Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

>They charge 100€ per hour!!!! Just got my gas burner inspected. 150€ for parts, 150€ for work.

Because while, "thanks" to globalization and everyone speaking English, you can offshore the manufacturing of your iPhone to China, your HDD to Thailand, your chips to Taiwan, your Mercedes to Poland, your Nikes, jeans and t-shirts to Bangladesh, or the SW dev work of your website to Ukraine, but you can't offshore a government mandated and strictly regulated gas boiler inspection, which if fucked up, could get you and your neighbors blown up. On the same note, you can't offshore medical care, education, police, fire fighting, lawyers, real-estate, etc.

>[...]Same 100€ per hour as freelancer software developer colleagues. While their employees work for peanuts[...]

Are you talking about the trades people earning peanuts or freelance SW devs?




Sorry, trades people earn not that much.


Trades people employed for some unscrupulous business owner don't earn much indeed, but their employer is basically shoveling piles of money.

Independent contractors who own their own business are making bank. Source: my uncle is a self employed plumber. He can't even reply to all the calls he's getting and has to turn many down despite asking for a lot of money. The fact that he's not paying much in income taxes, doing most jobs on a handshake deal and cash payments helps a lot too.


That’s weird. I would say, that plumber’s clients might require official pay documents for insurance reasons.

Sometimes I am thinking, that I need to open my own shop as electrician and work as electrical engineer part time. I really hate sitting all day and electrician’s tasks are not too hard on the body. Dust can be dealt with using modern equipment attached to decent vacuum.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: