Started ranting with the wife about technical jobs…
Ranting with not ranting at? It’s like an argument concert. She rants, I agree and rant, she responds with a loud denouement of whatever. Life around here can be quite different, really. Quite different, when you realize that she’s the truly technical one. The hardware junky that builds things. I’m just her one and only flunky that keeps the software running.
…and what they pay these days. Most of the places that advertise computer assistance/repair services pay no better than the places where the sum total of knowledge required to do the job is to be able to say “do you want fries with that?” We’ve gotten most of our business from people who have first called a number they heard advertised; and then after *insert business name here* made the problem worse, they did some searching and found us. We’d love to be the first ones that get called; but we just don’t work that cheaply, and shouldn’t be expected to.
What’s out of sync is that we don’t charge any more than *insert business name here* (less in fact) it’s just that as sole proprietors we pocket the full hourly charge for ourselves, like any real professional would.
And then I started off on a tangent. Specialized knowledge. That’s what makes a profession what it is. Imagine what it was like back when houses first started getting electricity. You already had plumbing, most likely. But this electrical stuff was all new. Someone who understood electricity and its rules would be highly valued. What followed would be decades of hard learning for all involved, with more and more people getting experience in the field. At some point, common knowledge of the basic rules of electricity made it seem like any old idiot could go out and wire a house and fiddle with electrical current. But that isn’t the case. Electricians still exist, and some of us still rely on them. Idiots get fried every year because they think they know about electricity. This isn’t that hard is probably the last thought they had.
While you won’t kill yourself trying to do some of the more technical jobs for yourself, when you realize that you’ve just turned your very expensive computer into a paper weight, you might wish you were dead.
No, I don’t think we need the government to step in now and start setting standards for a computer profession. I haven’t noticed that it’s done anything for any of the other professions out there including architecture. I just think it’s a shame that you’d pay a plumber an hourly wage that an attorney might charge, to handle the mystical plumbing problem you’re having, but computer problems are a different matter? You want fries with that?
