem is, what if medical if their thing but they don't know it yet. Well, in reality, they have their mom for that. But let's say they didn't. I mean, that sucks when you think about it. At the same time, you can't solve all problems in all situations. My biggest issue is, most of the people who complain about it, aren't even doing what I'm doing. I think if less effort was out there complaining that women aren't in STEM+C and more effort was placed on encouraging young girls to do it, in the next 10-20 years, there might be little to complain about. Granted, my nieces are lucky. I never had someone like me to introduce them to STEM+C. One thing I did, I taught them how to figure and utilize angles, do proper measurements, and alter scale by building cardboard planes and figuring out the best designs for distance. That, I think, does more than just repeating "You need to do STEM, you need to do STEM, you need to do STEM". You got to give reasons to care about the maths and the science. But stop them from blowing the house up... that's a legit problem sometimes.

Sexism is obviously an issue too. One that I notice women who exodus the Cali market and went elsewhere (I'm in FL), seem to say "It's better here". Which, I'm not saying it's non-existent here, I didn't think it was any better or worse for a long time, but I've learned the Cali market is toxic as fuck. I mean, to hear once or twice that women feel more comfortable in FL in general, I wonder what isolated shithole they came from. When it's quite a few, I realize it's just Cali in general. Obviously it's not restricted to Cali, but I'm noticing a pattern that it's real bad in Cali as a whole. Plus, I notice more engineers from the Cali market under the age of 30 are really... not socially equipped. At all. I'm bad in comparison to my circle. These kids from Cali, make me look like some great charismatic leader. I wonder sometimes if some of these guys have people locked in their house that they've drugged. Misery style. I get creeped out when I have to visit. I legitimately think a lot of those guys really don't know how to talk to people in general. Huge departure from the old school guys I know, who were considered socially bad in their time. This new generation is worse. Then get them in front of a woman, the dude is absolutely just dumb. Next, give him an iota of managerial power. Guy who can't take rejection of any sort in a mature manner, then gets managerial power over a woman. Yea, it's a bad situation for her. So, if I was a woman in Silicon Valley, no, I wouldn't do it. Seriously. To hell with that shit. Let's reverse it out. Let's say dudes are the minority and I had to put up with that shit. Fuck it. Nah. Reminds me of Horrible Bosses, the dentist part. I'd prefer working lawncare in the summer instead. At least I'd keep a nice tan again. Actually, as a guy in a guy dominated market over in Cali... fuck it. Lawncare. I'm not dealing with it. The people are just backwards when it comes to dealing with other humans. It's a problem, I can't answer. It's an honest bad problem. And to be honest, I also feel it's an issue of witness guys not standing up and being men when they see it happen. Take the Weinstein shit going on. All these guys going "I knew about it but did nothing." Being a man is about stopping bad/dumb shit from happening, especially to women. That's the way I was raised. Don't let bad shit happen to other people, period. Society has made it difficult to stand up for someone else, for anything, without getting flagged for some other dumb shit. It's a bad cycle that needs to be broken at some point. I'm not equipped to answer it on a wide scope scale. I can only deal with it on my own local scale. And since I'm ragging on Cali, Florida has better beaches :P

It's all an interesting conversation I don't mind having. HN just doesn't seem like the place. This font makes it impossible for me to read, keep track and properly edit what I write.

I knew a software developer who purposefully became a truck driver because he enjoyed it. That was long time ago when conditions might have been better though.

East coast would have been nicer if I wasn’t so constantly freaked out for low overpasses. I5, for me, is the ideal route if I had to do it again.

Previous HN Discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6023484

Grapevine sucks big time on a heavy load. Siskiyous can be scary when you are super green. Cabbage over in Oregon, first downhill route, oh god, I nearly shit myself because the fog... I’m sorry, the clouds because you’re so damn high up, came in, at night.

Got to love folks who think a "startup" can save the world when they have no clue how the real world works. They totally missed the fact that truckers earn peanuts. So add more cost on top of a meal they can't really afford to begin with? Maybe an iPhone app can help truckers? Totally save the poor with iPhone apps. That's an idea...lol.

How well developed (or undeveloped) is the rail network in the states? Is it equipped to handle this cargo and if so, why do businesses turn to the road network instead?

Rails are terrible for on-demand supply chain due to lag time for loading, unloading and then logistics to ship again on a truck anyways.

Bit of a self fullfilling prophecy there.

Lots of places around the world have rail slips going to the back of shopping malls.

The real reason is that 100 years ago the rail companies in America were so predatory and vicious to any customer trying to ship something smaller than a boxar's worth that the first generation of truck drivers were pretty much heroes for providing an alternative. The companies decided to stay in an inwardly looking economic niche and pretty much only ship slow moving multicar loads.

To be fair to the logistics people, predicting demand is difficult. Also, long supply chains suffer from the "bullwhip effect" which can cause extreme misprediction at the tail (source) of the chain.

Roughly 1100 mile haul. Industry standard base time is 55 mph. Some states limit trucks to 55mph even if it's a 70mph interstate. Also, you aren't driving 55mph going up a mountain with a full load. There's a reason why there are truck lanes on mountain passages going up hill. You're going 30mph sometimes (Grapevine and Siskiyous for that particular route).

That's about 20 hours, of straight driving (in theory). Figure in some food stops and 2 refueling stops (100+ gallon tanks, takes a while to fuel up). So that's a bit more than 20 hours. Oh, also you can only drive 11 hours within a 14 hour window. Then you have to not drive for 10 hours to reset your clock. Government regulations.

It was 9:35am when I had possession to leave. Official pickup was 9:15am, but the lumpers were behind schedule. I was to drop that trailer in a yard in LA by midnight, same day or I was fired. Yes, I was told fired.

You're welcome to try that math. 14 hours to do a 20+ hour load, if you don't count gov regulations. It doesn't take a liberal arts degree to figure that one out.

But surely this must be a fluke mistake! No, this was not the only time with this piss poor math skills. There were about 2 dozen occurrences of stupid load times because, yes, they can't do simple math because it was on their bill of lading. It's not like "Oh, this load was to be picked up a week ago and no one has". It was scheduled that way when it was first ordered.

These shipment orders are made weeks in advance. Not on demand. A lot are actually "standing orders" with big companies because they have consistent loads to send out and get a better rate if they guarantee ahead of time that they'll have one.

So don't believe the bullshit, cop out rhetoric they try to pull.

It was however the first and only time I was told I was going to be fired for it though.

Use humans to do last-mile delivery of the goods, but let a machine do the open road.

What exactly is the back pain from? Outsider's perspective would expect that since it's mostly sitting, at least your back should be okay. What am I missing?

Even have a year of hard dedication to dealing with it, I still "feel" it and get some flares. As long as I'm always careful about my posture when doing things, I can mitigate it. Like, I don't pick up my keys by bending my back, I have to crouch or I risk getting a flare up of pain for the next day or two. But before trucking, I never had to be "thoughtful" of my back.

Best of luck with the recovery.

Yes, at any point, I can go "I should take a 5 min walk around" or just stretch my legs, which I do relatively often. Most "sitting" jobs have that luxury. Even just stretching your arms out is a luxury. Always one hand has to be on that wheel in a confined area.

My job is also sitting for 12 hours a day (although much better regulated and not as damaging as yours).

Try stretching your psoas, look for gymnastics, cycling or dance stretching. It's been the only thing that has helped me. I started having problems to straighten each morning, constant pain in the lumbar zone, bulging disc. A job partner told me about the psoas stretching and it works! It's the only thing that can make the pain go away. I'm telling everybody I know now! And usually helps a lot.

I only need to stretch it once a week but I must be constant if I fail to do it, the pain slowly returns.

The economy does not price jobs based on prestige, education level, or some other signal... that's a judgement made by certain people about what they think a job is worth.. not the market. The opinions of people about the worth of a job are irrelevant.

Most cases I would guess this is true until you hit the point that the pay is enough to live comfortably. Then it changes.

My partner was recently approached for a position offering compensation more than 200% of their current for the same work. However,the hiring process is exposing red flags hinting at a toxic working environment: On-fighting, lack of planning, unreasonable expectations. I'm guessing this is the reason the pay they offer is so much higher than it 'should' be.

That position may remain unfilled for quite some time. Working conditions are such a major aspect of any job, and while folks will put up with a bad working environment if the pay is right, that only works up to the point of being comfortably paid. Once you reach that level most folks start to care more about what their work day feels like. Toxic work cultures are very hard to fix, too.

This all gets silly when looked at in isolation, though. :-) I'd agree that there's not always an amount of compensation that the company could pay that would also attract enough workers.

IME places like this usually pay low to middle of the road salaries though, I suspect you partner may have avoided a bait and switch hiring process.

There is definitely a price for that but if you are comfortable emotionally and physically now 'double' isn't enough in a lot of cases.

So they need to increase compensation even more to account for these aspects of the job. If they can't fill the position, it is because they aren't paying enough for the job. I don't see how anything changes except that employers don't want to admit that their jobs suck so much more than similar jobs that paying even twice the amount doesn't pull people in.

Trucking companies paying drivers 30-50K/year are probably not in this situation; software companies got there a long time ago for engineers.

Many positions get assigned a grade based upon the nature of the work. A series of qualifiers fix that kind of position to a grade. You can earn anything inside of that grade, but not distinctly above it.

Considering yearly cost of living increases are usually fixed at about 2%, it can take one some many years before they even approach the cap. And then there is the yearly culling of the herd with no standard qualifier.

Somebody wants more money? You find a better job.

One of my favourite [read that with sarcasm] lines I'd heard in a yearly review was, "your salary here is like running a marathon..."

To put it another way, they typically know when they're recruiting for a position where the compensation and job expectations don't align, and they hate it. They hate wasting their time, your time, etc. They argue against it, but at the end of the day, they're not setting the salary benchmarks/pay bands. Those are set by some Director/VP and dictated to HR.

They don't expect it. They put up an offer and from the pool of candidates they pick the ones they prefer. Everyone wants to maximize the return they get from their offering. The same goes for job seekers, who seek the cushiest job they can get.

On the other hand, the reputation of an employer or of an industry plays into the market price. You'd think that post-2015 most life scientists would not have worked for Theranos for any salary at all, and if truckers tell you that bonuses are worthless, that means you have to raise the base salary to find any takers.

Software/SaaS is able to give ever increasing wages because of near infinite supply of investor money and/or insane profit margins (which won't last). Some other industries, not so much.

If you can't afford the inputs you need at the price the market is setting, you can't afford to run a profitable business.

Yet the headline talks about 80 kUSD/year.

Are you willing to drive while sleepy, break regs when the customer is demanding you drive longer to deliver their products (due to traffic delaying you or similar)? Its a really screwed up industry.

No, trucking was a decent living 'till deregulation in the 90s.

"How Trucking Went From One of the Best Jobs in America to One of the Worst" http://time.com/money/4325164/trucking-worst-job/

This is one of the reasons there is a shortage alot of those drivers that used to "cheat the books" (which is a whole other thing) stopped making as much money, and can not pull the same number of loads anymore

Bonus, if you are caught the company doesn't care, they will hire someone else, but it sticks with your record.

Which is why the company is also fined in many places (like the EU). The problem is the company most of the time.

Screwed up would be forbidding people from making this personal choice through regulation.

It was an interesting observation that he contrasted to this myth of the independent truck guy working for himself... when really most are just as tied to company whims and rules that they have nothing to do with, and arguably have less freedom than most workers.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35025680-the-long-haul

Here's an HN discussion of the book:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310849

A passage from the introduction on the hierarchy of truckers that probably has some relevance here:

To the casual observer all trucks probably look similar, and I suppose people figure all truckers do pretty much the same job. Neither is true. There’s a strict hierarchy of drivers, depending on what they haul and how they’re paid. The most common are the freighthaulers. They’re the guys who pull box trailers with any kind of commodity inside. We movers are called bedbuggers, and our trucks are called roach coaches. Other specialties are the car haulers (parking lot attendants), flatbedders (skateboarders), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers), chemical haulers (thermos bottle holders), and hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys). Bedbuggers are shunned by other truckers. We will generally not be included in conversations around the truckstop coffee counter or in the driver’s lounge. In fact, I pointedly avoid coffee counters, when there is one, mainly because I don’t have time to waste, but also because I don’t buy into the trucker myth that most drivers espouse. I don’t wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots, or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson. My driving uniform is a three-button company polo shirt, lightweight black cotton pants, black sneakers, black socks, and a cloth belt. My moving uniform is a black cotton jumpsuit.

I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.

You want people to be truck drivers? Get the trucks good internet access,provide laptops and tablets where possible and give the drivers time to take it easy between and during runs. Internet access wherever you are means you can maintain some social life and video call with the family.

On the flip side,trucking isn't just a job,it's a lifestyle. You never leave work since your truck with the hidden Mics and location tracking is also your home. The compensation just isn't worth the job for most people. Better pay helps but so does hiring convicts and relaxing the driving history restrictions (like running a stop sign 4 years ago shouldn't make you unhirable)

Unfortunately it's the good companies and drivers that find out their industry was swiped from underneath them first. It happens in farm labour markets too.

Bigger companies start undercutting with cheaper labour and worse conditions, the smart people leave the industry all together because the writing is on the wall, and those companies willing to pay for good people with reasonable work conditions have no one to hire anymore.

If there is a real shortage why do truckers get paid less than some fast food employees? The article seems to answer its own question: Very low pay, very high hours, and little time spent at home/with family.

The other thing that people don't realize about those kind of jobs is, for men at least, they are very hard on your prostate. Sitting for such long periods can cause it to swell leading to prosatitus along with a whole host of other bad health effects. All that being said, our jobs were cake compared to long haulers. You would need to pay people $120-150k before you could get a consistent hiring pool.

Things I found interesting from the article:

a. Approximately 150,000 Sikhs (my edit: Sikhs are a subset of Indians and to a smaller extent Pakistanis) in trucking, 90% of whom are drivers.

b. Those numbers are growing rapidly, with 18,000 Sikhs entering the industry in 2017 alone.

c. Sikhs control about 40% of trucking in California.

d. (In the US and Canada) - A network of Indian truck stops is spreading along the main routes, serving some fine daal and naan bread. (My edit: Sikh highway food is a cultural bookend in India and it is whimsical to see this transported to the Rockies)

e. Earnings of $42,000, or about $20 an hour, a sum that may dwindle after expenses. Annual turnover rates within firms hover around 90%.

f. The American Trucking Associations warned of a shortage of 50,000 drivers by the end of 2017, rising to 174,000 by 2026.

d. The median age of the private-fleet driver is 52;

(1) - https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/05/03/an-all-am...

Now THAT would get me to conisder trucking for a living.

Indians know how to do truck stops right.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-44275782

Yes, they have. First, the fuel situation: trucks carrying fuel to gas stations were blocked by strikers, so they quickly ran out of fuel. Buses need diesel fuel to run, so people can't get to work. Cars also need fuel (gasoline or ethanol) to run, so even people who have cars can't get to work. Those with gas-powered cars (mostly taxis) could still get fuel (it goes to the gas station through pipes), but even these need a small amount of gasoline to start the motor.

Then, the food situation: almost all the fresh food is gone from the markets, and what little there is got really expensive (like 4 or 5 times more expensive). Longer-lived but basic food (like rice and beans) flew from the shelves, since people still have memories from the hyperinflation days last century. Huge amounts of food had to be thrown away in the farms.

Hospitals had to cancel all non-emergency surgery, since stocks are running really low. Industries have stopped, since they can't get their inputs or don't have space to store their outputs. There was a risk of water rationing in some places, since stocks of water treatment chemicals ran low.

We're lucky that our country's power supply is mostly hydro, and most of the thermal generators either get their fuel through pipes, or had enough fuel stored locally. Only a few distant cities (probably without interconnection to the national system) lost power.

Things are getting better. Many of the blockades have now been cleared, and fuel trucks escorted by the police or the army are getting fuel to essential services and to the gas stations. Hopefully trucks will soon be able to get food from the farms to the markets.

That's interesting. So the gas stations have compressors?

The other option would be LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gas), that too is usually delivered by truck.

In my experience, not all stations have natural gas, but it's not exactly rare. I found a list which matched my intuition: http://www.gasnet.com.br/postos_gnv_lista.asp?nomestado=Rio%... shows 531 stations on my state, several cities have 10 or more, the state capital has over 200.

It seems to me that truck driving is at the same boring, unhealthy and dangerous. I can't imagine not making serious mistakes if I had to drive on a freeway for 8 hours a day or more.

A friend from the Baltics is teaching new drivers... from the Phillipines, because the local ones are getting "expensive". To speak of a race to the bottom...

(Not dealing with ethics here, just strategy for winning.)

We've had a few years now of news stories about how truck drivers will all be replaced with self-driving. I'd wondered about whether that was good strategy on the part of companies working on self-driving, because it might cause truck drivers to organize and lobby for regulation to keep it out. But it seems to be working for them.

It's been small utility trucks ever since, driven on short hauls, by people who might well live walking distance to my house.

A train would never deliver to my house, but to this day there are still unused train slips leading to factories around my urban area, and in Europe there are plenty of shopping malls that have a train slip as well as a truck loading bay.

(Except politics, that is)

The reason it isn't done this way is certainly not the amount of labor.

Most truckers work as members of a fleet. Where a larger company handles the contracting, insurance, fuel, and maintenance while the drivers are paid to drive. This job can pay ~40-60k/yr.

This article tries to paint a world where truckers are fabulously paid. Why would nobody want to work this job?

But in reality it’s a very stressful job underpaid job. And a small subset of truckers manage to become well paid contractors but the VAST MAJORITY aren’t. This swings the average/high end pay into idiotic territory.

Paragraph 5: "government statistics say median pay for the industry is $42,000."

Well. There's your problem.

It's also not clear if the $80k jobs referred to here are employee or owner-operator jobs. If they're employee it's a massive outlier and if they're owner-operator the expenses are high and $80k results in rather pathetic take home pay.

For some reason I can see this company operating like an uber with tractors waiting at way points to swap trailers. Problem is the swaps will be conducted at the drivers discretion which opens the flood gates to all sorts of abusive shenanigans and race to the bottom economics. I can picture all the complaints of drivers meeting in private parking lots causing damage and trespass. Or meeting in residential neighborhoods off highways causing all sorts of noise and possible damage. Excessive idling causing noise and air pollution, drivers taking up parking or partly blocking roads while waiting for other truck which is trapped in two hours of back up.

These are heavy vehicles that make a lot of noise and beat on the pavement. Best keep them rolling along the highways where they belong. That or keep the heavy duty noise to terminals located in industrial or commercial centers where people wont be bothered by the racket.

Make sure to pay extra for a top slot, and go on youtube. Everyone who owns a luxury car despises car shipping companies.

uShip used to have a decent program where people will do it for about $400-700 with no wheels touching the ground. You need proper registration and title work though.

I'm sure if the companies increased wages that shortage would magically disappear.

Anyway, I don't think is a wise move t o invest in truck drive carrer, when we are so close of autonomous trucks.

I had two uncles who retired from a F500 train company (many years ago). It sounds like this industry is going to end up with one person riding in the equivalent of a caboose to handle the unexpected stuff, or to oversee intermodal activities.

Either way, most are paid by the ( loaded ) mile which makes them some weird bizarro version of Uber drivers.

There are a HUGE number of business opportunities in the "short-term" 5 to 10 year market. About 15 years ago, when 3d-printing was "about to take off", I know of some entrepreneurs who started a 3d-printer / 3d-CNC Mill sharing service.

It was an old-school service. Telephone based, door-to-door, handshakes kinda deal. They knew it was a temporary job. This was a door-to-door business in the age of the internet. Furthermore, 3d printers were about to become mainstream and in everybody's houses.

Well, it looks like they were wrong. And their business model matured for the last 15 years and grew instead. Turns out that the 3d printers at Universities and bigger labratories sit idle most of the time... and even today, there's no consumer-grade 3d printer you can buy that gives you the quality or speed of the ones at public universities.

Indeed, there are probably more business models out there that are based on "temporary" work than are based on forward-looking models. If there's a need today, that need will likely remain for decades to come, even as technology improves.

Ehhhh, this is not really true. All (decent) printers operate at similar speeds and qualities these days, the main difference is that cheaper printers require a bit more fiddling and may not be as reliable if you're planning on running it constantly. A $4000 Ultimaker really doesn't perform any better than a $800 i3 Mk3, which in turn is only a bit better than a $400 CR-10.

There are industrial ($100K+) range printers by companies like Stratasys that are really a different class of machine that are dramatically more capable, but universities aren't really operating those and only laboratories with a specific use case buy them. Most universities are running the same sort of printers that consumers are buying, e.g. the one I attended had a fleet of Lulzbots. The appeal of services like you describe is that you don't have to operate the device yourself at all, nor do you need to make an initial investment if you only want one thing printed. Most people don't really have a need for a 3D printer nearly often enough to justify investing even $3-400 nor do they want to learn how to use one, hence there is a nice niche serving their infrequent needs.

I agree with the comments saying that if the pay was higher then there wouldn't be such a shortage and the fact that is generally true. That doesn't mean the market always adapts fast enough and balances itself though.

* only 3 people, so purely anecdotal.

Humans can barely handle it.

AI only being useful on highways is still useful -- if not still far off. Off-ramp the AI trucks into a huge ass parking lot where a human does the last mile(s).

Driving on the highway is not the only significant part of the job, far from it and I suspect some people are very enamoured by their dreams/greed mixed with the holy tech, just like the pneumatic high-speed trains from the 50s/60s, then maglev, now hyperloop.

Efficiency gains on the existing tech + infrastructure will always win over revolutionary new tech.

If drivers are only responsible for the last mile(s) it’s quite possible the job changes from “drive one truck, sit and wait for it to be unloaded, leave” to “pick up the truck, drive it to the destination, go pick up another truck”

For perspective, 20 years ago, what would have been your opinion about bipedal robots walking on rough terrain, self driving cars, and classifying objects in realtime from a video stream? Would you have said "Yea, those things might happen, but certainly not parking a truck." What other tasks do you currently think might be possible with AI in future but we haven't achieved yet? Tasks of similar difficulty to the parts of truck driving you mentioned.

I wouldn't want anyone still living like this to go hungry--we don't make the choice to enter the world we find ourselves in, as far as I know--but I can't stomach that lifestyle for myself or my children, or the kin of anyone I've known or met. When I was young it was thrilling, with engines and freeways and drive-thrus. My friends bought cheap sports cars and motorbikes, and there was 100 years of movies to watch.

Now I am older, and I find it inhumane.

But an article like this one brings me back to reality. I guess I'll stick to coding for a while longer.

What would be the annual billable revenue if you decided to buy a truck and start hauling cargo around yourself, cutting the middlemen? There are people who do this.

Obviously your income is limited by regulations regarding how long you can drive and how long you must rest in between. These physically clamp the amount of time you can do billable work (unless you're driving with a partner and take turns).

I would guess some hundreds of thousands of gross revenue per truck annually, EBITDA is probably a lot less. Would be interesting to know what the books might look like.

Not really. These vehicles are at the top of the list to go autonomous sooner rather than later. In fact, aren't they being tested in Europe? Germany?

Editorial (and slighly off topic): Perhaps it's time for the USA to revisit its consumption based economy? Less good consumed means less goods to ship. Perhaps the driver supply is fine. It's the excessive demand that's gone mad.

I rear-ended a U-Haul with my company big rig (totally my fault) and they didn't care enough to fire me, just deducted some random amount from my pay and didn't actually fix the bumper on my truck. The U-Haul was fine, those truck are seriously solid it turns out.

I would go back to driving trucks but it's kind of a rough life...

Remove the stigma, make it “cool”, and they’ll see more people applying.

a. Raise pay? b. Improve benefits? c. Improve working conditions? or

d. Bitch and moan to the press?