I’ve done time as an operating engineer for asphalt plants, hobby hotrodding stuff, and painted cars professionally for several years where I mostly worked solo and do all operations, although I did have employees twice for a few years. I did some tig, but mostly mig in automotive and stick at asphalt plants while doing maintenance, which is likely far more than you realize.

There are several hard facing jobs that get done at a plant. It is a nickel rod used to extend the wear surfaces of different parts. Hard facing gets you a lot of practice. It is applied to things like a wheeled front end loader’s bucket. You’re simply spending a couple of days making cross hatch patterns on all of the primary wear surfaces so the beads wear out instead of the bucket. The other one is the crushing hammers in a rock crusher.

Most of the time with tig, you’re messing with ultra thin or dissimilar materials. There is a ton of nuance required to understand temperature, expansion, and how heat flows through various surfaces. Your prep and cleaning are super critical. These become the main job. Automotive paint is exponentially more prep oriented, but still, actually striking an arc is only around 5% of the work for tig. Your setup, cleaning, and prep are a far bigger part of the job. You’re building a strategy to manage heat and expansion. The actual process of controlling the molten pool is complex. In both welding and machining, your primary sensory feedback is actually sound. That is how you know when the settings are dialed correctly.

In all of this, it is very possible to setup automation to replace the welder. You’re just going to need to spend a long time setting up the machines and ruin a couple dozen workpieces to dial in the operations until the weld passes xray and empirical tests.

Seeing someone make metal sticky is totally irrelevant except in decorative consumer junk. If someone is going to be facing life or death because of the quality of the welds, the expectations and requirements are stringent. In those circumstances, the human welder will not be replaced unless the goal is to make hundreds of items or more. The human is far faster and cheaper at any smaller scales. One day there will be something like humaniform AGI, and long after these, one might specialize in this type of operation, but this kind of sensory and spacial awareness, with very complex feedback systems are orders of magnitude beyond anything that exists in the present. Just the software complexity for the humanoid robots that already exist is ridiculously impossible to coordinate in a high level meaningful way.

If you want to weld, you’ll have a job. Just be aware that it sucks as a job. The fumes are toxic awful. Tig in particular sucks because you are going to slip and touch the tungsten to the weld pool from time to time. That causes a flash that is way brighter than any welding hood you can actually use will block. It will blind you over time. If you use an auto darkening hood at all with any form of welding, you will lose most if not all of your vision later in life. That fraction of a second before the glass darkens is faster than your brain can process, but it is not your brain getting damaged, it is your eyes, and that electromagnetic radiation and searing photons are still getting to your retina and damaging it a little bit every time. Selling your body parts off to eat today is an insidious haunt you’ll likely regret one day. You may think you’ll wear a mask/respirator, but you’re going to find yourself in extremely cramped, hot, dirty, nasty, scary AF places where you must find a way to get the weld done right. You do not matter in these circumstances. Your skill and pay is largely measured by your willingness and ability to never say no and get the job done. That is how you make a decent paycheck welding.

I’ve been on a fully extended manlift a hundred feet in the air, in a gusty wind, with the tipping alarm going off, getting motion sickness, with the bucket periodically banging against a silo so hard I could barely stand.

I’ve crawled into a tiny opening of a tractor trailer size drum cylinder made of steel that was barely under 140° F in air temperature, with it pitch back because I went in the actually pitch-tar shoot where hot dry aggregate mixes to make asphalt – exits to go up the silo elevator. I got burned through my coveralls because the surface was so hot. I was pouring sweat, and it sizzled on everything it touched. I replaced a large steel shelf called a flight inside. I had to cut it out, dig out the aggregate, and weld in the replacement as fast as humanly possible because the way the old flight failed stopped the elevator full of asphalt on the chain and buckets. If that stuff solidified beyond what the motor and transmission could overcome to restart, it would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in the middle of a major freeway paving operation in the middle of the night. Chiseling out the elevator takes at least 3 whole days. I actually ruined my favorite boots doing that one, the bottoms were melted beyond any further use. That is the kind of thing to expect. In an expensive place like Southern California, if you can do jobs like that, and don’t mind the diesel fuel bath afterwards to get the tar off your skin and clothes, you’ll make a six figure income and afford to live in a lower end 3 bedroom house kind of life.