Dropping Comp Sci for a trade career as electrician?

I read the bell curve a couple days ago and it got me thinking about where my intelligence would get the most reward.

I go to a UW school for computer Science and do well on class, a little better than average.

But the thing is that i am just average, destined for making 80 g a year in a low to middle level positon for the rest of my life. And every day i hear of the best and brightest ditxhing other fields to go into CS, i will soon be below average, with 20 percent taking 80prrcent of the profit becuase they are better workers.

But, if i was to dropout and become an electrician, i would be near the 95th percentile in mental ability, and would therefore earn near the top of the payscale, and have a nice high level position.

I also realized that i cant sit and code for more than 2 hours before i need to go for a walk and eat and then read or something else just to get over the boredom.

Compare that to how much fun i had working with my uncle all days rewiring his mancave.

I think im going to dropout and do an apprenticeship.

What do you all think? Is this a bad idea?

i think you're right, you are an idiot

Why

You're going to have to work twice as hard if you're an electrician in the 95 percentile than if you're the 50th percentile in CS but it seems like you've got some solid reasoning already so go for it.

I went to a state school and now work at amazon in seattle making 175 total comp out of school. If you graduate from UW with a cs degree, you'll make similar.

a trade such as electrician is more about attention to detail than knowledge and brain power.

I do commercial/industrial electrical work, and I enjoy it. It's certainly the best of the trades. The course work, however, is all about the fucking code. There's a little bit of math, but you can probably pass without it. Here's the real catch: most electricians spend there days doing the same fucking little thing over and over again. Only if you work for a smaller, lower-paying company (as I do) will you enjoy a wide variety of challenging work. More than half the electricians we hire don't work out, because they don't have the necessary experience. ALSO - you need to be strong. There's no getting around that. Our boss won't hire manlets, and (for a variety of reasons) he's given up on women. Also, be prepared to join a very heirarchical, medieval-guild-like structure. When the journeyman in charge tells you to splice wires his way, you've got to shelve your ego and do what he says. On the good side, you get to play with lots of cool tools, and every once in a while you'll find yourself handling a horse cock (pic related). Last thing - residential wiring gets old very fast, unless you like the taste of old insulation, and you don't get to play with the big boy tools.

Does any field not require attention to detail?

What do you mean by "the fucking code"? What is code?

The fuck. They only offered me 160k and said it wasn't negotiable. How'd you get 175k?

Bump

Sorry, I forgot that I was talking to a CS major. I was refering to the Electrical Code. It's a VERY thick book of extremely exacting rules. You need to know it intimately for a bunch of reasons, the two most salient being: 1) so you don't kill anybody with bad wiring practices and 2) so you pass your jobsite inspections.

had competing offer for facebook that I mentioned. don't know if it played a role or not. also aws is a bit different from retail, etc, I think.

That salary doesnt make me feel like yoi were middle of the pack. I bet you were near the top of every class...

Yeah I think the Facebook offer could help. Also I hope to god I'm not on AWS.

aws gets a rep for overworking and hire turn over, but I work from 10 to 4 with hour lunch. It's pretty comfy. Most nights I'll work longer though as I do really enjoy the work. One of the few places that I think you work on problems that haven't been done before (I know everyone says that, but the traffic that various AWS services receive is in a league of its own).

perhaps, I do have some open source projects that are pretty popular. still went to a state school not known for computer science though. Had total of 3 internships, 2 of which were at local unknown companies, last one was at amazon.

Well that makes me feel better about the hours that certain teams are known for working. All of my peers are trying to convince me that I'll be working like a dog for Amazon when I start, but my internship was only 35-40 hours/week.

Ya, I mean obviously every team is different, but there are definitely teams that work decent hours with an emphasis on work-life balance. Just try to avoid teams that are constantly putting out fires and constanltly being cut sev2 tickets and such (dynamodb, s3 come to mind).

Yeah my internship was with a pretty comfy HR team where the manager apologized for how busy things were over my 12 weeks when my coworkers were really only working 40 hour weeks. I put Kindle as my top pick, so hopefully there's some work-life balance if I get that team.

Is Kindle done by "Kindle" org, or is that like part of lab126?

I don't know much about the teams yet. I finished my internship in July and I am still waiting on team placement for May. I just attended a Kindle presentation that seemed interesting enough to put as one of my top picks for teams.

An electrician's work is much more useful and fulfilling than computer "science". Same goes for almost any other trade.

lol. come on man. computer science you can affect billions. electrician is lucky to affect millions.

Iol. come on man, most computer science grads end up working for Amazon.

>when you make life decisions based only on earning potential
Why dont you just neck yourself now and cut out the middle part?

Your horsecock is missing a medial ring. It's pretty close though

t. 162 IQ confirmed by mensa, never achieved anything, dropped out of high school cuz of persisent anhedonia and schizoid personality disorder
don't sweat it OP, you only lose when you desire to win

This is actually a very good idea.

There's almost no job you can take in CS that can't be easily outsourced to someone cheaper, unless you are at the absolute top of your field. This is only going to get worse as time goes on.

Meanwhile, an electrician has almost perfect job security, even at the very bottom of the field.

Also, on average, electrician pays better, at least until you get into that top 1% bracket and the occasional lucky bastard who invents the next over the top popular ap or facebook - but often that has more to do with good connections and people who are good at marketing, than it does with coding skills.

You'll also be less likely to be executed as a superfluous and potentially threatening meatbag. when the CS majors inevitably release the AI apocalypse.

>But, if i was to dropout and become an electrician, i would be near the 95th percentile in mental ability, and would therefore earn near the top of the payscale, and have a nice high level position
Wrong. As the great electrician who trained me once said “Its not what you know, or who you know. Its who you blow.”
You can be the smartest electrician alive, it doesn’t guarantee you will make more money than the dumb ones nor does it even mean you will perform higher quality work. Any moron who can follow a code book, and has a good work ethic can do a literally flawless job as an electrician. The reality is, your ability to rise through the ranks in any job is directly related to three things. Most importantly, your social standing with your superiors and peers. Then comes work ethic, and lastly intelligence. A hard working, charismatic moron will make more money than you and likely will be your boss.

That said, i have an IQ of 141(yes IQ is a meme, blah blah) and i work as an industrial electrician, while pursuing scientific endeavors in my spare time and building stuff in my garage. Its a very rewarding and pleasant life.