Halfway through his interview for this story, Joey Brown’s video froze.
The audio held. Someone suggested he cut the camera and keep talking. “Do you guys hear me now?” he asked, and then picked his answer back up where he’d left it.
That’s Joey Brown in one scene: two jobs running at once, and neither one waiting on the other.
Two Jobs, Same Guy
By day, Brown manages schedules, submittals and subs as a commercial construction project manager, most recently with Taft Construction in Culpeper, Virginia. By night (and lunch break, and red light) he’s @__joeybrown__, 31,200 followers deep into a hashtag he’ll happily admit is corny: #MakeConstructionFunAgain.
“It’s a little on the nose,” he says. He keeps using it anyway.
The two jobs shouldn’t fit together as easily as they do. They do, because both come down to the same thing: getting people who don’t usually listen to each other to hear one another. That’s the whole job on a jobsite. It turns outit’s also the whole job on a phone screen.
A ‘Total Accident’
Ask how the second job started, and Brown doesn’t dress it up.
“It was a total accident,” he says. A college friend who’d interned alongside him at a Hampton Roads contractor started posting on TikTok and talked him into trying it. Brown figured it might be a side hustle, nothing more. Then the messages started.
“People actually care about what I have to rant about,” he says. “Maybe I should do this.”
By then, he’d already put in the years on the first job: an internship at 20, a mechanical engineering technology degree from Old Dominion University, a climb to project manager.
The career came first. The camera just found someone who already knew how to explain one department to another, then pointed that instinct at a bigger room.
The Bit, the Instruction
Scroll his social media feed and you’ll find two different things happening.
One half is a rotating cast of characters, all of them blaming each other for the same jobsite headache: GC project manager, GC superintendent, architect, engineer.
The other half is straight instruction. Sprinkler lines vs. ductwork. How to read coordinated drawings. What’s going on with the bottom half of a fire hydrant. Hard hat brim back, wraparound sunglasses, usually filmed from a truck cab, whichever job he’s doing that day.
Both halves work for the same reason. Brown has sat in every one of those chairs, so the jokes land like recognition instead of mockery.
There’s a bill attached to the joke, too. A 2018 survey of nearly 600 construction professionals conducted by FMI Corp. found that poor communication accounted for 26% of all rework in the U.S., a potential cost of roughly $17 billion a year. Bad project information accounted for another 22%.
“I’ll have a civil engineer who will message me and say, ‘Hey, I really never thought about that,’” he says. Even the general contractor bit took some getting used to. “I just would like to think that I’m one of the better ones,” he says. “So, it was difficult for me to make fun of myself, which I have practiced.”
Making It Look Like a Good Job
The construction workforce is older than the country’s. The median age in the industry is 42, a year above the national labor force, according to the National Association of Home Builders’ analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Baby boomers still made up 14.2% of it as of 2023, and most of them are heading toward the door.
Brown’s read on it is less a strategy than a bet.
“I have a suspicion that it’s going to solve itself with supply and demand,” he says. “The more social media covers financial wellness, and then, of course, people are willing to pay tradespeople more and more, I think that more and more young men and women will join the trades.”
He doesn’t claim to be part of the fix. The research suggests people like him already are. In Thumbtack’s 2024 “Future of Skilled Trades” report, 55% of Generation Z respondents said they were considering a trades career, up 12 points in a year, and two out of three said social media had increased their interest. Among those with a college degree, it was three out of four.
The bet may already be paying off. Gen Z’s share of the construction labor force more than doubled between 2019 and 2023, from 6.4% to 14.1%.
Brown would probably wave that off. He’s just a guy in a hard hat, on camera, making the work look like a good time and a good living.
Fair to Both Sides
Brown doesn’t go easy on either half of his own audience.
On the industry he works in: “The white-collar side of the industry can be so serious and so polished,” he says, “and it is such a huge mess in comparison to the people in the field actually performing the work.” He doesn’t stop there. “There is just so much animosity at all times,” he says. “It doesn’t need to be that way.”
He’s just as hard on the people who’ve never set foot on a site. Walk one onto a big commercial project and the noise gets them first. Steel hanging overhead. Dump trucks backing up. Off-road equipment working the dirt. Voices carrying across an open slab. “People yelling,” as Brown puts it, “not because they’re angry, but because that’s how you have to communicate sometimes.” Most spend their first couple of days simply overwhelmed by it.
Then something else lands. “This is actually genuinely dangerous, loud and intimidating,” he says.
None of which comes through from the outside. “You have no real perspective whatsoever of what it is like to pour concrete when it is 100 degrees outside for an entire summer,” he says. His comparison: someone mulching their yard on a Saturday, calling it hot.
“That’s nothing.”
Boxes of Paper
The same gap between old and new shows up in his tools. Brown remembers 60-plus-page submittals, five to eight copies hauled into a single meeting, boxes of paper riding in the back of a truck to get there.
Now the work itself lives inside the software, and Brown’s reaction the first time he showed it to someone outside construction has stuck with him. “How is this gate kept?” he says of Bluebeam. “Is it just construction?”
Every Building Is a First Attempt
Ask Brown to explain why the industry moves the way it does and he gives you the most honest answer available.
“Construction is behind schedule because it is immensely complicated, and every single building is the first attempt at that structure,” he says. The crews aren’t new to the work; they’re new to this building. “It’s their first time building that building.”
No assembly line, no template, no muscle memory to fall back on. He’s not wrong, though the industry has more say in it than that. McKinsey’s construction productivity research found that only half the firms it surveyed kept a standard design library, and it names repeatable design elements as one of the sector’s biggest missed opportunities. Some of the one-off-ness is the work. Some of it is habit.
“The immense amount of complexity within construction is lost,” he says, “and no one really understands it until they’ve lived it for a while.”
That’s the industry Brown works in every day, and the one he spends his nights explaining on social media. He just happens to keep standing inside two versions of it at once.
“Everyone should look at the industry and try and put themselves in other people’s shoes,” he says, “because all of it is difficult in its own way.”
Including his own.
