The Journey Starts here…

The journey begins here. Hi! My name is Jake, and I wanted to start off by taking the time to thank you for stopping by, this is out of the norm for me and isn’t something I would every really see myself doing, but you know what they say, “you miss 100% of the shot’s you don’t take”- or maybe it was great Wayne Gretzky, either way, here I am taking a shot and hoping I don’t miss. Being this is the first blog I’ve ever written, be easy on me, I promise they will get better.

Where to begin? Perhaps a more personal introduction than the what’s on the page you originally searched? I grew up in Queens, NY. My father Sammy, a hairstylist from Brookyln, turned sanitation worker, turned Correction officer, turned Limousine driver (I know, a man of many talents) and my mother, Karen- you guessed it, ALSO a hairdresser from Brookyln. Being that both of my parents are hairdressers you’d assume that I was destined to cut hair myself, right? Nope, I decided to get into one of the most cut-throat, time consuming, demanding careers that you can think of in the busiest city in the world. My parents weren’t really what I would call planners… they kind of just winged it all the time and luckily for me I inherited that trait early on in my life. When you ask a child in grammar school, or middle school what they want to be when they grow up, you’ll get the typical answers, a police officer, a doctor, a lawyer, a veterinarian, and that one kid that wants to be something extremely outrageous that makes the teacher smile, move on, and contemplate calling their parents to make sure everything is okay at home. But me? For as long as I can remember when asked what I wanted to be, I said that I wanted to play for the New York Yankees, and I actually thought I had a shot at making it to the big leagues until I realized that the chances were slim and even slimer for someone that doesn’t live in a state that has a warm climate year round. Now here I am, a junior in high school, LaGuardia Middle College Highschool in Long Island City, coming down from cloud nine realizing that I had to make a decision on what I was going to do with myself, and I needed to make that decision fast. To quote Steve from Blue’s Clues, I had to “sit down in my thinking chair and think, think, thinnnnkk”. What I had come to realize, is that I knew two things about myself, one, I was handy and two I wasn’t afraid to work hard and that there would always be a demand for physical labor, and I found that out from my old man. At a young age, I found myself outside with him doing yard work, shoveling snow, re-organizing the garage every weekend, and fixing things around the house. Our home always looked well-kept, which fit in with all of our neighbors because we did all of their house’s too… FOR FREE! While we never compensated with money, it taught me so much about myself, which was all the compensation that I needed.

Now, I’d like to go back to what I said a few sentences back, which was “I wasn’t afraid to work hard, because I knew that there would always be a demand for physical labor”. When that was a thought that came across my mind in the early 2000’s it was true, but in 2025 that is far from the truth. There are a few reasons why I decided to make the switch from being a Laborer to being a Superintendent. As time went on, I realized that, if I continued down the path of being a career laborer, by the time I was 50, I would probably need a few replacements surgeries, I realized that while NYC is one of the most pro-union cities in the world, there’s a good chance they won’t be around forever, considering only 20-25% of construction work in 2018 was union which is a decline from the early 2000’s where more than half of NYC construction was union, and finally because as we got closer to the 2020’s, robotics and A.I started to become a part of the conversation in replacement of humans. How much replacement? Well, according to Bill Gates, he predicts that A.I will replace humans for “most things”. Now, I’m not trying to scare anyone, or imply that there will be robots yelling “Get to the choppa!”, but I do think that robots and A.I will play a huge role in the work force, not just in construction, but every industry. This is something that I’m going to dive a little deeper into in future blogs. Now, I do think however, that becoming a superintendent for me was more than just fearing that robots are going to take over the world and put me out of a job, for me, there was more to it. Coming up in the union, I worked around some pretty intense, union or die, blue collar guys who taught me a lot, good and bad. They taught me how to survive in this industry, how to ease the sore muscles after a 14-hour day, how to avoid injury, they also taught me that the GC is public enemy number one, not the company guys, but the guys out of the hall. If you don’t know a union guy who strictly solicits his work out of the hall, then you don’t know intense, and these guys were intense. I have to give them credit though, they’re loyal to a fault for their union which I can understand completely, but I wasn’t buying it, and I knew the only way to know for sure, was to take the leap of faith and make the switch. You may think that switching to the “dark side” was difficult, and it was in some respects, like a pretty big pay cut, and the fear of being a younger guy telling career veterans what to do, but not long into making the switch, I knew I had made the right decision. Luckily, at the time of my switch to the dark side, I had the support of my fantastic girlfriend, Rebecca, who is now the most supportive wife a guy can ask for. I have a few of my buddies who are still working in the union, and doing great, but I always get the questions from them like, “are the benefits good?” or “do you miss being a laborer?” or the famous one that I get on a consistent basis from my brick-layer buddy, Luciano who came up with me in the industry, “how do you like being white-collar now?”. For me, the answers are easy, I may have taken a pay cut at the beginning, but now I make a lot more as a superintendent on a 40-hour work week than I did on a 40-hour work week as a laborer and I would have to work a lot of overtime to come close, I come home clean, I don’t feel the aches and pains I used to feel when I come home, I have PTO which is unheard of in the trades, and I enjoy my quality of life way more than I used to, so I stand by my decision.

Don’t get me wrong, while I love the decision I made, I do miss being in the trades sometimes. I miss the jokes that were told on coffee break, I miss the comradery, and above all, I miss not having to read 100 emails at the end of the day, but there is always a tradeoff. In my mind, the decision that I made to make the switch will hopefully be an everlasting good decision. I think that if and when robots take over the industry, regretfully, the trades may be their first target and that’s why I’ve decided to start really paying attention in hopes, that my ideas and thoughts can help shape what a new industry would look like and how I can find a way to make workers and robotics work in harmony. See, I think we as a society aren’t truly prepared for what is to come and the only way to get ahead of this, is to know what to expect and find a way as workers-as humans, to remain at the top of the food chain.