From observing the career trajectories of the tradespeople I've known who likely match or out-earn me, yes, the ideal (and, from what I can tell, not terribly unachievable[1]) path is to be running a crew (or two... or three...) with your name on the truck(s) no later than age 35.
That does mean the job becomes management, sales, and customer relations, but it's management, sales, and customer relations for a trade you know well, which (this is my speculation here) makes it a bit easier to swallow than doing the same thing at office-bound bigco for some product you were only introduced to last week.
[1] I suspect, from also observing the crews themselves, that it's achievable because it's relatively easy for someone with a decent head on their shoulders, who speaks good English, and with the ability to show up almost all the time and to not come off as a flaky meth addict or lazy scam artist when talking to customers, to move up very fast in the trades...
[EDIT] In fact, in the linked story, it appears the locksmith's early-retirement-from-locksmithing plan might be to become a landlord. Also a fairly solid plan, and another that I've seen tradespeople follow—they have an advantage because they can achieve better results with less money on property maintenance, between their own skills, their connections, and having insight into what a good price and good work look like in other trades.
Working in software doesn't confer social status and never has. Money, maybe, but not status.
Lawyers' wages are badly depressed, supposedly, yet "I'm a lawyer" instantly confers better social status than "I'm a software developer" or even "I work at Google". Doctor, professor, those are jobs that come with a little or large bump in social status. "I'm a software developer" is like "I'm an accountant"—neutral at best.
Pretty sure enough (doesn't need to be a high proportion of them, really) office workers can re-train as e.g. locksmiths or plumbers fast enough if the money is really there that a substantial bump from this effect will be short-lived.
Hell, I'd kinda rather do something like that, if the money were as good, and I'm already reasonably handy. Pretty sure I'm far from alone, and again, it only needs to be a few percent of laid-off office workers able & willing to train into blue collar jobs to flatten any price spike.
The idea that anyone but capital's going to benefit from this, if any of it plays out the way AI-maximalists think (separately, I think that's mostly BS, but do think this is going to provide the activation energy for another wave of off-shoring instead of hiring back US workers when the AI tools prove inadequate) seems so naïve that it's hard not to read it as deliberate propaganda.
You could spend the time you'd have spent reading the news instead reading actual books on history, poli sci and political philosophy, ethics, economics, et c., and then figure out who the right person to vote for is and what the right votes on various issues are in like 30 minutes of search-n-skim per election.
This pattern would result in a far better-informed voter than one who diligently follows the news all the time but doesn't read many books. The amount of news you need to read to make informed decisions at the ballot box is usually tiny, if you have the background to understand the news—and if you don't, consuming more news won't help much with that. Meanwhile, it takes a ton of close book-reading before you start to see diminishing returns on that front.
After a lot of consideration of this question (I have also all-but written off Rails work, after doing a lot of it) I think it's a combination of two things, one technical, one business-social:
1) Rails and Ruby will gladly let you make an absolute garbage fire out of your codebase, while it still technically works, and discovering how exactly the garbage fire is structured so you can start trying to put it out is unusually difficult in Rails. You don't have to make it a garbage fire, but they won't do a single thing to discourage it, and once it's bad, it's hard for an outsider to show up and figure out how to fix it, because of how the framework and language are designed.
2) Rails is often chosen by very price-sensitive companies trying to move fast, as cheaply as possible. This means high turnover, lots of enthusiastic juniors, outsourcing (often passing through multiple outsourced teams...) and often mediocre or poor management oversight.
The result is that a high proportion of Rails codebases in the wild are both remarkably terrible and impractically difficult to restore to some non-terrible state (i.e. they're the kind of cases where the right call really is to just start over—one of the things that makes them hard to work with is that a bad rails codebase is especially hard to rewrite-in-place, it's just a ground-up replacement job usually, but you won't actually be allowed to do that because see again: price sensitive, so you'll just live with an awful pace of development and poor application performance while management gets increasingly frustrated by the outcomes of their own choices)
Can confirm, I'd charge a laaaarge premium to ever work on an existing Rails codebase again.
Did it several times over a period of 15 years and they were always a wreck and unreasonably painful to work with. Every single time.
I'd start a green field one, no problem, provided I get veto on gem choices ("Let's use some twee fucking template language that's a ton worse-performing than the default and doesn't let you programmatically control nesting levels / end tags because it's terribly designed" yeah how about we don't do that because it's going to make my life a living hell) without charging a premium. But no more onboarding to rails codebases without enough money to make it worth my hating every second of work for the (assuredly short) duration.
The way US cops talk is a whole thing. It’s one of the most-distinctive job-related American English variants. Even more so than white-collar “business English” (“let’s take this offline and circle back to it, as per my prior email”)
Some of it’s weird posturing (I’d put the “sir” thing in that category) and a bunch of it’s a combination of actually-effective and folk-supposed-effective ways of speaking to dazzle jurors, plus probably some other motivations and influences thrown in (some Hollywood-military turns of phrase and vocabulary, certainly)
Any way to run the Docker version without the external DB requirement? I have a bunch of things running on my home server and so far every one is a single image with no external requirements, which is very nice. Everything that needs a DB just uses sqlite, makes it operationally very simple, and nothing I do even comes within the same universe as the kind of usage that'd cause sqlite to become a bottleneck (and this doesn't look like it would, either).
That does mean the job becomes management, sales, and customer relations, but it's management, sales, and customer relations for a trade you know well, which (this is my speculation here) makes it a bit easier to swallow than doing the same thing at office-bound bigco for some product you were only introduced to last week.
[1] I suspect, from also observing the crews themselves, that it's achievable because it's relatively easy for someone with a decent head on their shoulders, who speaks good English, and with the ability to show up almost all the time and to not come off as a flaky meth addict or lazy scam artist when talking to customers, to move up very fast in the trades...
[EDIT] In fact, in the linked story, it appears the locksmith's early-retirement-from-locksmithing plan might be to become a landlord. Also a fairly solid plan, and another that I've seen tradespeople follow—they have an advantage because they can achieve better results with less money on property maintenance, between their own skills, their connections, and having insight into what a good price and good work look like in other trades.