This is what Ive shifted to as well. Trades are much more useful in life, because you can't pay to get a job done right, and paying anyone else at all is far too expensive.
For most people you have the reality of needing a 40 hour week job to live, and there's plenty of people who spent the 4 years to get a bachelor's in compsci and nobody cares to hire them. Software is volatile, you can spend plenty of time making something that will not work and won't be at all useful.
Reality is the software job market sucks, and people have to learn how to build their own houses or else become stuck as rent slaves.
I disagree. I really enjoy woodworking, but it's definitely not to save money. Same for working on motorcycles. The former is rendered useless by economies of scale, the latter by the cost of my garage and tools.
Woodworking is apart of a series of skills that transfer to other useful trades. Hard to make buildings if you don't know how the basics of how wood works.
I didn't pick up woodworking to build a house. If that was my goal, sticking to programming would be the fastest way to get a house built. My ability to make money from programming far exceeds my ability to save money by doing anything else. If it was about the money, I wouldn't rent a garage, fill it with tools and spend my weekends building subpar furniture for twice the cost (a common woodworking trope). I'd just have it shipped to my door.
I probably average to about $50/hour programming. Last time I hired someone to fix something in my house I ended up paying about $350 for 1.5 hours of work. Physical materials was just a low voltage cable.
I had a plumber quote me $1300 to replace a $250 part that just screws on/off. I did it myself in a few hours.
Since I work on salary, one of the best ways for me to get more money is to save mine by not paying overpriced contractors to fix things around my house.
That's of course assuming that you are already skilled and equipped enough to do the job yourself. If you're starting from scratch, you'll end up saving below minimum wage by doing it yourself.
Besides, if you're already working 40 hours a week, the remaining time is much more valuable, because it's relatively scarce. Not everyone is comfortable spending their evenings doing extra work.
Okay, good for you, as I said in my original post the job market for software is not generally that good, and the vast majority of people work low paying jobs.
For most people you have the reality of needing a 40 hour week job to live, and there's plenty of people who spent the 4 years to get a bachelor's in compsci and nobody cares to hire them. Software is volatile, you can spend plenty of time making something that will not work and won't be at all useful.
Reality is the software job market sucks, and people have to learn how to build their own houses or else become stuck as rent slaves.