I too had many shitty jobs in my early 20's and reading this article kinda triggered those job's bad memories and how much I hated working at those places. I remember even after getting into tech many years later I would sometimes have dreams where I would be back in one of those jobs having a minor case of PTSD.
That being said there are other ways to do the type of career shift that the author wants. My Wife's cousin who worked as a electrician near SF mentioned to me one of his co-workers was a former sr. director at Oracle who got burned out and wanted to try something new. I asked him how they liked the new career and he said she loved it. That job payed well and didn't require the forced degradation seen at amazon warehouses, plus you get to interact with interesting people and travel to different locations frequently.
A senior director at Oracle likely had enough money to be able to afford to take classes while not working (and not going into debt), get an apprenticeship (mandatory for electricians) working for peanuts, and then spend a bunch of money on advertising and/or leverage all his business contacts (as everyone, especially the wealthy, need electricians at some point.) He could afford to pay $$$ for all the electrical code books that non-master-electricians are required to memorize (and pass tests on.) He likely didn't have to worry about health insurance, wasn't carrying any debt, had a reliable car, etc.
Dear everyone in this discussion: stop pretending like people working Amazon Warehouse jobs can just switch gears, and especially stop citing examples of rich, educated, privileged people doing it as "proof" it can be done.
It's pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps nonsense. These sorts of jobs are so physically demanding that you end up exhausted at the end of a shift and there's not much energy for other things unless you're pretty young....and unlike wealthy connected people, they don't have the personal/professional network.
I don't think you "get" what I was trying to say. I had mentioned a actual person - this was a woman and not a man btw(I mentioned that, I guess you didn't read my post close enough), who moved out of a engineering director position and was now a electrician. They don't own their own electrical business, they are just another electrician on the job. And yes they probably are very wealthy but wanted to switch careers like the author of this post and really enjoyed going into manual labor and getting out of tech. I don't know what else there is to argue about?
I used to do landscaping. One morning I pulled my then-girlfriend out of bed by the legs because I was dreaming about dragging a tree into a hole. I moved a lot of heavy trees and shrubs in that job. Haha, memories!
That being said there are other ways to do the type of career shift that the author wants. My Wife's cousin who worked as a electrician near SF mentioned to me one of his co-workers was a former sr. director at Oracle who got burned out and wanted to try something new. I asked him how they liked the new career and he said she loved it. That job payed well and didn't require the forced degradation seen at amazon warehouses, plus you get to interact with interesting people and travel to different locations frequently.