When I first came to New York, I did not come with a plan to be an HVAC technician. I came with ambition, a background in heavy duty vehicle sales, and the kind of hunger that makes you say yes to opportunities before you fully understand what they are. When I was offered an apprentice position, I took it. And within the first few weeks on the job, I started watching people fail. Not at the technical work. At the basics.
I want to write about this honestly because I think it is one of the most important things a young person entering any trade needs to hear before they set foot on their first job site. Not the technical stuff. The stuff that determines whether you last six months or build a career.
My boss told me, before I had even gotten properly started, that there had been many before me. And the reason they did not work out was not that they could not learn the trade. It was that they could not show up for it. Not one person. Several different people, each with their own version of the same problem.
One showed up late. Not once or twice but consistently, as if the start time was a suggestion rather than a professional commitment. In a trade business that runs on schedules, on customer appointment windows, on a dispatcher trying to coordinate multiple jobs across a day, one person showing up late disrupts everything downstream. My boss was not running a school. He was running a business. Lateness was not a learning curve. It was a decision.
Another showed up tipsy. I am not going to pretend I did not understand why a young person might make that choice on a given night. But showing up to a job site where you are handling tools, climbing ladders, working around electrical systems, and representing someone else's business with alcohol still in your system is not just unprofessional. It is dangerous. My boss did not have a conversation about it. He did not need to.
There was the smell of cigarettes and weed that followed someone else through the door every morning. Again, I am not here to judge anyone's personal choices. But you are entering someone's home or their place of business. You are in their space. The smell you carry in with you is the first impression you make before you say a single word. And in a referral-based trade business, first impressions travel.
💡 The pattern I noticed: None of these people thought they were doing anything that serious. Each one probably had a justification. But my boss was not looking for justifications. He was looking for professionals. Those are different things.
Then there were the ones who had none of those obvious issues but still did not last. And honestly, watching these people struggle taught me more than watching the others fail.
They had a problem with the back and forth. In HVAC, especially as an apprentice, you spend a significant portion of your time going to the truck. Running for a tool. Fetching a part. Going back for the right size fitting because the one you brought was wrong. This is the job. This is not beneath you. This is not a punishment. This is what being an apprentice looks like in the real world, and the techs who understand that move through it without complaint while the ones who do not start to show their frustration in small ways that senior people notice immediately.
Try doing that in the middle of a New York winter when the temperature is in the teens and the wind is cutting through everything. Or in the middle of July when the heat coming off the pavement makes the air feel like a wall. I watched people lose their patience with the weather as if the weather was something that could be negotiated with. It cannot. The job does not pause for your comfort. It never has and it never will.
And then there were the hours. Seven in the morning to seven at night during the busy summer season is not unusual in HVAC. Cooling season in New York is not a gentle ramp up. It hits fast and it hits hard, and the phones ring constantly because every residential and commercial customer who ignored their maintenance all winter is now dealing with a system that is struggling. The work comes in waves and the waves do not care about your preferred schedule.
Some of the people I watched leave the trade could not make peace with that reality. They had imagined the job differently, I think. They saw the technical skill and the potential income and the independence that comes with being a tradesperson, and they did not fully account for what it costs to get there. The hours. The physical demands. The fact that you are on someone else's schedule, in someone else's building, solving someone else's emergency, in weather that nobody ordered.
I am not writing this to criticize anyone who did not make it. I am writing this because I believe most of those people could have made it if someone had been honest with them before they started about what the apprentice experience actually looks like. Not the version that gets presented in a trade school brochure. The real version.
The real version involves discomfort. It involves subordinating your preferences to the demands of the job for a period of time. It involves being the least experienced person in the room and doing the least glamorous work until you have earned the right to do the more interesting work. That is not a flaw in the system. That is how knowledge and skill transfer from one generation to the next in every trade that has ever existed.
The apprentice role is not a punishment. It is a foundation. Every great technician I have ever known went through a version of it. The ones who approached it with patience and professionalism came out the other side with something that cannot be taught in a classroom. The ones who fought it, or disrespected it, or thought they were above it, mostly did not come out the other side at all.
If you are entering the trades, read that paragraph again. Then read the next article in this series. Because what separated me from the people who left was not talent. It was something else entirely.