The 8th highest voted HN submission is on mechanical watches. I imagine that's the type the watchmaking school involves themself with because afaik all high end watches are mechanical.
They have a certain beauty in their intricate details working together for function. I do really like looking at the glass back which shows some details and you can see the piece that move to gain power.
Although it seems youd have to pay a lot to get an accurate one because I have a $250 mechanical Seiko and its time keeping is junk. It was mediocre when I got it and has gotten worse. It was $150 when I bought it so I suppose it would have been a good investment if it hadn't got beat up.
That’s why I eventually settled with gshock that has solar charging and syncs time twice a day with radio towers (or bluetooth if you are somewhere in the world where there is no time radio signal)
Even rolex needs time setting, servicing to lube and clean metal parts, etc.
Gshock on the other hand will work for 10-15 years without a single manual time adjustment or battery swap needed.
Absolute unit.
This gold metal square one I especially love for summer:
> Although it seems youd have to pay a lot to get an accurate one because I have a $250 mechanical Seiko and its time keeping is junk. It was mediocre when I got it and has gotten worse. It was $150 when I bought it so I suppose it would have been a good investment if it hadn't got beat up.
You know you need to service mechanical watches regularly, right?
A 7S26 movement (Seiko's mass-produced budget workhorse) isn't that accurate (I think -35 to +45s per day IIRC?). But if you paid $250 secondhand you most likely have a 6R15 or similar inside, which should keep between -15s to +25s per day at worst if regularly serviced. Often you can get much better performance from these movements than the specs imply.
But ... you need to service that poor thing. For a 6R15, every 5 years at minimum, but as an old watchmaker I knew used to say -- a watch will tell you if it needs servicing earlier. Sounds like yours has been trying to get your attention for some time :)
(Otherwise, it's like complaining that the Porsche you haven't taken to a mechanic in the last decade doesn't drive so well any more ...)
You will never get quartz accuracy from any mechanical watch, but that's hardly the point.
(The ETA 2824-2 movement in the page you linked to -- the movement that powers most mid-range mechanical watches -- is substantially more accurate than these lower-range Seiko movements, although it's more costly as well.)
>You know you need to service mechanical watches regularly, right?
Mostly, yeah, but I have some nicer pieces that have been in my rotation for decades with only the barest minimum of services. Like, I think my Omega (ca. 1998) has been serviced maybe once, and it keeps great time.
No, most high end male jewelry are mechanical watches (and much of women-oriented jewelry as well).
High end watches are such a solved problem we don't even talk about them anymore. Either the G-shock, the Garmin watches, or the Apple Watch run circles around mechanical watches in terms of functionality with each satisfying a different niche (100% self-contained, long lived smart functionality, glance-oriented integration with full-stack personal tech ecosystem).
I think most people when they hear "high-end watch" picture some sort of mechanical jewelry watch. When G-shocks, Garmins, and Apple Watches are a few hundred dollars and well-known luxury watch brands start at a few thousand, it's reasonable to consider the latter more "high end".
Personally I'm not interested in owning a luxury watch, I like the Garmin ones.
I would have expected guitar repair. One of my recent youtube channel finds was a young woman who repairs old guitars, rewinding pickups and such. Fascinating. I didn't realize one of the uses for Formvar (aside from films for use in electron microscopes) was insulation on electric guitar pickup wires.
There is something pleasantly backwards about a school teaching people to repair objects that were designed to last, while so much of the rest of the economy is optimized around replacement
It's promising and I'm glad to hear such a depth-oriented study of making things, taking time is still a thing in a fast world. People are paying to study this, nice
Yes, but notice the scale - 20 students, in a nation of 40+ million people.
We might call that a moral or poetic victory - but practically speaking, it's like an endangered human language which "still has over 100 native speakers". The future ain't looking good.
My grandfather was a master watchmaker and jeweler who learned his trade in the Soviet Union and then in Europe. After emigrating to Toronto after the war, he opened his own jewelry store, where he repaired watches and clocks, as well as crafted and repaired fine jewelry.
He was a true master of his craft and built a successful business based on his exceptional skill. He Was well known for his craftsmanship and his remarkable ability to repair virtually any watch or clock, no matter how complex.
Jewelers from across the city would bring him pieces that no one else could repair. For antique and vintage timepieces, he would often fabricate tiny replacement parts by hand when originals were no longer available. When he retired, very large companies would still come to his home to repair incredibly expensive pieces. He liked to tinker and would quietly work in his little home shop, pipe burning, radio playing, and visitors coming throughout the day to have him fix things.
When he passed, he had 10's of 1000's of watch parts in all these little bags that were all tagged and in boxes. We ended up giving them away to one of his customers who own several Jewelry stores. Had I known I would have offered them to this school along with 100's of watches he kept for parts.
My father was a watchmaker. Fond memories of going with him in his van to the various jewellers he did work for picking up and dropping off. I remember being given a big metal lamp from his workshop when he passed away and realising the body of the lamp was not isolated from the incoming power, although luckily not at mains voltage (not what killed him).
I would think so, in the same way instrument maker or painting maintenance can be careers: not for many, but a decent career for a few aficionados.
It’s not likely to employ millions of people, but there will be demand from people with serious money. For instrument making, research labs will need specialized glass parts, for example; for painting maintenance, museums have a need to keep their centuries-old pieces in the best condition. For watches, if you pay a few million for a watch, paying 10k a year for maintenance should not be a problem. For that money, you can make a decent living of 20 customers a year in many countries.
It depends on what you consider viable, and your level.
As someone in love with fountain pens and ink, I can tell you that there are absolutely wealthy pen turners, private designers, and the same with watches.
I mean people do make a living doing it, but my understanding is that it requires a lot of hustle—as a hobbyist you can just take your time and meditate and take a million pictures, but if you're trying to make a living you have to focus on volume, volume, volume... So you have to have a system, this one goes in the cleaner and you are immediately disassembling the next, another is in a tray next to the machine that tells you how fast or slow it's ticking... It is maybe less glamorous than it first sounds.
Mechanical timepieces are a luxury item, and these students are essentially artists in training. Wrist time was solved in the late 1970's with the commoditization of quartz movements. These 'jobs' will get replaced by AI at approximately the same pace as your local sculptor.
I don't know if watchmaking is one of them, but there are a bunch of traditional crafts which are actually approaching a danger point because there aren't enough up-and-coming acolytes in the discipline to replace them, even though the craft still enjoys enough popular support to have a thriving economy.
Anecdotally, I see enough mechanical watches on wrists and in duty-free shops that I imagine there's enough of a pipeline there for at least one school. Much like vinyl records it doesn't appear to actually be going away even if it's superfluous.
I have a friend who got an English and Creative Writing degree from a liberal arts college, and then immediately went back to trade school for band instrument repair. It's not particularly lucrative, as trades go, but it does seem a lot more future proof than most careers.
Correct, AI will not replathe 3 high-paying watch maker jobs that exist. You are the best kind of correct, technically. But you are distracting from the fact that most people aren't doing anything even remotely physical related in the space that some people posit will be decimated by AI: white-collar jobs where you are a keyboard jockey all day.
canada's economy is roughly slightly below Mississipi with increasing amount of migration from third world countries putting strain on its resources and with almost no plans other than to tax the already overstretched middle class
its almost the exact dilemma in Western Europe except the only saving grace is military security is guaranteed by its larger and richer neighbor
Yes, and it's a great example of an industry that was completely decimated by automation - you can get a functional watch for a fiver, whereas back when every watch was handmade and a de-facto inheritance piece.
But bespoke, handmade, high value, low volume stuff is still around.
I am literally wearing a watch right now that was produced without any of these artisans’ specialized labor and which boasts among its features access to AI.
In a very real sense I have replaced use of the skills of watchmakers with AI.
Sorry about that. To be fair most watchmakers were already put out of work by quartz oscillators and integrated circuits in the 1980s.
The reason that you bought your watch and the reason that other people buy these hand crafted mechanical watches are very, very different. Once upon a time, utility used to be what necessitated an accurate movement, and it came at great cost because of the skill, knowledge, precision, and artistic talent needed to make one; this justified further embellishing the movement with a beautiful case and band because it would be in poor taste to make something that is both expensive and ugly when your primary consumers would be aristocrats. Eventually timepieces became commodified as industrialization made their manufacture feasible at a larger scale, and later then the advent of the quartz crystal made mechanical movements functionally obsolete as a means of telling time accurately. Approaching perfect timekeeping in a mechanical movement is not meant to be utilitarian, but rather a practice in artistry. Mechanical watches are jewelry, and jewelry irrationally commands the price that any luxury does because it's a matter of taste and not utility. Nobody buying a Patek Philippe is doing so because they want millisecond accuracy via atmoic clock GPS signals - they buy Seikos for that.
Yet most people in the watch industry will suggest that the Apple Watch was a boon for the industry because it retrained people to wear a watch, a fashion that was being abandoned.
I don't know how high paying it is, although I can see how it can be, especially given there is a shortage of watchmakers in the developed world, even in Switzerland.
Basically anything that is a luxury good is probably safe from AI. If people are buying it for status or high performance reasons, they aren’t going to pick the low end AI slop version.
Unless they’re replaced by humans controlled by AI(look at the various research for BCIs or for gene therapy that allows for the possibility for you to be controlled by radio frequencies), then they’re very easily replaced.
As a Canadian cool! Never heard of this school before but on the west coast so probably why.
I've watched many watch repair videos online and the knowledge base required is huge. Also there are many tools needed which are not cheap. There is just so much to know that takes years to learn.
Very cool that the knowledge is being shared and the skill passed on. In my small town there was only one guy who worked on clocks and watches. He passed a while back and his kids continue with his jewelry store but they now send out watches and clocks to another business as none of his kids learned how to do it.
I discovered this school right after discovering the Richard Mille clock in Quebec City [1] because the school is responsible for maintaining the clock.
If you read about Harrison's Chronometers you read of Rupert T. Gould who suffered a Nervous Breakdown, and it is said fell into watch repair as therapy, bringing them back to life.
kid me thought AI would replace people doing insanely precise hand work. turns out it replaced me writing emails, and this school's still going strong after 80 years. lmao we got played
it's a funny meme but it's because software can iterate faster than hardware. Give it a few years for robot maids to come out that can do your laundry, then we'll see society upturn.
They are doing incredible things with world models, and have an economy that really could do incredible things with robots wired to effective world models.
It won't surprise me at all if in 10 years LLMs are less of a big deal than world models
The 8th highest voted HN submission is on mechanical watches. I imagine that's the type the watchmaking school involves themself with because afaik all high end watches are mechanical.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533 4 years ago 413 comments
They have a certain beauty in their intricate details working together for function. I do really like looking at the glass back which shows some details and you can see the piece that move to gain power.
Although it seems youd have to pay a lot to get an accurate one because I have a $250 mechanical Seiko and its time keeping is junk. It was mediocre when I got it and has gotten worse. It was $150 when I bought it so I suppose it would have been a good investment if it hadn't got beat up.
That’s why I eventually settled with gshock that has solar charging and syncs time twice a day with radio towers (or bluetooth if you are somewhere in the world where there is no time radio signal)
Even rolex needs time setting, servicing to lube and clean metal parts, etc.
Gshock on the other hand will work for 10-15 years without a single manual time adjustment or battery swap needed.
Absolute unit.
This gold metal square one I especially love for summer:
https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...
> Although it seems youd have to pay a lot to get an accurate one because I have a $250 mechanical Seiko and its time keeping is junk. It was mediocre when I got it and has gotten worse. It was $150 when I bought it so I suppose it would have been a good investment if it hadn't got beat up.
You know you need to service mechanical watches regularly, right?
A 7S26 movement (Seiko's mass-produced budget workhorse) isn't that accurate (I think -35 to +45s per day IIRC?). But if you paid $250 secondhand you most likely have a 6R15 or similar inside, which should keep between -15s to +25s per day at worst if regularly serviced. Often you can get much better performance from these movements than the specs imply.
But ... you need to service that poor thing. For a 6R15, every 5 years at minimum, but as an old watchmaker I knew used to say -- a watch will tell you if it needs servicing earlier. Sounds like yours has been trying to get your attention for some time :)
(Otherwise, it's like complaining that the Porsche you haven't taken to a mechanic in the last decade doesn't drive so well any more ...)
You will never get quartz accuracy from any mechanical watch, but that's hardly the point.
(The ETA 2824-2 movement in the page you linked to -- the movement that powers most mid-range mechanical watches -- is substantially more accurate than these lower-range Seiko movements, although it's more costly as well.)
>You know you need to service mechanical watches regularly, right?
Mostly, yeah, but I have some nicer pieces that have been in my rotation for decades with only the barest minimum of services. Like, I think my Omega (ca. 1998) has been serviced maybe once, and it keeps great time.
If you are using a mechanical watch to keep time (accurately for long) you are doing it wrong
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> all high end watches are mechanical.
No, most high end male jewelry are mechanical watches (and much of women-oriented jewelry as well).
High end watches are such a solved problem we don't even talk about them anymore. Either the G-shock, the Garmin watches, or the Apple Watch run circles around mechanical watches in terms of functionality with each satisfying a different niche (100% self-contained, long lived smart functionality, glance-oriented integration with full-stack personal tech ecosystem).
I think most people when they hear "high-end watch" picture some sort of mechanical jewelry watch. When G-shocks, Garmins, and Apple Watches are a few hundred dollars and well-known luxury watch brands start at a few thousand, it's reasonable to consider the latter more "high end".
Personally I'm not interested in owning a luxury watch, I like the Garmin ones.
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Antrax lead guitarist Dan Spitz went on to become a watch maker:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Spitz
I would have expected guitar repair. One of my recent youtube channel finds was a young woman who repairs old guitars, rewinding pickups and such. Fascinating. I didn't realize one of the uses for Formvar (aside from films for use in electron microscopes) was insulation on electric guitar pickup wires.
There is something pleasantly backwards about a school teaching people to repair objects that were designed to last, while so much of the rest of the economy is optimized around replacement
It's promising and I'm glad to hear such a depth-oriented study of making things, taking time is still a thing in a fast world. People are paying to study this, nice
Yes, but notice the scale - 20 students, in a nation of 40+ million people.
We might call that a moral or poetic victory - but practically speaking, it's like an endangered human language which "still has over 100 native speakers". The future ain't looking good.
My grandfather was a master watchmaker and jeweler who learned his trade in the Soviet Union and then in Europe. After emigrating to Toronto after the war, he opened his own jewelry store, where he repaired watches and clocks, as well as crafted and repaired fine jewelry.
He was a true master of his craft and built a successful business based on his exceptional skill. He Was well known for his craftsmanship and his remarkable ability to repair virtually any watch or clock, no matter how complex.
Jewelers from across the city would bring him pieces that no one else could repair. For antique and vintage timepieces, he would often fabricate tiny replacement parts by hand when originals were no longer available. When he retired, very large companies would still come to his home to repair incredibly expensive pieces. He liked to tinker and would quietly work in his little home shop, pipe burning, radio playing, and visitors coming throughout the day to have him fix things.
When he passed, he had 10's of 1000's of watch parts in all these little bags that were all tagged and in boxes. We ended up giving them away to one of his customers who own several Jewelry stores. Had I known I would have offered them to this school along with 100's of watches he kept for parts.
My father was a watchmaker. Fond memories of going with him in his van to the various jewellers he did work for picking up and dropping off. I remember being given a big metal lamp from his workshop when he passed away and realising the body of the lamp was not isolated from the incoming power, although luckily not at mains voltage (not what killed him).
Fond memories and a slightly terrifying electrical inheritance
Maybe it was a touch lamp? (Like a clapper but works when you touch the body not through sound)
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The image of him in the home shop with the radio playing and people still bringing him supposedly unfixable things is wonderful
Is this still a viable career?
I would think so, in the same way instrument maker or painting maintenance can be careers: not for many, but a decent career for a few aficionados.
It’s not likely to employ millions of people, but there will be demand from people with serious money. For instrument making, research labs will need specialized glass parts, for example; for painting maintenance, museums have a need to keep their centuries-old pieces in the best condition. For watches, if you pay a few million for a watch, paying 10k a year for maintenance should not be a problem. For that money, you can make a decent living of 20 customers a year in many countries.
2 replies →
It depends on what you consider viable, and your level.
As someone in love with fountain pens and ink, I can tell you that there are absolutely wealthy pen turners, private designers, and the same with watches.
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I mean people do make a living doing it, but my understanding is that it requires a lot of hustle—as a hobbyist you can just take your time and meditate and take a million pictures, but if you're trying to make a living you have to focus on volume, volume, volume... So you have to have a system, this one goes in the cleaner and you are immediately disassembling the next, another is in a tray next to the machine that tells you how fast or slow it's ticking... It is maybe less glamorous than it first sounds.
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highly doubtful if it was your career and you are just starting
probably would make more $ from it if you were a YouTuber or TikTok creator and did "watchmaking" content.
I believe this is exactly the kind of high-paying job that is difficult for AI to replace.
Mechanical timepieces are a luxury item, and these students are essentially artists in training. Wrist time was solved in the late 1970's with the commoditization of quartz movements. These 'jobs' will get replaced by AI at approximately the same pace as your local sculptor.
I don't know if watchmaking is one of them, but there are a bunch of traditional crafts which are actually approaching a danger point because there aren't enough up-and-coming acolytes in the discipline to replace them, even though the craft still enjoys enough popular support to have a thriving economy.
Anecdotally, I see enough mechanical watches on wrists and in duty-free shops that I imagine there's enough of a pipeline there for at least one school. Much like vinyl records it doesn't appear to actually be going away even if it's superfluous.
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Come to think of it, it makes sense; in this day and age, every industry is evolving so rapidly that the future remains quite uncertain.
I have a friend who got an English and Creative Writing degree from a liberal arts college, and then immediately went back to trade school for band instrument repair. It's not particularly lucrative, as trades go, but it does seem a lot more future proof than most careers.
I recently left my career as a software engineer to train to become a violin maker. Couldn't be happier.
Haha, so you're going to do something AI can't replace, right?
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Correct, AI will not replathe 3 high-paying watch maker jobs that exist. You are the best kind of correct, technically. But you are distracting from the fact that most people aren't doing anything even remotely physical related in the space that some people posit will be decimated by AI: white-collar jobs where you are a keyboard jockey all day.
Sure but it’s also a microscopically small component of the country’s overall economy.
canada's economy is roughly slightly below Mississipi with increasing amount of migration from third world countries putting strain on its resources and with almost no plans other than to tax the already overstretched middle class
its almost the exact dilemma in Western Europe except the only saving grace is military security is guaranteed by its larger and richer neighbor
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Yes, and it's a great example of an industry that was completely decimated by automation - you can get a functional watch for a fiver, whereas back when every watch was handmade and a de-facto inheritance piece.
But bespoke, handmade, high value, low volume stuff is still around.
I am literally wearing a watch right now that was produced without any of these artisans’ specialized labor and which boasts among its features access to AI.
In a very real sense I have replaced use of the skills of watchmakers with AI.
Sorry about that. To be fair most watchmakers were already put out of work by quartz oscillators and integrated circuits in the 1980s.
The reason that you bought your watch and the reason that other people buy these hand crafted mechanical watches are very, very different. Once upon a time, utility used to be what necessitated an accurate movement, and it came at great cost because of the skill, knowledge, precision, and artistic talent needed to make one; this justified further embellishing the movement with a beautiful case and band because it would be in poor taste to make something that is both expensive and ugly when your primary consumers would be aristocrats. Eventually timepieces became commodified as industrialization made their manufacture feasible at a larger scale, and later then the advent of the quartz crystal made mechanical movements functionally obsolete as a means of telling time accurately. Approaching perfect timekeeping in a mechanical movement is not meant to be utilitarian, but rather a practice in artistry. Mechanical watches are jewelry, and jewelry irrationally commands the price that any luxury does because it's a matter of taste and not utility. Nobody buying a Patek Philippe is doing so because they want millisecond accuracy via atmoic clock GPS signals - they buy Seikos for that.
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Yet most people in the watch industry will suggest that the Apple Watch was a boon for the industry because it retrained people to wear a watch, a fashion that was being abandoned.
you need AI to tell the time?
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Not really. No one wants a Rolex or Omega with ChatGPT in it.
I don't know how high paying it is, although I can see how it can be, especially given there is a shortage of watchmakers in the developed world, even in Switzerland.
Is that because of a lack of interest or because the requirements and education required are just very high level and specialised?
Basically anything that is a luxury good is probably safe from AI. If people are buying it for status or high performance reasons, they aren’t going to pick the low end AI slop version.
Unless they’re replaced by humans controlled by AI(look at the various research for BCIs or for gene therapy that allows for the possibility for you to be controlled by radio frequencies), then they’re very easily replaced.
> gene therapy that allows for the possibility for you to be controlled by radio frequencies
What. Can you cite this research?
As a Canadian cool! Never heard of this school before but on the west coast so probably why.
I've watched many watch repair videos online and the knowledge base required is huge. Also there are many tools needed which are not cheap. There is just so much to know that takes years to learn. Very cool that the knowledge is being shared and the skill passed on. In my small town there was only one guy who worked on clocks and watches. He passed a while back and his kids continue with his jewelry store but they now send out watches and clocks to another business as none of his kids learned how to do it.
I live in Quebec and this is the first time I hear about it.
I discovered this school right after discovering the Richard Mille clock in Quebec City [1] because the school is responsible for maintaining the clock.
1. https://www.ville.quebec.qc.ca/en/apropos/portrait/attraits/...
Maybe I will take up watchmaking when I get sick of AI slop programming and offshore morons going wild with a Claude subscription.
If you read about Harrison's Chronometers you read of Rupert T. Gould who suffered a Nervous Breakdown, and it is said fell into watch repair as therapy, bringing them back to life.
kid me thought AI would replace people doing insanely precise hand work. turns out it replaced me writing emails, and this school's still going strong after 80 years. lmao we got played
AI was supposed to do my laundry so that I could make art and code for fun but now the AI is coding and making art while I do laundry.
it's a funny meme but it's because software can iterate faster than hardware. Give it a few years for robot maids to come out that can do your laundry, then we'll see society upturn.
Profound and painful statement.
yep,sci-fi really got this one wrong lol.
Give the Chinese some time.
They are doing incredible things with world models, and have an economy that really could do incredible things with robots wired to effective world models.
It won't surprise me at all if in 10 years LLMs are less of a big deal than world models
Yes, but has it taken a licking?
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Enjoy till ai with robot arm take your job..