To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.
A trade being any job you can do with your own tools and is universally useful to people. So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need. Ideally you could arrive in a new town with only this skill and your tools, and begin to eke out an existence. I favor trades that are also useful to oneself, so the building trades are good because everyone needs shelter-may as well build your own or at least understand what you are buying. Doctor also works as a trade, because the need is so basic and universal.
A profession being anything else, basically, especially if it generally requires an employer (major capital investment) to be a useful activity. Interestingly, being a farmer falls into this category, since it requires land and equipment. Even if you own the land and equipment, you could lose it, and then your livelihood is out of your reach. So that’s a profession, by my narrow practical classification.
I figured with a trade and a profession, young adults are much better prepared to roll with the punches in the inevitable chaos they will confront, and be empowered to walk away from situations that are untenable. The power to walk away is highly underrated.
For myself, I have benefited greatly from my practical upbringing, and am a sophomore journeyman in many trades but my happy place is creating things. Electronics, a little mechanics, and software to breathe life into the soul of a new machine. Fortunately I have been hardcore unemployable by nature for decades, so I have developed the freedom to follow my own path, which is deeply gratifying. But without a strong trades type background this would not have really been possible.
I grew up in a trade. My folks ran a small auto repair business, and as such, I'm more than competent in a lot of automotive related things and a barely competent in a lot of the trades (carpentry, electrical, tile, accounting, taxes, etc). Essentially, anything we needed to get done to make the business run, I did alongside my folks and family.
I'm decidedly out of the trades as an adult.
Mostly, this is because of my folk's parenting in general. I was not good, due to the stresses of said work and business. But I imagine that's true of most small business owners.
But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body. I'm fully not kidding here when I say that my jeans were so dirty that they stood up on their own. Again, kid's jeans, and it wasn't every day, but at least twice a week. Heavy machinery like lathes will literally tear your arms off and beat you to death with them. I've grabbed 220V before and my Dad had to break the circuit with a broom handle, leaving quite the bruise on my arms, not to mention the near death of that kind of shock. Don't get me started on car exhaust and brake cleaners.
Auto repair may not be very exemplary of the trades as a whole, but I choose to take showers after work now.
Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, my hearing is shot too. My spouse is always having to say things louder and slower to me. Not a lot of fun for them to do. I also can't smell certain smells; I suppose this is due to the aforementioned brake cleaners (spray acetone really), but am not very sure.
Totally depends on the trade. Concrete foundations, roofing, anything that uses a wheelbarrow, etc. will eventually break you. Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in, but digging post holes or hauling shingles up a ladder is not the same beating as hanging cabinets, or wiring circuit breakers. Just saying there are different kinds of hard.
>Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in
Those trades mostly pay their dues when they are younger and then the next batch of journeymen and apprentices take over that part of the job as they move up into the less physically demanding parts of the job. Even fairly physical jobs like bricklaying, they'll have the older dude doing nothing but slapping the bricks in place, they get carried over to him by one guy, one guy is mixing up the mortar, one guy is unloading the truck, another is touching up the joints, etc. It's one of those things that explains why union jobs have so many extra people too. It's not one dude doing everything, it's 3 guys doing different parts of the job and learning how to do the next part.
For this reason, maybe a handyman / jack-of-all-trades will have less wear and tear on their body? Diversity in tasks could mean a week of concrete followed by a week of cabinets, then a day or two of building a staircase, three hours of adding a new receptacle, and then two days of painting? Although in some ways, a handyman's job might be harder - they should be a quick learner, have good support / contacts in specific trades, and it might require better/more marketing to get customers.
Those are vanishingly small jobs these days in the US at least. Most companies and guys will specialize in electrical or drywall or something as they become faster at it and time is money in the trades. These skilled jobs typically require more than a single truck's worth of equipment to do quickly.
Like, tying rebar is really hard to do by hand, but they make a gun that will do it for you in seconds: https://amsalesinc.com/products/rebar-tying-gun-makita-xrt01... . You can do a whole pad of concrete in an hour that would take you days otherwise. But that gun is thousands of dollars (supply and demand baby). So having a truck of these time saving gadgets for a bunch of job types isn't feasible. Hence the specialization.
Unless you live in a remarkably remote area, rental yards carry pretty much everything you can need. I've even rented $100,000 excavators I needed for a day quite easily, and it eats into the value of your labor maybe 20-30% at worst.
Oh, I very much have a lot of these jobs at the house. It's just that I tend to call a specialist [0] as the handy men around me tend to, well, not really exist anymore. Besides, most of the smaller things that don't require the really tall ladders, I can do myself.
[0] who then never shows up on time and charges too much. But that's a whole nother story about where I live...
but there's something to be said about doing something with your hands and going to bed physically tired...
your other option is mentally drained, potentially depressed, probably anxious - especially if/when something breaks on you
i went with the desk job, yearn for something else.. would rather have become a machinist or welder looking back. do both as hobbies now to clear the head from the desk job
Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of "go into trades" rhetoric is that most trades people either get into management as fast as they can, a small amount start their own business and a share of that small amount are very successful, or a large amount of people trade $$$ for future health problems (not just joints, many of the materials used in trades are awful and many never wear proper PPE). It's important to look at the trades without the veil of blue-collar romanticism; the trades can be lucrative but tradesmen will be very quick to give you the tradeoffs.
Yes, all of this is very easily seen by the BLS statistics about the average/median wages of trades.
For every anecdote of a plumber making $20k/month in a HCOL area, there are probably 3-4 plumbers who are barely pulling $70k/year in M/LCOL and end up having health problems.
For my family it really wan't a trade off. This jobs was the only one we could do to make end meet.
My family is the 'petite bourgeois'(owners that labor alongside their workers[0]) that Marx said were the only people that actually had a choice in the class war and were the breeding grounds for fascism.
We did management too, but labored with the employees all the same. Did we get paid more? Sometimes, but we had to go without pay a lot and pick up other jobs. Still, my sibling and I went to college debt free, none of the employees' kids did that [1].
Karl Marx died 40 years before fascism was invented so I would be surprised if he said anything at all about it. Fascism is just repackaged marxism anyways with more nationalism.
I actually wouldn't be suprised, running your own shop in a trade or in software bootstrap day to day mode has to be remarkable similar. Including consulting gigs to keep yourself afloat.
For sure. I believe that a a person should work towards working more with their mind than their back, long term. A lot of professions are good vehicles towards that goal. But being able to do what you need to, and being able to make ends meet in a worst case scenario are both great sources of strength and significantly reduce your economic fragility.
Yeah, I agree with both your replies here. The certainty that I had when I was starting out in life that I could walk into pretty much any auto shop and have a job in a week, I dunno, I think I took that for granted. In that, I never really thought about it and my profession was more of a choice to me; I always had a backup. I guess a lot of my friends and coworkers really didn't have that sense about themselves, maybe.
The real question, per the WSJ article here, is: How does a kid go about getting this back up? I got it by virtue of birth. But some other kid would have to go seeking it out, at the expense of time they could spend studying or, you know, just being a teenager. I'm not sure that teenage me would have taken the 'learn a trade as a backup plan' route. In fact, I know I would not have done that.
I prefer trades as a backup to a profession, for sure. A trade can give you the runway to put yourself through school or to ramp up your capabilities in other ways, leading to a better long term plan. Getting old Is a bitch, to be sure.
I think that the connectedness of cars (requiring dealer-level tools for some operations, even if available to independents at a cost that’s difficult to recoup) and the prevalence of pre-paid service bundles with new and CPO car sales is moving mechanic higher up the capital intensity (or employer/pool required) scale.
I'm getting increasingly relevant personally as a double-whammy hacker and mechanic towards liberating people and the machines they fucking bought from daddy Chevrolet who doesn't want them to control their own machinery.
It's still possible, even if for some you need to swap the entire engine controller, to take that control back. Ultimately all these damn modules have to eventually switch bare copper conductors to make all the stuff work in the car, and if we have to, we can swap ALL the silicon involved.
I would love some actual right to repair legislation but our government is too occupied undermining people's civil rights and pissing off every other market on the face of the Earth.
I will never ever pay a subscription fee for my fucking heated seats even if I have to bridge the 12V across a big toggle in the dashboard and wire the stupid thing myself. You gotta draw a line somewhere and that's mine. Fuck ALL the way off with subscription gating features in the machine I already bought.
Every industry is feeling the same pressures. Even in "simple" trades the latent cost of running a licensed business is so high that you almost can't be in business yourself or with a couple people, you need to have a dozen guys running around doing gravy work (that nobody else can do, because no license, and that no other licensee will undercut any other on, because they're invested) under your license in order to stay above water in some markets.
There are a lot of things that work for one person or 10 people, but growing from 1-10 is the hard part. Even things like lawn care, as soon as you grow beyond what you can do, the first employee needs a duplicate of all of your truck, trailer, and other equipment, plus they aren't going to work as hard as you do and probably expect to be paid better than you pay yourself.
Sort of?, if you are sufficiently well rounded and can implement solutions from start to finish. It’s sort of Art adjacent, or entrepreneur adjacent. Still, I’d encourage strongly to learn carpentry, as in the rough construction level carpentry for anyone who is likely to focus on anything extremely cerebral. It is empowering to know you can build your own shelter, and construction carpentry tends to be a touching grass type of outdoor activity.
Programming also is kinda iffy as a trade in the “I just got dropped off in the middle of BFE and I need to eat” kind of way. It sort of requires a bunch of fragile situational trimmings that are not really under individual control … so I’ve looked at software as a profession, really. It doesn’t quite pass the doctor test. Not everyone needs a programmer, but everyone needs shelter.
True, but it still, generally, requires a whole lot of other societal components to be in place and functioning in order to generate most of its value. It tends to service the tyranny of needs in a very tangential way, or serves those needs only through the more direct agency of others. In that way it fails my test for a trade, in the same way that being a lawyer does. A trade should serve a universal human need with no intermediary. That’s what makes it especially resilient to chaos, and especially useful to the person with those skills.
It gets close when you incorporate hardware as well. Now you can make tools with a software component, sort of a technical blacksmith, but you are still reliant on a fragile supply chain. Perhaps the technological handyman or tinker is as close as can be achieved inside this scope?
I think “grey area” is the right way to think of carpenters and electricians and plumbers too.
You say that programmers need a lot of societal components but so does every one of those professions. Unless your kids are learning how to harvest and dry their own lumber along with classical carpentry with nothing but wood joints, they will need a massive supply chain for the lumber and fasteners - unless you expect them to hunt down bog iron and bootstrap all of civilization themselves. Same with plumbers who need PVC/copper/solder and a modern sewer/water system or septic tank. Or the electrician who needs copper wire and power infrastructure (or solar panels, which require semiconductor manufacturing). What good is an electrician without the power plants to feed their customers?
I like your approach but I can't help but feel that unless you’re going full apocalyptic prepper, the practical skills are an illusion.
It’s all about the degree of independence. There are a lot of places that you can’t find work as a data scientist, and. Being a data scientist does little to directly solve problems your family might encounter if your career gets eaten by AI or a pandemic. I’m not suggesting working in the trades vs a profession.. by I do advocate competence in a trade in addition to your chosen profession, with some exceptions.
What are the characteristics that are actually useful on a deserted island? Outdoorsy (ideally, skilled in bushcraft), ex-military, able-bodied. On the first two, the programmer wins. On the last one, it's probably a wash. For every obese slob in this field, there's a carpenter whose back is fucked and is dependent on opiates.
Carpentry offers limited applicable skills if they're stranded 1000 miles away from the nearest Home Depot.
Of course the knee jerk answer is a carpenter, but unless that carpenter knows how to make metal tools from scratch, hand hew a log, and fashion his own nails, I’m not sure how really useful they’d be apart from better physical fitness. A carpenter that buys nails at home depot by the box and sends plywood through a table saw likely isn’t going to have the practical skills to survive on a desert island without the modern supply chain.
Traditional woodworking and blacksmithing like that is now mostly a novelty in the developed world. No one really knows how to make their own tools from scratch which is what it’d take to bootstrap carpentry. The best realistic set of skills would probably be knowledge of how to work with fibers to make rope and gather pitch for adhesive. Then you could make a primitive axe that can do most of the hard work in bringing down and hewing trees.
If a carpenter can’t read a book and understand how to make a structure without metal fasteners, they are not competent in that field. And working with raw logs is also not much of a challenge.
I’m not an especially good carpenter, and I can work with limited tools. A chainsaw and an auger drill would be really nice, especially if I had to make lumber.. but an axe , drawknife , and chisels will do.
That’s like being a programmer that can’t write software without a framework and libraries. The idea is that tools make the job easier and faster, not that you don’t even understand how to do the job, but only how to staple code together. We all start out there, and while we may rarely if ever work that way, we can when it is needed, do something no one has done for us.
Obviously, different trades have different utility if you are talking about the breakdown of society, but I’m not really leaning into that particularly hard, more leaning into the breakdown of one’s plans or expectations, the failure of a company or the evolution of an industry, those kinds of force majure events that one can reasonably expect to have happen during a life lived.
Even so, there is some comfort in knowing that your personal knowledge and value to society is robust and resistant to black swan events, I suppose.
Depends on the situation... If the food source is on a nearby deserted island, connected by two small boats that can carry inconvenient numbers of people + food, and for some reason the boats must always be full and you must always take all the food by the end, well, give me an older programmer accustomed to puzzle interviews!
You can sell carpentry work directly to people in your community as an individual, and make a profit on every customer. Programming needs a larger customer base to break even, and you generally won't be selling software to individuals.
You can get started with programming for $15 for a monitor/mouse/keyboard from Goodwill and $50 for a PC off ebay (or $125 for a new N150 minipc, which are insanely powerful). Startup capital costs are negligible next to even (first-world) poverty living costs.
Sure, but how are you going to find customers? Within weeks of beginning carpentry you can make useful products that people will pay for. Even using less than $100 of hand tools (A saw, a chisel, and sanding + polishing can make useful and beautiful kitchen tools.) How long to go from beginner programmer to break-even revenue? Maybe if you're really smart and hit it big, at least six months. For most people closer to 2-6 years.
My answer to this question, having been a victim of this economic crash, is bug bounty programs. Chaos is a ladder. All this outsourcing, layoffs, and AI slop is an opportunity. That Apple AirPlay wormable RCE CVE is an indicator of how bad things have already gotten. It's pathetic how far even Apple has fallen in this race to the bottom.
These companies are running on fumes. They cut to the bone, through the bone, and everything is being held together by a thread.
But security research is really far removed from the skillset of a startup app developer. Realistically, even if you were capable of learning, which most aren't, it'd take longer for you to get up to speed than it would take for the market to improve.
The more relevant answer would be to bootstrap an MVP and pitch it to investors to get funding to scale. There's no piecework model for consumers like "install can lights" or "build a she-shed."
Maybe, but carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, etc all typically have apprenticeship opportunities and its extremely rare to encounter anything in the tech field like this.
Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things, while the tech industry loves to re-invent the wheel frequently.
> its extremely rare to encounter anything in the tech field like this.
That depends on where you are. In the US, it's rare, but our Japanese office actually had a pretty rigorous system for career growth, that involved what is, for lack of a better word, "apprenticeship."
> Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things
I wouldn't say that. I know a lot of mechanics, and they have experienced a big change, over the last decade or so.
One of the things about being a mechanic (or appliance repairman), is that you are responsible for maintaining a huge range of stuff; including things that are decades old.
I have a friend that sets up and maintains professional sterile stuff. This is big juju. These aren't little autoclaves, and they incorporate pretty much every trade you can think of, like plumbing, electrical, metalshop, mechanical, etc. Many of these units are huge. They also tend to be run by fairly advanced computers.
These units cost six- or seven-figures, and the customers like to keep them going for as long as possible. I often hear him talking about having to work on a decade-old sterilizer, in the sub-basement of some research lab.
If I’m bored I sometimes freelance as a field repair technician for service contractors. It’s typically opening up a machine I’ve never seen, and finding the combination of mechanical, electronic, and/or software fixes it needs to come back online. It can be a lot of fun, and the pay is not terrible. But you need to understand some analog electronics, strong digital electronics skills, basic programming paradigms, SQL, networking from the physical layer on up through the application layer, and also how to read between the lines on poorly written manuals and find the hidden truth that the various contradictions point to.
I’ve worked on everything from CT scanners to cutting lasers to ATMs, and done more server swaps, PDU replacements, and field upgrades than I care to count. It’s great when I need a break from the sea of bytes, and I get to see an inside view on a lot of cool stuff, and some pretty concerning things going on behind the scenes as well. I could say, I’ve seen some shit.
I’ve watched a 27 year old pentium pro boot up off the arm of Michelin, the sparkle of the token ring LEDs twitching furtively in the twighlight of an abandoned server room, screens blaring static amid a tangle of drooping cables and fallen raceways. Shit still gives me nightmares.
Unless you plan to work for a large tech employer, you can completely ignore the movement of the industry. Most of it is noise that isn't going to give you a productivity boost as an individual.
Setting up websites for people/small businesses? Give them each a virtual host/directory with mod_php if you need some CRUD. No k8s or AWS or react or anything needed. Your client's site is all in a tidy directory you could zip up and give to them if they want (e.g. you're going to move out of the business, or they want to work with someone else). I despise working with PHP, but it's the obvious choice if you were going to be a "trade web programmer" doing small jobs for people.
Writing custom software for someone? Do it with Qt's drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor and deliver it as a .zip or .apk or whatever.
It probably won't be as easy money as a SaaS megacorp, but I'm sure there is plenty of demand for programmers' services out there in the same way that you can find people looking for contractors for home renovations. If you're doing custom work, you can use whatever tools make you productive.
Tradeskill work can have a "quality appraisal" by the customer. A good car shop, a good painter, a good gardener. Code by an individual programmer is more difficult to appraise.
Many of the trades you listed require licenses, apprenticeships, or trade schools. Usually high schools make you choose between a college prep track or vo-tech track, so you can't do both. Also, those the tools for those trades (if going beyond a handyman level) are a significant capital investment.
> So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need.
I've hired all of these trades for my basic needs and I've never seen their licenses. They don't need no stinking license to get lots of residential work around here, just word of mouth that they are competent.
Just because you don't see fhwm, doesn't mean they don't have them or need them. I would bet your state/county requires electricians to have a license, and your mechanic is likely ASE certified.
That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them. I know for a fact that the current mechanic I use (the best I've ever had) is a farmer trying to make ends meet with no formal training. My electrician had a license as a lineman once but is now just supplementing his pension, unlicensed. Etc., etc.
The guy who came out to install a generator is licensed, and he needed one for the inspection, but that's an exception not the rule. The claim was that all you need is the skill to make a living, and around here that's demonstrated daily. Sometimes they don't even have the tools and use mine. Frequently they require cash, and that's standard procedure here.
> That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them.
Ok so in your small rural town, where people take up trades because they’re struggling to make ends meet, and where you have to settle for whoever is available, and where if someone screws you over word of mouth on its own is enough of a deterrent and is easily enforced, you can get by without relying on licenses. As far as giving general advice to young people, the original point still stands that you generally need to jump through some additional hoops to make a living off of many of the trades. Yes there are exceptions but most young people aren’t looking for answers that require you move out to the boonies and where you’re going to be scraping by.
Yeah, the GP's argument seems to be self disproving - the people doing this stuff on the shady side aren't able to make a living on it as they're barely scraping by.
Even in cities like NYC most handymen doing repairs, even in large buildings, are unlicensed. And if they are licensed, it's their employers that actually hold the meaningless paper while they send out unlicensed grunts into the field.
And then you have companies like my old one-- they didn't have a fire protection license, so they hired an old dude to come in once a year for $40k and borrowed his so they can now do sprinkler and standpipe work legally. It's the same idea everywhere, except more fraud is involved in the cities.
No, it might only be an exception that the person didn't break the law and got the inspection. Pretty much any electrical work that would require an electrician requires an inspection by code.
Just because some of the people around you aren't following the law doesn't mean that you can really make a living that way. All it takes is one mistake and you get wiped out because you didn't have insurance and were operating illegally. I've lived in rural areas and people doing stuff as a business without the proper permits is the exception.
In rural areas where people know one another, people like yourself get sniffed out before they reach the ol boys network. If you're known as someone who seems like they would like codes, licensing, and inspections then these opportunities won't even appear to you, which works out well for both parties.
People who trade this way with one another aren't going to want to wipe the other guy out because it is mutually assured destruction.
While I agree with the sentiment, population density tends to make regularization more important. In a smaller community, social proofs are highly effective. Less so as people become more commodified.
Go ahead and hire someone without a license, who cares, but if your livelihood depends on that trade, it’s probably a good idea to get a license, when the alternative is fines or worse.
Its trivial to hire unlicensed folks. Its even more trivial for any insurance company to void warranty case in case of ie electrical fire, flood from work by unlicensed plumbers etc. You do you, not everybody is living in the race-to-the-bottom mode.
Place I live in Europe, it would also be outright illegal. Biggest city or rural, folks here respect their local communities and only get official pros for any serious work.
This is why my house is uninsured and built totally without licenses or code inspection. Fuck paying out to some assholes just so they can void it as soon anything goes wrong.
I could literally rebuild it 3x for the all the bullshit insurance and regulatory costs were it I got inspections, licensing, and insurance.
Most people are incapable of assuming such responsibility as you described.
They've been brainwashed into "safety" since they were 3 years old, so anything outside of that box is literally unthinkable to them. Their mind literally shuts down trying to process it.
So it's workable for a niche group of people but not the majority.
The insane risk aversion in the USA is at least an opportunity.
I also got my land incredibly cheaply that way. No one wanted to take a risk on an unproven plot of land, everybody wants some place where they can already legally get water/power/electric. By doing all the legwork and legal to prove utilities I basically made $30k profit in a year just by passively testing and connecting water/electric/septic at my own risk.
Lol some boomer slumlord would buy it for cash to rent out if nothing else, considering I could sell for 1/3 the price of anything remotely similar and still break even.
Your story doesn't add up. If it's as rural as you say, there's not enough rental market to make it worth while. It will be an even smaller market if it requires a good old boy network to not wipe you out. Many rural areas have plenty of rundown houses that surely would be cheaper than your place if it's in as good a shape as you make it out to be.
Lol they all got bid to infinity during the covid mania, that's why I resorted to building a house myself in the first place -- if buying a rundown built house or even a shitty trailer were cheaper I would have done that in the first place.
I built this place for ~1/3 the price of anything else available because even a completely burnt out husk of a trailer is more expensive than DIY building a house due to the weird dynamics of the housing market that places a gigantic premium on being the guy who takes all the risk of connecting utilities and getting a permitted residential structure.
Your thesis that I can't sell an actual house for the price of all the unmortgagable burned out trailers that sell like hotcakes is interesting but false. I don't expect this dynamic to change much until most of those ~0% mortgages expire or a massive new supply of housing emerges.
You must not be that rural if stuff was being bid up. Run down doesn't mean burnt out. The thesis is that your house is likely unmortgagable/uninsurable if you ignored the permits etc.
But I have a legal permit. And that permit says I don't have to get it inspected, or need or license, or get code compliance checks. I used a rarely used 'loophole' to get that explicitly stated on my permit.
A lot of work gets done outside of that framework, and licensing in many places is not all that onerous. It depends on the location and the field, and there is a difference between the commitment level of learning a trade as a backup and personal development step and getting really serious about making money in that trade.
Yeah, it would be impractical to do them all lol, but you can get set up either by high school graduation or within two years afterward. So you go to college , if desired, at 19 or 20.
As far as the “track” available in high school, I’ve found it trivial to basically ignore it. You can pick and choose, but you may have to demonstrate ability to skip prerequisites, so that means independent study -a critical skill anyway. Also, summer school or community college in the summer can move a student ahead significantly.
Having raised 5 kids under this pattern it hasn’t been problematic or expensive. If the plan is to go to a prestigious university, you will need to do some extra academics or work yourself into a university program to make it obvious that going to a trade school doesn’t define your potential, usually completing a year of community college or participating as a research assistant etc by high school graduation is sufficient.
As far as tools cost, being a mechanic is the pricey one, with basic set of tools around $3000 these days because of the technology component.
But the other trades are not so bad.
If you don’t try to buy all new and vanity brands, you can get set up around $1000. Used tools are generally nearly as good as new ones. If you need advanced tools they are nearly universally available for rent, and often the first time you need to rent a tool, the job you do will pay for you to buy one for next time.
I think most people overvalue the dominant paradigm and pattern copying. It’s fine (even desirable) not to look like the usual applicant as long as your lumps are interesting or signal value to an institution.
$3k seems extremely low unless you're offering only a subset of services. Things like tire machines, alignment racks, and even just a smaller/non-shop air compressor is pricey. If you want to contract at a shop that has those, they typically want an ASE cert too
Being a mechanic is a lot like being a hair stylist. In many cases they're paying for a bay at a shop, and bring their own tools, in exchange for not having to do any of the business operations.
My optometrist wants to retire. Nobody wants to buy the (very successful) business. New graduates (only two took the state boards last year. Two.) want to work regular hours and go home. No interest in running the business, hiring and firing, purchasing and rent and all the rest.
They just want a gig. Do their expert thing and go home.
At the art fair downtown I noticed many of the stall operators are quite old. I quizzed a couple - same answer. They can get a partner in the (kiln, woodshop, metalshop etc) but not in the business side, selling at fairs. Nobody wants to do that.
Even retail - my sister had a chocolate shop. Her employees were business students! But when she wanted to retire, none of them, zero, wanted to take over the business. They wanted to exercise their speciality at some big firm.
The western world of business has changed beyond recognition since I was young.
The problem isn't that no one wants to do it, its that the math doesn't work out.
If you have 6 figures of student loan debt just to get an optometry degree, you don't want to double or triple that to buy an established business. Your interest cost will eat any hope of profit.
For small businesses, its the same issue. A pottery shop or fabrication shop isn't really worth a lot more than a used kiln or set of tools, but I'm guessing that the owners want to be bought out for a lot more than they can sell their old stuff for. There is a serious mismatch going on. At the same time, the work itself is devalued. Fewer people are going to lay out $1k on a handmade dinnerware set from their local ceramics people when they can pay 1/3rd the price from an importer.
>No interest in running the business, hiring and firing, purchasing and rent and all the rest.
Just like everything else these days the middle option is rendered economically useless by cost (time or money or both) of all the overhead and the juice isn't worth the squeeze unless you're employing dozens.
While I get that it's fashionable to peddle it that way because it confirms the HN audience's biases the overwhelming majority of mechanics are paid flat rate same as they would have been 50yr ago.
Renting a bay is the kind of thing a business owner does. Like a gas station with a 2-bay garage will be owned by a landlord who leases it to a tenant business. Perhaps the same or different business than is operating the convieience store.
You are describing being an automotive repair shop owner. A mechanic may work on cars, or they may work on generators, pumps, valves, augers, or any number of other kinds of industrial machinery that services a vast field of critical infrastructure. Most applications for mechanics are on-premise not in a shop… it’s just there are so many cars that we think of automotive mechanics as representing the field.
Oh, you can spend 50k on tools, of course. You can spend as much as you want.
But you don’t need every tool to work on every car.
Plenty of mechanics work with a single toolbox that you can carry by hand.
It will handle 90 percent of the jobs. The one semi-specialty tool you need for the job is a phone call to Napa away.
Before long you have 99 percent of what you will actually do covered. If you look at a mechanics toolset you will find that 20 percent of the tools get 99.9% of the use. A lot, maybe more than half, basically never get used at all.
In many things, a full set consists of perhaps 16-20 sizes, but for many types of tools, there are 3 sizes that get used all the time, and two that get used once or twice a year. The rest not at all.
Also, you can buy a “$10,000” set of tools for around $2000 if you are patient, less if you identify where you need really good tools and where middle of the road will work fine, and don’t let it become a vanity hobby.
Over time, you will likely have a lot invested in tools.. but you don’t need that much to start, unless you are talking about opening a full service shop from scratch, not just being a mechanic.
Yeah, the costs just aren’t that high. I’d say that adding a trade to my children’s accomplishments probably in total added about 3-5k to the cost of their education. In some cases, the educational component of the trade actually earned them money in the process. In the grand scheme of things, the cost is negligible.
That’s only an obstacle if one believes education should be finished by 22-23 years old. Doing another few years of formal education isn’t a huge impediment and is probably pretty beneficial before even considering GP’s main point.
Sure, resource potential is important. But putting all of your eggs in one basket can push you into a corner, especially in the sense of -feeling- cornered. Options, even if they exist primarily in theory, are a force multiplier.
For example;
If you have a “good” job, but it is trending toward a flat trajectory, and you have a set of skills that requires a complex set of circumstances to be employed, it may be too risky to move to a new location simply because the downside is so severe. It can be a 1:4 bet paying 10:1 odds, a bet you definitely should take, but if losing means your family doesn’t eat, you can’t take the risk.
If you know you can find a way to get by even with day labor if things go badly until you can stabilize your situation, you can take those beneficial risks.
It’s a matter of being prepared to roll with the inevitable punches, and being able to make decisions based on the knowledge of that readiness. Being less fragile, even antifragile.
Sure, and optimizing earning potential along with tactical flexibility is arguably the best way to maximize that potential. Having a trade as a backup skill gives you tactical maneuverability that allows you to be a more effective negotiator and to take beneficial risks. Negotiating power alone is worth any costs.
My nephew hates math. So he's not going to college right now. Instead he's going to vo-tech school. Where he takes math.
Anyway, he seemed very interested in being a part of the FBLA and went to the various functions and conventions that the organization had. I encouraged him to keep in the back of his mind that one day he's not going to be young anymore, he's going to be tired of someone else's shit, every person in their mid 50s and over he knows who is in a trade has needed multiple surgeries just to function on a daily basis, and he's going to be frustrated that his boss is buying a motorcoach to drive to his vacation home while he's struggling to pay the note on his truck. Learn a trade. And then learn to run a business. So that you can run a business while working your trade.
>To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.
I think one or the other is ok. My main thing is that you have to have some sort of plan. You can plan to be a software engineer or a hairdresser or whatever else, but you need to have some sort of plan. You can always update your plan, but you should at least have some vague idea of what it is. The 'failure to launch' folks that I know are all the ones that didn't have some sort of plan so they end up bouncing around from one low paying job to another without any sort of career progression. Even if they end up doing OKish as an office administrator or assistant retail manager, if/when they lose that job (often due to economic realities outside their control) they end up starting back over at the bottom.
Unfortunately a lot of people just “sleep through life” as i like to say. They are physically awake, but they make decisions like they don’t have any agency. Almost like they are asleep.
They think some higher power will magically drop a plan into their lap.
I believe a professional skill is an important educational goal, and insofar as a person is capable and interested they will more likely thrive with a professional skill.
But: professional skills tend to require a lot of dependencies and connections, can be heavily reputation based, and you can find yourself in a dead end of many kinds.
Having a trade gives you an opt-out so you can always move laterally and reposition yourself, probably to get back into your profession or a related one. Also, it creates a way to take a “break” to avoid burnout. And being skilled in trades, you can easily “earn” tens of thousands of dollars a year as a homeowner by not having to pay a premium for life’s demands unless you want to.
Just being able to credibly walk away is a huge advantage in negotiation. And even if you won’t, knowing that you could, really could, is a huge boost to well being.
It all boils down to plotting a course based on options rather than only constraints. Empowerment.
Thing is, most people won’t use that fallback, but it still provides a great advantage. With a fallback, you can take risks that can position you ahead of more timid strategies. Same as owning a little land with a simple cabin on it, outright.
For a few thousand dollars or even less, the worst that can happen is that you might have to go “home” and recoup. You always have a place to be. Even if you rarely go there.
So we'll all be living in wood huts because there are no architects and civil engineers and if break your leg the doctor will saw it off because no one studied biology and chemistry so pharmaceuticals don't exist...
What? I’m not advocating for forgoing education. On the contrary. I advocate for deeper, broader education and life experience. Not quite sure where you get that?
OTOH we’d be better off living in well built wood huts than in the conditions that people with a high degree of specialized education but no practical education can provide. I have a great respect for knowledge, science, and learning in general… but the “incompetent intellectual“ stereotype, so effectively weaponized in the culture wars, exists for a reason.
In the end, individuals and societies benefit from well educated people who have a well rounded education in not only the arts and sciences, but also in practical physical affairs of urgent application, AKA applied engineering or applied science.
Probably they misread you while arguing with their own ghosts. Your idea is perfectly reasonable and sound. It allows the lived experience to shape youngsters minds.
> You could caricature libertarianism, or you could engage with understanding what it actually is, whether or not you choose to agree with it.
Why is it that 99% of people arguing for libertarianism do a much better job making a caricature of it than anyone else that's intentionally tried?
I've tried to engage with them in good faith but ultimately all their arguments devolve into abolishing taxes and keeping track of existing bureaucracy on an individual level. Every. Single. Time.
It's not a practically tenable position. It's a youthful fantasy on the opposite side of the spectrum of property rights (the other side of the spectrum is communism).
I’d call myself a “spiritual” libertarian. Over the years, it became obvious that laws, regulations, compromises, and balances that curtail freedoms exist for a reason. It’s an imperfect world, And if the goal is to maximize human happiness and prosperity, a framework for cooperation is absolutely imperative.
I think it’s also good to push back against this flow of structure, because just as much as the idea that freedom and self-interest are the ideal drivers of society is a dangerous and intoxicating illusion, so is the idea that cooperation and goodwill can be legislated.
The reality is, of course, much more nuanced and poorly distributed. Incentives alignment to the common good is an effort that is a struggle to even properly define, much less to implement.
The fact that people seem to not understand that incentive alignment is the goal, rather than mothering or oppression, doesn’t help.
The problems of the state are much less tractable and congruous with personal experience than most people, including most politicians, appreciate. Relatable analogies such as running a business or a family used in appeals to “common sense” are farcical in their relation to the state, and often disastrous in application.
Statecraft is something that requires not only a deep understanding of political theory and practice, but also of psychology, economics, game theory, statistics, and a solid dose of intuition and luck. In short, it is demanding to the point of nearly being a fools errand, yet the electorate seems to favor simpletons, paternal figures, and shiny things that smell like upper class. I really don’t know if there is a way forward with democracy unless we lean in hard to education.
I was raised to believe that going to college was the only right path.
But later, a friend of mine dropped out and started training as a machinist—and somehow, he ended up living much more freely than most of us.
He’s not what you'd call especially “smart,” but he has this intuitive sense for metal, welding, and machines.
Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories—about the machine he fixed, or how he spotted a tiny issue just by the sound it made.
That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk.
Sometimes I wonder if being truly respectable isn’t about how much you earn, but whether you feel proud of what you do.
I've been trying for a long time to understand all the anti-education, anti-science sentiment we've been seeing in the US for so long now. I think a lot of it comes from how much college is emphasized over everything else in k-12 education in the US.
My son is heading to high school next year, and in the big welcome event for incoming 9th graders every mention of post high-school life was phrased as "college and career". I tried to listen with the mindset of someone who didn't go to college, and was doing quite fine. It definitely felt like those people were being spoken down to. There were no overt statements against non-college outcomes, but the emphasis was quite clear.
I've watched this play out in my own family. A bunch of extended family members have become quite successful without any college education. When I talk to them today, decades after graduating high school, they still carry so much resentment about how they felt they were treated back then.
anti-education occurs when education is watered down with indoctrination and ideology. Then people equate "education" with what's currently taught. This is dangerous because anti-education becomes anti-learning. Chris Rock had a bit about this.
I think a lot of that sentiment comes from the conservative/religious right, which sees college as a dangerous thing that turns their obedient children into free thinkers and other forms of deviancy.
Another aspect of this is simply pandering by reframing the class war into "intellectual elites" vs the owner class.
College isn't for everyone, but it should be accessible to all that want it.
> In considering the historic tension between access to education and excellence in education, Hofstadter argued that both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were in part consequences of the democratization of knowledge. Moreover, he saw these themes as historically embedded in America's national fabric, resulting from its colonial and evangelical Protestant heritage. He contended that evangelical American Protestantism's anti-intellectual tradition valued the spirit over intellectual rigor.[5]
> Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as "resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life."[6] He further described the term as a view that "intellectuals...are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive ... The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."[7]
> in the big welcome event for incoming 9th graders every mention of post high-school life was phrased as "college and career".
1. If the school pulled from a certain kind of socio-economic status population, then this is a reasonable broad statement to make.
2. In other cases, it may just be projection and/or lazy thinking.
3. The US fascination with college eduction, attributing it to higher earnings, conflates correlation with causation. Many of the folks who go to college will also have a financially bright future if they don’t go to college — for example, by monetizing their social network.
4. The case for defaulting to a college education is that many places use it as a filter for job applicants.
5. My recommendation to folks is either go to a school with a well-developed alumni and/or job placement network or go to the cheapest and easiest school that they have access to. Learning isn’t really part of the equation, since it will either be baked into the program they enter, or they can just embrace autonomous/independent learning. The quality of education at middling institutions is just not very good.
6. Note that I believe that the US is producing college graduates at about double the rate that we need. A quick search of data shows that ~40% of folks aged 25-29 in 2022 had a college degree. I think that number should probably be closer to 15-20%… maybe as low as 10%. The only way the waste in the system can be cut is probably from above — using a college degree as a job filter misaligns incentives, imho, and this won’t change easily.
>> Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to ...
Well, everyone has this energy at 18. Can you do this "sweating through long manual labor shifts" for 10, 20, 30 years?
If you get hurt or just your body gives up (back pain, neck pain, arthritis or what else), you're in a much worse position as a "trade worker" than an office worker.
Not mentioning how much they'd love to replace you with machines, immigrants or younger workers. This is true in an office setting also but bureaucracy somehow finds a way to survive.
I don't know. To add a bit of anecdata, I've married into a carpentry family. They are all older and much healthier than me who "is just sitting at the computer whole day". Also goes to my IT friends from university and high school who all developed serious back and other health issues from sitting the whole day doing office work. So I would say it depends.
I'm frome trade family and I've seen the opposite. The ones who actually stay in the trade and don't step onto management of some sort are broken down in old age. It looks fine at 40, but by 50 you see the impact and by 60 the difference is alarming. Of course you maintain physical fitness by virtue of what they do, but the amount of injuries they acclimate is also worth considering, especially since an office worker can just get a better chair and run on occasion to mitigate risk. Not so for trade jobs. You normally must stop doing the trade and manage those who do it to maintain your health.
Totally agree, our culture definitely focuses way too much on idolising wonderkids, which often isn't realistic and is far from the truth of how success usually happens. You see it so clearly in sports, it's often not the most naturally gifted kid who ends up achieving the most, but the one who trains harder and just refuses to give up. I wish I knew the secret to bottling this life lesson up for my own kids but it seems this only comes naturally with time.
Yes, sorry I wrote short. The praise was about when the child achieves something you yse language like "you worked hard to succeed there" rather than "you're so talented to succeed there"
> Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories
That's because he's only sweating through those long shifts, and not thinking through them. I bet I would have more energy to clean the house after work than he would.
We have a real problem in the way we think about intelligence. There are so many dimensions to intelligence that having a single scalar value is very counterproductive.
Your friend seems to have a certain type of intelligence, while you and your other friends have a different type of intelligence.
Part of the current political situation is in part due to the traditionally intelligent people looking down on the rest of society.
For a functioning society we need all types of intelligence, and we need to value them all. Equally.
If you are interested, you can do both. I work for a company that produces machines that tend to get integrated in automation cells for aerospace/automotive parts manufacturers. As the field technician, it's my job to know how our machines play with everything else in that cell so I can fix issues for our customers when things break (and they will break, eventually, for a wide variety of reasons which creates a weird fragility to the whole automation system, but that's a different post).
This requires that I know what's going on mechanically _and_ at what expected behavior of the embedded systems should be (PLCs, device firmware/software packages, network security, etc).
Like you, I was pushed to go to college after high school, only to find out later that college is an industry, not an institution, so the rhetoric about not being able to get a good job without a degree was really just a sales pitch to get my lower-class parents to take out loans they could not afford so me, a veritable child at the time, could make a major decision that would set the tone for the rest of my life. It's a lot of systemically flawed Capitalistic nonsense.
In my field, we _desperately_ need people who understand (at the very least) basic electronics and mechanics, but also the software side of things. The amount of techs from other companies, companies with a much larger and more public reputation than my employers mind you, that do not seem to have a grasp on the basics is astounding and alarming. But even the competent electromechanical techs are weak on how the software or firmware functions, which is often a big key to the "wtf is wrong" puzzle.
I'm not even a coder/programmer, but I know enough to get by and make effort to learn something about programming embedded systems or software for Controls every day, and while I am still an amateur, my god, it gives me quite the edge over a lot of the other guys.
You don't have to be trapped at a desk. Mechanical aptitude can be developed, but it starts by not being afraid to take the screws out and seeing what you can just figure out. The pride you mention comes from that, but you also touched on something else; tangible results. Believe me, I have respect for devs who can create a piece of software from start to finish, but when I manage to bring a slag-crusted horrifyingly-neglected machine back to live after a catastrophic failure that had Automaker X sweating $10000 bullets, it is a real thrill, one that infuses me with great energy for days, sometimes weeks. That's why your friend likes sharing those stories!
> I have no interest in working for $60k for the rest of my life.
I’m not sure where you live, but folks in the trades in CA move beyond $60k fairly quickly.
I realize that is partially because of CA, where full time fast food folks make $40k a year minimum, but many of the folks in trades that I know have really nice houses and cars.
Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries? Pick the right tool for the job. If you’re wrong, or don’t know how to use your tools / understand the metals, you in for some trouble.
Most programmers think too highly of themselves.
Software projects have the exact same problems as construction jobs, with the main difference liability.
> Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries
I'm not sure this is a serious question, but the two have nothing at all in common. Anyone who says otherwise either has never welded or never used a computer.
Those "software vs physical stuff" discussions remind me of modern vs old-school music production. Not the final product (the music) but the production process in itself.
One goes "commit to nothing, you can always change it later, hundreds of convenient tools at hand, move super quick but you don't 'finish' it, you just 'abandon' it".
The other is "commit early, make the best you can since changing anything is expensive, not too many tools, slap the roof and proclaim it good enough, ship it".
The difference is mostly due to destructive vs non-destructive workflows.
I'm not really saying one is better than the other, or even that the difficulty is different... but process-wise those things are miles apart.
I mostly agree but dimensionality is also a huge one. Being constrained to 3 dimensions and standard building materials really limits the problem space. It's why you can probably figure out how to build a structure where all the entrances lock but you definitely shouldn't roll your own crypto.
I find that physical work is different but not simpler than programming. Yes there are only 3 dimensions, but there are lots of layers of important "details" that you can't ignore, whereas digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot.
> digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot
I'm not clear what you mean by that. Most of the library code I deal with is far from ideal (IMO). Even most of the things I implement aren't ideal because either I'm interacting with the real world or even if not I don't want to spend unlimited time fully generalizing it.
As a concrete example, absolutely nothing that touches floating point arithmetic is "ideal" in any sense of the word.
Scheduling, staffing, and tooling constraints all exist in the software world as well. If you're going to extend to the entire job site then you'll need to extend to the entire dev team plus associated management.
I don't immediately see an analogy to supply chain issues but then I hadn't intended this as a pissing contest to begin with.
It's interesting to me that I'm getting defensive replies when all I pointed out was the increased dimensionality of the problem space when writing code versus assembling a physical product. I don't think that observation can realistically be contested.
A friend is dropping out of IT to pursue welding - but knows the money just isn’t there. She’s starting a 5:30am 10 hour shift at a manufacturer to be able to move onto welding and CNC. She’s autistic so can struggle sometimes but is also one of the smartest people I know and does physics puzzles for fun and builds shit all the time.
Skilled trade jobs value paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.
Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck.
"Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck."
My oldest son is 17 years old and graduated one semester early from high school.
He now works full-time as a welder and heavy equipment mechanic with a base rate of $25/hour and will get many, many hours of overtime this summer.
He will easily gross > 70k this year.
Granted, this is in the Bay Area (so add some inflation there) and he has certain physical and interpersonal attributes[1] that make him special ... but this is, indeed, happening and my impression is that it would be repeatable for others like him.
FWIW, he's very proud of himself and we're very proud of him but ... we're also trying to impress upon him that wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security. Owning things is[2].
[1] He's a big strong guy, projects as aged 20+ and is very outgoing and charismatic.
At least in the trades the overtime is a well-understood part of the bargain. Plenty of white-collar employees work 60+ hour weeks with no additional compensation except the possibility of a larger-than-average bonus.
If you talk to someone in the trades yes, it's understood that overtime is required to make good money. When you see people promoting the trades to highschoolers though, they are not talking about that fact.
Yes, white collar jobs can require overtime but not all and not always but that is kinda besides the point. Why are we promoting work that requires 50-60+ hours a week to get by?
Yes, continue and elaborate? Mental (white collar) work has more of that feeling of dread I think. Maybe physical “overtime” has a physical limit, not sure how often you push yourself into burnout in those fields? Curious and asking here, don’t read in too much here.
You can google "retirement age plumbers" and see stories of people's bodies giving out at age 50. There are some things you can do to mitigate that risk, but physical labor jobs frequently land you into unplanned early retirement, with the rest of your life in pain.
I agree with that, the physical labor has been studied and experienced for quite some time now. But we need to look forward and see if there might be changes we cannot comprehend yet.
For example, we cannot yet google the software eng retirement age or the like. Assuming we started in 2005, average dude 25years old then hasn't retired yet and we don't know either where he/she's gone in 2035/45.
Software engineering as a popular career track goes back to the early 80s if I'm being extremely conservative.
There are plenty of retired software engineers that I know. Most of them retired because they wanted to do something different, and they had the money to do it. I don't know of any that have retired as a direct result of the physical effects on their body.
Yeah I’m not talking about Kernighan & Ritchie et al. More like the big boom, zero interest rate and the huge demand of SWE that occurred 2010 onwards.
I’m sure the biggest early retirement factor is weight. Most guys in the trades were 50-150lbs overweight. That’s more ruinous to your back and body than anything you are likely to do at work. We had old guys working and one thing basically all of them had in common was being thin.
>The WEL for Manganese (since 2018) in the UK for those small particles that reach the deep lung (known as respirable particles) is 0.05mg/m3 (8hr TWA), a tenth of the previous WEL.
This change is significant as much of the manganese in the fume will be respirable. It is likely that the respirable limit will be exceeded during many welding activities unless effective controls are introduced and used properly.
I think if you really want to make a proper living from the trades, you need to at some stage plan to move "off the tools" and into starting your own welding/plumbing/whatever business.
If you can do that successfully, you can get FAANG money.
Well there are around 130K plumbing businesses in the USA and around 400K plumbers, so I think that plan leaves around 270K plumbers snaking drains until they die.
Yes, but I don’t see why that means overtime is compensated in one but not the other. If anything blue collar workers are more upfront about their time being valuable, while in white collar work there’s an unwritten expectation that you’ll suck it up and get the job done. Talking about money is taboo, but who does that benefit?
Yet I see tradesmen who have started their own contacting businesses and poorly paid software engineers who somehow just make Wordpress themes.
At the end of the day, people need to discover themselves and find what they excel at. Who am I to tell people that they’ll enjoy my job and be as good at it as I am. No one should tell me to start a career in chemistry or playing an instrument. I’ve already tried it.
Yeah, is it really a good indicator if you need to work 20 hours overtime every week to make the median household income? That's just exploitation.
We also just know that, blue or white, there is no raise structure in society anymore. You can't just do honest work or even be loyal and expect it to pay off financially.
Median household income is household income, not personal income. Median personal income in the US for all people with an income is (as of 2022) $47,960. [1] For those in full time year-long employment, it's $60,070. And note because that is for all employed persons, that's including people with years of experience in their respective fields.
Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.
$70k isn't a median income, it's much more than it. Which is to say it's much more than 50% of full+ time American workers, with years of experience on average, earn. And overtime is typically time and a half. So somebody earning $50k and working 60 hour weeks would be earning $87,500 which would put them in the top quarter of all earners in the US [1], straight out of high school, and with 0 debt.
You are right that doing this in the Bay Area would be unusual due to an unreasonable cost of living, but it's possible he's still living with his parents. If not, the great thing about the trade is that they're in high demand everywhere - including offshore where the pay skyrockets, especially for a welder who can get underwater work. Those gigs enable one to comfortably retire, if they want, a multi millionaire well before 40.
But the interesting thing about trades is that people end up enjoying them. A friend works the rigs and makes a stupid amount of $$$ thanks to doing 2 on 2 off and spending his offtime in places like Thailand. So he's taking home a healthy 6 figures, gets 50% of the year off, and is having a total cost of living in the low thousands per year. He still has no intention of retiring though, even though he could live off simple interest alone at this point. It ends up being a lifestyle and not just a job.
>Median weekly earnings of full-time workers were $1,194 in the first quarter of 2025.
Extrapolates to 62k/year. I don't know what else to say here.
>. So somebody earning $50k and working 60 hour weeks would be earning $87,500 which would put them in the top quarter of all earners in the US
Yes, work 50% more than the median and you hit the 75% mark (above 50% of the top half). The math seems to math out. But thought we wanted to not worm ourselves to death these days?
>straight out of high school, and with 0 debt.
Well, no. Not straight out of high school. You need to compete for a role among unions (which seems to be a hurdle the poster above passed, or is confident of passing), then complete an apprenticeship for a few years that may either be unpaid or pay significantly less. Then after that you become a journeyman and start to get that pay.
There's still a near college level of training where you need resources to survive that your apprenticeship isn't covering. Resources that may or may not include parents covering room and board (and in that case, sure. You can survive on anything That pays anything if the biggest expense is paid for). That's sadly a growing luxury in modern society, though.
>But the interesting thing about trades is that people end up enjoying them.
I work in games, so yea. I get it. You sacrifice comfort and maybe even health for furfillment. But I can still recognize in my industry when that passion and engagement is being exploited while still choosing to participate it.
Well, eventually I recognized it. Gaining 60 pounds and having an emergency room visit finally knocked some sense into me.
Most people don't work 52 weeks a year so yearly earnings are different than weekly earnings times 52. Beyond that it's important to consider what you're comparing here. You're looking at the wages of (and only of) all full time+ workers in America - meaning you're comparing the earnings of somebody fresh out of high school to somebody who's been working for years on average. And of course plenty of those people are also working overtime. In spite of all of this, the high school kid is still earning 20% more! And the OP that started this thread conversation made it clear his kid has already received this offer, so yes it's literally straight out of high school. His earnings in a few years will be even higher.
Games and trades are complete opposites. If you still think you enjoy game development (and aren't independent), then it's almost certain that you haven't been in the industry long. With games, you start with a passion and the games industry will just completely beat it out of you. The games industry will make you hate game development and even games. The trades are different in that somehow that passion is enabled to be born for those that didn't already have it, and fostered and grown in those that did. In software you end up in a scenario (I'm speaking outside of games here - where you don't even get good pay) where people mostly hate their job, but love the pay. And in welding you end up in one where people mostly love their job.
>Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.
I'm scoffing at a kid needing to work 60 hours a week in order to earn an income barely above the median. I'm scoffing at the idea that people think 70k is liveable in high COL areas without sharing multiple roommates.These aren't things we should normalize.
If you really think this isn't bad, you're the ones out of touch with how expensive it is to survive these days.
Not everything that is hard or unpleasant is exploitation. 50% of jobs will pay below the median income. That's what median means. The existence of jobs paying below the median income is a mathematical certainty, not exploitation.
"Good" is always going to be relative. Is it good if your other option is to be a programmer? Probably not. Is it good if your other option is working retail for minimum wage? Yeah, then it's probably pretty good.
So it's a below median income job (as 50% of all jobs necessarily are) with the option to increase your income by working more. Still not exploitation.
There are salaried employees making less who also work 60 hours a week and don't even get overtime (granted, their jobs are likely less physically demanding).
I don't think you're understanding the long term implications of this, nor how expensive it is these days to simply live. People don't understand that soke areas can barely live on median income to begin with and that these aren't just "nice to have" hours, but needed to survive. I will call that exploitation.
>There are salaried employees making less who also work 60 hours a week and don't even get overtime
Those are called exempt jobs and they tend to start at 80k for that to qualify. I still don't like it but baby steps.
If you're non-exempt and have unpaid overtime... How is that not exploitation?
Exempt jobs in no way shape or form start at $80k. You can be making $35k and be exempt. It has to do with the nature of the work, not a salary.
You can't be non-exempt and have unpaid overtime. Non-exempt means you are required to be paid overtime for working over 40 hours per week. That's the entire point of the exempt / non-exempt designation. If you're non-exempt and not getting paid overtime, you need to report your employer to the DoL.
Yes, some areas are expensive, those areas also have higher wages. The median wage in that area will be higher than the overall median for the whole country. If you can't afford to live there...live somewhere else. That isn't complicated.
>Exempt employees in California generally must earn a minimum monthly salary of no less than two times the state minimum wage for full time employment.
So as of now that floor would be $34/hr to even be considered.
>Yes, some areas are expensive, those areas also have higher wages
Given federal minimum wage, it's likely to be the other way around. $25/hr in CA may go down to $11 in a low COL. You can see some abysmally low compensations flr jobs that "require" advanced degrees.
>If you can't afford to live there...live somewhere else. That isn't complicated.
Spoken like someone who's never tried to get housing out of state without a job offer. Let alone moving long distance.
I'm not sure what you want. It's not like $68k is poverty wages. If they don't do the overtime, maybe they only make $50k, which is still above the median personal income ($68k is household income, meaning that is usually with more than one person working). Yeah, you can't live in downtown Manhattan or San Francisco on that, but there's lots of other places you can live just fine, and many many people who live on less. Welding is in demand in lots of places, especially lower cost of living places. It can't be that hard to move. Human beings migrated across Siberia wearing animal skins, surely one can figure out how to apply for a job online and rent a U-Haul.
What's loyalty got to do with this? I'm not "loyal" to my employer and I don't know anyone who is. If I find a job that pays better, and offers better conditions, I'll take it. Why would anyone do anything else, and why would anyone put any value on that?
I actually don't believe it.
Most people work not only for the pay check but also for some concrete project they want to see completed (or a customer problem they want to see fixed, etc). Omo economicus is a very simplified theoretical model of only one aspect of work.
There are options other than "loyal to the company" or "always choose option which pays most"
For example someone might like their co-workers, enjoy the projects they work on, and want to see the current product (that they have invested so many time into) succeed. But at the same time, they might not care about company itself at all. If the project got closed and co-workers left, they will move to a new company with no hesitation.
I don't believe in loyalty to an employer but I've had and seen numerous employers who said they valued loyalty. Those employers didn't pay for that loyalty and didn't deserve, yes.
But that is the point of the GP. Ostensibly, employers once paid for loyalty by offering consistent raises. That is done now.
Thanks for agreeing with me. Older generations have a notion of "be loyal and reliable and you'll move up". The last few decades broke such a social contract.
It probably deserved to be broken but the point overall is thst job progression isn't just a given built into most structures anymore. You gotta fight or bounce around and keep proving your worth.
Tribal knowledge and company familiarity should justify the employer in offering raises to keep the employee around. Hiring someone new almost assuredly costs more in both the front-end and the back-end.
Yes, loyalty is a two way street. If they aren't loyal to you, you're not getting any payoff by being loyal to them. Times have changed (IMO for the worse).
By comparison I was making $75k in the Bay Area as an entry level software engineer with no overtime and only because I was afraid of negotiating higher (I think 85-90 was on the table).
This isn’t to take anything away from your son’s achievements and congrats to him and you all should of course be proud of his accomplishments. I think though it’s useful to compare and contrast blue collar and white collar wages in terms of effort per dollar earned as well when discussing options to kids. There’s nothing wrong with working harder for that amount, especially when you love the work because then you get even more pride out of it, but some kids may want to work harder in the “short” term via a professional education for the long term easier path or have better job stability even in the face of physical ailments.
At a prior gig we stepped up a machine shop and ended up hiring a stinky kid who I thought was someone's homeless brother. Extremely talented, after our program wound down he started his own machine shop and now does multiple millions of dollars of revenue yearly, has staff etc, in his mid 20s now.
He's a special case sure, but if you have business sense you don't have to top out at the high end of the hourly scale.
And Vitalik Buterin was a billionaire before the age of 30 with a CS degree as was Bill Gates and Lebron James was set by the time he was 18. What's the point of talking about outliers?
It feels dubious to appeal to job stability with software in modern times. Companies in the past were hiring and building out during unprecedently great times, and there's no reason to think those times will return. And on the issue of physical ailments - the one ailment we all hope to suffer is growing "old."
In software there's widespread "age discrimination". Mostly it's companies not really valuing experience in software much, so they'd rather hire a younger guy for much less. But the outcome is the same - software is a relatively shortlived occupation for most people, and that's after spending another 4+ years in university, then spending however much time paying off your debts, and then finally seeing your full salary.
By contrast working in the trades until retirement is entirely possible. And it's undoubtedly better for your body as well. Our bodies are meant for doing things - not idle sitting and staring at screens. I did software and CS, but will not be recommending it to my children. At this point I think the best future proofing is some sort of field where computer science is applied, rather than the occupation itself, like electrical engineering.
>At this point I think the best future proofing is some sort of field where computer science is applied, rather than the occupation itself, like electrical engineering.
I think a lot of people actually like physical work and the day passes faster when you aren’t sitting at a desk. But you can’t make the big bucks there unless you are some sort of high end craftsman, and your service life is limited to how long your body stays together.
> wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security.
High wages provide the discretionary income required to invest though. So I'd say, they're not the goal, but if the word path is to be used, I'd say they are part of the path. As far as owning things...investments specifically (not two motorcycles and a hummer), the usual advice is a well balanced portfolio. Could be equities, maybe some real estate, maybe even some crypto, all at different ratios depending on your risk profile.
My concern is that we are in a unique time period where all of that is coming to an end and there will be no wealth appreciation even for disciplined investors.
> My concern is that we are in a unique time period where all of that is coming to an end and there will be no wealth appreciation even for disciplined investors.
Everyone always fears the future when their portfolio is down.
The best hedge is to also "invest" in something that has value to you. Like bricks / house.
I'm not the person you're replying to. But actually I've been getting quite concerned about this for some time. Mostly due to the shrinking world demographics on the horizon. Overall growth is slowing and in most developed economies it will be shrinking. Also, increasing wealth inequality tends to lead to lower overall GDP so if that trend continues I expect lower aggregate growth as well.
I think there is indeed a strong possibility that we may see very poor inflation-adjusted growth from an otherwise reasonable and diverse investment portfolio.
Ultimately, the recipe for growth will just not be so simple in a world economy with a dwindling population. Thats a VERY unique situation so a lot of historical wisdom regarding investments I think may not bear fruit like it did in the past.
My approach to mitigate this is two-fold, first I'm trying to be even MORE diversified. I have investments spread out over domestic and international ETF's, real estate, and I work a public sector job with a public pension. In addition, while aggregate growth may become lackluster, certain industries will still do well. Ive run businesses before and I'm looking to start another business in a very well-targeted industry to add an additional potential revenue stream well into the future. And the second prong of my approach is to increase my savings rate much higher than historically safe targets.
I think there is good reason to be concerned about this and it has very little to do with the current market turmoil. (Although there are some indicators of trouble in that too)
One of the things I'm very happy to have is a pension from a very long-ago job that I doubt I gave more than a couple passing thoughts to at the time (as well as another less-insulated annuity that is nonetheless in a very well-funded/managed institution.) In any case, being very cautious about anything near or even mid-term.
Or AI takes off so that labor becomes worthless and owning things is all that matters and labor gets gaslight that it's a them problem until capital has built a big enough army of murderbots to put down anyone who says the emperor has no clothes.
I'm hoping for something inbetween the apocalyptic possibilities.
someone needs to weld those murderbots, or pick up the little piece of scrap keeping the welding bot from making more murderbots, or to take over welding when the murderbots all stop working and start watching Sanctuary Moon 24/7
>The best hedge is to also "invest" in something that has value to you. Like bricks / house.
That makes intuitive sense, but quickly falls apart when you do any rigorous analysis. Buying a house might cover your shelter needs, but you still need to eat, and you can't eat bricks. Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit). Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.
On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks. Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area. If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price. All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.
I can live in Albera. My commute to my job in British Columbia would be hell though.
Owning a home too far from amenities isn't worth much. Same with living too far from where the weather is hospitable, food is available, or the people with skills I need have settled.
Owning a home isn't much of an investment if the jobs, people, or weather shift out from under you. You're then stuck selling your investment, likely at a loss, while also moving to where you can make a living
Yeah, that's the chance you take buying real estate. Try not to be bad at it?
I don't know what to tell you, I bought in a city where I've lived for 25 years and in the neighborhood for a bit over a decade, even that not for the first time. I'm not going to say it doesn't take luck and work.
> Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank
>That makes intuitive sense, but quickly falls apart when you do any rigorous analysis. Buying a house might cover your shelter needs, but you still need to eat, and you can't eat bricks.
This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.
>Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit).
This analysis is an edge case and in no way represents the norm. I'm not sure of any area that has gone from Bay Area prices to Detroit prices in a single lifetime.
>Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.
Another crazy edge case. It's saying don't buy a house because an asteroid might hit. I'm pretty sure that newly non-functioning legal system wouldn't protect your stock portfolio either. If it comes to that, best to invest in bullets and whiskey.
>On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks.
Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.
>Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area.
You shouldn't ever put all your money in stocks. Putting money in real estate, bonds, CDs, cash, etc. is the definition of diversification.
>If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price.
Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job. If you lose your job and haven't saved up enough runway, you could default on your mortgage. You could also not pay your rent. You get kicked out either way, but the bank should cut you a check for the equity you have remaining, minus whatever fees they conjure up.
>All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.
All of your points were based on invalid assumptions, edge cases, or are irrelevant when compared to paying rent. Buying a house is a long game.
>This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.
The problem is that in much of the anglosphere, housing is so scarce that you have to ignore such rules of thumb, or live in the middle of nowhere.
>This analysis is an edge case
>Another crazy edge case
If you ignore edge cases, then you're left with just the median case, and that says that at current price levels, houses aren't worth investing in because they have historically worse returns than stocks, and provide poor diversification.
>Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.
This calculator[1] factors everything you listed, and the math doesn't work out for the hottest housing markets. It might work out for Miami or Huston, but not San Francisco or even Albuquerque. Using default assumptions implies a break-even price-to-rent ratio of 14, but most US metros are far above that[2].
The nice thing about the calculator is that if you don't agree with the assumptions, you can plug in your own numbers. I'd like to see what numbers you come up with to make to make the math work out in favor of buying in the top US cities.
>Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job.
The point isn't that a Bay Area housing market will crash because Google Employee #68908 lost his job, it's that if there was an AI winter/tech crash, that will result in Bay Area housing prices dropping, along with layoffs.
> The problem is that in much of the anglosphere, housing is so scarce that you have to ignore such rules of thumb, or live in the middle of nowhere.
This is a bit circular, supply-and-demand-wise. Especially in the US - why is demand in some areas so high that people will bid houses in San Jose up to 2M+? Why aren't they buying the same thing for 450k in Dallas?
Why aren't the companies based in those crazy expensive areas and paying million-plus total comp to large sections of their workforce being eaten alive by ones with lower labor costs in other regions?
Housing is scarce in the areas that are already the most densely populated, which itself is a bit of yogi-berra moment.
Too much discussion about housing in the US focuses only on the supply side and ignores the geographic concentration of demand that has happened over the last few decades. Is that centralization good for the country in the long-run regardless? Obviously that centralization goes back way longer in many European countries, so was the distribution and the number of growing populaces in cheap, not-yet-established areas part of the secret sauce for the 20th century US? Could you start the companies that made the Bay Area what it is today in today's Bay Area? Could you even start them in somewhere cheaper today, or would you not be able to get the talent to join you there? We're five years into remote work being way more common than it ever was before, and it hasn't broken that stranglehold of concentration yet.
>We're five years into remote work being way more common than it ever was before, and it hasn't broken that stranglehold of concentration yet.
That's partially because big companies decided WFH was now verboten. Part of it was because execs in that area didn't want their personal property values to go down, I suspect. I'm sure there was also governmental pressure as well to protect the auxiliary businesses like local restaurants, protect tax revenue like property tax state income tax, etc.
> This calculator[1] factors everything you listed, and the math doesn't work out for the hottest housing markets
That's a great calculator; I remember using it like a decade ago. And while it includes all factors they listed there are a few it doesn't:
1. If interest rates go down, you can refinance, but if they go up, the inflation and appreciation values likely will as well, but your rate is fixed, for (up to) 30 yrs (!!)
2. It's relatively easy to make improvements while you live there (and capture increased value when you leave)
3. The calculator assumes that the down payment and cost difference vs renting would be invested, which is fine but ignores psychological realities that prevent this more often than not
Also:
> The best hedge is to also "invest" in something that has value to you. Like bricks / house.
The suggestion was mentioned as a 'hedge'. The point being: you don't know what the values entered into the calculator will really end up being. Having some costs locked in can help with concerns around cash flow (and shelter costs are usually a significant percentage of costs overall). It's an "also 'invest'" strategy, so there's a whole lot not included in the calculator here as well
I will agree that this could play a massive factor, but it's a massive "if" you're banking on. There's no guarantee that interest rates will dip, and the longer it doesn't dip the worse the math works out for you. Sure, tons of homeowners refinanced during the pandemic, but that was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Moreover stocks also rallied in the same period, which raised the opportunity cost of the equity you have locked inside your home.
> but if they go up, the inflation and appreciation values likely will as well, but your rate is fixed, for (up to) 30 yrs (!!)
No, higher interest rates makes house prices dip, or at least suppresses growth, not the other way around. All things being equal, higher interest rates means higher monthly payments, which means buyers have less buying power in absolute terms. We see this reflected in housing prices after the fed hiked interest rates.
>2. It's relatively easy to make improvements while you live there (and capture increased value when you leave)
I reject the premise that making improvements is some sort of positive value activity. If you're staying for a long time, then that 10-year old kitchen remodel isn't going to boost prices much by the time you sell. If you're selling in the near future, then you run into the problem of realtor fees eating into any profits, because moving frequently means such fees can't be amortized over longer periods. In either case there's risk associated with renos. They can be botched or go over budget, and all things being equal as a buyer I'd rather buy a non-renovated house for $x, than pay $x + $50k for a house that the previous owner spent $50k renovating. By all means, do that kitchen reno to make your home a nicer place to live, but don't think it's something that pays for itself.
>3. The calculator assumes that the down payment and cost difference vs renting would be invested, which is fine but ignores psychological realities that prevent this more often than not
Fair point, although I seriously doubt people who do rigorous buy vs rent analysis are the type of people who can only be cajoled to save through a house/mortgage
>The suggestion was mentioned as a 'hedge'. The point being: you don't know what the values entered into the calculator will really end up being. Having some costs locked in can help with concerns around cash flow (and shelter costs are usually a significant percentage of costs overall). It's an "also 'invest'" strategy, so there's a whole lot not included in the calculator here as well
The values could easily work against you as well. For instance if housing costs rise slower than expected. This is a real possibility with the rise of YIMBY in politics and boomers selling up as they retire. Moreover how is parking most/all of your savings in a single asset (ie. your house) considered a "hedge"? Maybe it can be construed as a hedge if your portfolio was all MAANA stocks, but I'm not sure how anyone would think shifting from a globally diversified stock/bond portfolio (ie. a bet on the global economy) to a single house in the US is a "hedge".
No, of course not but I think you should respond by increasing your savings rate beyond historically safe targets and diversifying even more aggressively.
100% agree. Part of it is age, and part of it is current situation and needs, but I've definitely dialed back on aggressive investments into safe harbors.
I'm not sure what the rest of the US market is like, but the Bay Area has a huge shortage of tradespeople because of the 2008 housing crash and very high cost of living pricing folks out. I knew of this but became much more acutely aware when I started doing transit advocacy. Getting folks to build/maintain HVAC systems, weld, drive buses, etc is getting increasingly difficult.
If your son can avoid having to buy into the Bay Area housing market (by living on property you own/pay for), he can make good money and probably will have little trouble finding work for years to come.
FYI for those not from the bay area: California mandates that chain restaurants pay at least $20/hour. So $25/hour isn't that much more than entry-level at McDonald's.
But McDonalds doesn’t really offer OT, which is a huge draw. Many fast food workers work multiple jobs because they need the hours for money, and none of their employers give OT regularly.
Working 40 hours at $20/hr = 800/week.
Work 40 hours at $25 and 20 at $37.5 = $1750 which is enough to live in the Bay Area.
I'm pretty sure OP wasn't talking about the Bay Area which isn't a sane place economically speaking where 70K isn't all that great of a salary, especially with a ton of overtime.
Yeah, ignoring the OT, 70k in the Bay Area is ~40k in Omaha, Ann Arbor, Orlando, etc [1]. Without the OT it's more like 30k. And if your brain, like mine, hasn't adjusted to inflation yet, that's ~23k in 2019 dollars [2].
Sure, Omaha doesn’t have surfing or mountains, but camping, hiking and other outdoor activities are cheaper, less crowded, and way more accessible. You’re not fighting for a campsite or dropping $50 just to sleep outside, and most hiking is free or near-free. No $25 parking fees or permit lotteries just to walk a trail. And saying $70k goes far in the Bay Area if you don’t pay rent is kind of ridiculous. Almost no one lives rent-free. Every well-paid software engineer I know out there is trying to get out. They’re all burned out by housing costs, crowds, and the grind. Amenities don’t mean much if you can’t afford to enjoy them.
Dispersed camping in National Forests is typically free. Likewise BLM land. There is a lot of both in California. And because public land is your land, permission is usually not required.
Is the Bay area perfect? For me, no. I don’t live there. I live somewhere better that’s within driving day trip distance. But if I was young, it would be a different story.
I mean, even an hour west of Boston, there's a ton of hiking/canoeing/etc. mostly with free or cheap parking (have a free parking pass for state stuff). Mostly just do day-trips so not sure what camping spots run. But there's a ton of cheap/free stuff. No, it's not Yosemite though have a pass for national parks as well but plenty of nice stuff.
You are exactly right. This is how I have calculated it since I took MicroEconomics as a Freshman.
P.S. Union Journeyman Welder, Bay Area median salary is $26 ~ $36.82 =
$52,000 to $72,400.
"The median household income in the Bay Area was $128,151 in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This represents a slight decrease from $132,586 in 2019. "
So.. 56% of median household income? If him, and his gf worked, then they would collectively make 112% of median household income.
> we're also trying to impress upon him that wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security. Owning things is
I'm not a parent, so I'm a little hesitant to disagree, but this seems like the dumbest thing I've heard in my life.
Wages are exactly the path to wealth and security -- the matter is what you do with those wages. You can't own things without receiving wages unless you inherit your wealth.
If what you were trying to say is that the best path to being wealthy is to already be wealthy, then I definitely agree, but for those born missing their silver spoon wages are the only way.
Your kid had his silver spoon (no offense intended here), and it seems like he's going to be a balanced person because he'll probably be able to see and appreciate different worlds, so congrats on that. I find it hard to believe someone can go into a field like welding (knowing tech exists, and having the aptitude).
I am curious to hear though -- what is your plan? In my own pre-parent mind it seems like this is a chance to teach him about as much of the world and the people around him/society above and below him as you can before settles into his life (clearly there's a ton of time left to change, etc). The struggles of the average blue collar worker are very different from that of the white collar worker -- but the right advice about the various big things in life I'd imagine would make a world of difference.
With regard to owning things, knowing things like "banks giving out mortgages are playing a trust game -- and they trust you a lot more if you have 50 working years left". It's possible of course to get a bad mortgage, but the first rung of the ladder is more about projections more than anything for young people. In the Bay Area I'm sure that... isn't reasonable advice though since your housing market is absolutely insane.
Also, is he going into welding with some sort add-on skills? Like welding with a little bit of CS/robotics? Welding with a passion for cooking? etc. The (currently) secondary skill tree can completely change careers.
Banks do not engage in age discrimination in giving mortgages. You can get one at age 20 or age 60, all else being equal.
It’s a secured asset, so if you turn 65 and need to go into a nursing home for some , or die, they’re confident they can recoup the balance of the loan from the house when it is auctioned off or sold to another family member.
> It’s a secured asset, so if you turn 65 and need to go into a nursing home for some , or die, they’re confident they can recoup the balance of the loan from the house when it is auctioned off or sold to another family member.
Thanks for noting this, this was definitely a possibility I hadn't weighed enough, though I'm not sure it's always another family member (I assume you meant another family member or any random bidder)
> Banks do not engage in age discrimination in giving mortgages. You can get one at age 20 or age 60, all else being equal.
I find it hard to believe the suggestion here that as far as 30y loan repayment goes, all else equal, a 60 year old earning 70k a year is similarly risky to a 20 year old earning the same rate? From first principles, this clearly doesn't hold.
Now, I assume you were referring to the illegality of considering age in loans -- it is illegal to consider age, but in this case the "age discrimination" is baked in -- because it's built into credit scores[0][1]. The common sense take prevails here, I think.
Actual results on the ground often differ from what is and isn't legal/right, as anyone who is in an underrepresented class will attest to (I do not mean this in the preachy liberal sense, it's just the best way I can find to say it), I think this might be one of those cases (guess I'll find out when I'm 60?).
The aarp link seems to basically say that a lot of seniors are having loans rejected because of low reported income, so be sure to report retirement income.
The philadelphia fed link notes that older people who apply for loans are being denied more often, but there's lots of potential reasons for that. Aggregate economic stats, other than credit score, in the table at the end look worse to my eye near the top age brackets (but maybe not at the same levels that rejection started climbing).
It's not clear to me when it says age discrimination is prohibited, but mortality expectations are allowed. Seems like the same thing to me.
The paper suggests there may be an element of selection, which resonates with me. Looking at my parents and their siblings, most all of them would have had a mortgage 30 years ago and likely be in these statistics; now, those with higher retirment incomes also seem to be the ones that paid off their mortgages and aren't interested in a new one.
I think all he's saying to the kid is to avoid the wage slage mindset of always being a worker, renter, and consumer. You don't have to be born wealthy to understand that or to work your way out of it. Wages are important but they're a mean not an end.
> Wages are exactly the path to wealth and security -- the matter is what you do with those wages. You can't own things without receiving wages unless you inherit your wealth.
No, you can also build things to achieve wealth – for example, you can build a company and achieve wealth this way. This doesn't necessarily have to be a pump&dump startup, lots of entrepreneurs became wealthy by founding a sustainable business.
True, but let's consider the next age group up from 17, ... graduate students earn less than that, don't get paid overtime, and will have to search for a new job in a few years.
That may be true but we're talking about an anecdote. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks that people with a high school education, on average, earn about half of what people with masters degrees earn [0]. It's easy to lose the big picture when focusing on an outlier.
In the chart linked by mmcwilliams, an undergraduate degree in engineering would normally be a "Bachelor's Degree" - assuming the certificate awarded at the end says "bachelor of science" or something similar.
Some engineering programs make sure students are learning specialized practical skills, others make sure they get a solid grounding in basics so they have an easier time in picking whatever engineering discipline strikes their fancy.
The differentiation here is usually that a professional degree follows a bachelors or undergrad degree. Law school and medical school are categorized differently than masters degree programs. In US colleges an engineering degree would typically be an MA and in some fields the MA is not a terminal degree.
Kids (kid being someone from 16 to 30 without children of their own, ideally also without substance abuse problem and a home they can sleep in without fear of being assaulted) have nearly infinite energy, capacity to absorb (physical) abuse, and often the focus to learn esoteric subjects, if they're interested in the subject.
So I would fully expect a large fraction of bored kids to potentially become expert car mechanics, or tree pruners, algebraic geometers, hadoop experts, air conditioning duct builders, etc, if given access, mentorship, opportunity, recognition, and compensation.
I don’t disagree. After all, that’s exactly how I became an expert in whatever I do right now.
You seem to have missed my point though, it was about switching tracks to become an expert in a new thing. A random physics PhD grad might not have a burning passion for fintech, for example but still becomes an expert after three months in the job because of the sheer amount of rigorous training.
I think that the ability to learn adjacent skills (and I'd call fintech and physics PhD adjacent) is a function of domain expertise. For instance, if I were running an automotive body shop I'd put the expert hvac technician slightly ahead of the quant in the "how quickly they'll pick it up" and I'd put either ahead of the person who's never run down to the end of the "obsessive about a subject" maze. For lots and lots of kids, that "obsessive about a subject" focus comes naturally and often is beaten out of them by "please go back to your data entry task; we're not paying you to find weird buffer overruns while speed-running mario brothers 720"
And let’s consider the next age group up from that with some graduate students easily clearing 150-200k in total comp. Short term pain for long term prosperity - studies related to me was that on average university graduates end up making $1M more than non graduates in lifetime earnings (of course misleading data since university admission is already selecting for something that correlates with ambition AND the professional world tended to prefer university students with opportunities)
Of course people pursuing higher education are often doing it for personal growth reasons as well.
Haha, can't actually tell if this is satire. If it is, then bravo, sir! If it's not, then it's sad this poor father doesn't know his son has dropped out of high school to become welder who needs a ton of OT to scrape by in the Bay Area.
Welder employment market is very boom bust (people crowd it when work is well paid because welders are rare, and they leave it when work is not well paid because welders are plentiful), it could go either way in 5 years (programming is the same, but we haven’t had a bust since 2008, and then there was the 80s which was brutal for SWEs).
> paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.
Yes, paying dues, both in the sense of putting in the time to learn the trade well, and very likely for a good paying career in the trade, paying union dues.
People have been doing this since the rise of professional guilds in the middle ages.
Today's kids can show aptitude, capability, and interest by doing well in shop class. An employer can take that interested teen or tween on at an entry level, add to their skill level, and make a profit on their labor. The worker can protect their labor value through a union, and probably should if only for the side benefits apart from negotiating contract labor rates.
Should they just go to college instead? Sure, if they have that interest,
and can get out without a student loan debt bigger than some mortgages.
Unions are not magic. I have a friend who did belong to the local sheetmetal workers union and she was... not positive. Moved into a non-union shop and was a lot happier.
Similar experience here. Family member went into a union job and discovered that it was great for the old guys at the top who had been there for 3 decades, but it was rather repressive for the new people starting at the bottom. Much easier to pivot into a different job where union seniority wasn’t the defining factor of your entire career.
Sure, but a union is supposed to work better, so if it isn't, by definition it's to some degree corrupted. So it's important to remember that the union itself isn't a bad thing.
A union is supposed to provide for workers in the same way that a software company makes software. If either of them don't, there's something fundamentally corrupt about each org, not with the concept.
Our high school did something I'll never forget. They offered trade based two hour "block courses" through the school district. We had Electronics and Circuit Design, IT, Auto Shop and Repair, Welding, Aerospace Engineering, and a whole bunch more that I was never interested in and so don't remember.
It was a great program. It was offered in connection with local state and community colleges. You could get credit for some of your high school work if you continued on in the field. The local employers knew about it so they would stop by often to see what students were learning and to suggest new directions for the entire class.
Never seen anything like it before or since which was the 1990s. It was a way to start paying your dues before you even left high school. You wouldn't command an awesome salary right out of school but you could easily insert yourself into the trades with almost no down time.
My high school had something similar. Also in the 90s. The trade program was eventually disbanded. And the shop classes were converted to computer labs. In a similar vein, the nursing program is still going and very popular. You graduate with a CNA, 6 months to LPN, enough credits to get an AS.N in 1 year. A lot of my friends bought their first home before 25.
“Paying dues” is a waste of everyone’s time and the productivity of the market. It means one node of the market was underutilized, purely for ego.
One thing I like about being closer to market oriented trades (or directly trading) is that your compensating is immediately based in the utility you provide. Like in financial services if you provide a service is based on the volume and your toll on that volume.
But yes if you dint have opportunities, like the knowledge, capital and flexibility to leverage it, then there’s entry level grunt work remaining.
“Paying one’s dues” has a very different connotation to me than “Learning a skill.” The former suggests a tenure-based system of seniority and pay scales, rather than a meritocratic system based on skill level and actual output.
To me it just says you'll make less for a period while learning the ropes. I suppose there are situations where you need to be spending the time to empty the trashcans but I don't take it that way.
You have to take into account, that you start to earn money from a very young age. And you don't start your career with huge student debt. Skilled workers have a huge head start and it's easy to find need jobs because of the demand. If you're smart and good at your job, you can create a decent life for yourself with skilled labor. Especially because all the smart kids seem to do the "smart" thing and go to college, leaving more demand for good laborers in the skilled labor market.
The difference between compensation in different countries is fascinating. In OZ/NZ tradespeople are the highest earners. For Australia I suspect this is explained at least partially by mining (I know people who earned $600+ per hour 10-15 years ago, and that included free flights in and out, free accommodation etc), and NZ needed to follow because of the ease of moving to Oz. Mining doesn't really explain why plumbers and carpenters earn like crazy as well though.
The quality of work though is extremely poor if I compare what one would expect in e.g. Germany. I guess that's the advantage of the German apprenticeship system where tradespeople get proper training and not take a couple month course at a tafe and then start their own business.
> (I know people who earned $600+ per hour 10-15 years ago, and that included free flights in and out, free accommodation etc)
I remember countless stories like this circulating when I was in high school. Someone who wasn’t going to college was instead going off to do some obscure thing like work on oil rigs or do welding in hazardous locations.
The hook was always that they heard a friend of a friend brag about some extreme hourly rate they made one time a few years ago and assumed that’s just what the job always paid.
Then they went out and did it, learned that the job was terrible, and discovered that the average pay was a lot less than the all-time highest number that people would quote.
> I guess that's the advantage of the German apprenticeship system where tradespeople get proper training and not take a couple month course at a tafe and then start their own business.
Plumbers and electricians in Australia both do four year apprenticeships, with some time at TAFE and the rest training on the job.
The quality problems you see are generally less about training, and more the result of financially-motivated corner cutting.
I was into machining right out of high school. After layoffs and plant closings I got into IT, now networking. I’d never make the kind of money I do now if I hadn’t of made that career change! I love my job too.
You don’t even need to be in the trades to make $70k/year. That’s just about $33/hour, you can make that in a fast food restaurant or grocery store these days on the low rung of management or even just a senior IC in services where I live.
I own Netgate (hat tip to the haters who will comment), the company that does pfsense and tsnr.
I also own Bump It Offroad in Windsor, CO. We do some CNC (plasma table) as well. I pay welders about $70k/year plus benefits, to start. They’re both college drop-outs, but smart and willing to learn.
Though I grew up in the trades, it’s not about “dues” for me, but more work ethic and willingness to learn.
Very cool. I'm down the road in FtC, and I TRIED to get my daughter to take the Front Range machining program when she was in HS, but it required going an hour away to one of the Denver campuses every day because they didn't have it here. I thought it would be good for her to have as a fallback, and I'd have gotten her a CNC router to learn on. She also really didn't express any interest, if they had a local program I probably could have convinced her to go.
It seems like around here it's definitely some interest in some of those skills. I gather the Bugatti guy has some need of them.
edit: (I've got a 100 series, so I'll keep an eye on BIO)
I have a number of concerns with CSU Ft. Collins. I know people who transferred to Billings because FtC was losing accreditation in some majors. (This was years ago.)
FRCC only offers machining in Boulder Co. Welding (only mentioned because that’s what this tread is about) is offered in Larimer though.
I know of several job opportunities today in the northern part of the Front Range that need toolpath programming.
The kid built a CNC router for his HS FRC/FTC club as an Eagle Scout project, then ended up at Mines.
There's not much I dislike more than well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. Don't buy it. If at all possible get a degree, sit at a desk, and earn a living wage. This is your first priority.
Telling everyone to "just learn to code" is worse I think. Especially since I'm not reading about well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. (Except maybe on HN?)
I realized a long time ago that there are a lot of people that absolutely will not function if they cannot do a job with their hands where they can feel like they did something at the end of each day. (In fact I might almost be one of those people.) Keeping some manufacturing as well as good (union?) trade jobs is a smart move for a country/society.
And on top of the "will not function if they cannot do a job with their hands" issue, the great majority of people are really not potential good coders.
Plus, at any scale, an "everyone codes" society very obviously fails the "where does their food come from ?" test.
Grass is always greener and all that, but at least in high tax Europe and in poorer countries trades can be very well paid.
A whole lot of money can be earned under the table and it lets you work everywhere and under diverse conditions. Lots of people do short term work for a couple months, than vacation at home for a couple months, etc.. This is much more difficult to do in IT.
On my last flight back home I was talking to a guy doing roofing for some data centers in the Netherlands working for some dude from Sri Lanka. We calculated his theoretical salary and he could be making 80k+ euros cash a year assuming he worked normal yearly hours. He was working for a month or two, then chilling for 2-3 months, rinse and repeat. Sure, he's breaking his body, sure his retirement will be nonexistent since he's not paying taxes but he's literally on vacation more than half of the time and has been earning money since he became an adult without the broke student step.
I also have very close relatives with construction businesses and they're dying for skilled workers. It's very well paid if "you're not in construction because you can't do anything else" and they'd hire you for any period of time. Once approved you essentially call your boss the day before you want to work and he tells you where to go and what to do. You can work 7 days a week, you can work every second Saturday to get some movement in...
Seriously. Choosing the skilled trade path makes a lot of sense right now if the default option for you is unskilled work, but the job market isn't so tough that one should abandon the option to get paid much more in a much more comfortable field of work.
Related is a certain actor, clearly following his passions, preaching the same nonsense: "give up on your dreams! go into skilled trade and wreck your body for okay pay!"
Part of the "follow your dreams" advice that a lot of people seemed to miss is that "following your dreams" doesn't mean "major in that subject and try to not get Cs", it means obsess over that thing and work so hard at it you're always in the top 1% or higher for that craft. The reason you should chase your dreams is they're the only thing you can reasonably hope to obsess over enough for long enough to have a competitive advantage.
While not all of them are "rich", everyone I know who sincerely followed their passion to the point that other people thought they were a bit crazy are all able to survive, often pretty well, doing something they love.
Working as a front line trades-person is rough, but becoming a journeyman or master as one step towards a profession (“I’m an hvac technician” vs “I’m in the hvac business”) seems to be a very good career path based on my social circle’s experience.
Another thing I’ve seen in my circle: if you’re going to go to a bottom 25th percentile college, flunk every class for your first two years and be miserable, then you’re much better off not going to college and pursuing a different path, like trades or military. For these people, “go into the trades” is really good advice.
If you’re going to a top university, love classes, and will graduate in the top of your class with a marketable degree and college experience, then you should go to college because you’re much more likely to live a comfortable life than the trades.
I had a lot of friends from high school who would have been so much better off if they had went into the trades straight after high school instead of trying and failing for years in college, only to get a 1.8 gpa in Communications or Psychology that is totally worthless. People need to know other crafts are a viable and dignified option, and a much better option than failing out of no name university.
Yep. My boss bitches about her work all the time. What does she complain about specifically? Having to respond to people on slack. Office workers don't know how easy they have it.
I'm telling mine: 1) try to get a college degree regardless of whether you use it or not (I'm paying for it, BTW) but 2) don't become a programmer like I did though unless you really, really enjoy it.
They (three daughters) have no problem with 2), some struggle though even with 1).
My secretary, single mom pushed my sister to go to college so we would be happier than she was raising two kids and working at more or less minimum wage. (It turned out my degree, Education, didn't figure into my ultimate career as a programmer at Apple but it did allow me to buy a Mac Plus while in college with a student loan and at half the non-educational price — so I tought myself to program, wrote some games. It also introduced me to peers that were unhappy with the otherwise-prospect of playing D&D and working at Walmart for their foreseeable future.)
I guess my point is that when "messaging" our kids, we are reacting of course to what we disliked about the path we took as well as what we liked.
They'll do what they want, live their own lives ... regardless of what I tell them though. I accepted that a long time ago.
I don't mind too much what people tell their children - what concerns me is when people tell their own children one thing but give different generalised advice.
Ideally, if I had a high school age kid right now I would want them to get a 4 year degree but leave college with zero debt and then also learn to be an electrician.
For some, college is an obvious choice.
For some, a trade is an obvious choice.
For some in the middle, hedging both is probably the best choice.
We have a relatively new option in the UK which are "Degree Apprenticeships" [1]
"A degree apprenticeship enables you to gain a full undergraduate or master’s degree while you work. Degree apprenticeships take three to six years to complete, depending on the course level.
You’ll spend most of your time working and you’ll also study part-time at university. For example, you might go to university one or two days per week, or in short blocks, such as a week at a time. Overall, you spend about 20% of your time studying vs. 80% of your time working."
I have also known young people working in the trades who were all about encouraging others to go into the trades and how much better it was. They all did objectively well for themselves. It is a different life choice that suits people differently.
Neither path is necessarily the correct one for everybody, but the proportion of people going for degrees instead of other paths is too high.
I think you've arrived at the nuanced answer: AI absolutely has changed things, but probably not in the all-encompassing way that various proponents or corporate marketeers would have us believe.
Anyone with ⅑ of a brain has already realised AI isn't going to replace anyone other than people who have the word "AI" under their name on linkedin or ycombinator.
You're right — on both sides. The people that said computers would automate everything were overstating them. At the same time, c'est la vie travel agents. Some jobs truly are gone.
I feel like there's a modern dark-comedy film in there where a guy in the 90's gets a journalism degree only to find the industry collapsing with the internet — so he trains to switch careers to taxi driver....
That 68k/yr wage only sounds good if you're still thinking in circa year 2000 dollars. Nobody is making the mortgage on a house on 68k/year, and they're not starting a happy family if they have to do 20+hrs/week overtime in order to turn 25/hr into 68k/year. I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental, so it's certainly not a great wage today.
The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad.
>I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental
I made $10/hr my first job after college while living in a studio by myself in 2011 (and that was with student loan payments!), and I was barely able to get by, so how were you barely able to get by then on almost $70k a year?
> The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad.
The average rent nationally is $1860. In the Bay Area it’s $2650.
That’s not to say it’s bad. But the numbers are meaningless without some localized pricing or cost adjustment.
$68K/yr is plenty of money for a single person. And that's just an entry level salary, offered to someone in high school - you would have the opportunity to make far more as you gain more experience. By the time you're looking to start a family and buy a house I don't see why that's not a very promising career.
There is a severe shortage of homes in the United States. The problem is particularly acute in high opportunity cities where the jobs are located. Here is but one of the literally hundreds of sources describing the problem:
Depends on where you live, I was making $42,000 in 2013 in the Midwest, and was fine. If my now-spouse and I had wanted to start a family then, it could have been done--obviously more doable with both parents working.
Plenty of people get by on less than six-figure household incomes--they just live in lower-cost areas of the country.
The opportunity for trades-based small business creation in America would feel a lot more tangible... absent the carried interest tax loophole.
Part of the small business trades success narrative is built upon trust, trust that in youth, doing good work will create a reputation within your community that will be remembered, and form the foundation for a brand (your name) that can attract the next generation of youth to be developed, trained, etc.
If successful small businesses only exist to get acquired, so that both workers and customers suffer, that foundation of trust will struggle to persist.
Is it not also reliant on an affluent customer base that can pay high prices for services? In poorer communities are trade jobs lucrative? Obviously in places like the Bay Area they are VERY lucrative, but is that a sustainable narrative to re-tool the economy around?
Certain skills are always in a stable demand, and a relatively short supply. Plumbing, electricity, roofs. Some of this requires a license, all of this requires training and experience which only time and practice can give. Opportunities for that are also somehow limited.
So, if you live in a poorer community and serve a poorer community, you likely make more than most in the poorer community, and likely gain respect if you do a good job.
I can't help but notice that PE has been buying up HVAC companies in my region. I think sooner or later everything will get corporatized and even if your goal isn't to get acquired, you still need to learn how to compete with conglomerates.
The trade businesses for home services have significantly less barrier to entry than the usual established business that they would usually buy. All it takes is a van and some tools in many cases for workers to start a new one after working for some years under someone else to get their license. It's a field where the PE firms will be taken to the cleaners on pricing and even customer service.
Definitely never underestimate homeowner's desire to price shop and nickle and dime the smallest of repair.
Which is hilarious because the only thing gatekeeping the homeowner from doing their own HVAC is an EPA 608 cert you can do in like 2 nights in your underwear (cost me like $50 and saved me like $10k), after which you can order 200 lbs of whatever toxic refrigerant you want straight to your home.
It used to be getting the actual HVAC systems was a problem but with internet you can get everything you need and bypass that whole racket, especially if you use mini splits you don't even have to know how to run ducts.
Seeing some replies to the contrary below, with evidence. I am curious about how you define "small number", the unit of measure, is it proportional or a count, etc.
are you suggesting that eliminating carried interest would deter private equity from bothering with small businesses, and make the remaining small businesses feel like a more reliable thing for workers and employers to engage in? because they won't get shuttered unceremoniously?
if I'm understanding that correctly, I have to giggle, because there are plenty of ways for institutional money to have lower taxes than ordinary income tax rates. waaaay lower than the carried interest "loophole".
also, to me, loopholes are unintended things that no one person in government or branch of government noticed. like a couple of private letter rulings from the IRS combined with an accounting tweak in a budget appropriations bill. carried interest isn't one of those to me when it was directly passed by congress explicitly and deliberately affirmed multiple times in subsequent legislation.
but I could be misunderstanding your post entirely.
Welding isn't a job that you grow old in. It's physically taxing and exposes you to poisonous fumes and low levels of radiation from thoriated filaments. That's part of why kids are getting job offers, there needs to be a steady supply of meat.
I never went to college (high school dropout with a GED). My "formal" schooling was a 2-year, intensive EET (Technician) course, at a trade school.
It had both good and bad traits.
It was very structured and rigorous. When you graduated, you were ready to go directly into full-time work at almost any organization (the NSA and CIA used to recruit from our school).
It stressed practicum, over theory, though, so you came out more as a "doer," than a "thinker." All of my theoretical stuff, I learned on my own, after getting my first job. I did OK with that, as I was fairly quickly promoted into engineering (and was introduced to "exempt" pay).
Can’t really read the article so can’t confirm this. There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades, but doesn’t at least half the country live in a place / have parents that value the trades?
I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools.
Which means that maybe somewhat unintuitively, there are no separate paths — college for good students, trade school and military for I dunno, “non-academic/street smarts or whatever you wan to call it. — trade schools, the military and colleges are actually all competing for the same students.
The second theory is tied to the first one, but for all the marketing on how great these jobs are, there are structural / practical problems with them. From how they pay, to lack of job security to the havoc they can wreak on your body.
Current project has me working through: the _Make: Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ books (and looking for a good book on conic sections which has optimized formulae to speed up/simplify what are currently a series of chained trigonometric functions...).
It's true that bad schools make poor neighborhoods unproductive for military recruiters. They usually don't want recruits who dropped out of high school or have low ASVAB scores. But a lot of young people in those neighborhoods are also disqualified because of poor health (particularly including obesity, asthma, and various mental conditions), history of illegal drug use, and criminal records. These social issues are all highly correlated.
> I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools.
This has been the case for a long time. For almost the entirety of the post-1973 end of US military conscription, a high school diploma has been required to enlist. From a 2008 study <http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...>: "Members of the all-volunteer [American] military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods." Also, "American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree ... Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service."
> One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades
I've got to wonder if a deeper dynamic is that you now have to be relatively "smart" to go into the trades because perhaps the teaching/curricula is lacking, making it so that more base general intelligence / self starting on abstract concepts is required to actually learn in the first place. Trade classes should be an opportunity for people who missed the verbal-communication-of-abstract-topics meta-intelligence to develop their intelligence focused around a narrower topic that they taking a liking to. But if the teacher is really uninspired, and the curriculum shies away from actually creating larger cool things or playing with different techniques, (or becomes about following the manual for procedures for poorly-documented poorly-written throwaway proprietary software) I can see it coming off as yet another "when are we going to need this" high school class.
To do well in the trades (i.e. doing something more than general laborer work) you need to be smart. You need to be able to program computer controlled mills and lathes, or troubleshoot computer-controlled electrical distribution systems, etc. Even to be a good mechanic, carpenter, ironworker, or plumber involves more and more technology and has always required good mathmatical and geometric ability. You also have to memorize all the detailed requirements of building code or other regulations at least as they apply to your trade. You can't advance very far if you're not reasonably smart.
From what I've seen the money in the trades is mostly from being the guy who gets the jobs and takes the money, not from being the guy actually doing the work.
This is it for I think the majority of trade jobs. A few trades in some positions make good money doing the actual trade, but for most of the industry you don't make great money until/unless you can move into a managerial roll where you are setting up jobs as the business owner or manager. And unfortunately a lot of people never get to that point because there aren't enough of those positions for everyone and a good chunk just get used up as meat for the grinder. Many trades are also huge boom/bust industries and the first guys to feel the bust are the guys doing the ground work.
Yes this is the way: you go into the trades, become a journeyman to learn the ropes, open your own shop, maybe eventually hire a few others, and then comfortably retire. All the people I know in trades who made good money went this way. There is a huge differential in trades between the cost of work being billed out and how much the worker is paid, and that surplus goes into the business owner's pocket.
If you do good work as an independent you will always be busy.
I’ll bet it’s a scale issue though. Everyone knows a person (I’m one of them) who does bad in say math class but later gets a job with applied math, because doing math in a classroom is boring.
But if you try to design a curriculum for say “math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class”. You’re mostly going to get people who just don’t have the whatever they need to be good enough at math to be an electrician.
"math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class" seems like a reaction from within the model of the prevailing philosophy - more abstraction-first book learning. Whereas addressing a different learning style would be more like: here are the physical skills you need to be an electrician, here are more classes working your way up to build larger and larger things, and oh by the way now that you've developed the skills of building things while taking direction from someone telling you how to build it, let's try to teach you how to figure out how to build it yourself.
And I'm just wondering if the safety-and-HR-uber-alles dynamic has stamped out a lot a of that physical-skills-first in favor of like, dry lessons trying to tell people all about wiring before they actually get to play with wires. Thus making it so the same people who succeed here are the traditionally "smart" ones that can take abstract knowledge and store it for later, before having something tangible to apply it to.
(electrician might not be the best example for this because the differences between good/unsafe/unpowered wiring are still pretty abstract, but hopefully you can see the point regardless)
The same politicians who push trades on America and bash colleges won't send their kids to trade schools but send them to Ivy League Universities instead. I wonder why that is.
There's also a bit of this that's culture war fodder. A lot of middle-class conservatives send their kids to colleges, their kids reject their parents' conservatism, so the parents think the college has used some kind of magic liberalism ray[0] on their kids.
The reality is, of course, that their kids weren't nearly as conservative as the parents thought. But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges.
Trade schools come into play mainly as a totem to hold up against liberal colleges. They are being played up as a sort of bastion of conservative thought, mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system.
There's a kernel of truth in all of this, in that there's some trades that shouldn't have been left out of the STEM paths that colleges like to push as an obvious moneymaker. The culture war is ultimately one of mottes and baileys, where you take some truth and ride it as one's political hobby-horse. Hell, just to explain why this happens I've already had to do the same thing.
[0] In the same way that some people think tech companies can "hack our dopamine loops" or whatever
For what it’s worth, my intro to psychology gen ed professor told us to spell “humyn” with a y to “remove woman being dependent on man” and let us skip the final if we recorded ourselves protesting the controversial state house bill at the time.
On net I agree with what you’re saying, but know that the culture war isn’t total bs one sided, and my unremarkable school had plenty of bad examples like this. Evergreen university in 2017 barring white people from attending class for a day was particularly embarrassing.
For what it's worth, my one (1) class that had any kind of political spin was Engineering Ethics. In which I was told whistle blowing is bad and making weapons of war is super chill because they would've been made without you anyway.
Not complaining about it, just throwing some noise out there and I completely agree, being exposed to different viewpoints and learning to adjust your perspective is what makes well rounded humyns ;)
I went to Stony Brook, so my experience isn't comparable to yours, but I definitely did not encounter any professors doing shit like that[0]. And to be clear, there were a few politically-minded courses in our gen-ed requirements. We had a News Literacy course that was actually really good, that I wish I could force my Facebook-brained parents to sit through.
If SBU had an indoctrination ray, they certainly had it on the wrong setting[1]. I'd already been firmly radicalized by Ron Paul revoLution warriors on Reddit into mainlining LvMI blog posts about Austrian economics and anarcho-capitalism by the end of my first year. It wasn't until I was leaving school when my political positions shifted away from that.
[0] To be clear, SBU notoriously had a heterodox economics professor who was unabashedly a Marxist. I never met him, I only heard about the professor from one of the school newspapers.
[1] Which, given everything else managed by the state of New York, would be totally on-brand for them.
The thing that gets to me, and everyone is overly idealistic about a lot of things(learn to code!) but I really wish that that things were as simple as conservative culture warriors laid them out to be. It would be great if there was this “one neat trick!” To getting a 70k a year job right out of high school, optimized for people less academically inclined.
I kind of wonder if the professors changed, or the politics changed around them. You can only have a Republican Party leader chasing after the “uneducated” for so long before the ideology starts to adapt.
> those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system
There is no group of people I have encountered in my life that I have as much contempt for as the professors and administrators at the $60K tuition (I went for free) private university that pretended like they were fighting against the elites that run the system when they are, if fact, those elites. The level of delusion in the non hard science parts of academia is absolutely mind blowing.
You hold contempt for teachers, who will probably never make more than 250k a year at their career height, for railing against elites who make millions, or even billions? Most teachers are adjuncts anyway, and are not tenure-track, and are lucky to make over 80-100k in any market.
And you hold this contempt because you believe that these teachers are actually elites in disguise trying to hoodwink our kids?
Have you considered the possibility that you’re wrong about them being elites, or at least to what degree and in what context and sphere of influence? Who benefits from misdirecting legitimate ire away from wealthy elite society and toward middle class intellectual elite society?
Yeah, I make in that range and I'm disgusted by people at my income level who complain about money and are bitter and envious of people richer than them instead of enjoying their wealth. Really a waste of life. Got dealt a great hand and somehow find a way to ruin it.
To say that the crux of their dissent is envy of their betters is an unfounded assertion. Most teachers I know are underpaid, and yet still argue more for $15 nationwide minimum wage than they do for pay raises for themselves. And many of those same teachers have to work those same minimum wage jobs when classes aren’t in session just to pay rent.
I’m not sure who you’re arguing got such a great deal here, as I can definitely identify a few benefitting parties, but it isn’t the teachers, or the middle or lower class folks.
Finger pointing won’t solve the problem, and individuals have unique circumstances and abilities to pay. I’m not sure if you have to work for a living that it is even reasonable to use the word “wealth” in the same way that those who make money from returns on capital use the word.
I see you've tried to change the subject from six figure profs and admins at a private university to teachers working part time over the summer, but that's not what I said and you know it.
Make $150K and you're in the top 10% of the US and top 1% of the world. But go right ahead and waste your golden ticket complaining about how unfair it is that you aren't in that top 0.1%. And if they were, then they would be bitter about that 0.01% because if you make over $100K and can't be happy with it, your problem isn't financial.
Money is power in a capitalist system. It is simply rational for every market participant to advocate for their own interests in the pursuit of capital. It’s not a matter of how much is enough, it’s a matter of each individual deciding for themselves how they allocate capital. More money means more bites at the apple. If you don’t invest in in capital-producing ventures, such as stocks or bonds or real estate, then you don’t have wealth, you have money. Money loses value due to inflation and so is not a great store of value.
I’m not trying to change the subject, I’m presenting my point of view related to my understanding of the thread and the OP to you, in order to help you understand how I see the world, so that I might understand you and the world and myself more fully. I happen to be situated in a context so I can’t really step outside myself and be truly objective but I’m trying to engage with the conversation in good faith and assume you are as well so I’m not sure what specifically you found to be a diversion about my remarks in whole or in part.
“Six figure profs” are topped out as far as income growth. The ones working over the summer may never reach six figures. There are working class, middle class, and upper class teachers, professors, and instructors. To make six figures as one, you’re going to have to be doing it for a while at a high level, at a good school, in a field that makes money for the institution.
I would continue, but I don’t want to “change the subject” so I’ll await your reply.
> But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges.
It isn’t a myth.
> mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system.
There is value in a varied education, but a substantial number of Gen Ed requirements are used as a soap box by professors who would really rather be teaching something else. Social sciences and the arts tend to be the worst for it: Communications, English, Sociology, and Anthropology. Students want to get rid of these Gen Ed requirements primarily because the course content is treated as ancillary to Foucault, Adorno, and other dead-end thinkers.
> There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades
The conservative / GOP tactics are usually the same, and everyone else has, at conservative urging, disarmed themselves - they've abandoned postmodern understanding of communication, which the conservatives strategically embrace:
They reframe issues: College is reframed - it was that knowledge was power, the key to life, citzenship, work, and sharpening your mind, your critical thinking, with the best thinkers and ideas in history was the most powerful tool. Now college is reframed as a training in employment skills for corporations. Life was about dreams and opportunity, fulfilling your potential and your dreams; now it's about making enough to survive. They refame America: It was the land of opportunity, where by working hard anyone had the opportunity to accomplish anything, not a class-based oppressive system like Europe and elsewhere; now you stay in your socioeconomic lane, take any job you can get, and (again) survive - what does a poor kid need college for?
How you frame issues can determine the outcome of the discussion. 'Should we murder unborn babies?', 'Should we let undocumented criminals into the country?' - obviously, the answer is in how the question is framed (and often the framing is much more subtle than these easy examples). That doesn't mean there aren't merits to both sides but framing is a way to prevent discussion of the merits.
They also demonize: Everything must include a criticism of 'liberals'. Almost as a display of bona fides, you'll see that commentary must always include an attack on liberals, even if it's a critique of something the GOP/conservatives is doing. Similarly they blame 'liberals' for every problem, no matter how absurd. They blame liberals for immigration, health care, lack of green energy, etc. etc. If you read the transcripts of the leaked Signal chats, you'll see their agreed-upon talking points included, without discussion, 'blame Biden'. Biden isn't even in office and will never run again, but that's a must.
And why wouldn't they do these things? They work and nobody puts up any resistance; nobody even tries to understand their tactics or why they work and dominate the public debate. The Democrats play helpless - not a winning strategy and IMHO the reason they lose; who votes for helpless? And many liberals now embrace victimhood -- helplessness + persecution = a lack of personal responsibility for anything -- another winning strategy.
Universities are the main gatekeepers of the class based oppressive system you complain about. The current bureaucratic governing structure of the US has been created by the liberals during the period from the New Deal through the early 90s when Democrats had almost unbroken control of congress. So, regardless of whether conservative complaints are valid, liberals are the correct people to complain about if you are unhappy with the current system because they are the ones who built it.
Employers, not universities. Employers were the ones who decided that most good jobs require a college degree. And then they sent administrators as their minions to take over the universities. Americans often call their universities colleges, which implies an organizational structure where the senior professionals doing the actual work are in charge. And that's how things used to work. But somehow that got turned around, with the administrators in charge and business interests treating universities as vocational schools.
One way to look at this is through different motivations to studying: internal (you want to learn things), external (you want to be successful at whatever is being measured), and pragmatic (you want to pass the classes, get the degree, and move on). Universities prefer internally motivated students – those who study to learn rather than for jobs and career success. They can try to educate people with other motivations, but what those students want is inherently in conflict with what the professors want.
I think you are defining 'liberal' as 'whatever was favored in that time period' or the now popular 'not contemporary far right populists'. The White House, however, was controlled by Republicans, for example, from 1968-1992 with one four year break.
> Universities are the main gatekeepers of the class based oppressive system you complain about.
How so? Before Republicans cut funding, universities were widely available, especially public ones. Many like NYC's city colleges were free. Once you got a degree, you were in a different socioeconomic class, but degrees were available to those who could get them. The number of people with degrees grew considerably, including through programs like the GI Bill. That's substantial opportunity and class mobility.
Now whether you get into college depends, most of all, on the class you're born into. US social mobility has dropped significantly.
I'm using "liberal" very loosely here as the prevailing political establishment from the 1930s to 1990s when the Republicans started splitting off from that coalition. Though you could even argue that Bush II was a continuation of the same. You can cherry-pick dates if you like, but even in that cherry-picked 24 year range Democrats controlled the senate 18-6 and the house 24-0 and the Democrats had unified control of congress and the presidency for 4 years to 0 for the Republicans. The Democratic party was dominant in US politics from 1932 to 1992 and that is not really arguable. The modern US administrative state was build by primarily liberal Democrats with plenty of cooperation from moderate Republicans (who don't really exist anymore) and with opposition from segregationist southern Democrats (who also don't exist anymore). You can argue that they did a good job (and I would argue that for a lot of it they did), but you can't claim that they didn't do it and that they aren't the political establishment of the modern America state.
> Once you got a degree, you were in a different socioeconomic class,
A degree can either be a ticket to a high status job or common. It can't be both. As a society we have resolved this contradiction by making a tiered system where people nominally have the same degree, but actually only the ones from exclusive, high status schools count. And somehow the low status degrees cost almost as much as the high status ones even though they have a fraction of the value. But apparently a lot of people didn't get the memo and still think their low status degree is a ticket to a high status job.
> but degrees were available to those who could get them
So you are saying that degrees are less available now even though the number of people who have them has gone up 5x since 1960? Citation needed, because that fundamentally makes no sense.
> Now whether you get into college depends, most of all, on the class you're born into.
So you are telling me that in 1960 when 8% of people had a college degree, those 8% were a meritocratic sampling of all classes of society, but today when 40% of people have a degree, that 40% is somehow only the upper middle class? Again, citation needed, because that fundamentally makes no sense.
> I'm using "liberal" very loosely here as the prevailing political establishment from the 1930s to 1990s when the Republicans started splitting off from that coalition.
It becomes meaningless. You just rewrote history - the GOP was apparently liberal all that time. Who knew? The actual liberals sure didn't; they despised Nixon and Reagan. You're just saying that the modern rightward lurch is somehow the reality of the century before it happened.
> A degree can either be a ticket to a high status job or common.
You still are framing it around jobs.
> only the ones from exclusive, high status schools count
The overall average income for people with college degrees is much higher. That can't be because of the few who went to elite schools.
> So you are telling me that in 1960 when 8% of people had a college degree, those 8% were a meritocratic sampling of all classes of society, but today when 40% of people have a degree, that 40% is somehow only the upper middle class?
The leading predictor of college education now is your parents' income.
I wonder how long it will be until AI is making all the CAD/CNC models with just a check by humans. Same with the laser cutter they mentioned, water jet cutter, etc. It can't be that hard to have a model trained to take a technical drawing and generate the CAD model.
I think if I lose my current job (on a PIP), that I should be a CAD designer (entry level around $75k). But then I'm concerned that I'll be out of a job in a couple years.
I have heard complaints that the German system is pretty class-based and forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary. The result is that upper class kids stay upper class, working class kids stay working class.
> forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary
That criticism might be directed at the separation at age 10, where some kids get to go to Gymnasium (basically, the highest level) and then there are several other (lesser?) school types. That's often criticized for the reasons you mentioned. Trade schools and dual education start around age 15 and they're generally considered a success story afaik.
I count myself extremely lucky that I had somewhat of an idea at 12. At 10 I was a child firmly separated from the adult world.
That being said I think I can top that:
When I was in 2nd grade or so my school announced that a "sport" class would be created - ostensibly to promote physical education and whatnot as there was a judo club associated with the institution. Net effect was that all the boys from broken, troubled homes would join and my class was left with half of its original count of boys. Girls had the same option on paper, but none joined.
Sometimes I wonder whether it was good or bad that it happened. That is quite early to make such life-altering decisions, then again I wasn't in their position so perhaps to them it was beneficial. I really don't know.
There’s ways to work your way up with dedication. Quite a lot of folks go for their abitur[0] and then on to university. Classism in Germany is perpetuated by cultural conservatism far more than whether you went to gymnasium or not.
The “gifted” track in the US has the same effect. Get into the right track in mid-elementary school and you’re pretty well set from a college admissions perspective. In Fairfax, that’s a GT Center then Thomas Jefferson High, then your pick of top unis.
I largely agree but there is some egalitarianism with 'gifted' tracks in that they can exist poor areas. A friend of mine was the son of migrant workers who went to Stanford. He had the right combo of innate smarts, luck, caring teachers, and affirmative action policies which benefited dirt-poor minorities.
There's still a lot that I would improve if I were dumb enough to become president. Free daycare, free preschool, free after school programs - I think it's the best thing we could do for income inequity but there's not enough people to champion it so it will never happen.
>German system is pretty class-based and forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary
At some level I think that's true in a lot of places. I'm not sure, in the US, if you really know what kind of engineering (or whatever) you want to go into. High school pretty much didn't give you a good sense of that in a lot of cases. Perhaps, on this board, there is a disproportionate number of people who always knew they wanted to program. But sure wasn't the case for me growing up. And would probably have done something different than mechanical engineering but--whatever--didn't really matter.
People have to choose a path at some point. We can’t delay education for everyone until 25 or 30 to allow more time to figure it out.
Many people I know changed paths mid-college career. Many also changed careers post college. The US is relatively forgiving in that regard (as are many countries).
It’s the systems that shunt people into specific paths in high school that are challenging.
I don't disagree. In the US, a least, there's a lot of capability to make changes over time. Obviously, the more specialized and longer the training, the harder/costlier it gets. But so many people I went to school with never really just went to work in a stereotypical job related to their major (including myself). Which is just fine.
> We can’t delay education for everyone until 25 or 30 to allow more time to figure it out.
I mean, we could. Maybe a mandatory year or two of service as seen in other countries, then let them work in low credential jobs for 5-10, and only then go back and seek further education. Could be interesting. It would interrupt progression on complex topics though, expect to have a lot of trouble getting back into Calculus.
It would probably be really helpful for some people, especially those that end up dropping out of college after acruing several terms of debt. Otoh, delaying graduation for those who would have graduated 'on time' is probably a negative.
I think things have changed more recently, but when I was in college it was pretty easy to change from one STEM major to another. I didn't know I liked programing until my first Fortran class.
I did a bit of BASIC in high school and took a FORTRAN course in college. Not much else with computers until later. In retrospect might have done EE or CS though CS was very mathematical and theoretical at the time. (No PCs.)
I did sort of switch as I realized I didn't like college level organic chemistry so just switched to straight Mechanical Engineering from sort of a Biomech thing.
It's already been offered. The issue is automation remains cost effective because salaries remain relatively high.
$24 an hour for a fabricator out of high school is easily 20-30% higher the salary for a similar role in Germany.
US manufacturing remains competitive industries where a $20-40 an hour salary can be reasonably offered WITHOUT union guarantees. Otherwise the options were offshoring or automation. And for the kind of manufacturing roles that can afford to pay a relatively high salary, a college education is expected.
Skilled Trades increasingly require a college education, because understanding classical mechanics with calculus, being able to script in domain-specific CAD tooling, or understanding how to synthesize a compound does require at least an AP level education.
There is literally nothing stopping you from going to trade school and skipping college.
College is still a gate for higher paid trades because advanced manufacturing wants educated workers that can do math and/or programming g-code and/or know advanced metallurgy
I know someone who went to welding school, and he was basically practice welding 40 hours a week after class because he was working on some very advanced welds that actually required some decent chunk of engineering knowledge
I mean, most trades do expect some sort of a college education now as well (minimum AA), and vocational programs are increasingly require attending a community college.
Edit: can't reply below, but all of those vocations listed are offered at community colleges now and linked with an AS/AAS degree, as apprenticeships are often coordinated with CCs.
Just for future reference: when a comment thread is sufficiently nested the “reply” link is missing, but you can click/tap on the timestamp link. That’s a hardlink to the comment, whence you can reply.
If you read the threads in /r/construction that come up about this or adjacent topics ("trades are a guaranteed job, better than college") they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.
Personally, my friend is a carpenter and lives with his dad to save money. This is in Seattle so tons of construction and work to go around. He says he wishes he studied computer science in college (has an english degree).
>> they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.
Worse yet, when your body does fail or is injured, that wage tends to stop. Most tradespersons are working for very small companies, often incorporated as their own one-person company. If you cannot work, it all just stops.
One thing that makes the military different it that while the military can be very hard on your body (infantry) your wage does not stop if you are injured. A civilian carpenter with a broken leg must live on savings for a month. A military carpenter with a broken leg just won a month of desk duty without any drop in pay.
Absolutely. Some of my family owns a construction company and the career path for all employees in that company is basically to work your body while you're young and then move into management/estimating jobs before you do too much damage to your body.
The military equivalent is to work a few years as a grunt until you qualify for some sort of free higher education. Then you come back as an officer and get to boss around all those sergeants who once yelled at you. Depending on your exact path, its all generally pensionable time worked for the same company.
Indeed it’s hard to retire from the US military as an officer because there’s a big filter at Major. You generally need to reach LTC to make 20 years. Enlisting for four (or more) then going officer makes it easy to get 20 years and retire.
That is why the US armed forces has a rep for being so young. Other countries they dont kick people out so easily, but promotions are also much more difficult. Talk to a canadian or a brit. It is not unussual for them to be in 30+ years. And i've met canadian army captains who have been captains for 20 years, giving them more experiance than most american LTCs.
Well, yeah, not a lot of people are going to continue much past 20 years when that qualifies for immediate retirement pay and a private job can suppliment. There's up or out policies at various levels too.
Despite how maligned they've become, there are still some US trade unions who take care of their members in these situations.
But, yeah, on the whole this business about the virtue of trades and Boomer Facebook making baseless claims about how much money there is to be made is ... problematic. I've been there and these folks face all sorts of risks in the near (e.g. falls, electrocution) and long (e.g. Mesothelioma, (increased risk of) Parkinson's, etc.) terms. Working conditions have improved and seemingly everyone wears hiviz nowadays (possibly performatively / to virtue signal) but corners are absolutely still cut and I've heard many jokes and seen many eyes rolled on OSHA's account.
My old man is a tradesman, qualified as an electrician, worked and kept studying as he went and ended up as senior management.
My little brother has severe dyslexia and ADHD, couldn’t even finish school so went into trades, did some time as a diesel mechanic and qualified as a welder. Now builds race cars for a living ( Dakar ) and is a senior mechanic on track for management.
Ambition and luck plays a role but although yes both of their bodies are a little more beat up than mine, they get actively headhunted and even when they don’t have a full time job they can very easily fall back on the skills they have to fill gaps, people always need tradesmen.
Neither of them are struggling in life, other than some bad decisions.
Both of them are also on most countries critical skills list and emigration has always been an option if the local market drops off.
For those reading this, trades are not nearly as bad as is being described here, there are plenty stories of SEs working for horrible companies.
Pay differs a lot from place to place and sub-industry to subindistry. It's not uncommon to see people comment on redding claiming pay for something or another is far lower than I know of people earning in that field. To go by reddit you might conclude programmers make $40k/yr, since thats what they make in Japan or whatnot.
Not to say they they aren't correct here, but you shouldn't put too much stock in it.
Welding itself is also a pretty broad scope-- are you taking on broken trailer hitches or are you talking about underwater welding of pressure vessels? Programming robots to do automated welding? etc.
"When Rios graduates next year, he plans to work as a fabricator at a local equipment maker for nuclear, recycling and other sectors, a job that pays $24 an hour, plus regular overtime and paid vacations."
This sounds like a union job, and the $70k figure sounds like towards the upper end due to hierarchy, so realistically he'll be earning maybe half of that for a couple years first.
48k at 2000 hours. Getting to 70k would need roughly 600 hours of overtime at time and a half but some of these places do double time on weekends nights holidays etc.
I’m curious what the distinction is. I assume that the article isn’t just a complete fabrication, but maybe they highlight the 20 best stories and everything else is meh.
Kinda like saying you should go to code school because you can land a 175k/year entry level job at Google. Technically true.
P-hacking is allowed and encouraged outside physical science where getting stats of medicine and building a bridge wrong have obvious side effect
News media will whittle down their data set to get a result that only matters where cost of living is high, and there’s a tiny number of the workers overall.
Leads the innumerates in rural Somewhereville, Flyover, USA, to be all confused they don’t make SF salaries in the middle of nowhere.
Yea, welding offshore/underwater pays very well. Food-grade welding a bit less. Both have fairly miserable working conditions, are hard on your body, have some amount of danger, typically require lots of OT to make the claimed income, and unless you’re union, with mediocre benefits.
Great job for those who enjoy that type of work and/or want to hustle and save then move on. But any claim that it’s easy money or typicsl is just wrong.
We don’t Reddit in my household so I can’t respond directly, but there’s nothing strange about going to a welding class, picking the best student and offering them a $24/hr job with a lot of potential overtime. If you can make a clean weld they don’t care where you came from.
Not OP, and I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but why? Reddit now blocks many IPs (requires login/signup to see the page now). Plus the site takes a few years to load, if you don't know about old.reddit.com. I imagine many people no longer go to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc anymore because of this. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Reddit has about 500 million users. That's about 7500 million non-users, or 850 million English-speaking non-users. (Assuming all reddit users are english-speaking? Don't know if the site supports other languages.) Just looking at those numbers, I'm confident there's plenty of other people like me who looked at the site once or twice, found it unpleasant to use and with a low level of discourse, and never bothered actively going back; and these days stumbling upon it in web search is indeed actively unpleasant because of performance and UI issues.
How common it is to have shop classes in schools in USA?
For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects.
There are vocational schools, but they're known to be awful quality and you don't go there if you want to earn trade, but if you're an awful student. And if you aren't awful student, then you'll most likely end up as one - as your peers will most likely be :(
There are also "technikum" which is a mix of these two, but it's not for trade per se, and statistically chances you'll pass your end of school exams are smaller.
The answer is probably, unhelpfully, "it depends".
I attended a fairly large high school, and we probably had a dozen shop class offerings. A much smaller school just a few miles away had no infrastructure to support any shop classes.
It's probably even more nuanced than that, though. My parents both attended very small schools in small towns, and both offered shop classes. All four schools mentioned were / are located in the Midwest, though, and none in large cities.
If I had to guess, I'd say probably the majority of schools in the US offer some form of shop class(es). But I don't believe any would necessarily be part of the standard curriculum. Generally, these classes are elective.
I'll say something unrelated to my question before, but damn if I don't envy you for electives.
I had zero elective classes up through my entire pre-uni education. At my uni, I had one or two elective classes - at fifth and sixth semester, and that's all.
It is an aspect of American education I do like a lot.
(here we choose our profile, which assigns us to extended classes - i.e, Maths/English/Physics, Maths/Biology/Chemistry, Polish/Geography/History and so on, but then we don't get to choose anything after.)
Our area in San Diego, CA has different public high schools have a different offering that maybe all high schools would have had in the past. They are not vocational schools, but schools that offer specialized programs for you to use during your electives (2 of your 6-7 classes you take you get to choose yourself).
For example we have a high school with a culinary program, another with an auto program, another with a guitar building program, another with a music/theater arts program. These are all academic, public schools in the same district. You are assigned the school near* to your home, but you can petition for a different school.
> For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects. There are vocational schools
The US doesn't really differentiate between Lyceums/Gymnasiums, Vocational High Schools, and Technikum.
All tracks tend to be offered at the same school, but with students given the option to opt into vocational tracks.
Furthermore, a lot of skilled trades/"blue collar" (I hate that term) jobs have become increasingly specialized, so you anyhow have to attend a Community College or even a normal College to get the skills needed to land a job.
I went to law school with a guy who grew up in a state with "normal" highschools and "technical" schools for those not earmarked for higher education. Being a big football-type guy, he was directed to the latter. His mother fought to get him back into the "normal". Had she not done so, we would never have been classmates at law school. The technical school lacked the higher-level math and language courses that are important when applying to university.
Exactly the same here - after technikum you can go to uni... But statistically, your results for high school exam are going to be way lower. Or you simply won't pass.
I went to maybe slightly above average high school for my area and didn't have one. But there were programs where the school partnered with community colleges and students maintaining decent grades could attend classes elsewhere. And those had shop as well as other vocational programs.
They probably sent us home with a pamphlet with information at the beginning of the year, but I don't remember.
Larger high schools have them, in the Midwest US at least. College prep is pushed pretty heavily though, other tracks are looked down upon.
A tradesman I knew said find a career that doesn't destroy your body. Some tradesmen I've met say it's best to become an inspector or move into management.
My school dropped their shop classes about 20 years ago. Costs, potential liability, and a view that they were obsolete skills without value were cited as major reasons, but even for the last 10-20 years they did still have it it was 60% of the time just a class to throw kids into that didn't have the best grades and/or were bored of class work that they could be given an easy A in and push up those kid's grade point averages to try and secure more funding.
Very common, although many of the students don't take them (none of the girls as I recall). I took 'wood shop' in 8th grade, and there were shop classes (as well as 'auto shop') at my high school.
Even if Career Technical Education (CTE) classes are offered, there is a large variation in their quality. For me, the question would be whether a graduate from a CTE program is more likely to be hired and receives higher wages (initially) than a non-CTE program completer. My 2-minute Google Scholar search hasn't found anything on the topic.
At the end of the day, a 3-course sequence in a CTE pathway (which is the CA requirements for a high school CTE certificate in California) doesn't prepare you for a career in the same way as being in journalism class prepares you to be a journalist or being in theater prepares you to be an actor. Students will most likely need to pursue some form of post-secondary training (either through a community college or on-the-job) to become somewhat competent in their field.
One was at a well-funded school with a big honors program. All of the students were smart and engaged and clever and ambitious. They designed an extremely clever, complicated robot that looked really cool on paper and was completely impractical to actually build and they did poorly overall, barely getting an extremely-stripped-down version of the design up and running, losing every match with usually no points scored.
The other was at a poorly funded school with no honors classes. The students were just as intelligent and just as hard working, but instead of AP math and physics they were taking auto shop and wood shop. And they knew how to quickly design, build, and test simple, reliable solutions that got the job done. They fared much better in competition.
Me personally, I did mechanical work for a decade before getting a CS degree and a desk job. And I'm really glad I did. Welding and machinery were a heck of a lot more fun than debugging distributed software systems, and I'm glad I spent my 20s doing the former instead of the latter.
In something like a century now of obsession with higher ed, America seems to have forgotten about the concept of trade schools. Now companies hitting on the idea of recruiting out of shop class makes the a WSJ headline in 2025. LOL!
The problem with skilled trades is they put you inside a very limited skill box. You're stuck monetizing that trade for decades, with very little business opportunities outside that box. Swings in the economy and your health will not neatly follow this model of one-and-done.
You need 200k/yr to be comfortable in Alabama. These headlines are for older generations who think that is too much money for a young person. Meanwhile, they’d never be able to afford the homes they now live in.
There is a classic capitalist ploy, documented in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, where business owners vastly over-advertise the abundance and remuneration offered by a certain area of work. Then many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field, so supply and demand pushes down wages, benefitting the owners.
In America 2025, there is no better path to a high income and quality of life than learning a trade, then learning how to manage other tradespeople and then owning a company for such a trade.
In the trades, if you are slightly smarter than average, have a good work ethic and an inkling of entrepreneurial drive, you will be very successful.
I would like someone to mythbust this belief as it seems like it runs off nothing but anecdotes. White collar folks seem to pull this one out as a grass is greener take on a different life path when their industry is starting to unwind.
>I would like someone to mythbust this belief as it seems like it runs off nothing but anecdotes.
It can't happen for everyone, which is why all wages need to rise to make living affordable and then some. Capitalists love these competitive filters while disregarding all of the people that failed, but still promote it as viable without disclosing success/failure rates (and as anecdotes often do).
A lack of awareness about the realities of starting a business - and the consequences of not succeeding - is repeatedly the dumbest thing I see espoused about going into the trades and is the equivalent of advertising some kid's anomalous yearly salary that includes overtime.
I can't speak for all trades, but in my experience 'owning a company' and 'high quality of life' rarely go hand in hand. Owning a company is hard. It's a 24/7 job where you are managing customers, employees, accounting, etc., and you can hire people to help but ultimately it's on you if someone screws up and orders the wrong cabinets.
I'm happier working for Big Corp in an air-conditioned office.
You've noticed that the labor market is inherently a political problem. The only thing that sustains quality of pay and conditions is regulation and organization.
In the last 25 years, I've built 3 houses and remodeled half a dozen others. Worked very closely with these guys across the entire spectrum. From the unskilled, trying to cheat their way, to the 75 year old 50yr Journeyman who will never retire because he loves it.
The trades were decimated by immigration and the race for cheaper labor, higher margins. What were once solid middle class jobs, were undercut by unskilled labor masquerading as skilled. Over time, the market raised the rate of the unskilled and lowered the rate of the skilled. Prices rose to meet the market but quality declined. Unskilled were charging the same rates as skilled.
Today there are very few Journeyman tradesmen left. They were forced out. Which is why the market is crying for these skills and awarding them with high wages.
Looking forward, the entire nation is lined up to build. Those who mange this growth and bring the skills, will become wealthy.
I have worked in the trades as an electrician and then became an estimator/Project Manager. Most are small businesses that are barely hanging on. It is often not a path to wealth. Many of the smaller businesses are being bought up by private equity now to drive up prices. The tradesmen are not getting wealthy and typically will not become wealthy. Licensing a business is different than the license a tradesman gets. Rules vary by state and are often require the approval of your would be competitors, regardless of demonstrated skill and time in the trade.
The facts are that the overwhelming majority of Trades(people), are terrible business people. They may be excellent at their jobs, but very, very , very few have the business skills to build a solid business. Those who do, do extremely well well. Those who hire people who have the skill, do really, really well.
Not that different from engineers. Very few have business skills, but those who do, do very well.
Programming used to be another skilled trade, before big tech and big money took over everything and corrupted it all.
If there's good money in the trades, what's to stop them from similarly consolidating into national mega corps like every other field? Especially once we start encouraging former tech bros and VCs in, bringing with them their former mindsets?
A lot of HVAC companies have gone corporate now. Smaller companies are bought out and consolidated, higher paid and experienced personnel are let go, cheaper replacements are brought in that don't have much of a clue how to deal with older established systems, but they will definitely tell you if something is broke after you told them it was broke and offer to sell you a brand new system install that they don't have to troubleshoot with the skills and experience they lack and has a much higher margin than replacing a simple rollout switch or swap a new transformer or control board.
Installing new systems sure. But diagnosing and repairing problems is far from it. You are mixing gas fired devices, compressors and refrigerants, pressurized water systems, electrical systems, and mechanical systems tieing all together. And just junking all those systems because a $5 part wore out as expected and the owners of the system are lied to that it is unfixable is a colossal waste of money and human labor. All just so corporate owners have more money to scrape off the larger margins of a full install of a new system which are going to break down just the same in a few years again.
4 years to get a license in my state. 2 nights to get the EPA 608 cert which is the only real education you get, the rest is slave labor to get the sign-off for the license. The whole regulatory apparatus was co-opted by current industry to stop 'disruptions', you're going to have to go through the ol boy club to even get a seat at the table and even then they will just regulate your edge away.
This is the thing 'disruptors' don't get about the trades. It's heads I win, tails you lose. They just coopt the laws to ensure the fundamentals don't change.
I’m a software engineer. I’m over 50 and experienced a difficult time getting a new position after my last one evaporated.
I am now working as a “programmer” for CNC systems. (That means I draw shapes in CAD, lay them out on steel plates, and post those to the machines doing the work.) We have torch, plasma, and laser cutters, metal forming (really just bending), and a programmable drill.
The tasks involved in completing the processing after my work are: fetch the metal plate (warehouse crane, forklift), place the plate (must be aligned and at the correct origin), collect the cut parts onto pallets (organized by customer), operate forming machines, and/or feed beams into the drill.
Those tasks don’t exactly require skill. Because I’m a software guy, I’m always looking for opportunities for automation. We’re about as close to fully automated as you can get without advanced robots (requiring dexterity, observation, etc.)
I guess my point is that there’s little room for former tech bro/VC “innovation” in my particular industry. I can see how it’s similar in many trades. They don’t necessarily require “skills” because anyone can learn quickly how to do them. Anyone but today’s robots.
Fishing used to be a skilled trade in the rivers, seas and the oceans until giant ships operated by multinational companies took most of the market share and the fish people could sell. You got the point, small ones (at least most) don't stand a much chance nor are they efficient.
Now these industries should only be treated as a hobby or something that is expected already like knowing English language for writing corporate emails.
If you can't wire a house after 2 weeks of education, they were going to burn your house down anyway (especially if you are using AFCI). It's like one simple and highly redundant 300 page book of information at worst.
I will never understand why electricians are always held to this kind of standard and reverence. Framing my house took 10x the amount of study and learning than it did wiring it, and that included me doing a mains underground power extension and all of the mains meter and breaker.
I have to assume a huge amount of it is national and local regulations, which seem to change every freakin year. I read relevant sections a decade ago re: outlets with no ground(has to be on gfci breaker) and wiring a bathroom(has to be on separate circuit). Now you're apparently not allowed to put outlets on the side of or back of kitchen islands? Just random things like this.
I couldn't imagine having to keep up with all of it. I'd guess many don't...
atleast for general contractors - Its a fundamentally different business model. Little growth, tiny margins, low fixed costs and tremendous requirement for trust and quality assurance.
I love this. This is what we need more of. My only concern is who will challenge their thinking? Who will teach them critical thinking skills? Who will give them a broader more holistic understanding of the world if not at a university?
I fear we will get ( because we need them ) many thousands more skilled workers in the trades to build more again but they’ll also be too easily bamboozled by charlatans like Trump and vote in policies that will screw us all
Isn't this backwards? People who want the broader education will naturally gravitate towards college. It's not that college actually teaches these things, it's just a magnet for people who care about them.
Most people will still be going through education with specific career goals in mind, however lamentable that is. And then they will claim they also learned critical thinking.
Mandatory humanities electives broaden horizons at least a bit. Most trades programs don't make you take stuff that's specifically relevant to the certification; although if you're getting an Associates degree at the same time, you probably will need those.
Those who want education on subjects they are not employed in or "a broader more holistic understanding of the world" (whatever that means) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to college. College is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 13 in K-12. It has no special properties.
High School is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 8 in K-8. It has no special properties.
Those who want education on subjects taught in high school (whatever their value is) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to high school.
Between American states rolling back child labor laws, and the current federal administration's promising vision of factory and coal jobs for children and their future generations, there will be enough jobs that don't require useless high school diplomas.
Eliminating income tax and increasing tariffs to gorillion percent is just part of the equation. Rolling back of high school education is critical to truly achieve the dream of the "good old days."
> High School is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 8 in K-8. It has no special properties.
This is probably also true. High school standards have been lowered so much that everybody with a pulse can graduate so the degree is meaningless in terms of educational achievement. Basically just a filter now that says "I am at least one tiny step above a total retard or a complete 100% screw up."
I worked jobs part time as young as 14. Child labor laws are mainly about keeping kids in school rather than protecting them from anything bad because with our society defined around credentials, failing to obtain them is bad for that child's future. But that's just a rule we made up. There's absolutely no reason that a 14 year old who has finished 8th grade and knows how to read and do basic math couldn't go off and apprentice to a trade and be successful. In 1910 only 10% of Americans had finished high school and we still had a perfectly well functioning society. And at that time only 2 % had college degrees and still we were in an era of rapid scientific progress and economic growth.
Ironically the assumption that a broader more holistic understanding of the world comes from a university or humanities in general is itself a rather under-examined assumption treated as sacrosanct. It seems very reverse reasoned akin to virtue ethic's notorious tendency towards narcissistic self-praise.
A broad educational basis may have virtues but it is very unlikely the only path towards it. Even putting aside how 'holistic' critical thinking tends to be held as diametrically opposed to the practical. Often straw-manning the practical as robotic or inhuman. The idea that the practical is opposed to a holistic understanding is simply not true at all. Ask anybody who took and understood Calculus for one.
The concept of the practical as intrinsically bad is a stupidity of considerable vintage, dating back to at least Ancient Greece for reasons which is of course totally unrelated to the intellectuals of the day being funded by slave owners trying to purchase self-justification from those trying to avoid physical labor. That was sarcasm by the way, just to be clear. That same diseased thought of the practical as unworthy should have been put to bed by the Industrial Revolution at least.
https://archive.ph/sWpS1
To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.
A trade being any job you can do with your own tools and is universally useful to people. So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need. Ideally you could arrive in a new town with only this skill and your tools, and begin to eke out an existence. I favor trades that are also useful to oneself, so the building trades are good because everyone needs shelter-may as well build your own or at least understand what you are buying. Doctor also works as a trade, because the need is so basic and universal.
A profession being anything else, basically, especially if it generally requires an employer (major capital investment) to be a useful activity. Interestingly, being a farmer falls into this category, since it requires land and equipment. Even if you own the land and equipment, you could lose it, and then your livelihood is out of your reach. So that’s a profession, by my narrow practical classification.
I figured with a trade and a profession, young adults are much better prepared to roll with the punches in the inevitable chaos they will confront, and be empowered to walk away from situations that are untenable. The power to walk away is highly underrated.
For myself, I have benefited greatly from my practical upbringing, and am a sophomore journeyman in many trades but my happy place is creating things. Electronics, a little mechanics, and software to breathe life into the soul of a new machine. Fortunately I have been hardcore unemployable by nature for decades, so I have developed the freedom to follow my own path, which is deeply gratifying. But without a strong trades type background this would not have really been possible.
I grew up in a trade. My folks ran a small auto repair business, and as such, I'm more than competent in a lot of automotive related things and a barely competent in a lot of the trades (carpentry, electrical, tile, accounting, taxes, etc). Essentially, anything we needed to get done to make the business run, I did alongside my folks and family.
I'm decidedly out of the trades as an adult.
Mostly, this is because of my folk's parenting in general. I was not good, due to the stresses of said work and business. But I imagine that's true of most small business owners.
But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body. I'm fully not kidding here when I say that my jeans were so dirty that they stood up on their own. Again, kid's jeans, and it wasn't every day, but at least twice a week. Heavy machinery like lathes will literally tear your arms off and beat you to death with them. I've grabbed 220V before and my Dad had to break the circuit with a broom handle, leaving quite the bruise on my arms, not to mention the near death of that kind of shock. Don't get me started on car exhaust and brake cleaners.
Auto repair may not be very exemplary of the trades as a whole, but I choose to take showers after work now.
> But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body.
Most of my friends are blue collar, and aged 20 years in the last decade.
One can't hear as well as he used to from impact guns hammering away, back problems, knees, and more.
You can deal with it at 25, but time comes at you fast.
Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, my hearing is shot too. My spouse is always having to say things louder and slower to me. Not a lot of fun for them to do. I also can't smell certain smells; I suppose this is due to the aforementioned brake cleaners (spray acetone really), but am not very sure.
Totally depends on the trade. Concrete foundations, roofing, anything that uses a wheelbarrow, etc. will eventually break you. Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in, but digging post holes or hauling shingles up a ladder is not the same beating as hanging cabinets, or wiring circuit breakers. Just saying there are different kinds of hard.
>Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in
Those trades mostly pay their dues when they are younger and then the next batch of journeymen and apprentices take over that part of the job as they move up into the less physically demanding parts of the job. Even fairly physical jobs like bricklaying, they'll have the older dude doing nothing but slapping the bricks in place, they get carried over to him by one guy, one guy is mixing up the mortar, one guy is unloading the truck, another is touching up the joints, etc. It's one of those things that explains why union jobs have so many extra people too. It's not one dude doing everything, it's 3 guys doing different parts of the job and learning how to do the next part.
For this reason, maybe a handyman / jack-of-all-trades will have less wear and tear on their body? Diversity in tasks could mean a week of concrete followed by a week of cabinets, then a day or two of building a staircase, three hours of adding a new receptacle, and then two days of painting? Although in some ways, a handyman's job might be harder - they should be a quick learner, have good support / contacts in specific trades, and it might require better/more marketing to get customers.
Those are vanishingly small jobs these days in the US at least. Most companies and guys will specialize in electrical or drywall or something as they become faster at it and time is money in the trades. These skilled jobs typically require more than a single truck's worth of equipment to do quickly.
Like, tying rebar is really hard to do by hand, but they make a gun that will do it for you in seconds: https://amsalesinc.com/products/rebar-tying-gun-makita-xrt01... . You can do a whole pad of concrete in an hour that would take you days otherwise. But that gun is thousands of dollars (supply and demand baby). So having a truck of these time saving gadgets for a bunch of job types isn't feasible. Hence the specialization.
Unless you live in a remarkably remote area, rental yards carry pretty much everything you can need. I've even rented $100,000 excavators I needed for a day quite easily, and it eats into the value of your labor maybe 20-30% at worst.
I mean, not a lot of handymen are able to eat 20%; that a pretty big cost.
Apparently you are not a homeowner--as they have large numbers of these small jobs.
Oh, I very much have a lot of these jobs at the house. It's just that I tend to call a specialist [0] as the handy men around me tend to, well, not really exist anymore. Besides, most of the smaller things that don't require the really tall ladders, I can do myself.
[0] who then never shows up on time and charges too much. But that's a whole nother story about where I live...
It's all degrees of hard on your body.
Roofing might be relatively worse than electrical, but both are definitely harder than sitting an air-conditioned desk.
but there's something to be said about doing something with your hands and going to bed physically tired...
your other option is mentally drained, potentially depressed, probably anxious - especially if/when something breaks on you
i went with the desk job, yearn for something else.. would rather have become a machinist or welder looking back. do both as hobbies now to clear the head from the desk job
That’s the thing though… a desk job often affords you the time and income to pursue those other things as hobbies. The reverse is less often true.
The plumbers that just fixed my slab leak were getting IT certifications because their knees and lower backs are shot. Labor fucks you up.
Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of "go into trades" rhetoric is that most trades people either get into management as fast as they can, a small amount start their own business and a share of that small amount are very successful, or a large amount of people trade $$$ for future health problems (not just joints, many of the materials used in trades are awful and many never wear proper PPE). It's important to look at the trades without the veil of blue-collar romanticism; the trades can be lucrative but tradesmen will be very quick to give you the tradeoffs.
Yes, all of this is very easily seen by the BLS statistics about the average/median wages of trades.
For every anecdote of a plumber making $20k/month in a HCOL area, there are probably 3-4 plumbers who are barely pulling $70k/year in M/LCOL and end up having health problems.
For my family it really wan't a trade off. This jobs was the only one we could do to make end meet.
My family is the 'petite bourgeois'(owners that labor alongside their workers[0]) that Marx said were the only people that actually had a choice in the class war and were the breeding grounds for fascism.
We did management too, but labored with the employees all the same. Did we get paid more? Sometimes, but we had to go without pay a lot and pick up other jobs. Still, my sibling and I went to college debt free, none of the employees' kids did that [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
Karl Marx died 40 years before fascism was invented so I would be surprised if he said anything at all about it. Fascism is just repackaged marxism anyways with more nationalism.
Yeah, my grammar was bad there. Thanks for catching that. The wikipedia link goes into better detail about what I was trying to relate.
I actually wouldn't be suprised, running your own shop in a trade or in software bootstrap day to day mode has to be remarkable similar. Including consulting gigs to keep yourself afloat.
For sure. I believe that a a person should work towards working more with their mind than their back, long term. A lot of professions are good vehicles towards that goal. But being able to do what you need to, and being able to make ends meet in a worst case scenario are both great sources of strength and significantly reduce your economic fragility.
Yeah, I agree with both your replies here. The certainty that I had when I was starting out in life that I could walk into pretty much any auto shop and have a job in a week, I dunno, I think I took that for granted. In that, I never really thought about it and my profession was more of a choice to me; I always had a backup. I guess a lot of my friends and coworkers really didn't have that sense about themselves, maybe.
The real question, per the WSJ article here, is: How does a kid go about getting this back up? I got it by virtue of birth. But some other kid would have to go seeking it out, at the expense of time they could spend studying or, you know, just being a teenager. I'm not sure that teenage me would have taken the 'learn a trade as a backup plan' route. In fact, I know I would not have done that.
I prefer trades as a backup to a profession, for sure. A trade can give you the runway to put yourself through school or to ramp up your capabilities in other ways, leading to a better long term plan. Getting old Is a bitch, to be sure.
I think that the connectedness of cars (requiring dealer-level tools for some operations, even if available to independents at a cost that’s difficult to recoup) and the prevalence of pre-paid service bundles with new and CPO car sales is moving mechanic higher up the capital intensity (or employer/pool required) scale.
I'm getting increasingly relevant personally as a double-whammy hacker and mechanic towards liberating people and the machines they fucking bought from daddy Chevrolet who doesn't want them to control their own machinery.
It's still possible, even if for some you need to swap the entire engine controller, to take that control back. Ultimately all these damn modules have to eventually switch bare copper conductors to make all the stuff work in the car, and if we have to, we can swap ALL the silicon involved.
I would love some actual right to repair legislation but our government is too occupied undermining people's civil rights and pissing off every other market on the face of the Earth.
I will never ever pay a subscription fee for my fucking heated seats even if I have to bridge the 12V across a big toggle in the dashboard and wire the stupid thing myself. You gotta draw a line somewhere and that's mine. Fuck ALL the way off with subscription gating features in the machine I already bought.
Every industry is feeling the same pressures. Even in "simple" trades the latent cost of running a licensed business is so high that you almost can't be in business yourself or with a couple people, you need to have a dozen guys running around doing gravy work (that nobody else can do, because no license, and that no other licensee will undercut any other on, because they're invested) under your license in order to stay above water in some markets.
There are a lot of things that work for one person or 10 people, but growing from 1-10 is the hard part. Even things like lawn care, as soon as you grow beyond what you can do, the first employee needs a duplicate of all of your truck, trailer, and other equipment, plus they aren't going to work as hard as you do and probably expect to be paid better than you pay yourself.
Yes, this is becoming more and more relevant. There are a lot of things that need fixed besides cars though.
> carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer
programmer, then also?
Sort of?, if you are sufficiently well rounded and can implement solutions from start to finish. It’s sort of Art adjacent, or entrepreneur adjacent. Still, I’d encourage strongly to learn carpentry, as in the rough construction level carpentry for anyone who is likely to focus on anything extremely cerebral. It is empowering to know you can build your own shelter, and construction carpentry tends to be a touching grass type of outdoor activity.
Programming also is kinda iffy as a trade in the “I just got dropped off in the middle of BFE and I need to eat” kind of way. It sort of requires a bunch of fragile situational trimmings that are not really under individual control … so I’ve looked at software as a profession, really. It doesn’t quite pass the doctor test. Not everyone needs a programmer, but everyone needs shelter.
But programming can be done with less starting-capital than carpentry, realistically.
True, but it still, generally, requires a whole lot of other societal components to be in place and functioning in order to generate most of its value. It tends to service the tyranny of needs in a very tangential way, or serves those needs only through the more direct agency of others. In that way it fails my test for a trade, in the same way that being a lawyer does. A trade should serve a universal human need with no intermediary. That’s what makes it especially resilient to chaos, and especially useful to the person with those skills.
It gets close when you incorporate hardware as well. Now you can make tools with a software component, sort of a technical blacksmith, but you are still reliant on a fragile supply chain. Perhaps the technological handyman or tinker is as close as can be achieved inside this scope?
Lots of grey areas with many skills.
I think “grey area” is the right way to think of carpenters and electricians and plumbers too.
You say that programmers need a lot of societal components but so does every one of those professions. Unless your kids are learning how to harvest and dry their own lumber along with classical carpentry with nothing but wood joints, they will need a massive supply chain for the lumber and fasteners - unless you expect them to hunt down bog iron and bootstrap all of civilization themselves. Same with plumbers who need PVC/copper/solder and a modern sewer/water system or septic tank. Or the electrician who needs copper wire and power infrastructure (or solar panels, which require semiconductor manufacturing). What good is an electrician without the power plants to feed their customers?
I like your approach but I can't help but feel that unless you’re going full apocalyptic prepper, the practical skills are an illusion.
It’s all about the degree of independence. There are a lot of places that you can’t find work as a data scientist, and. Being a data scientist does little to directly solve problems your family might encounter if your career gets eaten by AI or a pandemic. I’m not suggesting working in the trades vs a profession.. by I do advocate competence in a trade in addition to your chosen profession, with some exceptions.
On the other hand, who would you prefer to end up on a deserted island with, a programmer or a carpenter?
What are the characteristics that are actually useful on a deserted island? Outdoorsy (ideally, skilled in bushcraft), ex-military, able-bodied. On the first two, the programmer wins. On the last one, it's probably a wash. For every obese slob in this field, there's a carpenter whose back is fucked and is dependent on opiates.
Carpentry offers limited applicable skills if they're stranded 1000 miles away from the nearest Home Depot.
Of course the knee jerk answer is a carpenter, but unless that carpenter knows how to make metal tools from scratch, hand hew a log, and fashion his own nails, I’m not sure how really useful they’d be apart from better physical fitness. A carpenter that buys nails at home depot by the box and sends plywood through a table saw likely isn’t going to have the practical skills to survive on a desert island without the modern supply chain.
Traditional woodworking and blacksmithing like that is now mostly a novelty in the developed world. No one really knows how to make their own tools from scratch which is what it’d take to bootstrap carpentry. The best realistic set of skills would probably be knowledge of how to work with fibers to make rope and gather pitch for adhesive. Then you could make a primitive axe that can do most of the hard work in bringing down and hewing trees.
If a carpenter can’t read a book and understand how to make a structure without metal fasteners, they are not competent in that field. And working with raw logs is also not much of a challenge.
I’m not an especially good carpenter, and I can work with limited tools. A chainsaw and an auger drill would be really nice, especially if I had to make lumber.. but an axe , drawknife , and chisels will do.
That’s like being a programmer that can’t write software without a framework and libraries. The idea is that tools make the job easier and faster, not that you don’t even understand how to do the job, but only how to staple code together. We all start out there, and while we may rarely if ever work that way, we can when it is needed, do something no one has done for us.
Obviously, different trades have different utility if you are talking about the breakdown of society, but I’m not really leaning into that particularly hard, more leaning into the breakdown of one’s plans or expectations, the failure of a company or the evolution of an industry, those kinds of force majure events that one can reasonably expect to have happen during a life lived.
Even so, there is some comfort in knowing that your personal knowledge and value to society is robust and resistant to black swan events, I suppose.
> If a carpenter can’t read a book
Deserted islands don't have libraries.
Depends on the situation... If the food source is on a nearby deserted island, connected by two small boats that can carry inconvenient numbers of people + food, and for some reason the boats must always be full and you must always take all the food by the end, well, give me an older programmer accustomed to puzzle interviews!
You can sell carpentry work directly to people in your community as an individual, and make a profit on every customer. Programming needs a larger customer base to break even, and you generally won't be selling software to individuals.
You can get started with programming for $15 for a monitor/mouse/keyboard from Goodwill and $50 for a PC off ebay (or $125 for a new N150 minipc, which are insanely powerful). Startup capital costs are negligible next to even (first-world) poverty living costs.
Sure, but how are you going to find customers? Within weeks of beginning carpentry you can make useful products that people will pay for. Even using less than $100 of hand tools (A saw, a chisel, and sanding + polishing can make useful and beautiful kitchen tools.) How long to go from beginner programmer to break-even revenue? Maybe if you're really smart and hit it big, at least six months. For most people closer to 2-6 years.
My answer to this question, having been a victim of this economic crash, is bug bounty programs. Chaos is a ladder. All this outsourcing, layoffs, and AI slop is an opportunity. That Apple AirPlay wormable RCE CVE is an indicator of how bad things have already gotten. It's pathetic how far even Apple has fallen in this race to the bottom.
These companies are running on fumes. They cut to the bone, through the bone, and everything is being held together by a thread.
But security research is really far removed from the skillset of a startup app developer. Realistically, even if you were capable of learning, which most aren't, it'd take longer for you to get up to speed than it would take for the market to improve.
The more relevant answer would be to bootstrap an MVP and pitch it to investors to get funding to scale. There's no piecework model for consumers like "install can lights" or "build a she-shed."
Assuming you only think of capital as physical things, then yes. But that's a very narrow definition.
Mental capital is still capital.
Maybe, but carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, etc all typically have apprenticeship opportunities and its extremely rare to encounter anything in the tech field like this.
Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things, while the tech industry loves to re-invent the wheel frequently.
> its extremely rare to encounter anything in the tech field like this.
That depends on where you are. In the US, it's rare, but our Japanese office actually had a pretty rigorous system for career growth, that involved what is, for lack of a better word, "apprenticeship."
> Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things
I wouldn't say that. I know a lot of mechanics, and they have experienced a big change, over the last decade or so.
One of the things about being a mechanic (or appliance repairman), is that you are responsible for maintaining a huge range of stuff; including things that are decades old.
I have a friend that sets up and maintains professional sterile stuff. This is big juju. These aren't little autoclaves, and they incorporate pretty much every trade you can think of, like plumbing, electrical, metalshop, mechanical, etc. Many of these units are huge. They also tend to be run by fairly advanced computers.
These units cost six- or seven-figures, and the customers like to keep them going for as long as possible. I often hear him talking about having to work on a decade-old sterilizer, in the sub-basement of some research lab.
This is a great example, really.
If I’m bored I sometimes freelance as a field repair technician for service contractors. It’s typically opening up a machine I’ve never seen, and finding the combination of mechanical, electronic, and/or software fixes it needs to come back online. It can be a lot of fun, and the pay is not terrible. But you need to understand some analog electronics, strong digital electronics skills, basic programming paradigms, SQL, networking from the physical layer on up through the application layer, and also how to read between the lines on poorly written manuals and find the hidden truth that the various contradictions point to.
I’ve worked on everything from CT scanners to cutting lasers to ATMs, and done more server swaps, PDU replacements, and field upgrades than I care to count. It’s great when I need a break from the sea of bytes, and I get to see an inside view on a lot of cool stuff, and some pretty concerning things going on behind the scenes as well. I could say, I’ve seen some shit.
I’ve watched a 27 year old pentium pro boot up off the arm of Michelin, the sparkle of the token ring LEDs twitching furtively in the twighlight of an abandoned server room, screens blaring static amid a tangle of drooping cables and fallen raceways. Shit still gives me nightmares.
Very poetic.
Thanks for that!
Unless you plan to work for a large tech employer, you can completely ignore the movement of the industry. Most of it is noise that isn't going to give you a productivity boost as an individual.
Setting up websites for people/small businesses? Give them each a virtual host/directory with mod_php if you need some CRUD. No k8s or AWS or react or anything needed. Your client's site is all in a tidy directory you could zip up and give to them if they want (e.g. you're going to move out of the business, or they want to work with someone else). I despise working with PHP, but it's the obvious choice if you were going to be a "trade web programmer" doing small jobs for people.
Writing custom software for someone? Do it with Qt's drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor and deliver it as a .zip or .apk or whatever.
It probably won't be as easy money as a SaaS megacorp, but I'm sure there is plenty of demand for programmers' services out there in the same way that you can find people looking for contractors for home renovations. If you're doing custom work, you can use whatever tools make you productive.
Tradeskill work can have a "quality appraisal" by the customer. A good car shop, a good painter, a good gardener. Code by an individual programmer is more difficult to appraise.
Tradeskills are also not scalable.
Many of the trades you listed require licenses, apprenticeships, or trade schools. Usually high schools make you choose between a college prep track or vo-tech track, so you can't do both. Also, those the tools for those trades (if going beyond a handyman level) are a significant capital investment.
> So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need.
I've hired all of these trades for my basic needs and I've never seen their licenses. They don't need no stinking license to get lots of residential work around here, just word of mouth that they are competent.
Just because you don't see fhwm, doesn't mean they don't have them or need them. I would bet your state/county requires electricians to have a license, and your mechanic is likely ASE certified.
That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them. I know for a fact that the current mechanic I use (the best I've ever had) is a farmer trying to make ends meet with no formal training. My electrician had a license as a lineman once but is now just supplementing his pension, unlicensed. Etc., etc.
The guy who came out to install a generator is licensed, and he needed one for the inspection, but that's an exception not the rule. The claim was that all you need is the skill to make a living, and around here that's demonstrated daily. Sometimes they don't even have the tools and use mine. Frequently they require cash, and that's standard procedure here.
> That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them.
Ok so in your small rural town, where people take up trades because they’re struggling to make ends meet, and where you have to settle for whoever is available, and where if someone screws you over word of mouth on its own is enough of a deterrent and is easily enforced, you can get by without relying on licenses. As far as giving general advice to young people, the original point still stands that you generally need to jump through some additional hoops to make a living off of many of the trades. Yes there are exceptions but most young people aren’t looking for answers that require you move out to the boonies and where you’re going to be scraping by.
Yeah, the GP's argument seems to be self disproving - the people doing this stuff on the shady side aren't able to make a living on it as they're barely scraping by.
Even in cities like NYC most handymen doing repairs, even in large buildings, are unlicensed. And if they are licensed, it's their employers that actually hold the meaningless paper while they send out unlicensed grunts into the field.
And then you have companies like my old one-- they didn't have a fire protection license, so they hired an old dude to come in once a year for $40k and borrowed his so they can now do sprinkler and standpipe work legally. It's the same idea everywhere, except more fraud is involved in the cities.
"but that's an exception not the rule."
No, it might only be an exception that the person didn't break the law and got the inspection. Pretty much any electrical work that would require an electrician requires an inspection by code.
Just because some of the people around you aren't following the law doesn't mean that you can really make a living that way. All it takes is one mistake and you get wiped out because you didn't have insurance and were operating illegally. I've lived in rural areas and people doing stuff as a business without the proper permits is the exception.
In rural areas where people know one another, people like yourself get sniffed out before they reach the ol boys network. If you're known as someone who seems like they would like codes, licensing, and inspections then these opportunities won't even appear to you, which works out well for both parties.
People who trade this way with one another aren't going to want to wipe the other guy out because it is mutually assured destruction.
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While I agree with the sentiment, population density tends to make regularization more important. In a smaller community, social proofs are highly effective. Less so as people become more commodified.
Go ahead and hire someone without a license, who cares, but if your livelihood depends on that trade, it’s probably a good idea to get a license, when the alternative is fines or worse.
Its trivial to hire unlicensed folks. Its even more trivial for any insurance company to void warranty case in case of ie electrical fire, flood from work by unlicensed plumbers etc. You do you, not everybody is living in the race-to-the-bottom mode.
Place I live in Europe, it would also be outright illegal. Biggest city or rural, folks here respect their local communities and only get official pros for any serious work.
This is why my house is uninsured and built totally without licenses or code inspection. Fuck paying out to some assholes just so they can void it as soon anything goes wrong.
I could literally rebuild it 3x for the all the bullshit insurance and regulatory costs were it I got inspections, licensing, and insurance.
Most people are incapable of assuming such responsibility as you described.
They've been brainwashed into "safety" since they were 3 years old, so anything outside of that box is literally unthinkable to them. Their mind literally shuts down trying to process it.
So it's workable for a niche group of people but not the majority.
The insane risk aversion in the USA is at least an opportunity.
I also got my land incredibly cheaply that way. No one wanted to take a risk on an unproven plot of land, everybody wants some place where they can already legally get water/power/electric. By doing all the legwork and legal to prove utilities I basically made $30k profit in a year just by passively testing and connecting water/electric/septic at my own risk.
Lol $30k profit? On what? Good luck selling the place when it required inspections for the new owners to mortgage and insure it.
Lol some boomer slumlord would buy it for cash to rent out if nothing else, considering I could sell for 1/3 the price of anything remotely similar and still break even.
Your story doesn't add up. If it's as rural as you say, there's not enough rental market to make it worth while. It will be an even smaller market if it requires a good old boy network to not wipe you out. Many rural areas have plenty of rundown houses that surely would be cheaper than your place if it's in as good a shape as you make it out to be.
Lol they all got bid to infinity during the covid mania, that's why I resorted to building a house myself in the first place -- if buying a rundown built house or even a shitty trailer were cheaper I would have done that in the first place.
I built this place for ~1/3 the price of anything else available because even a completely burnt out husk of a trailer is more expensive than DIY building a house due to the weird dynamics of the housing market that places a gigantic premium on being the guy who takes all the risk of connecting utilities and getting a permitted residential structure.
Your thesis that I can't sell an actual house for the price of all the unmortgagable burned out trailers that sell like hotcakes is interesting but false. I don't expect this dynamic to change much until most of those ~0% mortgages expire or a massive new supply of housing emerges.
You must not be that rural if stuff was being bid up. Run down doesn't mean burnt out. The thesis is that your house is likely unmortgagable/uninsurable if you ignored the permits etc.
But I have a legal permit. And that permit says I don't have to get it inspected, or need or license, or get code compliance checks. I used a rarely used 'loophole' to get that explicitly stated on my permit.
A lot of work gets done outside of that framework, and licensing in many places is not all that onerous. It depends on the location and the field, and there is a difference between the commitment level of learning a trade as a backup and personal development step and getting really serious about making money in that trade.
Yeah, it would be impractical to do them all lol, but you can get set up either by high school graduation or within two years afterward. So you go to college , if desired, at 19 or 20.
As far as the “track” available in high school, I’ve found it trivial to basically ignore it. You can pick and choose, but you may have to demonstrate ability to skip prerequisites, so that means independent study -a critical skill anyway. Also, summer school or community college in the summer can move a student ahead significantly.
Having raised 5 kids under this pattern it hasn’t been problematic or expensive. If the plan is to go to a prestigious university, you will need to do some extra academics or work yourself into a university program to make it obvious that going to a trade school doesn’t define your potential, usually completing a year of community college or participating as a research assistant etc by high school graduation is sufficient.
As far as tools cost, being a mechanic is the pricey one, with basic set of tools around $3000 these days because of the technology component.
But the other trades are not so bad.
If you don’t try to buy all new and vanity brands, you can get set up around $1000. Used tools are generally nearly as good as new ones. If you need advanced tools they are nearly universally available for rent, and often the first time you need to rent a tool, the job you do will pay for you to buy one for next time.
I think most people overvalue the dominant paradigm and pattern copying. It’s fine (even desirable) not to look like the usual applicant as long as your lumps are interesting or signal value to an institution.
$3k seems extremely low unless you're offering only a subset of services. Things like tire machines, alignment racks, and even just a smaller/non-shop air compressor is pricey. If you want to contract at a shop that has those, they typically want an ASE cert too
Being a mechanic is a lot like being a hair stylist. In many cases they're paying for a bay at a shop, and bring their own tools, in exchange for not having to do any of the business operations.
So many things have turned into gig economies.
My optometrist wants to retire. Nobody wants to buy the (very successful) business. New graduates (only two took the state boards last year. Two.) want to work regular hours and go home. No interest in running the business, hiring and firing, purchasing and rent and all the rest.
They just want a gig. Do their expert thing and go home.
At the art fair downtown I noticed many of the stall operators are quite old. I quizzed a couple - same answer. They can get a partner in the (kiln, woodshop, metalshop etc) but not in the business side, selling at fairs. Nobody wants to do that.
Even retail - my sister had a chocolate shop. Her employees were business students! But when she wanted to retire, none of them, zero, wanted to take over the business. They wanted to exercise their speciality at some big firm.
The western world of business has changed beyond recognition since I was young.
The problem isn't that no one wants to do it, its that the math doesn't work out.
If you have 6 figures of student loan debt just to get an optometry degree, you don't want to double or triple that to buy an established business. Your interest cost will eat any hope of profit.
For small businesses, its the same issue. A pottery shop or fabrication shop isn't really worth a lot more than a used kiln or set of tools, but I'm guessing that the owners want to be bought out for a lot more than they can sell their old stuff for. There is a serious mismatch going on. At the same time, the work itself is devalued. Fewer people are going to lay out $1k on a handmade dinnerware set from their local ceramics people when they can pay 1/3rd the price from an importer.
>No interest in running the business, hiring and firing, purchasing and rent and all the rest.
Just like everything else these days the middle option is rendered economically useless by cost (time or money or both) of all the overhead and the juice isn't worth the squeeze unless you're employing dozens.
While I get that it's fashionable to peddle it that way because it confirms the HN audience's biases the overwhelming majority of mechanics are paid flat rate same as they would have been 50yr ago.
Renting a bay is the kind of thing a business owner does. Like a gas station with a 2-bay garage will be owned by a landlord who leases it to a tenant business. Perhaps the same or different business than is operating the convieience store.
You are describing being an automotive repair shop owner. A mechanic may work on cars, or they may work on generators, pumps, valves, augers, or any number of other kinds of industrial machinery that services a vast field of critical infrastructure. Most applications for mechanics are on-premise not in a shop… it’s just there are so many cars that we think of automotive mechanics as representing the field.
If you are comparing to going to college $3000 startup cost is a joke.
I have no idea where this guy got $3k as a startup cost. Most mechanics pay more than that just for the mechanic's toolbox without any tools in it.
$10-15k is a more realistic number for an auto mechanic, and many of them have $50k+ into their tools.
Oh, you can spend 50k on tools, of course. You can spend as much as you want.
But you don’t need every tool to work on every car.
Plenty of mechanics work with a single toolbox that you can carry by hand.
It will handle 90 percent of the jobs. The one semi-specialty tool you need for the job is a phone call to Napa away.
Before long you have 99 percent of what you will actually do covered. If you look at a mechanics toolset you will find that 20 percent of the tools get 99.9% of the use. A lot, maybe more than half, basically never get used at all.
In many things, a full set consists of perhaps 16-20 sizes, but for many types of tools, there are 3 sizes that get used all the time, and two that get used once or twice a year. The rest not at all.
Also, you can buy a “$10,000” set of tools for around $2000 if you are patient, less if you identify where you need really good tools and where middle of the road will work fine, and don’t let it become a vanity hobby.
Over time, you will likely have a lot invested in tools.. but you don’t need that much to start, unless you are talking about opening a full service shop from scratch, not just being a mechanic.
Yeah, the costs just aren’t that high. I’d say that adding a trade to my children’s accomplishments probably in total added about 3-5k to the cost of their education. In some cases, the educational component of the trade actually earned them money in the process. In the grand scheme of things, the cost is negligible.
That’s only an obstacle if one believes education should be finished by 22-23 years old. Doing another few years of formal education isn’t a huge impediment and is probably pretty beneficial before even considering GP’s main point.
In the long run it's detrimental. The longer you delay earnings, the less time you have for it to compound.
If earnings are the main point of your life, that makes perfect sense.
I bet that a substantial majority of people's long term goals involve money to some extent.
Want to live in a van and surf all day? You do actually need money for that, particularly if you want to do it indefinitely.
Sure, resource potential is important. But putting all of your eggs in one basket can push you into a corner, especially in the sense of -feeling- cornered. Options, even if they exist primarily in theory, are a force multiplier.
For example;
If you have a “good” job, but it is trending toward a flat trajectory, and you have a set of skills that requires a complex set of circumstances to be employed, it may be too risky to move to a new location simply because the downside is so severe. It can be a 1:4 bet paying 10:1 odds, a bet you definitely should take, but if losing means your family doesn’t eat, you can’t take the risk.
If you know you can find a way to get by even with day labor if things go badly until you can stabilize your situation, you can take those beneficial risks.
It’s a matter of being prepared to roll with the inevitable punches, and being able to make decisions based on the knowledge of that readiness. Being less fragile, even antifragile.
Earnings aren't the main point, but they're a necessary point for everything else that does matter.
Sure, and optimizing earning potential along with tactical flexibility is arguably the best way to maximize that potential. Having a trade as a backup skill gives you tactical maneuverability that allows you to be a more effective negotiator and to take beneficial risks. Negotiating power alone is worth any costs.
My nephew hates math. So he's not going to college right now. Instead he's going to vo-tech school. Where he takes math.
Anyway, he seemed very interested in being a part of the FBLA and went to the various functions and conventions that the organization had. I encouraged him to keep in the back of his mind that one day he's not going to be young anymore, he's going to be tired of someone else's shit, every person in their mid 50s and over he knows who is in a trade has needed multiple surgeries just to function on a daily basis, and he's going to be frustrated that his boss is buying a motorcoach to drive to his vacation home while he's struggling to pay the note on his truck. Learn a trade. And then learn to run a business. So that you can run a business while working your trade.
>To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.
I think one or the other is ok. My main thing is that you have to have some sort of plan. You can plan to be a software engineer or a hairdresser or whatever else, but you need to have some sort of plan. You can always update your plan, but you should at least have some vague idea of what it is. The 'failure to launch' folks that I know are all the ones that didn't have some sort of plan so they end up bouncing around from one low paying job to another without any sort of career progression. Even if they end up doing OKish as an office administrator or assistant retail manager, if/when they lose that job (often due to economic realities outside their control) they end up starting back over at the bottom.
Unfortunately a lot of people just “sleep through life” as i like to say. They are physically awake, but they make decisions like they don’t have any agency. Almost like they are asleep.
They think some higher power will magically drop a plan into their lap.
What I’ve seen that drives my ideas on this are:
I believe a professional skill is an important educational goal, and insofar as a person is capable and interested they will more likely thrive with a professional skill.
But: professional skills tend to require a lot of dependencies and connections, can be heavily reputation based, and you can find yourself in a dead end of many kinds.
Having a trade gives you an opt-out so you can always move laterally and reposition yourself, probably to get back into your profession or a related one. Also, it creates a way to take a “break” to avoid burnout. And being skilled in trades, you can easily “earn” tens of thousands of dollars a year as a homeowner by not having to pay a premium for life’s demands unless you want to.
Just being able to credibly walk away is a huge advantage in negotiation. And even if you won’t, knowing that you could, really could, is a huge boost to well being.
It all boils down to plotting a course based on options rather than only constraints. Empowerment.
Thing is, most people won’t use that fallback, but it still provides a great advantage. With a fallback, you can take risks that can position you ahead of more timid strategies. Same as owning a little land with a simple cabin on it, outright.
For a few thousand dollars or even less, the worst that can happen is that you might have to go “home” and recoup. You always have a place to be. Even if you rarely go there.
So we'll all be living in wood huts because there are no architects and civil engineers and if break your leg the doctor will saw it off because no one studied biology and chemistry so pharmaceuticals don't exist...
Sounds great! I love libertarianism!
What? I’m not advocating for forgoing education. On the contrary. I advocate for deeper, broader education and life experience. Not quite sure where you get that?
OTOH we’d be better off living in well built wood huts than in the conditions that people with a high degree of specialized education but no practical education can provide. I have a great respect for knowledge, science, and learning in general… but the “incompetent intellectual“ stereotype, so effectively weaponized in the culture wars, exists for a reason.
In the end, individuals and societies benefit from well educated people who have a well rounded education in not only the arts and sciences, but also in practical physical affairs of urgent application, AKA applied engineering or applied science.
Probably they misread you while arguing with their own ghosts. Your idea is perfectly reasonable and sound. It allows the lived experience to shape youngsters minds.
lol. Probably. I’ve never, ever done that on an Internet forum. Casting stones, and what not.
Yeah! Hit that straw man!
You could caricature libertarianism, or you could engage with understanding what it actually is, whether or not you choose to agree with it.
> You could caricature libertarianism, or you could engage with understanding what it actually is, whether or not you choose to agree with it.
Why is it that 99% of people arguing for libertarianism do a much better job making a caricature of it than anyone else that's intentionally tried?
I've tried to engage with them in good faith but ultimately all their arguments devolve into abolishing taxes and keeping track of existing bureaucracy on an individual level. Every. Single. Time.
It's not a practically tenable position. It's a youthful fantasy on the opposite side of the spectrum of property rights (the other side of the spectrum is communism).
I’d call myself a “spiritual” libertarian. Over the years, it became obvious that laws, regulations, compromises, and balances that curtail freedoms exist for a reason. It’s an imperfect world, And if the goal is to maximize human happiness and prosperity, a framework for cooperation is absolutely imperative.
I think it’s also good to push back against this flow of structure, because just as much as the idea that freedom and self-interest are the ideal drivers of society is a dangerous and intoxicating illusion, so is the idea that cooperation and goodwill can be legislated.
The reality is, of course, much more nuanced and poorly distributed. Incentives alignment to the common good is an effort that is a struggle to even properly define, much less to implement.
The fact that people seem to not understand that incentive alignment is the goal, rather than mothering or oppression, doesn’t help.
The problems of the state are much less tractable and congruous with personal experience than most people, including most politicians, appreciate. Relatable analogies such as running a business or a family used in appeals to “common sense” are farcical in their relation to the state, and often disastrous in application.
Statecraft is something that requires not only a deep understanding of political theory and practice, but also of psychology, economics, game theory, statistics, and a solid dose of intuition and luck. In short, it is demanding to the point of nearly being a fools errand, yet the electorate seems to favor simpletons, paternal figures, and shiny things that smell like upper class. I really don’t know if there is a way forward with democracy unless we lean in hard to education.
I was raised to believe that going to college was the only right path. But later, a friend of mine dropped out and started training as a machinist—and somehow, he ended up living much more freely than most of us. He’s not what you'd call especially “smart,” but he has this intuitive sense for metal, welding, and machines.
Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories—about the machine he fixed, or how he spotted a tiny issue just by the sound it made.
That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk.
Sometimes I wonder if being truly respectable isn’t about how much you earn, but whether you feel proud of what you do.
I've been trying for a long time to understand all the anti-education, anti-science sentiment we've been seeing in the US for so long now. I think a lot of it comes from how much college is emphasized over everything else in k-12 education in the US.
My son is heading to high school next year, and in the big welcome event for incoming 9th graders every mention of post high-school life was phrased as "college and career". I tried to listen with the mindset of someone who didn't go to college, and was doing quite fine. It definitely felt like those people were being spoken down to. There were no overt statements against non-college outcomes, but the emphasis was quite clear.
I've watched this play out in my own family. A bunch of extended family members have become quite successful without any college education. When I talk to them today, decades after graduating high school, they still carry so much resentment about how they felt they were treated back then.
anti-education occurs when education is watered down with indoctrination and ideology. Then people equate "education" with what's currently taught. This is dangerous because anti-education becomes anti-learning. Chris Rock had a bit about this.
I think a lot of that sentiment comes from the conservative/religious right, which sees college as a dangerous thing that turns their obedient children into free thinkers and other forms of deviancy.
Another aspect of this is simply pandering by reframing the class war into "intellectual elites" vs the owner class.
College isn't for everyone, but it should be accessible to all that want it.
> In considering the historic tension between access to education and excellence in education, Hofstadter argued that both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were in part consequences of the democratization of knowledge. Moreover, he saw these themes as historically embedded in America's national fabric, resulting from its colonial and evangelical Protestant heritage. He contended that evangelical American Protestantism's anti-intellectual tradition valued the spirit over intellectual rigor.[5]
> Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as "resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life."[6] He further described the term as a view that "intellectuals...are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive ... The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."[7]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
> in the big welcome event for incoming 9th graders every mention of post high-school life was phrased as "college and career".
1. If the school pulled from a certain kind of socio-economic status population, then this is a reasonable broad statement to make.
2. In other cases, it may just be projection and/or lazy thinking.
3. The US fascination with college eduction, attributing it to higher earnings, conflates correlation with causation. Many of the folks who go to college will also have a financially bright future if they don’t go to college — for example, by monetizing their social network.
4. The case for defaulting to a college education is that many places use it as a filter for job applicants.
5. My recommendation to folks is either go to a school with a well-developed alumni and/or job placement network or go to the cheapest and easiest school that they have access to. Learning isn’t really part of the equation, since it will either be baked into the program they enter, or they can just embrace autonomous/independent learning. The quality of education at middling institutions is just not very good.
6. Note that I believe that the US is producing college graduates at about double the rate that we need. A quick search of data shows that ~40% of folks aged 25-29 in 2022 had a college degree. I think that number should probably be closer to 15-20%… maybe as low as 10%. The only way the waste in the system can be cut is probably from above — using a college degree as a job filter misaligns incentives, imho, and this won’t change easily.
>> Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to ...
Well, everyone has this energy at 18. Can you do this "sweating through long manual labor shifts" for 10, 20, 30 years?
If you get hurt or just your body gives up (back pain, neck pain, arthritis or what else), you're in a much worse position as a "trade worker" than an office worker.
Not mentioning how much they'd love to replace you with machines, immigrants or younger workers. This is true in an office setting also but bureaucracy somehow finds a way to survive.
I don't know. To add a bit of anecdata, I've married into a carpentry family. They are all older and much healthier than me who "is just sitting at the computer whole day". Also goes to my IT friends from university and high school who all developed serious back and other health issues from sitting the whole day doing office work. So I would say it depends.
I'm frome trade family and I've seen the opposite. The ones who actually stay in the trade and don't step onto management of some sort are broken down in old age. It looks fine at 40, but by 50 you see the impact and by 60 the difference is alarming. Of course you maintain physical fitness by virtue of what they do, but the amount of injuries they acclimate is also worth considering, especially since an office worker can just get a better chair and run on occasion to mitigate risk. Not so for trade jobs. You normally must stop doing the trade and manage those who do it to maintain your health.
“Average” people with grit are capable of much more than lazy intelligent people.
Totally agree, our culture definitely focuses way too much on idolising wonderkids, which often isn't realistic and is far from the truth of how success usually happens. You see it so clearly in sports, it's often not the most naturally gifted kid who ends up achieving the most, but the one who trains harder and just refuses to give up. I wish I knew the secret to bottling this life lesson up for my own kids but it seems this only comes naturally with time.
Re life lesson, simple study was effective: praise effort over results
At some point you need actual results. Otherwise people will very quickly start abusing it by saying "I tried" and walking away from problems.
Yes, sorry I wrote short. The praise was about when the child achieves something you yse language like "you worked hard to succeed there" rather than "you're so talented to succeed there"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6176062
(& this supports your point somewhat in that unconditional praise is also suboptimal)
The "immediate seeing result" is what draws me to Embedded system.
When i was a kid, i'm always fascinated with toys that my best toys is the screwdriver that i used to take apart other toys.
Now, seeing a line of code somehow make the machine break in flames still very amusing to me.
Temporarily light emitting diodes will always be funny.
> Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories
That's because he's only sweating through those long shifts, and not thinking through them. I bet I would have more energy to clean the house after work than he would.
We have a real problem in the way we think about intelligence. There are so many dimensions to intelligence that having a single scalar value is very counterproductive.
Your friend seems to have a certain type of intelligence, while you and your other friends have a different type of intelligence.
Part of the current political situation is in part due to the traditionally intelligent people looking down on the rest of society.
For a functioning society we need all types of intelligence, and we need to value them all. Equally.
If you are interested, you can do both. I work for a company that produces machines that tend to get integrated in automation cells for aerospace/automotive parts manufacturers. As the field technician, it's my job to know how our machines play with everything else in that cell so I can fix issues for our customers when things break (and they will break, eventually, for a wide variety of reasons which creates a weird fragility to the whole automation system, but that's a different post).
This requires that I know what's going on mechanically _and_ at what expected behavior of the embedded systems should be (PLCs, device firmware/software packages, network security, etc).
Like you, I was pushed to go to college after high school, only to find out later that college is an industry, not an institution, so the rhetoric about not being able to get a good job without a degree was really just a sales pitch to get my lower-class parents to take out loans they could not afford so me, a veritable child at the time, could make a major decision that would set the tone for the rest of my life. It's a lot of systemically flawed Capitalistic nonsense.
In my field, we _desperately_ need people who understand (at the very least) basic electronics and mechanics, but also the software side of things. The amount of techs from other companies, companies with a much larger and more public reputation than my employers mind you, that do not seem to have a grasp on the basics is astounding and alarming. But even the competent electromechanical techs are weak on how the software or firmware functions, which is often a big key to the "wtf is wrong" puzzle.
I'm not even a coder/programmer, but I know enough to get by and make effort to learn something about programming embedded systems or software for Controls every day, and while I am still an amateur, my god, it gives me quite the edge over a lot of the other guys.
You don't have to be trapped at a desk. Mechanical aptitude can be developed, but it starts by not being afraid to take the screws out and seeing what you can just figure out. The pride you mention comes from that, but you also touched on something else; tangible results. Believe me, I have respect for devs who can create a piece of software from start to finish, but when I manage to bring a slag-crusted horrifyingly-neglected machine back to live after a catastrophic failure that had Automaker X sweating $10000 bullets, it is a real thrill, one that infuses me with great energy for days, sometimes weeks. That's why your friend likes sharing those stories!
Yeah I would like to do that too but I have no interest in working for $60k for the rest of my life.
> I have no interest in working for $60k for the rest of my life.
I’m not sure where you live, but folks in the trades in CA move beyond $60k fairly quickly.
I realize that is partially because of CA, where full time fast food folks make $40k a year minimum, but many of the folks in trades that I know have really nice houses and cars.
60k pa for the rest of your life depends on where you currently live. Or, where you would like to move to for retirement.
especially when you can get the same $60k by getting two promotions at walmart (associate -> team lead -> coach)
>That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk.
I take it you are not a SWE then? This is a pretty ubiquitous feeling for most engineers I'd think.
I think you are discounting how smart your friend is.
Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries? Pick the right tool for the job. If you’re wrong, or don’t know how to use your tools / understand the metals, you in for some trouble.
Most programmers think too highly of themselves.
Software projects have the exact same problems as construction jobs, with the main difference liability.
> Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries
I'm not sure this is a serious question, but the two have nothing at all in common. Anyone who says otherwise either has never welded or never used a computer.
Those "software vs physical stuff" discussions remind me of modern vs old-school music production. Not the final product (the music) but the production process in itself.
One goes "commit to nothing, you can always change it later, hundreds of convenient tools at hand, move super quick but you don't 'finish' it, you just 'abandon' it".
The other is "commit early, make the best you can since changing anything is expensive, not too many tools, slap the roof and proclaim it good enough, ship it".
The difference is mostly due to destructive vs non-destructive workflows.
I'm not really saying one is better than the other, or even that the difficulty is different... but process-wise those things are miles apart.
>Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries?
Yes.
I dunno. Rails welds very good to metal. So does ML on Apple Metal
> with the main difference liability
I mostly agree but dimensionality is also a huge one. Being constrained to 3 dimensions and standard building materials really limits the problem space. It's why you can probably figure out how to build a structure where all the entrances lock but you definitely shouldn't roll your own crypto.
I find that physical work is different but not simpler than programming. Yes there are only 3 dimensions, but there are lots of layers of important "details" that you can't ignore, whereas digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot.
> digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot
I'm not clear what you mean by that. Most of the library code I deal with is far from ideal (IMO). Even most of the things I implement aren't ideal because either I'm interacting with the real world or even if not I don't want to spend unlimited time fully generalizing it.
As a concrete example, absolutely nothing that touches floating point arithmetic is "ideal" in any sense of the word.
You can swap out or improve your library at any stage.
That’s kind of hard with a foundation, or other materials
Something went wrong. Oh, just remove and fix the underlying problem from weeks ago.
No git, version control, copy paste.
You need to a bigger crane? Ouch.
Rainy season causes some delay? Welcome to the domino effect.
Supply chain issues? Oh well.. you better have good contracts.
Most applications are a 2D problem space: carthesian products.
Scheduling, staffing, and tooling constraints all exist in the software world as well. If you're going to extend to the entire job site then you'll need to extend to the entire dev team plus associated management.
I don't immediately see an analogy to supply chain issues but then I hadn't intended this as a pissing contest to begin with.
It's interesting to me that I'm getting defensive replies when all I pointed out was the increased dimensionality of the problem space when writing code versus assembling a physical product. I don't think that observation can realistically be contested.
A friend is dropping out of IT to pursue welding - but knows the money just isn’t there. She’s starting a 5:30am 10 hour shift at a manufacturer to be able to move onto welding and CNC. She’s autistic so can struggle sometimes but is also one of the smartest people I know and does physics puzzles for fun and builds shit all the time.
Skilled trade jobs value paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.
Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck.
"Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck."
My oldest son is 17 years old and graduated one semester early from high school.
He now works full-time as a welder and heavy equipment mechanic with a base rate of $25/hour and will get many, many hours of overtime this summer.
He will easily gross > 70k this year.
Granted, this is in the Bay Area (so add some inflation there) and he has certain physical and interpersonal attributes[1] that make him special ... but this is, indeed, happening and my impression is that it would be repeatable for others like him.
FWIW, he's very proud of himself and we're very proud of him but ... we're also trying to impress upon him that wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security. Owning things is[2].
[1] He's a big strong guy, projects as aged 20+ and is very outgoing and charismatic.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
"many hours of overtime this summer."
I think the biggest misconception with any of the trades jobs is that yes, you can make 70K+, even 100K+, but that involves lots of overtime.
At least in the trades the overtime is a well-understood part of the bargain. Plenty of white-collar employees work 60+ hour weeks with no additional compensation except the possibility of a larger-than-average bonus.
If you talk to someone in the trades yes, it's understood that overtime is required to make good money. When you see people promoting the trades to highschoolers though, they are not talking about that fact.
Yes, white collar jobs can require overtime but not all and not always but that is kinda besides the point. Why are we promoting work that requires 50-60+ hours a week to get by?
Physical labor is very different from white collar work.
Yes, continue and elaborate? Mental (white collar) work has more of that feeling of dread I think. Maybe physical “overtime” has a physical limit, not sure how often you push yourself into burnout in those fields? Curious and asking here, don’t read in too much here.
You can google "retirement age plumbers" and see stories of people's bodies giving out at age 50. There are some things you can do to mitigate that risk, but physical labor jobs frequently land you into unplanned early retirement, with the rest of your life in pain.
Completely anecdotal - but the guys I know in trades have a larger proportion that smoke/drink heavily compared to the office workers I know.
Would be curious if there’s a study that compares “health nut” physical trade workers with “health nut” office workers.
Still as you said, there’s a lot of risk with relying on physical capabilities for work.
If an office worker gets injured outside of work, you can still do the basic job.
If a physical tradeworker gets injured outside of work, you could be out of a paycheck.
I agree with that, the physical labor has been studied and experienced for quite some time now. But we need to look forward and see if there might be changes we cannot comprehend yet.
For example, we cannot yet google the software eng retirement age or the like. Assuming we started in 2005, average dude 25years old then hasn't retired yet and we don't know either where he/she's gone in 2035/45.
Software engineering as a popular career track goes back to the early 80s if I'm being extremely conservative.
There are plenty of retired software engineers that I know. Most of them retired because they wanted to do something different, and they had the money to do it. I don't know of any that have retired as a direct result of the physical effects on their body.
So…no back pain? :)
Purdue started CS degree program in the 60’s
Yeah I’m not talking about Kernighan & Ritchie et al. More like the big boom, zero interest rate and the huge demand of SWE that occurred 2010 onwards.
I’m sure the biggest early retirement factor is weight. Most guys in the trades were 50-150lbs overweight. That’s more ruinous to your back and body than anything you are likely to do at work. We had old guys working and one thing basically all of them had in common was being thin.
There are reasons the welding movement isn't going to spread to the UK. More general awareness of the risks, less cultural passion for the optics
https://breathefreely.org.uk/guidance-on-exposure-to-mangene...
>The WEL for Manganese (since 2018) in the UK for those small particles that reach the deep lung (known as respirable particles) is 0.05mg/m3 (8hr TWA), a tenth of the previous WEL.
This change is significant as much of the manganese in the fume will be respirable. It is likely that the respirable limit will be exceeded during many welding activities unless effective controls are introduced and used properly.
https://www.hse.gov.uk/welding/health-risks-welding.htm
I think if you really want to make a proper living from the trades, you need to at some stage plan to move "off the tools" and into starting your own welding/plumbing/whatever business.
If you can do that successfully, you can get FAANG money.
Well there are around 130K plumbing businesses in the USA and around 400K plumbers, so I think that plan leaves around 270K plumbers snaking drains until they die.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472152.htm https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-busi...
They (270K) can still create new businesses though?
With overtime as a freelance software developer I felt my brain developing faster. With overtime as a mailman I felt it decaying faster.
Both jobs drained my will to live though. The mailman job was actually much nicer, just the pay was total ass.
Yes, but I don’t see why that means overtime is compensated in one but not the other. If anything blue collar workers are more upfront about their time being valuable, while in white collar work there’s an unwritten expectation that you’ll suck it up and get the job done. Talking about money is taboo, but who does that benefit?
This doesn't mean that the concept and value of overtime is different between the two
Yet I see tradesmen who have started their own contacting businesses and poorly paid software engineers who somehow just make Wordpress themes.
At the end of the day, people need to discover themselves and find what they excel at. Who am I to tell people that they’ll enjoy my job and be as good at it as I am. No one should tell me to start a career in chemistry or playing an instrument. I’ve already tried it.
Yeah, is it really a good indicator if you need to work 20 hours overtime every week to make the median household income? That's just exploitation.
We also just know that, blue or white, there is no raise structure in society anymore. You can't just do honest work or even be loyal and expect it to pay off financially.
Median household income is household income, not personal income. Median personal income in the US for all people with an income is (as of 2022) $47,960. [1] For those in full time year-long employment, it's $60,070. And note because that is for all employed persons, that's including people with years of experience in their respective fields.
Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
HN comments are so out of touch with reality that you see people sneer at someone running a business in Russia that earns them $100k annual profit.
I'm "out of touch" for not accepting 1.5x overtime in order to have a median income? Meanwhile 60, 70+% is going off to rent.
I don't care if someone compensated highly chooses that lifestyle, but not someone "average".
$70k isn't a median income, it's much more than it. Which is to say it's much more than 50% of full+ time American workers, with years of experience on average, earn. And overtime is typically time and a half. So somebody earning $50k and working 60 hour weeks would be earning $87,500 which would put them in the top quarter of all earners in the US [1], straight out of high school, and with 0 debt.
You are right that doing this in the Bay Area would be unusual due to an unreasonable cost of living, but it's possible he's still living with his parents. If not, the great thing about the trade is that they're in high demand everywhere - including offshore where the pay skyrockets, especially for a welder who can get underwater work. Those gigs enable one to comfortably retire, if they want, a multi millionaire well before 40.
But the interesting thing about trades is that people end up enjoying them. A friend works the rigs and makes a stupid amount of $$$ thanks to doing 2 on 2 off and spending his offtime in places like Thailand. So he's taking home a healthy 6 figures, gets 50% of the year off, and is having a total cost of living in the low thousands per year. He still has no intention of retiring though, even though he could live off simple interest alone at this point. It ends up being a lifestyle and not just a job.
[1] - https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
@>70k isn't a median income, it's much more than it.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
>Median weekly earnings of full-time workers were $1,194 in the first quarter of 2025.
Extrapolates to 62k/year. I don't know what else to say here.
>. So somebody earning $50k and working 60 hour weeks would be earning $87,500 which would put them in the top quarter of all earners in the US
Yes, work 50% more than the median and you hit the 75% mark (above 50% of the top half). The math seems to math out. But thought we wanted to not worm ourselves to death these days?
>straight out of high school, and with 0 debt.
Well, no. Not straight out of high school. You need to compete for a role among unions (which seems to be a hurdle the poster above passed, or is confident of passing), then complete an apprenticeship for a few years that may either be unpaid or pay significantly less. Then after that you become a journeyman and start to get that pay.
There's still a near college level of training where you need resources to survive that your apprenticeship isn't covering. Resources that may or may not include parents covering room and board (and in that case, sure. You can survive on anything That pays anything if the biggest expense is paid for). That's sadly a growing luxury in modern society, though.
>But the interesting thing about trades is that people end up enjoying them.
I work in games, so yea. I get it. You sacrifice comfort and maybe even health for furfillment. But I can still recognize in my industry when that passion and engagement is being exploited while still choosing to participate it.
Well, eventually I recognized it. Gaining 60 pounds and having an emergency room visit finally knocked some sense into me.
Most people don't work 52 weeks a year so yearly earnings are different than weekly earnings times 52. Beyond that it's important to consider what you're comparing here. You're looking at the wages of (and only of) all full time+ workers in America - meaning you're comparing the earnings of somebody fresh out of high school to somebody who's been working for years on average. And of course plenty of those people are also working overtime. In spite of all of this, the high school kid is still earning 20% more! And the OP that started this thread conversation made it clear his kid has already received this offer, so yes it's literally straight out of high school. His earnings in a few years will be even higher.
Games and trades are complete opposites. If you still think you enjoy game development (and aren't independent), then it's almost certain that you haven't been in the industry long. With games, you start with a passion and the games industry will just completely beat it out of you. The games industry will make you hate game development and even games. The trades are different in that somehow that passion is enabled to be born for those that didn't already have it, and fostered and grown in those that did. In software you end up in a scenario (I'm speaking outside of games here - where you don't even get good pay) where people mostly hate their job, but love the pay. And in welding you end up in one where people mostly love their job.
>Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.
I'm scoffing at a kid needing to work 60 hours a week in order to earn an income barely above the median. I'm scoffing at the idea that people think 70k is liveable in high COL areas without sharing multiple roommates.These aren't things we should normalize.
If you really think this isn't bad, you're the ones out of touch with how expensive it is to survive these days.
Not everything that is hard or unpleasant is exploitation. 50% of jobs will pay below the median income. That's what median means. The existence of jobs paying below the median income is a mathematical certainty, not exploitation.
That's fair, but if you want to frame a job as a "good" one, you'd expect to be on the other side of median.
"Good" is always going to be relative. Is it good if your other option is to be a programmer? Probably not. Is it good if your other option is working retail for minimum wage? Yeah, then it's probably pretty good.
yeah but their point is 60+ hours workweek for a median income
So it's a below median income job (as 50% of all jobs necessarily are) with the option to increase your income by working more. Still not exploitation.
There are salaried employees making less who also work 60 hours a week and don't even get overtime (granted, their jobs are likely less physically demanding).
I don't think you're understanding the long term implications of this, nor how expensive it is these days to simply live. People don't understand that soke areas can barely live on median income to begin with and that these aren't just "nice to have" hours, but needed to survive. I will call that exploitation.
>There are salaried employees making less who also work 60 hours a week and don't even get overtime
Those are called exempt jobs and they tend to start at 80k for that to qualify. I still don't like it but baby steps.
If you're non-exempt and have unpaid overtime... How is that not exploitation?
Exempt jobs in no way shape or form start at $80k. You can be making $35k and be exempt. It has to do with the nature of the work, not a salary.
You can't be non-exempt and have unpaid overtime. Non-exempt means you are required to be paid overtime for working over 40 hours per week. That's the entire point of the exempt / non-exempt designation. If you're non-exempt and not getting paid overtime, you need to report your employer to the DoL.
Yes, some areas are expensive, those areas also have higher wages. The median wage in that area will be higher than the overall median for the whole country. If you can't afford to live there...live somewhere else. That isn't complicated.
Okay sure. Your state will vary. California's exempt status requires a certain salary, among several other clauses:
https://www.calchamber.com/california-labor-law/exempt-nonex...
>Exempt employees in California generally must earn a minimum monthly salary of no less than two times the state minimum wage for full time employment.
So as of now that floor would be $34/hr to even be considered.
>Yes, some areas are expensive, those areas also have higher wages
Given federal minimum wage, it's likely to be the other way around. $25/hr in CA may go down to $11 in a low COL. You can see some abysmally low compensations flr jobs that "require" advanced degrees.
>If you can't afford to live there...live somewhere else. That isn't complicated.
Spoken like someone who's never tried to get housing out of state without a job offer. Let alone moving long distance.
I'm not sure what you want. It's not like $68k is poverty wages. If they don't do the overtime, maybe they only make $50k, which is still above the median personal income ($68k is household income, meaning that is usually with more than one person working). Yeah, you can't live in downtown Manhattan or San Francisco on that, but there's lots of other places you can live just fine, and many many people who live on less. Welding is in demand in lots of places, especially lower cost of living places. It can't be that hard to move. Human beings migrated across Siberia wearing animal skins, surely one can figure out how to apply for a job online and rent a U-Haul.
> or even be loyal
What's loyalty got to do with this? I'm not "loyal" to my employer and I don't know anyone who is. If I find a job that pays better, and offers better conditions, I'll take it. Why would anyone do anything else, and why would anyone put any value on that?
I actually don't believe it. Most people work not only for the pay check but also for some concrete project they want to see completed (or a customer problem they want to see fixed, etc). Omo economicus is a very simplified theoretical model of only one aspect of work.
There are options other than "loyal to the company" or "always choose option which pays most"
For example someone might like their co-workers, enjoy the projects they work on, and want to see the current product (that they have invested so many time into) succeed. But at the same time, they might not care about company itself at all. If the project got closed and co-workers left, they will move to a new company with no hesitation.
I don't believe in loyalty to an employer but I've had and seen numerous employers who said they valued loyalty. Those employers didn't pay for that loyalty and didn't deserve, yes.
But that is the point of the GP. Ostensibly, employers once paid for loyalty by offering consistent raises. That is done now.
Thanks for agreeing with me. Older generations have a notion of "be loyal and reliable and you'll move up". The last few decades broke such a social contract.
It probably deserved to be broken but the point overall is thst job progression isn't just a given built into most structures anymore. You gotta fight or bounce around and keep proving your worth.
Tribal knowledge and company familiarity should justify the employer in offering raises to keep the employee around. Hiring someone new almost assuredly costs more in both the front-end and the back-end.
GP is suggesting that the lack of loyalty nowadays is part of the issue.
Yes, loyalty is a two way street. If they aren't loyal to you, you're not getting any payoff by being loyal to them. Times have changed (IMO for the worse).
By comparison I was making $75k in the Bay Area as an entry level software engineer with no overtime and only because I was afraid of negotiating higher (I think 85-90 was on the table).
This isn’t to take anything away from your son’s achievements and congrats to him and you all should of course be proud of his accomplishments. I think though it’s useful to compare and contrast blue collar and white collar wages in terms of effort per dollar earned as well when discussing options to kids. There’s nothing wrong with working harder for that amount, especially when you love the work because then you get even more pride out of it, but some kids may want to work harder in the “short” term via a professional education for the long term easier path or have better job stability even in the face of physical ailments.
At a prior gig we stepped up a machine shop and ended up hiring a stinky kid who I thought was someone's homeless brother. Extremely talented, after our program wound down he started his own machine shop and now does multiple millions of dollars of revenue yearly, has staff etc, in his mid 20s now.
He's a special case sure, but if you have business sense you don't have to top out at the high end of the hourly scale.
And Vitalik Buterin was a billionaire before the age of 30 with a CS degree as was Bill Gates and Lebron James was set by the time he was 18. What's the point of talking about outliers?
It feels dubious to appeal to job stability with software in modern times. Companies in the past were hiring and building out during unprecedently great times, and there's no reason to think those times will return. And on the issue of physical ailments - the one ailment we all hope to suffer is growing "old."
In software there's widespread "age discrimination". Mostly it's companies not really valuing experience in software much, so they'd rather hire a younger guy for much less. But the outcome is the same - software is a relatively shortlived occupation for most people, and that's after spending another 4+ years in university, then spending however much time paying off your debts, and then finally seeing your full salary.
By contrast working in the trades until retirement is entirely possible. And it's undoubtedly better for your body as well. Our bodies are meant for doing things - not idle sitting and staring at screens. I did software and CS, but will not be recommending it to my children. At this point I think the best future proofing is some sort of field where computer science is applied, rather than the occupation itself, like electrical engineering.
>At this point I think the best future proofing is some sort of field where computer science is applied, rather than the occupation itself, like electrical engineering.
Amazing words for everybody to consider.
Some people like physical work and don’t place high value on office jobs [1][2]
[1] I did not say some people don’t enjoy physical work but do physical work anyway.
[2] I did not say there is anything wrong with a preference for office jobs.
I think a lot of people actually like physical work and the day passes faster when you aren’t sitting at a desk. But you can’t make the big bucks there unless you are some sort of high end craftsman, and your service life is limited to how long your body stays together.
When was this? Even 6 years ago startups in the bay paid $130-140k to juniors.
But do they pay that to 17 year olds without a college degree?
As an 18 year old without a college degree in 2019, I was making $130k/yr in Palo Alto.
Yes, they did.
+ there is a 10% chance the stock they got is now worth $5mil.
10%? Oh my sweet summer child
15 years ago.
> wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security.
High wages provide the discretionary income required to invest though. So I'd say, they're not the goal, but if the word path is to be used, I'd say they are part of the path. As far as owning things...investments specifically (not two motorcycles and a hummer), the usual advice is a well balanced portfolio. Could be equities, maybe some real estate, maybe even some crypto, all at different ratios depending on your risk profile.
My concern is that we are in a unique time period where all of that is coming to an end and there will be no wealth appreciation even for disciplined investors.
> My concern is that we are in a unique time period where all of that is coming to an end and there will be no wealth appreciation even for disciplined investors.
Everyone always fears the future when their portfolio is down.
The best hedge is to also "invest" in something that has value to you. Like bricks / house.
I'm not the person you're replying to. But actually I've been getting quite concerned about this for some time. Mostly due to the shrinking world demographics on the horizon. Overall growth is slowing and in most developed economies it will be shrinking. Also, increasing wealth inequality tends to lead to lower overall GDP so if that trend continues I expect lower aggregate growth as well.
I think there is indeed a strong possibility that we may see very poor inflation-adjusted growth from an otherwise reasonable and diverse investment portfolio.
Ultimately, the recipe for growth will just not be so simple in a world economy with a dwindling population. Thats a VERY unique situation so a lot of historical wisdom regarding investments I think may not bear fruit like it did in the past.
My approach to mitigate this is two-fold, first I'm trying to be even MORE diversified. I have investments spread out over domestic and international ETF's, real estate, and I work a public sector job with a public pension. In addition, while aggregate growth may become lackluster, certain industries will still do well. Ive run businesses before and I'm looking to start another business in a very well-targeted industry to add an additional potential revenue stream well into the future. And the second prong of my approach is to increase my savings rate much higher than historically safe targets.
I think there is good reason to be concerned about this and it has very little to do with the current market turmoil. (Although there are some indicators of trouble in that too)
One of the things I'm very happy to have is a pension from a very long-ago job that I doubt I gave more than a couple passing thoughts to at the time (as well as another less-insulated annuity that is nonetheless in a very well-funded/managed institution.) In any case, being very cautious about anything near or even mid-term.
Or AI takes off so that labor becomes worthless and owning things is all that matters and labor gets gaslight that it's a them problem until capital has built a big enough army of murderbots to put down anyone who says the emperor has no clothes.
I'm hoping for something inbetween the apocalyptic possibilities.
someone needs to weld those murderbots, or pick up the little piece of scrap keeping the welding bot from making more murderbots, or to take over welding when the murderbots all stop working and start watching Sanctuary Moon 24/7
Even if murderbots don't work out, we're only a few sheriffs or prosecutors away from seeing Pinkertons deployed against any effective strikes.
Based on how the rule of law is going, maybe we're already there.
>The best hedge is to also "invest" in something that has value to you. Like bricks / house.
That makes intuitive sense, but quickly falls apart when you do any rigorous analysis. Buying a house might cover your shelter needs, but you still need to eat, and you can't eat bricks. Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit). Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.
On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks. Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area. If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price. All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.
I can live in it.
I can live in Albera. My commute to my job in British Columbia would be hell though.
Owning a home too far from amenities isn't worth much. Same with living too far from where the weather is hospitable, food is available, or the people with skills I need have settled.
So don't buy in a place like that? If there is meant to be a problem here, I'm not seeing it.
Owning a home isn't much of an investment if the jobs, people, or weather shift out from under you. You're then stuck selling your investment, likely at a loss, while also moving to where you can make a living
Yeah, that's the chance you take buying real estate. Try not to be bad at it?
I don't know what to tell you, I bought in a city where I've lived for 25 years and in the neighborhood for a bit over a decade, even that not for the first time. I'm not going to say it doesn't take luck and work.
> Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank
Well, yeah. I didn't buy in the Bay Area, or near Bay Area levels of price inflation. I'm not a moron, or not that kind at least.
>That makes intuitive sense, but quickly falls apart when you do any rigorous analysis. Buying a house might cover your shelter needs, but you still need to eat, and you can't eat bricks.
This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.
>Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit).
This analysis is an edge case and in no way represents the norm. I'm not sure of any area that has gone from Bay Area prices to Detroit prices in a single lifetime.
>Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.
Another crazy edge case. It's saying don't buy a house because an asteroid might hit. I'm pretty sure that newly non-functioning legal system wouldn't protect your stock portfolio either. If it comes to that, best to invest in bullets and whiskey.
>On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks.
Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.
>Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area.
You shouldn't ever put all your money in stocks. Putting money in real estate, bonds, CDs, cash, etc. is the definition of diversification.
>If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price.
Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job. If you lose your job and haven't saved up enough runway, you could default on your mortgage. You could also not pay your rent. You get kicked out either way, but the bank should cut you a check for the equity you have remaining, minus whatever fees they conjure up.
>All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.
All of your points were based on invalid assumptions, edge cases, or are irrelevant when compared to paying rent. Buying a house is a long game.
>This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.
The problem is that in much of the anglosphere, housing is so scarce that you have to ignore such rules of thumb, or live in the middle of nowhere.
>This analysis is an edge case
>Another crazy edge case
If you ignore edge cases, then you're left with just the median case, and that says that at current price levels, houses aren't worth investing in because they have historically worse returns than stocks, and provide poor diversification.
>Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.
This calculator[1] factors everything you listed, and the math doesn't work out for the hottest housing markets. It might work out for Miami or Huston, but not San Francisco or even Albuquerque. Using default assumptions implies a break-even price-to-rent ratio of 14, but most US metros are far above that[2].
The nice thing about the calculator is that if you don't agree with the assumptions, you can plug in your own numbers. I'd like to see what numbers you come up with to make to make the math work out in favor of buying in the top US cities.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
[2] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/price-to-rent-ratio-in-50...
>Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job.
The point isn't that a Bay Area housing market will crash because Google Employee #68908 lost his job, it's that if there was an AI winter/tech crash, that will result in Bay Area housing prices dropping, along with layoffs.
> The problem is that in much of the anglosphere, housing is so scarce that you have to ignore such rules of thumb, or live in the middle of nowhere.
This is a bit circular, supply-and-demand-wise. Especially in the US - why is demand in some areas so high that people will bid houses in San Jose up to 2M+? Why aren't they buying the same thing for 450k in Dallas?
Why aren't the companies based in those crazy expensive areas and paying million-plus total comp to large sections of their workforce being eaten alive by ones with lower labor costs in other regions?
Housing is scarce in the areas that are already the most densely populated, which itself is a bit of yogi-berra moment.
Too much discussion about housing in the US focuses only on the supply side and ignores the geographic concentration of demand that has happened over the last few decades. Is that centralization good for the country in the long-run regardless? Obviously that centralization goes back way longer in many European countries, so was the distribution and the number of growing populaces in cheap, not-yet-established areas part of the secret sauce for the 20th century US? Could you start the companies that made the Bay Area what it is today in today's Bay Area? Could you even start them in somewhere cheaper today, or would you not be able to get the talent to join you there? We're five years into remote work being way more common than it ever was before, and it hasn't broken that stranglehold of concentration yet.
>We're five years into remote work being way more common than it ever was before, and it hasn't broken that stranglehold of concentration yet.
That's partially because big companies decided WFH was now verboten. Part of it was because execs in that area didn't want their personal property values to go down, I suspect. I'm sure there was also governmental pressure as well to protect the auxiliary businesses like local restaurants, protect tax revenue like property tax state income tax, etc.
> This calculator[1] factors everything you listed, and the math doesn't work out for the hottest housing markets
That's a great calculator; I remember using it like a decade ago. And while it includes all factors they listed there are a few it doesn't:
1. If interest rates go down, you can refinance, but if they go up, the inflation and appreciation values likely will as well, but your rate is fixed, for (up to) 30 yrs (!!)
2. It's relatively easy to make improvements while you live there (and capture increased value when you leave)
3. The calculator assumes that the down payment and cost difference vs renting would be invested, which is fine but ignores psychological realities that prevent this more often than not
Also:
> The best hedge is to also "invest" in something that has value to you. Like bricks / house.
The suggestion was mentioned as a 'hedge'. The point being: you don't know what the values entered into the calculator will really end up being. Having some costs locked in can help with concerns around cash flow (and shelter costs are usually a significant percentage of costs overall). It's an "also 'invest'" strategy, so there's a whole lot not included in the calculator here as well
>1. If interest rates go down, you can refinance,
I will agree that this could play a massive factor, but it's a massive "if" you're banking on. There's no guarantee that interest rates will dip, and the longer it doesn't dip the worse the math works out for you. Sure, tons of homeowners refinanced during the pandemic, but that was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Moreover stocks also rallied in the same period, which raised the opportunity cost of the equity you have locked inside your home.
> but if they go up, the inflation and appreciation values likely will as well, but your rate is fixed, for (up to) 30 yrs (!!)
No, higher interest rates makes house prices dip, or at least suppresses growth, not the other way around. All things being equal, higher interest rates means higher monthly payments, which means buyers have less buying power in absolute terms. We see this reflected in housing prices after the fed hiked interest rates.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA
>2. It's relatively easy to make improvements while you live there (and capture increased value when you leave)
I reject the premise that making improvements is some sort of positive value activity. If you're staying for a long time, then that 10-year old kitchen remodel isn't going to boost prices much by the time you sell. If you're selling in the near future, then you run into the problem of realtor fees eating into any profits, because moving frequently means such fees can't be amortized over longer periods. In either case there's risk associated with renos. They can be botched or go over budget, and all things being equal as a buyer I'd rather buy a non-renovated house for $x, than pay $x + $50k for a house that the previous owner spent $50k renovating. By all means, do that kitchen reno to make your home a nicer place to live, but don't think it's something that pays for itself.
>3. The calculator assumes that the down payment and cost difference vs renting would be invested, which is fine but ignores psychological realities that prevent this more often than not
Fair point, although I seriously doubt people who do rigorous buy vs rent analysis are the type of people who can only be cajoled to save through a house/mortgage
>The suggestion was mentioned as a 'hedge'. The point being: you don't know what the values entered into the calculator will really end up being. Having some costs locked in can help with concerns around cash flow (and shelter costs are usually a significant percentage of costs overall). It's an "also 'invest'" strategy, so there's a whole lot not included in the calculator here as well
The values could easily work against you as well. For instance if housing costs rise slower than expected. This is a real possibility with the rise of YIMBY in politics and boomers selling up as they retire. Moreover how is parking most/all of your savings in a single asset (ie. your house) considered a "hedge"? Maybe it can be construed as a hedge if your portfolio was all MAANA stocks, but I'm not sure how anyone would think shifting from a globally diversified stock/bond portfolio (ie. a bet on the global economy) to a single house in the US is a "hedge".
Some conservative investments at the moment? Especially with some known outflows coming up? Sure. But that doesn't imply giving up on investing.
No, of course not but I think you should respond by increasing your savings rate beyond historically safe targets and diversifying even more aggressively.
100% agree. Part of it is age, and part of it is current situation and needs, but I've definitely dialed back on aggressive investments into safe harbors.
I'm not sure what the rest of the US market is like, but the Bay Area has a huge shortage of tradespeople because of the 2008 housing crash and very high cost of living pricing folks out. I knew of this but became much more acutely aware when I started doing transit advocacy. Getting folks to build/maintain HVAC systems, weld, drive buses, etc is getting increasingly difficult.
If your son can avoid having to buy into the Bay Area housing market (by living on property you own/pay for), he can make good money and probably will have little trouble finding work for years to come.
the bay area does not have a shortage of tradespeople. Or any profession, it feels like.
For trades, thousands of people apply to be apprentices, for a few spots
But McDonalds doesn’t really offer OT, which is a huge draw. Many fast food workers work multiple jobs because they need the hours for money, and none of their employers give OT regularly.
Working 40 hours at $20/hr = 800/week.
Work 40 hours at $25 and 20 at $37.5 = $1750 which is enough to live in the Bay Area.
> He will easily gross > 70k this year. Granted, this is in the Bay Area (so add some inflation there)
Don't waiters in the Bay Area make almost that much? This is not a middle class wage in that region.
Edit: Yes waiters make that much https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/s/JlymaN4MPK
I'm pretty sure OP wasn't talking about the Bay Area which isn't a sane place economically speaking where 70K isn't all that great of a salary, especially with a ton of overtime.
70k doing OT in Bay Area. So what is that in real money, 35k?
Yeah, ignoring the OT, 70k in the Bay Area is ~40k in Omaha, Ann Arbor, Orlando, etc [1]. Without the OT it's more like 30k. And if your brain, like mine, hasn't adjusted to inflation yet, that's ~23k in 2019 dollars [2].
[1] Bankrate
[2] BLS
If you don’t pay rent, it’s pretty much $70k without rent anywhere else in the US but with better economic opportunities and better amenities.
Omaha is cheaper but you can’t go mountain hiking or surfing or skiing on your day off.
Sure, Omaha doesn’t have surfing or mountains, but camping, hiking and other outdoor activities are cheaper, less crowded, and way more accessible. You’re not fighting for a campsite or dropping $50 just to sleep outside, and most hiking is free or near-free. No $25 parking fees or permit lotteries just to walk a trail. And saying $70k goes far in the Bay Area if you don’t pay rent is kind of ridiculous. Almost no one lives rent-free. Every well-paid software engineer I know out there is trying to get out. They’re all burned out by housing costs, crowds, and the grind. Amenities don’t mean much if you can’t afford to enjoy them.
Almost no one lives rent-free.
Most 17 year olds do.
Dispersed camping in National Forests is typically free. Likewise BLM land. There is a lot of both in California. And because public land is your land, permission is usually not required.
Is the Bay area perfect? For me, no. I don’t live there. I live somewhere better that’s within driving day trip distance. But if I was young, it would be a different story.
I mean, even an hour west of Boston, there's a ton of hiking/canoeing/etc. mostly with free or cheap parking (have a free parking pass for state stuff). Mostly just do day-trips so not sure what camping spots run. But there's a ton of cheap/free stuff. No, it's not Yosemite though have a pass for national parks as well but plenty of nice stuff.
70k / 25$/hr / 40hr/week = 70 weeks of fulltime labor
You missed overtime pay
They missed mathematics
2,000 hours / year (straight time, 10 paid days PTO), $35/hour is $70k base.
You are exactly right. This is how I have calculated it since I took MicroEconomics as a Freshman.
P.S. Union Journeyman Welder, Bay Area median salary is $26 ~ $36.82 = $52,000 to $72,400.
"The median household income in the Bay Area was $128,151 in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This represents a slight decrease from $132,586 in 2019. " So.. 56% of median household income? If him, and his gf worked, then they would collectively make 112% of median household income.
>Owning things is"
Yes! I learned this from the infamous "Poor dad, rich dad" book. Being an asset owner is probably the best way to become "free".
> we're also trying to impress upon him that wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security. Owning things is
I'm not a parent, so I'm a little hesitant to disagree, but this seems like the dumbest thing I've heard in my life.
Wages are exactly the path to wealth and security -- the matter is what you do with those wages. You can't own things without receiving wages unless you inherit your wealth.
If what you were trying to say is that the best path to being wealthy is to already be wealthy, then I definitely agree, but for those born missing their silver spoon wages are the only way.
Your kid had his silver spoon (no offense intended here), and it seems like he's going to be a balanced person because he'll probably be able to see and appreciate different worlds, so congrats on that. I find it hard to believe someone can go into a field like welding (knowing tech exists, and having the aptitude).
I am curious to hear though -- what is your plan? In my own pre-parent mind it seems like this is a chance to teach him about as much of the world and the people around him/society above and below him as you can before settles into his life (clearly there's a ton of time left to change, etc). The struggles of the average blue collar worker are very different from that of the white collar worker -- but the right advice about the various big things in life I'd imagine would make a world of difference.
With regard to owning things, knowing things like "banks giving out mortgages are playing a trust game -- and they trust you a lot more if you have 50 working years left". It's possible of course to get a bad mortgage, but the first rung of the ladder is more about projections more than anything for young people. In the Bay Area I'm sure that... isn't reasonable advice though since your housing market is absolutely insane.
Also, is he going into welding with some sort add-on skills? Like welding with a little bit of CS/robotics? Welding with a passion for cooking? etc. The (currently) secondary skill tree can completely change careers.
Banks do not engage in age discrimination in giving mortgages. You can get one at age 20 or age 60, all else being equal.
It’s a secured asset, so if you turn 65 and need to go into a nursing home for some , or die, they’re confident they can recoup the balance of the loan from the house when it is auctioned off or sold to another family member.
> It’s a secured asset, so if you turn 65 and need to go into a nursing home for some , or die, they’re confident they can recoup the balance of the loan from the house when it is auctioned off or sold to another family member.
Thanks for noting this, this was definitely a possibility I hadn't weighed enough, though I'm not sure it's always another family member (I assume you meant another family member or any random bidder)
> Banks do not engage in age discrimination in giving mortgages. You can get one at age 20 or age 60, all else being equal.
I find it hard to believe the suggestion here that as far as 30y loan repayment goes, all else equal, a 60 year old earning 70k a year is similarly risky to a 20 year old earning the same rate? From first principles, this clearly doesn't hold.
Now, I assume you were referring to the illegality of considering age in loans -- it is illegal to consider age, but in this case the "age discrimination" is baked in -- because it's built into credit scores[0][1]. The common sense take prevails here, I think.
Actual results on the ground often differ from what is and isn't legal/right, as anyone who is in an underrepresented class will attest to (I do not mean this in the preachy liberal sense, it's just the best way I can find to say it), I think this might be one of those cases (guess I'll find out when I'm 60?).
[0]: https://www.aarp.org/money/personal-finance/mortgage-rejecti...
[1]: https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-...
The aarp link seems to basically say that a lot of seniors are having loans rejected because of low reported income, so be sure to report retirement income.
The philadelphia fed link notes that older people who apply for loans are being denied more often, but there's lots of potential reasons for that. Aggregate economic stats, other than credit score, in the table at the end look worse to my eye near the top age brackets (but maybe not at the same levels that rejection started climbing).
It's not clear to me when it says age discrimination is prohibited, but mortality expectations are allowed. Seems like the same thing to me.
The paper suggests there may be an element of selection, which resonates with me. Looking at my parents and their siblings, most all of them would have had a mortgage 30 years ago and likely be in these statistics; now, those with higher retirment incomes also seem to be the ones that paid off their mortgages and aren't interested in a new one.
Interesting paper. Note that elderly people were only 5% or so more likely to get rejected - statistically significant, but not a big difference.
Right now I imagine the average “Baby Boomer” is more creditworthy than the typical Gen Z borrower.
I think all he's saying to the kid is to avoid the wage slage mindset of always being a worker, renter, and consumer. You don't have to be born wealthy to understand that or to work your way out of it. Wages are important but they're a mean not an end.
> Wages are exactly the path to wealth and security -- the matter is what you do with those wages. You can't own things without receiving wages unless you inherit your wealth.
No, you can also build things to achieve wealth – for example, you can build a company and achieve wealth this way. This doesn't necessarily have to be a pump&dump startup, lots of entrepreneurs became wealthy by founding a sustainable business.
But not everyone who became wealthy did so by selling their time to an employer (definition of wage).
I mean no disrespect but I'm pretty sure when someone throws out a salary figure they are assuming 40 hours per week
You're describing someone hustling very hard. Which is great. But a little different?
True, but let's consider the next age group up from 17, ... graduate students earn less than that, don't get paid overtime, and will have to search for a new job in a few years.
That may be true but we're talking about an anecdote. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks that people with a high school education, on average, earn about half of what people with masters degrees earn [0]. It's easy to lose the big picture when focusing on an outlier.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-educatio...
What is a “professional degree”, between master’s and PhD?
That typically refers to a degree like a JD or MD.
Is an undergraduate in engineering a professional degree or an undergrad degree?
In the chart linked by mmcwilliams, an undergraduate degree in engineering would normally be a "Bachelor's Degree" - assuming the certificate awarded at the end says "bachelor of science" or something similar.
This varies a lot.
Some engineering programs make sure students are learning specialized practical skills, others make sure they get a solid grounding in basics so they have an easier time in picking whatever engineering discipline strikes their fancy.
There are pros and cons for both.
The differentiation here is usually that a professional degree follows a bachelors or undergrad degree. Law school and medical school are categorized differently than masters degree programs. In US colleges an engineering degree would typically be an MA and in some fields the MA is not a terminal degree.
> graduate students
Interesting comparison. You’re right. The primary difference I can think of is the training to quickly become an expert in a different topic.
I know plenty of PhD students accepting jobs in unrelated fields and quickly becoming the local expert in that topic.
While possible, it’s far more difficult for a machinist to suddenly become an expert car mechanic like this.
Were you ever a kid?
Kids (kid being someone from 16 to 30 without children of their own, ideally also without substance abuse problem and a home they can sleep in without fear of being assaulted) have nearly infinite energy, capacity to absorb (physical) abuse, and often the focus to learn esoteric subjects, if they're interested in the subject.
So I would fully expect a large fraction of bored kids to potentially become expert car mechanics, or tree pruners, algebraic geometers, hadoop experts, air conditioning duct builders, etc, if given access, mentorship, opportunity, recognition, and compensation.
I don’t disagree. After all, that’s exactly how I became an expert in whatever I do right now.
You seem to have missed my point though, it was about switching tracks to become an expert in a new thing. A random physics PhD grad might not have a burning passion for fintech, for example but still becomes an expert after three months in the job because of the sheer amount of rigorous training.
I think that the ability to learn adjacent skills (and I'd call fintech and physics PhD adjacent) is a function of domain expertise. For instance, if I were running an automotive body shop I'd put the expert hvac technician slightly ahead of the quant in the "how quickly they'll pick it up" and I'd put either ahead of the person who's never run down to the end of the "obsessive about a subject" maze. For lots and lots of kids, that "obsessive about a subject" focus comes naturally and often is beaten out of them by "please go back to your data entry task; we're not paying you to find weird buffer overruns while speed-running mario brothers 720"
...and because we decided to call "expert" any dev with 3 months of experience.
Now, how much of this is actual expertise and how much wealth extraction, I really don't know.
Honestly, this is a great way of putting it.
And let’s consider the next age group up from that with some graduate students easily clearing 150-200k in total comp. Short term pain for long term prosperity - studies related to me was that on average university graduates end up making $1M more than non graduates in lifetime earnings (of course misleading data since university admission is already selecting for something that correlates with ambition AND the professional world tended to prefer university students with opportunities)
Of course people pursuing higher education are often doing it for personal growth reasons as well.
Haha, can't actually tell if this is satire. If it is, then bravo, sir! If it's not, then it's sad this poor father doesn't know his son has dropped out of high school to become welder who needs a ton of OT to scrape by in the Bay Area.
we'll see who's laughing in five years
Welder employment market is very boom bust (people crowd it when work is well paid because welders are rare, and they leave it when work is not well paid because welders are plentiful), it could go either way in 5 years (programming is the same, but we haven’t had a bust since 2008, and then there was the 80s which was brutal for SWEs).
> paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.
Yes, paying dues, both in the sense of putting in the time to learn the trade well, and very likely for a good paying career in the trade, paying union dues. People have been doing this since the rise of professional guilds in the middle ages.
Today's kids can show aptitude, capability, and interest by doing well in shop class. An employer can take that interested teen or tween on at an entry level, add to their skill level, and make a profit on their labor. The worker can protect their labor value through a union, and probably should if only for the side benefits apart from negotiating contract labor rates.
Should they just go to college instead? Sure, if they have that interest, and can get out without a student loan debt bigger than some mortgages.
Unions are not magic. I have a friend who did belong to the local sheetmetal workers union and she was... not positive. Moved into a non-union shop and was a lot happier.
Similar experience here. Family member went into a union job and discovered that it was great for the old guys at the top who had been there for 3 decades, but it was rather repressive for the new people starting at the bottom. Much easier to pivot into a different job where union seniority wasn’t the defining factor of your entire career.
Sure, but a union is supposed to work better, so if it isn't, by definition it's to some degree corrupted. So it's important to remember that the union itself isn't a bad thing.
A union is supposed to provide for workers in the same way that a software company makes software. If either of them don't, there's something fundamentally corrupt about each org, not with the concept.
But people don't interact with concepts, they interact with individual unions.
In what way was she unhappy?
Also, seniority, which you seem to skip over.
Our high school did something I'll never forget. They offered trade based two hour "block courses" through the school district. We had Electronics and Circuit Design, IT, Auto Shop and Repair, Welding, Aerospace Engineering, and a whole bunch more that I was never interested in and so don't remember.
It was a great program. It was offered in connection with local state and community colleges. You could get credit for some of your high school work if you continued on in the field. The local employers knew about it so they would stop by often to see what students were learning and to suggest new directions for the entire class.
Never seen anything like it before or since which was the 1990s. It was a way to start paying your dues before you even left high school. You wouldn't command an awesome salary right out of school but you could easily insert yourself into the trades with almost no down time.
My high school had something similar. Also in the 90s. The trade program was eventually disbanded. And the shop classes were converted to computer labs. In a similar vein, the nursing program is still going and very popular. You graduate with a CNA, 6 months to LPN, enough credits to get an AS.N in 1 year. A lot of my friends bought their first home before 25.
“Paying dues” is a waste of everyone’s time and the productivity of the market. It means one node of the market was underutilized, purely for ego.
One thing I like about being closer to market oriented trades (or directly trading) is that your compensating is immediately based in the utility you provide. Like in financial services if you provide a service is based on the volume and your toll on that volume.
But yes if you dint have opportunities, like the knowledge, capital and flexibility to leverage it, then there’s entry level grunt work remaining.
It takes time and experience to learn a skill, call it whatever the hell you want.
“Paying one’s dues” has a very different connotation to me than “Learning a skill.” The former suggests a tenure-based system of seniority and pay scales, rather than a meritocratic system based on skill level and actual output.
To me it just says you'll make less for a period while learning the ropes. I suppose there are situations where you need to be spending the time to empty the trashcans but I don't take it that way.
Skilled trades are physical, not software. They're not simulations. Iterations and experience require actual time.
Call it whatever you will, but you're only getting the experience by spending a large amount of time and cycles.
Signed, son of a carpenter than did 30+ years and then taught it to underprivileged youth.
Even in the industries you're talking about you still have to pay your dues by building a client book, learning the industry, etc.
It becomes wasteful when advancement depends less on experience or intelligence and more on seniority or politics.
You have to take into account, that you start to earn money from a very young age. And you don't start your career with huge student debt. Skilled workers have a huge head start and it's easy to find need jobs because of the demand. If you're smart and good at your job, you can create a decent life for yourself with skilled labor. Especially because all the smart kids seem to do the "smart" thing and go to college, leaving more demand for good laborers in the skilled labor market.
If WSJ publishes an article about your job offer, don’t believe it’s a common occurrence.
The difference between compensation in different countries is fascinating. In OZ/NZ tradespeople are the highest earners. For Australia I suspect this is explained at least partially by mining (I know people who earned $600+ per hour 10-15 years ago, and that included free flights in and out, free accommodation etc), and NZ needed to follow because of the ease of moving to Oz. Mining doesn't really explain why plumbers and carpenters earn like crazy as well though.
The quality of work though is extremely poor if I compare what one would expect in e.g. Germany. I guess that's the advantage of the German apprenticeship system where tradespeople get proper training and not take a couple month course at a tafe and then start their own business.
> (I know people who earned $600+ per hour 10-15 years ago, and that included free flights in and out, free accommodation etc)
I remember countless stories like this circulating when I was in high school. Someone who wasn’t going to college was instead going off to do some obscure thing like work on oil rigs or do welding in hazardous locations.
The hook was always that they heard a friend of a friend brag about some extreme hourly rate they made one time a few years ago and assumed that’s just what the job always paid.
Then they went out and did it, learned that the job was terrible, and discovered that the average pay was a lot less than the all-time highest number that people would quote.
To be fair that bait and switch happens in software too. Not all devs make 500 000 usd.
> I guess that's the advantage of the German apprenticeship system where tradespeople get proper training and not take a couple month course at a tafe and then start their own business.
Plumbers and electricians in Australia both do four year apprenticeships, with some time at TAFE and the rest training on the job.
The quality problems you see are generally less about training, and more the result of financially-motivated corner cutting.
I was into machining right out of high school. After layoffs and plant closings I got into IT, now networking. I’d never make the kind of money I do now if I hadn’t of made that career change! I love my job too.
Plumbers make $70k to $200K.
https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/as-tech-job...
You don’t even need to be in the trades to make $70k/year. That’s just about $33/hour, you can make that in a fast food restaurant or grocery store these days on the low rung of management or even just a senior IC in services where I live.
You still need welders to build starships... https://www.spacex.com/careers/jobs?search=weld
>A friend is dropping out of IT to pursue welding
Why? Sounds like IT is a better fit for her?
Do you weld?
Good welding requires intense focus/nondistractions, which some people on the spectrum really enjoy.
On the contrary, I know many tradespeople who are making $70k +.
70k? A more realistic pay is double that if you live anywhere other than the middle of nowhere for electricians, steamfitters, etc.
I own Netgate (hat tip to the haters who will comment), the company that does pfsense and tsnr.
I also own Bump It Offroad in Windsor, CO. We do some CNC (plasma table) as well. I pay welders about $70k/year plus benefits, to start. They’re both college drop-outs, but smart and willing to learn.
Though I grew up in the trades, it’s not about “dues” for me, but more work ethic and willingness to learn.
Very cool. I'm down the road in FtC, and I TRIED to get my daughter to take the Front Range machining program when she was in HS, but it required going an hour away to one of the Denver campuses every day because they didn't have it here. I thought it would be good for her to have as a fallback, and I'd have gotten her a CNC router to learn on. She also really didn't express any interest, if they had a local program I probably could have convinced her to go.
It seems like around here it's definitely some interest in some of those skills. I gather the Bugatti guy has some need of them.
edit: (I've got a 100 series, so I'll keep an eye on BIO)
I have a number of concerns with CSU Ft. Collins. I know people who transferred to Billings because FtC was losing accreditation in some majors. (This was years ago.)
FRCC only offers machining in Boulder Co. Welding (only mentioned because that’s what this tread is about) is offered in Larimer though.
I know of several job opportunities today in the northern part of the Front Range that need toolpath programming.
The kid built a CNC router for his HS FRC/FTC club as an Eagle Scout project, then ended up at Mines.
p.s. We have 100 series product now.
There's not much I dislike more than well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. Don't buy it. If at all possible get a degree, sit at a desk, and earn a living wage. This is your first priority.
Telling everyone to "just learn to code" is worse I think. Especially since I'm not reading about well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. (Except maybe on HN?)
I realized a long time ago that there are a lot of people that absolutely will not function if they cannot do a job with their hands where they can feel like they did something at the end of each day. (In fact I might almost be one of those people.) Keeping some manufacturing as well as good (union?) trade jobs is a smart move for a country/society.
> is worse I think.
Yep.
And on top of the "will not function if they cannot do a job with their hands" issue, the great majority of people are really not potential good coders.
Plus, at any scale, an "everyone codes" society very obviously fails the "where does their food come from ?" test.
Grass is always greener and all that, but at least in high tax Europe and in poorer countries trades can be very well paid.
A whole lot of money can be earned under the table and it lets you work everywhere and under diverse conditions. Lots of people do short term work for a couple months, than vacation at home for a couple months, etc.. This is much more difficult to do in IT.
On my last flight back home I was talking to a guy doing roofing for some data centers in the Netherlands working for some dude from Sri Lanka. We calculated his theoretical salary and he could be making 80k+ euros cash a year assuming he worked normal yearly hours. He was working for a month or two, then chilling for 2-3 months, rinse and repeat. Sure, he's breaking his body, sure his retirement will be nonexistent since he's not paying taxes but he's literally on vacation more than half of the time and has been earning money since he became an adult without the broke student step.
I also have very close relatives with construction businesses and they're dying for skilled workers. It's very well paid if "you're not in construction because you can't do anything else" and they'd hire you for any period of time. Once approved you essentially call your boss the day before you want to work and he tells you where to go and what to do. You can work 7 days a week, you can work every second Saturday to get some movement in...
Seriously. Choosing the skilled trade path makes a lot of sense right now if the default option for you is unskilled work, but the job market isn't so tough that one should abandon the option to get paid much more in a much more comfortable field of work.
Related is a certain actor, clearly following his passions, preaching the same nonsense: "give up on your dreams! go into skilled trade and wreck your body for okay pay!"
Part of the "follow your dreams" advice that a lot of people seemed to miss is that "following your dreams" doesn't mean "major in that subject and try to not get Cs", it means obsess over that thing and work so hard at it you're always in the top 1% or higher for that craft. The reason you should chase your dreams is they're the only thing you can reasonably hope to obsess over enough for long enough to have a competitive advantage.
While not all of them are "rich", everyone I know who sincerely followed their passion to the point that other people thought they were a bit crazy are all able to survive, often pretty well, doing something they love.
Like all advice, it only applies to some people.
Working as a front line trades-person is rough, but becoming a journeyman or master as one step towards a profession (“I’m an hvac technician” vs “I’m in the hvac business”) seems to be a very good career path based on my social circle’s experience.
Another thing I’ve seen in my circle: if you’re going to go to a bottom 25th percentile college, flunk every class for your first two years and be miserable, then you’re much better off not going to college and pursuing a different path, like trades or military. For these people, “go into the trades” is really good advice.
If you’re going to a top university, love classes, and will graduate in the top of your class with a marketable degree and college experience, then you should go to college because you’re much more likely to live a comfortable life than the trades.
I had a lot of friends from high school who would have been so much better off if they had went into the trades straight after high school instead of trying and failing for years in college, only to get a 1.8 gpa in Communications or Psychology that is totally worthless. People need to know other crafts are a viable and dignified option, and a much better option than failing out of no name university.
Yep. My boss bitches about her work all the time. What does she complain about specifically? Having to respond to people on slack. Office workers don't know how easy they have it.
Having done both. Sometimes physical work is easier. Sometimes.
I'd be interested to see what they are telling their own children.
I'm telling mine: 1) try to get a college degree regardless of whether you use it or not (I'm paying for it, BTW) but 2) don't become a programmer like I did though unless you really, really enjoy it.
They (three daughters) have no problem with 2), some struggle though even with 1).
My secretary, single mom pushed my sister to go to college so we would be happier than she was raising two kids and working at more or less minimum wage. (It turned out my degree, Education, didn't figure into my ultimate career as a programmer at Apple but it did allow me to buy a Mac Plus while in college with a student loan and at half the non-educational price — so I tought myself to program, wrote some games. It also introduced me to peers that were unhappy with the otherwise-prospect of playing D&D and working at Walmart for their foreseeable future.)
I guess my point is that when "messaging" our kids, we are reacting of course to what we disliked about the path we took as well as what we liked.
They'll do what they want, live their own lives ... regardless of what I tell them though. I accepted that a long time ago.
I don't mind too much what people tell their children - what concerns me is when people tell their own children one thing but give different generalised advice.
Ideally, if I had a high school age kid right now I would want them to get a 4 year degree but leave college with zero debt and then also learn to be an electrician.
For some, college is an obvious choice. For some, a trade is an obvious choice. For some in the middle, hedging both is probably the best choice.
We have a relatively new option in the UK which are "Degree Apprenticeships" [1]
"A degree apprenticeship enables you to gain a full undergraduate or master’s degree while you work. Degree apprenticeships take three to six years to complete, depending on the course level.
You’ll spend most of your time working and you’ll also study part-time at university. For example, you might go to university one or two days per week, or in short blocks, such as a week at a time. Overall, you spend about 20% of your time studying vs. 80% of your time working."
[1] https://www.ucas.com/apprenticeships/degree-apprenticeships
I have also known young people working in the trades who were all about encouraging others to go into the trades and how much better it was. They all did objectively well for themselves. It is a different life choice that suits people differently.
Neither path is necessarily the correct one for everybody, but the proportion of people going for degrees instead of other paths is too high.
You assume desk jobs still exist in 10 years?
They will. The AI fad however…
Come on, anyone with half a brain cell can see that AI isn't going anywhere. Sure the excitement might die down but we're not going back to pre-AI.
This is like those people that thought smartphones were a fad.
We can't un-invent LLMs, but it's less about excitement and more about practical use cases - there are fewer of them than commonly believed.
I think you've arrived at the nuanced answer: AI absolutely has changed things, but probably not in the all-encompassing way that various proponents or corporate marketeers would have us believe.
Anyone with ⅑ of a brain has already realised AI isn't going to replace anyone other than people who have the word "AI" under their name on linkedin or ycombinator.
AI has already replaced people. Just not very many... yet.
I found this in a few seconds of searching: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/ai-replacing-artists-heres-p...
Anyway that's off topic. It doesn't need to completely replace people to not be a fad.
And yet it's immediately evident to anyone when a website is using AI "art" and it looks completely pointless.
That's a little like how people still don't like CGI in films though...
Didn't we hear something similar about computers?
You're right — on both sides. The people that said computers would automate everything were overstating them. At the same time, c'est la vie travel agents. Some jobs truly are gone.
I feel like there's a modern dark-comedy film in there where a guy in the 90's gets a journalism degree only to find the industry collapsing with the internet — so he trains to switch careers to taxi driver....
That 68k/yr wage only sounds good if you're still thinking in circa year 2000 dollars. Nobody is making the mortgage on a house on 68k/year, and they're not starting a happy family if they have to do 20+hrs/week overtime in order to turn 25/hr into 68k/year. I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental, so it's certainly not a great wage today.
The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad.
>I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental
I made $10/hr my first job after college while living in a studio by myself in 2011 (and that was with student loan payments!), and I was barely able to get by, so how were you barely able to get by then on almost $70k a year?
[0] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/
> The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad.
The average rent nationally is $1860. In the Bay Area it’s $2650.
That’s not to say it’s bad. But the numbers are meaningless without some localized pricing or cost adjustment.
$68K/yr is plenty of money for a single person. And that's just an entry level salary, offered to someone in high school - you would have the opportunity to make far more as you gain more experience. By the time you're looking to start a family and buy a house I don't see why that's not a very promising career.
I earned that wage circa 2008 and saved half my salary.
What you say is true, but unaffordable housing is a product of too few homes, and not one of too low wages.
If there aren’t enough homes to go around, home prices will rise to a level that only the wealthier can afford.
There's enough homes.
There is a severe shortage of homes in the United States. The problem is particularly acute in high opportunity cities where the jobs are located. Here is but one of the literally hundreds of sources describing the problem:
https://www.uschamber.com/economy/the-state-of-housing-in-am...
Depends on where you live, I was making $42,000 in 2013 in the Midwest, and was fine. If my now-spouse and I had wanted to start a family then, it could have been done--obviously more doable with both parents working.
Plenty of people get by on less than six-figure household incomes--they just live in lower-cost areas of the country.
Find a spouse with a job.
The opportunity for trades-based small business creation in America would feel a lot more tangible... absent the carried interest tax loophole.
Part of the small business trades success narrative is built upon trust, trust that in youth, doing good work will create a reputation within your community that will be remembered, and form the foundation for a brand (your name) that can attract the next generation of youth to be developed, trained, etc.
If successful small businesses only exist to get acquired, so that both workers and customers suffer, that foundation of trust will struggle to persist.
Is it not also reliant on an affluent customer base that can pay high prices for services? In poorer communities are trade jobs lucrative? Obviously in places like the Bay Area they are VERY lucrative, but is that a sustainable narrative to re-tool the economy around?
Certain skills are always in a stable demand, and a relatively short supply. Plumbing, electricity, roofs. Some of this requires a license, all of this requires training and experience which only time and practice can give. Opportunities for that are also somehow limited.
So, if you live in a poorer community and serve a poorer community, you likely make more than most in the poorer community, and likely gain respect if you do a good job.
> If successful small businesses only exist to get acquired
The average small business does not exist to get acquired. Only a very small number of small businesses are even interesting to private equity.
I can't help but notice that PE has been buying up HVAC companies in my region. I think sooner or later everything will get corporatized and even if your goal isn't to get acquired, you still need to learn how to compete with conglomerates.
Not just HVAC, they want it all: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/10/24/private-equity-...
Doomed to blow back on PE firms long term.
The trade businesses for home services have significantly less barrier to entry than the usual established business that they would usually buy. All it takes is a van and some tools in many cases for workers to start a new one after working for some years under someone else to get their license. It's a field where the PE firms will be taken to the cleaners on pricing and even customer service.
Definitely never underestimate homeowner's desire to price shop and nickle and dime the smallest of repair.
Which is hilarious because the only thing gatekeeping the homeowner from doing their own HVAC is an EPA 608 cert you can do in like 2 nights in your underwear (cost me like $50 and saved me like $10k), after which you can order 200 lbs of whatever toxic refrigerant you want straight to your home.
It used to be getting the actual HVAC systems was a problem but with internet you can get everything you need and bypass that whole racket, especially if you use mini splits you don't even have to know how to run ducts.
Seeing some replies to the contrary below, with evidence. I am curious about how you define "small number", the unit of measure, is it proportional or a count, etc.
are you suggesting that eliminating carried interest would deter private equity from bothering with small businesses, and make the remaining small businesses feel like a more reliable thing for workers and employers to engage in? because they won't get shuttered unceremoniously?
if I'm understanding that correctly, I have to giggle, because there are plenty of ways for institutional money to have lower taxes than ordinary income tax rates. waaaay lower than the carried interest "loophole".
also, to me, loopholes are unintended things that no one person in government or branch of government noticed. like a couple of private letter rulings from the IRS combined with an accounting tweak in a budget appropriations bill. carried interest isn't one of those to me when it was directly passed by congress explicitly and deliberately affirmed multiple times in subsequent legislation.
but I could be misunderstanding your post entirely.
Welding isn't a job that you grow old in. It's physically taxing and exposes you to poisonous fumes and low levels of radiation from thoriated filaments. That's part of why kids are getting job offers, there needs to be a steady supply of meat.
On yt I see some people using masks with a separate air supply and filter. I guess this really needs to be more widespread.
I never went to college (high school dropout with a GED). My "formal" schooling was a 2-year, intensive EET (Technician) course, at a trade school.
It had both good and bad traits.
It was very structured and rigorous. When you graduated, you were ready to go directly into full-time work at almost any organization (the NSA and CIA used to recruit from our school).
It stressed practicum, over theory, though, so you came out more as a "doer," than a "thinker." All of my theoretical stuff, I learned on my own, after getting my first job. I did OK with that, as I was fairly quickly promoted into engineering (and was introduced to "exempt" pay).
Can’t really read the article so can’t confirm this. There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades, but doesn’t at least half the country live in a place / have parents that value the trades?
I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools.
Which means that maybe somewhat unintuitively, there are no separate paths — college for good students, trade school and military for I dunno, “non-academic/street smarts or whatever you wan to call it. — trade schools, the military and colleges are actually all competing for the same students.
The second theory is tied to the first one, but for all the marketing on how great these jobs are, there are structural / practical problems with them. From how they pay, to lack of job security to the havoc they can wreak on your body.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell --- I've always described the "Maker Movement" as "Geeks who missed shop class".
Cut my teeth on texts such as:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square
and have bought (and given away) more copies of:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-...
and
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-ge...
than I'd care to count.
Current project has me working through: the _Make: Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ books (and looking for a good book on conic sections which has optimized formulae to speed up/simplify what are currently a series of chained trigonometric functions...).
It's true that bad schools make poor neighborhoods unproductive for military recruiters. They usually don't want recruits who dropped out of high school or have low ASVAB scores. But a lot of young people in those neighborhoods are also disqualified because of poor health (particularly including obesity, asthma, and various mental conditions), history of illegal drug use, and criminal records. These social issues are all highly correlated.
> I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools.
This has been the case for a long time. For almost the entirety of the post-1973 end of US military conscription, a high school diploma has been required to enlist. From a 2008 study <http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...>: "Members of the all-volunteer [American] military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods." Also, "American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree ... Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service."
> One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades
I've got to wonder if a deeper dynamic is that you now have to be relatively "smart" to go into the trades because perhaps the teaching/curricula is lacking, making it so that more base general intelligence / self starting on abstract concepts is required to actually learn in the first place. Trade classes should be an opportunity for people who missed the verbal-communication-of-abstract-topics meta-intelligence to develop their intelligence focused around a narrower topic that they taking a liking to. But if the teacher is really uninspired, and the curriculum shies away from actually creating larger cool things or playing with different techniques, (or becomes about following the manual for procedures for poorly-documented poorly-written throwaway proprietary software) I can see it coming off as yet another "when are we going to need this" high school class.
To do well in the trades (i.e. doing something more than general laborer work) you need to be smart. You need to be able to program computer controlled mills and lathes, or troubleshoot computer-controlled electrical distribution systems, etc. Even to be a good mechanic, carpenter, ironworker, or plumber involves more and more technology and has always required good mathmatical and geometric ability. You also have to memorize all the detailed requirements of building code or other regulations at least as they apply to your trade. You can't advance very far if you're not reasonably smart.
From what I've seen the money in the trades is mostly from being the guy who gets the jobs and takes the money, not from being the guy actually doing the work.
This is it for I think the majority of trade jobs. A few trades in some positions make good money doing the actual trade, but for most of the industry you don't make great money until/unless you can move into a managerial roll where you are setting up jobs as the business owner or manager. And unfortunately a lot of people never get to that point because there aren't enough of those positions for everyone and a good chunk just get used up as meat for the grinder. Many trades are also huge boom/bust industries and the first guys to feel the bust are the guys doing the ground work.
Yes this is the way: you go into the trades, become a journeyman to learn the ropes, open your own shop, maybe eventually hire a few others, and then comfortably retire. All the people I know in trades who made good money went this way. There is a huge differential in trades between the cost of work being billed out and how much the worker is paid, and that surplus goes into the business owner's pocket. If you do good work as an independent you will always be busy.
I’ll bet it’s a scale issue though. Everyone knows a person (I’m one of them) who does bad in say math class but later gets a job with applied math, because doing math in a classroom is boring.
But if you try to design a curriculum for say “math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class”. You’re mostly going to get people who just don’t have the whatever they need to be good enough at math to be an electrician.
"math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class" seems like a reaction from within the model of the prevailing philosophy - more abstraction-first book learning. Whereas addressing a different learning style would be more like: here are the physical skills you need to be an electrician, here are more classes working your way up to build larger and larger things, and oh by the way now that you've developed the skills of building things while taking direction from someone telling you how to build it, let's try to teach you how to figure out how to build it yourself.
And I'm just wondering if the safety-and-HR-uber-alles dynamic has stamped out a lot a of that physical-skills-first in favor of like, dry lessons trying to tell people all about wiring before they actually get to play with wires. Thus making it so the same people who succeed here are the traditionally "smart" ones that can take abstract knowledge and store it for later, before having something tangible to apply it to.
(electrician might not be the best example for this because the differences between good/unsafe/unpowered wiring are still pretty abstract, but hopefully you can see the point regardless)
The same politicians who push trades on America and bash colleges won't send their kids to trade schools but send them to Ivy League Universities instead. I wonder why that is.
There's also a bit of this that's culture war fodder. A lot of middle-class conservatives send their kids to colleges, their kids reject their parents' conservatism, so the parents think the college has used some kind of magic liberalism ray[0] on their kids.
The reality is, of course, that their kids weren't nearly as conservative as the parents thought. But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges.
Trade schools come into play mainly as a totem to hold up against liberal colleges. They are being played up as a sort of bastion of conservative thought, mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system.
There's a kernel of truth in all of this, in that there's some trades that shouldn't have been left out of the STEM paths that colleges like to push as an obvious moneymaker. The culture war is ultimately one of mottes and baileys, where you take some truth and ride it as one's political hobby-horse. Hell, just to explain why this happens I've already had to do the same thing.
[0] In the same way that some people think tech companies can "hack our dopamine loops" or whatever
For what it’s worth, my intro to psychology gen ed professor told us to spell “humyn” with a y to “remove woman being dependent on man” and let us skip the final if we recorded ourselves protesting the controversial state house bill at the time.
On net I agree with what you’re saying, but know that the culture war isn’t total bs one sided, and my unremarkable school had plenty of bad examples like this. Evergreen university in 2017 barring white people from attending class for a day was particularly embarrassing.
For what it's worth, my one (1) class that had any kind of political spin was Engineering Ethics. In which I was told whistle blowing is bad and making weapons of war is super chill because they would've been made without you anyway.
You likely went to a nice school, Trump supporters’ kids didn’t and my story is the kind of stuff they’re responding to, results may vary
If the indoctrination ray worked, you wouldn't be complaining about it. :-)
Not complaining about it, just throwing some noise out there and I completely agree, being exposed to different viewpoints and learning to adjust your perspective is what makes well rounded humyns ;)
I went to Stony Brook, so my experience isn't comparable to yours, but I definitely did not encounter any professors doing shit like that[0]. And to be clear, there were a few politically-minded courses in our gen-ed requirements. We had a News Literacy course that was actually really good, that I wish I could force my Facebook-brained parents to sit through.
If SBU had an indoctrination ray, they certainly had it on the wrong setting[1]. I'd already been firmly radicalized by Ron Paul revoLution warriors on Reddit into mainlining LvMI blog posts about Austrian economics and anarcho-capitalism by the end of my first year. It wasn't until I was leaving school when my political positions shifted away from that.
[0] To be clear, SBU notoriously had a heterodox economics professor who was unabashedly a Marxist. I never met him, I only heard about the professor from one of the school newspapers.
[1] Which, given everything else managed by the state of New York, would be totally on-brand for them.
The thing that gets to me, and everyone is overly idealistic about a lot of things(learn to code!) but I really wish that that things were as simple as conservative culture warriors laid them out to be. It would be great if there was this “one neat trick!” To getting a 70k a year job right out of high school, optimized for people less academically inclined.
Professors self-stated political leanings, which have changed markedly over time, are important evidence here.
I kind of wonder if the professors changed, or the politics changed around them. You can only have a Republican Party leader chasing after the “uneducated” for so long before the ideology starts to adapt.
> those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system
There is no group of people I have encountered in my life that I have as much contempt for as the professors and administrators at the $60K tuition (I went for free) private university that pretended like they were fighting against the elites that run the system when they are, if fact, those elites. The level of delusion in the non hard science parts of academia is absolutely mind blowing.
You hold contempt for teachers, who will probably never make more than 250k a year at their career height, for railing against elites who make millions, or even billions? Most teachers are adjuncts anyway, and are not tenure-track, and are lucky to make over 80-100k in any market.
And you hold this contempt because you believe that these teachers are actually elites in disguise trying to hoodwink our kids?
Have you considered the possibility that you’re wrong about them being elites, or at least to what degree and in what context and sphere of influence? Who benefits from misdirecting legitimate ire away from wealthy elite society and toward middle class intellectual elite society?
Yeah, I make in that range and I'm disgusted by people at my income level who complain about money and are bitter and envious of people richer than them instead of enjoying their wealth. Really a waste of life. Got dealt a great hand and somehow find a way to ruin it.
To say that the crux of their dissent is envy of their betters is an unfounded assertion. Most teachers I know are underpaid, and yet still argue more for $15 nationwide minimum wage than they do for pay raises for themselves. And many of those same teachers have to work those same minimum wage jobs when classes aren’t in session just to pay rent.
I’m not sure who you’re arguing got such a great deal here, as I can definitely identify a few benefitting parties, but it isn’t the teachers, or the middle or lower class folks.
Finger pointing won’t solve the problem, and individuals have unique circumstances and abilities to pay. I’m not sure if you have to work for a living that it is even reasonable to use the word “wealth” in the same way that those who make money from returns on capital use the word.
I see you've tried to change the subject from six figure profs and admins at a private university to teachers working part time over the summer, but that's not what I said and you know it.
Make $150K and you're in the top 10% of the US and top 1% of the world. But go right ahead and waste your golden ticket complaining about how unfair it is that you aren't in that top 0.1%. And if they were, then they would be bitter about that 0.01% because if you make over $100K and can't be happy with it, your problem isn't financial.
Money is power in a capitalist system. It is simply rational for every market participant to advocate for their own interests in the pursuit of capital. It’s not a matter of how much is enough, it’s a matter of each individual deciding for themselves how they allocate capital. More money means more bites at the apple. If you don’t invest in in capital-producing ventures, such as stocks or bonds or real estate, then you don’t have wealth, you have money. Money loses value due to inflation and so is not a great store of value.
I’m not trying to change the subject, I’m presenting my point of view related to my understanding of the thread and the OP to you, in order to help you understand how I see the world, so that I might understand you and the world and myself more fully. I happen to be situated in a context so I can’t really step outside myself and be truly objective but I’m trying to engage with the conversation in good faith and assume you are as well so I’m not sure what specifically you found to be a diversion about my remarks in whole or in part.
“Six figure profs” are topped out as far as income growth. The ones working over the summer may never reach six figures. There are working class, middle class, and upper class teachers, professors, and instructors. To make six figures as one, you’re going to have to be doing it for a while at a high level, at a good school, in a field that makes money for the institution.
I would continue, but I don’t want to “change the subject” so I’ll await your reply.
> But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges.
It isn’t a myth.
> mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system.
There is value in a varied education, but a substantial number of Gen Ed requirements are used as a soap box by professors who would really rather be teaching something else. Social sciences and the arts tend to be the worst for it: Communications, English, Sociology, and Anthropology. Students want to get rid of these Gen Ed requirements primarily because the course content is treated as ancillary to Foucault, Adorno, and other dead-end thinkers.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...
> There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades
The conservative / GOP tactics are usually the same, and everyone else has, at conservative urging, disarmed themselves - they've abandoned postmodern understanding of communication, which the conservatives strategically embrace:
They reframe issues: College is reframed - it was that knowledge was power, the key to life, citzenship, work, and sharpening your mind, your critical thinking, with the best thinkers and ideas in history was the most powerful tool. Now college is reframed as a training in employment skills for corporations. Life was about dreams and opportunity, fulfilling your potential and your dreams; now it's about making enough to survive. They refame America: It was the land of opportunity, where by working hard anyone had the opportunity to accomplish anything, not a class-based oppressive system like Europe and elsewhere; now you stay in your socioeconomic lane, take any job you can get, and (again) survive - what does a poor kid need college for?
How you frame issues can determine the outcome of the discussion. 'Should we murder unborn babies?', 'Should we let undocumented criminals into the country?' - obviously, the answer is in how the question is framed (and often the framing is much more subtle than these easy examples). That doesn't mean there aren't merits to both sides but framing is a way to prevent discussion of the merits.
They also demonize: Everything must include a criticism of 'liberals'. Almost as a display of bona fides, you'll see that commentary must always include an attack on liberals, even if it's a critique of something the GOP/conservatives is doing. Similarly they blame 'liberals' for every problem, no matter how absurd. They blame liberals for immigration, health care, lack of green energy, etc. etc. If you read the transcripts of the leaked Signal chats, you'll see their agreed-upon talking points included, without discussion, 'blame Biden'. Biden isn't even in office and will never run again, but that's a must.
And why wouldn't they do these things? They work and nobody puts up any resistance; nobody even tries to understand their tactics or why they work and dominate the public debate. The Democrats play helpless - not a winning strategy and IMHO the reason they lose; who votes for helpless? And many liberals now embrace victimhood -- helplessness + persecution = a lack of personal responsibility for anything -- another winning strategy.
Universities are the main gatekeepers of the class based oppressive system you complain about. The current bureaucratic governing structure of the US has been created by the liberals during the period from the New Deal through the early 90s when Democrats had almost unbroken control of congress. So, regardless of whether conservative complaints are valid, liberals are the correct people to complain about if you are unhappy with the current system because they are the ones who built it.
Employers, not universities. Employers were the ones who decided that most good jobs require a college degree. And then they sent administrators as their minions to take over the universities. Americans often call their universities colleges, which implies an organizational structure where the senior professionals doing the actual work are in charge. And that's how things used to work. But somehow that got turned around, with the administrators in charge and business interests treating universities as vocational schools.
One way to look at this is through different motivations to studying: internal (you want to learn things), external (you want to be successful at whatever is being measured), and pragmatic (you want to pass the classes, get the degree, and move on). Universities prefer internally motivated students – those who study to learn rather than for jobs and career success. They can try to educate people with other motivations, but what those students want is inherently in conflict with what the professors want.
I think you are defining 'liberal' as 'whatever was favored in that time period' or the now popular 'not contemporary far right populists'. The White House, however, was controlled by Republicans, for example, from 1968-1992 with one four year break.
> Universities are the main gatekeepers of the class based oppressive system you complain about.
How so? Before Republicans cut funding, universities were widely available, especially public ones. Many like NYC's city colleges were free. Once you got a degree, you were in a different socioeconomic class, but degrees were available to those who could get them. The number of people with degrees grew considerably, including through programs like the GI Bill. That's substantial opportunity and class mobility.
Now whether you get into college depends, most of all, on the class you're born into. US social mobility has dropped significantly.
I'm using "liberal" very loosely here as the prevailing political establishment from the 1930s to 1990s when the Republicans started splitting off from that coalition. Though you could even argue that Bush II was a continuation of the same. You can cherry-pick dates if you like, but even in that cherry-picked 24 year range Democrats controlled the senate 18-6 and the house 24-0 and the Democrats had unified control of congress and the presidency for 4 years to 0 for the Republicans. The Democratic party was dominant in US politics from 1932 to 1992 and that is not really arguable. The modern US administrative state was build by primarily liberal Democrats with plenty of cooperation from moderate Republicans (who don't really exist anymore) and with opposition from segregationist southern Democrats (who also don't exist anymore). You can argue that they did a good job (and I would argue that for a lot of it they did), but you can't claim that they didn't do it and that they aren't the political establishment of the modern America state.
> Once you got a degree, you were in a different socioeconomic class,
Yeah, maybe in 1960 when 8% of Americans had a degree, but not today when 40% do: https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics
A degree can either be a ticket to a high status job or common. It can't be both. As a society we have resolved this contradiction by making a tiered system where people nominally have the same degree, but actually only the ones from exclusive, high status schools count. And somehow the low status degrees cost almost as much as the high status ones even though they have a fraction of the value. But apparently a lot of people didn't get the memo and still think their low status degree is a ticket to a high status job.
> but degrees were available to those who could get them
So you are saying that degrees are less available now even though the number of people who have them has gone up 5x since 1960? Citation needed, because that fundamentally makes no sense.
> Now whether you get into college depends, most of all, on the class you're born into.
So you are telling me that in 1960 when 8% of people had a college degree, those 8% were a meritocratic sampling of all classes of society, but today when 40% of people have a degree, that 40% is somehow only the upper middle class? Again, citation needed, because that fundamentally makes no sense.
> I'm using "liberal" very loosely here as the prevailing political establishment from the 1930s to 1990s when the Republicans started splitting off from that coalition.
It becomes meaningless. You just rewrote history - the GOP was apparently liberal all that time. Who knew? The actual liberals sure didn't; they despised Nixon and Reagan. You're just saying that the modern rightward lurch is somehow the reality of the century before it happened.
> A degree can either be a ticket to a high status job or common.
You still are framing it around jobs.
> only the ones from exclusive, high status schools count
The overall average income for people with college degrees is much higher. That can't be because of the few who went to elite schools.
> So you are telling me that in 1960 when 8% of people had a college degree, those 8% were a meritocratic sampling of all classes of society, but today when 40% of people have a degree, that 40% is somehow only the upper middle class?
The leading predictor of college education now is your parents' income.
I wonder how long it will be until AI is making all the CAD/CNC models with just a check by humans. Same with the laser cutter they mentioned, water jet cutter, etc. It can't be that hard to have a model trained to take a technical drawing and generate the CAD model.
I think if I lose my current job (on a PIP), that I should be a CAD designer (entry level around $75k). But then I'm concerned that I'll be out of a job in a couple years.
hmm... the U.S. economy might stand to benefit from adapting a school system more akin to the German model?
Specifically, offering a track similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_school
I have heard complaints that the German system is pretty class-based and forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary. The result is that upper class kids stay upper class, working class kids stay working class.
> forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary
That criticism might be directed at the separation at age 10, where some kids get to go to Gymnasium (basically, the highest level) and then there are several other (lesser?) school types. That's often criticized for the reasons you mentioned. Trade schools and dual education start around age 15 and they're generally considered a success story afaik.
15 is too young to make a lifelong career choice IMO.
I didn't figure out what I wanted to do until I was in community college at 20 years old.
I count myself extremely lucky that I had somewhat of an idea at 12. At 10 I was a child firmly separated from the adult world.
That being said I think I can top that:
When I was in 2nd grade or so my school announced that a "sport" class would be created - ostensibly to promote physical education and whatnot as there was a judo club associated with the institution. Net effect was that all the boys from broken, troubled homes would join and my class was left with half of its original count of boys. Girls had the same option on paper, but none joined.
Sometimes I wonder whether it was good or bad that it happened. That is quite early to make such life-altering decisions, then again I wasn't in their position so perhaps to them it was beneficial. I really don't know.
There’s ways to work your way up with dedication. Quite a lot of folks go for their abitur[0] and then on to university. Classism in Germany is perpetuated by cultural conservatism far more than whether you went to gymnasium or not.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur
The “gifted” track in the US has the same effect. Get into the right track in mid-elementary school and you’re pretty well set from a college admissions perspective. In Fairfax, that’s a GT Center then Thomas Jefferson High, then your pick of top unis.
I largely agree but there is some egalitarianism with 'gifted' tracks in that they can exist poor areas. A friend of mine was the son of migrant workers who went to Stanford. He had the right combo of innate smarts, luck, caring teachers, and affirmative action policies which benefited dirt-poor minorities.
There's still a lot that I would improve if I were dumb enough to become president. Free daycare, free preschool, free after school programs - I think it's the best thing we could do for income inequity but there's not enough people to champion it so it will never happen.
100% agree on government-funded preschool and after-school programs. And free lunches for all kids (not just those below some arbitrary line).
>German system is pretty class-based and forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary
At some level I think that's true in a lot of places. I'm not sure, in the US, if you really know what kind of engineering (or whatever) you want to go into. High school pretty much didn't give you a good sense of that in a lot of cases. Perhaps, on this board, there is a disproportionate number of people who always knew they wanted to program. But sure wasn't the case for me growing up. And would probably have done something different than mechanical engineering but--whatever--didn't really matter.
People have to choose a path at some point. We can’t delay education for everyone until 25 or 30 to allow more time to figure it out.
Many people I know changed paths mid-college career. Many also changed careers post college. The US is relatively forgiving in that regard (as are many countries).
It’s the systems that shunt people into specific paths in high school that are challenging.
I don't disagree. In the US, a least, there's a lot of capability to make changes over time. Obviously, the more specialized and longer the training, the harder/costlier it gets. But so many people I went to school with never really just went to work in a stereotypical job related to their major (including myself). Which is just fine.
> We can’t delay education for everyone until 25 or 30 to allow more time to figure it out.
I mean, we could. Maybe a mandatory year or two of service as seen in other countries, then let them work in low credential jobs for 5-10, and only then go back and seek further education. Could be interesting. It would interrupt progression on complex topics though, expect to have a lot of trouble getting back into Calculus.
It would probably be really helpful for some people, especially those that end up dropping out of college after acruing several terms of debt. Otoh, delaying graduation for those who would have graduated 'on time' is probably a negative.
I think things have changed more recently, but when I was in college it was pretty easy to change from one STEM major to another. I didn't know I liked programing until my first Fortran class.
I did a bit of BASIC in high school and took a FORTRAN course in college. Not much else with computers until later. In retrospect might have done EE or CS though CS was very mathematical and theoretical at the time. (No PCs.)
I did sort of switch as I realized I didn't like college level organic chemistry so just switched to straight Mechanical Engineering from sort of a Biomech thing.
It's already been offered. The issue is automation remains cost effective because salaries remain relatively high.
$24 an hour for a fabricator out of high school is easily 20-30% higher the salary for a similar role in Germany.
US manufacturing remains competitive industries where a $20-40 an hour salary can be reasonably offered WITHOUT union guarantees. Otherwise the options were offshoring or automation. And for the kind of manufacturing roles that can afford to pay a relatively high salary, a college education is expected.
Skilled Trades increasingly require a college education, because understanding classical mechanics with calculus, being able to script in domain-specific CAD tooling, or understanding how to synthesize a compound does require at least an AP level education.
Doesn't matter because U.S. ruling class doesn't agree.
There is literally nothing stopping you from going to trade school and skipping college.
College is still a gate for higher paid trades because advanced manufacturing wants educated workers that can do math and/or programming g-code and/or know advanced metallurgy
I know someone who went to welding school, and he was basically practice welding 40 hours a week after class because he was working on some very advanced welds that actually required some decent chunk of engineering knowledge
I mean, most trades do expect some sort of a college education now as well (minimum AA), and vocational programs are increasingly require attending a community college.
Edit: can't reply below, but all of those vocations listed are offered at community colleges now and linked with an AS/AAS degree, as apprenticeships are often coordinated with CCs.
Just for future reference: when a comment thread is sufficiently nested the “reply” link is missing, but you can click/tap on the timestamp link. That’s a hardlink to the comment, whence you can reply.
Not plumbing, electrical, welding, construction, auto mechanic, hvac tech.
For what it's worth, /r/welding seems to think this claim is complete bunk:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Welding/comments/1khd9aj/this_is_co...
If you read the threads in /r/construction that come up about this or adjacent topics ("trades are a guaranteed job, better than college") they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.
Personally, my friend is a carpenter and lives with his dad to save money. This is in Seattle so tons of construction and work to go around. He says he wishes he studied computer science in college (has an english degree).
>> they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.
Worse yet, when your body does fail or is injured, that wage tends to stop. Most tradespersons are working for very small companies, often incorporated as their own one-person company. If you cannot work, it all just stops.
One thing that makes the military different it that while the military can be very hard on your body (infantry) your wage does not stop if you are injured. A civilian carpenter with a broken leg must live on savings for a month. A military carpenter with a broken leg just won a month of desk duty without any drop in pay.
Absolutely. Some of my family owns a construction company and the career path for all employees in that company is basically to work your body while you're young and then move into management/estimating jobs before you do too much damage to your body.
The military equivalent is to work a few years as a grunt until you qualify for some sort of free higher education. Then you come back as an officer and get to boss around all those sergeants who once yelled at you. Depending on your exact path, its all generally pensionable time worked for the same company.
Indeed it’s hard to retire from the US military as an officer because there’s a big filter at Major. You generally need to reach LTC to make 20 years. Enlisting for four (or more) then going officer makes it easy to get 20 years and retire.
That is why the US armed forces has a rep for being so young. Other countries they dont kick people out so easily, but promotions are also much more difficult. Talk to a canadian or a brit. It is not unussual for them to be in 30+ years. And i've met canadian army captains who have been captains for 20 years, giving them more experiance than most american LTCs.
Well, yeah, not a lot of people are going to continue much past 20 years when that qualifies for immediate retirement pay and a private job can suppliment. There's up or out policies at various levels too.
Despite how maligned they've become, there are still some US trade unions who take care of their members in these situations.
But, yeah, on the whole this business about the virtue of trades and Boomer Facebook making baseless claims about how much money there is to be made is ... problematic. I've been there and these folks face all sorts of risks in the near (e.g. falls, electrocution) and long (e.g. Mesothelioma, (increased risk of) Parkinson's, etc.) terms. Working conditions have improved and seemingly everyone wears hiviz nowadays (possibly performatively / to virtue signal) but corners are absolutely still cut and I've heard many jokes and seen many eyes rolled on OSHA's account.
A counter argument to this.
My old man is a tradesman, qualified as an electrician, worked and kept studying as he went and ended up as senior management.
My little brother has severe dyslexia and ADHD, couldn’t even finish school so went into trades, did some time as a diesel mechanic and qualified as a welder. Now builds race cars for a living ( Dakar ) and is a senior mechanic on track for management.
Ambition and luck plays a role but although yes both of their bodies are a little more beat up than mine, they get actively headhunted and even when they don’t have a full time job they can very easily fall back on the skills they have to fill gaps, people always need tradesmen.
Neither of them are struggling in life, other than some bad decisions.
Both of them are also on most countries critical skills list and emigration has always been an option if the local market drops off.
For those reading this, trades are not nearly as bad as is being described here, there are plenty stories of SEs working for horrible companies.
Pay differs a lot from place to place and sub-industry to subindistry. It's not uncommon to see people comment on redding claiming pay for something or another is far lower than I know of people earning in that field. To go by reddit you might conclude programmers make $40k/yr, since thats what they make in Japan or whatnot.
Not to say they they aren't correct here, but you shouldn't put too much stock in it.
Welding itself is also a pretty broad scope-- are you taking on broken trailer hitches or are you talking about underwater welding of pressure vessels? Programming robots to do automated welding? etc.
They are extrapolating the $70k figure:
"When Rios graduates next year, he plans to work as a fabricator at a local equipment maker for nuclear, recycling and other sectors, a job that pays $24 an hour, plus regular overtime and paid vacations."
This sounds like a union job, and the $70k figure sounds like towards the upper end due to hierarchy, so realistically he'll be earning maybe half of that for a couple years first.
48k at 2000 hours. Getting to 70k would need roughly 600 hours of overtime at time and a half but some of these places do double time on weekends nights holidays etc.
I’m curious what the distinction is. I assume that the article isn’t just a complete fabrication, but maybe they highlight the 20 best stories and everything else is meh.
Kinda like saying you should go to code school because you can land a 175k/year entry level job at Google. Technically true.
P-hacking is allowed and encouraged outside physical science where getting stats of medicine and building a bridge wrong have obvious side effect
News media will whittle down their data set to get a result that only matters where cost of living is high, and there’s a tiny number of the workers overall.
Leads the innumerates in rural Somewhereville, Flyover, USA, to be all confused they don’t make SF salaries in the middle of nowhere.
That’s my take.
Yea, welding offshore/underwater pays very well. Food-grade welding a bit less. Both have fairly miserable working conditions, are hard on your body, have some amount of danger, typically require lots of OT to make the claimed income, and unless you’re union, with mediocre benefits.
Great job for those who enjoy that type of work and/or want to hustle and save then move on. But any claim that it’s easy money or typicsl is just wrong.
We don’t Reddit in my household so I can’t respond directly, but there’s nothing strange about going to a welding class, picking the best student and offering them a $24/hr job with a lot of potential overtime. If you can make a clean weld they don’t care where you came from.
"We don't Reddit in my household"
Woah.
Can you explain this?
Not OP, and I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but why? Reddit now blocks many IPs (requires login/signup to see the page now). Plus the site takes a few years to load, if you don't know about old.reddit.com. I imagine many people no longer go to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc anymore because of this. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I don't have a problem with site loading at all, and I currently don't even have an account although I've had probably a dozen since the site started.
I'm asking the op in particular about what seems like maybe some kind of stance.
Reddit has about 500 million users. That's about 7500 million non-users, or 850 million English-speaking non-users. (Assuming all reddit users are english-speaking? Don't know if the site supports other languages.) Just looking at those numbers, I'm confident there's plenty of other people like me who looked at the site once or twice, found it unpleasant to use and with a low level of discourse, and never bothered actively going back; and these days stumbling upon it in web search is indeed actively unpleasant because of performance and UI issues.
"I don't like talking to people online" is pretty easy to type.
How common it is to have shop classes in schools in USA?
For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects.
There are vocational schools, but they're known to be awful quality and you don't go there if you want to earn trade, but if you're an awful student. And if you aren't awful student, then you'll most likely end up as one - as your peers will most likely be :(
There are also "technikum" which is a mix of these two, but it's not for trade per se, and statistically chances you'll pass your end of school exams are smaller.
The answer is probably, unhelpfully, "it depends". I attended a fairly large high school, and we probably had a dozen shop class offerings. A much smaller school just a few miles away had no infrastructure to support any shop classes.
It's probably even more nuanced than that, though. My parents both attended very small schools in small towns, and both offered shop classes. All four schools mentioned were / are located in the Midwest, though, and none in large cities.
If I had to guess, I'd say probably the majority of schools in the US offer some form of shop class(es). But I don't believe any would necessarily be part of the standard curriculum. Generally, these classes are elective.
I'll say something unrelated to my question before, but damn if I don't envy you for electives.
I had zero elective classes up through my entire pre-uni education. At my uni, I had one or two elective classes - at fifth and sixth semester, and that's all.
It is an aspect of American education I do like a lot.
(here we choose our profile, which assigns us to extended classes - i.e, Maths/English/Physics, Maths/Biology/Chemistry, Polish/Geography/History and so on, but then we don't get to choose anything after.)
Our area in San Diego, CA has different public high schools have a different offering that maybe all high schools would have had in the past. They are not vocational schools, but schools that offer specialized programs for you to use during your electives (2 of your 6-7 classes you take you get to choose yourself).
For example we have a high school with a culinary program, another with an auto program, another with a guitar building program, another with a music/theater arts program. These are all academic, public schools in the same district. You are assigned the school near* to your home, but you can petition for a different school.
*there is gerrymandering here too
> For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects. There are vocational schools
The US doesn't really differentiate between Lyceums/Gymnasiums, Vocational High Schools, and Technikum.
All tracks tend to be offered at the same school, but with students given the option to opt into vocational tracks.
Furthermore, a lot of skilled trades/"blue collar" (I hate that term) jobs have become increasingly specialized, so you anyhow have to attend a Community College or even a normal College to get the skills needed to land a job.
I went to law school with a guy who grew up in a state with "normal" highschools and "technical" schools for those not earmarked for higher education. Being a big football-type guy, he was directed to the latter. His mother fought to get him back into the "normal". Had she not done so, we would never have been classmates at law school. The technical school lacked the higher-level math and language courses that are important when applying to university.
Exactly the same here - after technikum you can go to uni... But statistically, your results for high school exam are going to be way lower. Or you simply won't pass.
I went to maybe slightly above average high school for my area and didn't have one. But there were programs where the school partnered with community colleges and students maintaining decent grades could attend classes elsewhere. And those had shop as well as other vocational programs.
They probably sent us home with a pamphlet with information at the beginning of the year, but I don't remember.
Larger high schools have them, in the Midwest US at least. College prep is pushed pretty heavily though, other tracks are looked down upon.
A tradesman I knew said find a career that doesn't destroy your body. Some tradesmen I've met say it's best to become an inspector or move into management.
My school dropped their shop classes about 20 years ago. Costs, potential liability, and a view that they were obsolete skills without value were cited as major reasons, but even for the last 10-20 years they did still have it it was 60% of the time just a class to throw kids into that didn't have the best grades and/or were bored of class work that they could be given an easy A in and push up those kid's grade point averages to try and secure more funding.
Very common, although many of the students don't take them (none of the girls as I recall). I took 'wood shop' in 8th grade, and there were shop classes (as well as 'auto shop') at my high school.
Even if Career Technical Education (CTE) classes are offered, there is a large variation in their quality. For me, the question would be whether a graduate from a CTE program is more likely to be hired and receives higher wages (initially) than a non-CTE program completer. My 2-minute Google Scholar search hasn't found anything on the topic.
At the end of the day, a 3-course sequence in a CTE pathway (which is the CA requirements for a high school CTE certificate in California) doesn't prepare you for a career in the same way as being in journalism class prepares you to be a journalist or being in theater prepares you to be an actor. Students will most likely need to pursue some form of post-secondary training (either through a community college or on-the-job) to become somewhat competent in their field.
I mentored two FIRST robotics teams.
One was at a well-funded school with a big honors program. All of the students were smart and engaged and clever and ambitious. They designed an extremely clever, complicated robot that looked really cool on paper and was completely impractical to actually build and they did poorly overall, barely getting an extremely-stripped-down version of the design up and running, losing every match with usually no points scored.
The other was at a poorly funded school with no honors classes. The students were just as intelligent and just as hard working, but instead of AP math and physics they were taking auto shop and wood shop. And they knew how to quickly design, build, and test simple, reliable solutions that got the job done. They fared much better in competition.
Me personally, I did mechanical work for a decade before getting a CS degree and a desk job. And I'm really glad I did. Welding and machinery were a heck of a lot more fun than debugging distributed software systems, and I'm glad I spent my 20s doing the former instead of the latter.
There was a time when high-school shop and home ec was normal.
In something like a century now of obsession with higher ed, America seems to have forgotten about the concept of trade schools. Now companies hitting on the idea of recruiting out of shop class makes the a WSJ headline in 2025. LOL!
Works where archive.ph is blocked:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-high...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1EjI7E
The problem with skilled trades is they put you inside a very limited skill box. You're stuck monetizing that trade for decades, with very little business opportunities outside that box. Swings in the economy and your health will not neatly follow this model of one-and-done.
Non-paywalled version here: https://archive.is/mhFn0
You need 200k/yr to be comfortable in Alabama. These headlines are for older generations who think that is too much money for a young person. Meanwhile, they’d never be able to afford the homes they now live in.
There is a classic capitalist ploy, documented in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, where business owners vastly over-advertise the abundance and remuneration offered by a certain area of work. Then many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field, so supply and demand pushes down wages, benefitting the owners.
> many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field
uproot from what, though?
It's not like people disrupt their investment banking careers to become plumbers.
The alternative (perhaps a pointless college degree with debt + barista job + realtor license) is worse.
More people should go into the trades. Says the aristocrat with legacy admission kids making sure they can hire a plumber for their next remodel.
If you've got ambitions to be a small business owner trades are a fair place to land. If you don't then avoid it like the plague.
Just like the software industry!
"learn to code..it's the future"
In America 2025, there is no better path to a high income and quality of life than learning a trade, then learning how to manage other tradespeople and then owning a company for such a trade.
In the trades, if you are slightly smarter than average, have a good work ethic and an inkling of entrepreneurial drive, you will be very successful.
I would like someone to mythbust this belief as it seems like it runs off nothing but anecdotes. White collar folks seem to pull this one out as a grass is greener take on a different life path when their industry is starting to unwind.
>I would like someone to mythbust this belief as it seems like it runs off nothing but anecdotes.
It can't happen for everyone, which is why all wages need to rise to make living affordable and then some. Capitalists love these competitive filters while disregarding all of the people that failed, but still promote it as viable without disclosing success/failure rates (and as anecdotes often do).
A lack of awareness about the realities of starting a business - and the consequences of not succeeding - is repeatedly the dumbest thing I see espoused about going into the trades and is the equivalent of advertising some kid's anomalous yearly salary that includes overtime.
I can't speak for all trades, but in my experience 'owning a company' and 'high quality of life' rarely go hand in hand. Owning a company is hard. It's a 24/7 job where you are managing customers, employees, accounting, etc., and you can hire people to help but ultimately it's on you if someone screws up and orders the wrong cabinets.
I'm happier working for Big Corp in an air-conditioned office.
trades are becoming the next walmart job in both pay and quality. you cant have a surplus and expect the system to be sustainable.
You've noticed that the labor market is inherently a political problem. The only thing that sustains quality of pay and conditions is regulation and organization.
Do you work in the trades?
Yes, when I was young. Pre internet days.
In the last 25 years, I've built 3 houses and remodeled half a dozen others. Worked very closely with these guys across the entire spectrum. From the unskilled, trying to cheat their way, to the 75 year old 50yr Journeyman who will never retire because he loves it.
The trades were decimated by immigration and the race for cheaper labor, higher margins. What were once solid middle class jobs, were undercut by unskilled labor masquerading as skilled. Over time, the market raised the rate of the unskilled and lowered the rate of the skilled. Prices rose to meet the market but quality declined. Unskilled were charging the same rates as skilled.
Today there are very few Journeyman tradesmen left. They were forced out. Which is why the market is crying for these skills and awarding them with high wages.
Looking forward, the entire nation is lined up to build. Those who mange this growth and bring the skills, will become wealthy.
I have worked in the trades as an electrician and then became an estimator/Project Manager. Most are small businesses that are barely hanging on. It is often not a path to wealth. Many of the smaller businesses are being bought up by private equity now to drive up prices. The tradesmen are not getting wealthy and typically will not become wealthy. Licensing a business is different than the license a tradesman gets. Rules vary by state and are often require the approval of your would be competitors, regardless of demonstrated skill and time in the trade.
The facts are that the overwhelming majority of Trades(people), are terrible business people. They may be excellent at their jobs, but very, very , very few have the business skills to build a solid business. Those who do, do extremely well well. Those who hire people who have the skill, do really, really well.
Not that different from engineers. Very few have business skills, but those who do, do very well.
Programming used to be another skilled trade, before big tech and big money took over everything and corrupted it all.
If there's good money in the trades, what's to stop them from similarly consolidating into national mega corps like every other field? Especially once we start encouraging former tech bros and VCs in, bringing with them their former mindsets?
A lot of HVAC companies have gone corporate now. Smaller companies are bought out and consolidated, higher paid and experienced personnel are let go, cheaper replacements are brought in that don't have much of a clue how to deal with older established systems, but they will definitely tell you if something is broke after you told them it was broke and offer to sell you a brand new system install that they don't have to troubleshoot with the skills and experience they lack and has a much higher margin than replacing a simple rollout switch or swap a new transformer or control board.
Very low skill trade. Takes a few weeks of training. It is a business ripe for consolidation because of this fact.
Installing new systems sure. But diagnosing and repairing problems is far from it. You are mixing gas fired devices, compressors and refrigerants, pressurized water systems, electrical systems, and mechanical systems tieing all together. And just junking all those systems because a $5 part wore out as expected and the owners of the system are lied to that it is unfixable is a colossal waste of money and human labor. All just so corporate owners have more money to scrape off the larger margins of a full install of a new system which are going to break down just the same in a few years again.
4 years to get a license in my state. 2 nights to get the EPA 608 cert which is the only real education you get, the rest is slave labor to get the sign-off for the license. The whole regulatory apparatus was co-opted by current industry to stop 'disruptions', you're going to have to go through the ol boy club to even get a seat at the table and even then they will just regulate your edge away.
This is the thing 'disruptors' don't get about the trades. It's heads I win, tails you lose. They just coopt the laws to ensure the fundamentals don't change.
I’m a software engineer. I’m over 50 and experienced a difficult time getting a new position after my last one evaporated.
I am now working as a “programmer” for CNC systems. (That means I draw shapes in CAD, lay them out on steel plates, and post those to the machines doing the work.) We have torch, plasma, and laser cutters, metal forming (really just bending), and a programmable drill.
The tasks involved in completing the processing after my work are: fetch the metal plate (warehouse crane, forklift), place the plate (must be aligned and at the correct origin), collect the cut parts onto pallets (organized by customer), operate forming machines, and/or feed beams into the drill.
Those tasks don’t exactly require skill. Because I’m a software guy, I’m always looking for opportunities for automation. We’re about as close to fully automated as you can get without advanced robots (requiring dexterity, observation, etc.)
I guess my point is that there’s little room for former tech bro/VC “innovation” in my particular industry. I can see how it’s similar in many trades. They don’t necessarily require “skills” because anyone can learn quickly how to do them. Anyone but today’s robots.
Fishing used to be a skilled trade in the rivers, seas and the oceans until giant ships operated by multinational companies took most of the market share and the fish people could sell. You got the point, small ones (at least most) don't stand a much chance nor are they efficient.
Now these industries should only be treated as a hobby or something that is expected already like knowing English language for writing corporate emails.
Oh great, can't wait for a 2 week bootcamped electrician to burn my house down.
If you can't wire a house after 2 weeks of education, they were going to burn your house down anyway (especially if you are using AFCI). It's like one simple and highly redundant 300 page book of information at worst.
I will never understand why electricians are always held to this kind of standard and reverence. Framing my house took 10x the amount of study and learning than it did wiring it, and that included me doing a mains underground power extension and all of the mains meter and breaker.
I have to assume a huge amount of it is national and local regulations, which seem to change every freakin year. I read relevant sections a decade ago re: outlets with no ground(has to be on gfci breaker) and wiring a bathroom(has to be on separate circuit). Now you're apparently not allowed to put outlets on the side of or back of kitchen islands? Just random things like this.
I couldn't imagine having to keep up with all of it. I'd guess many don't...
atleast for general contractors - Its a fundamentally different business model. Little growth, tiny margins, low fixed costs and tremendous requirement for trust and quality assurance.
Unions. IBEW for electrical workers, for example.
Skip the trade, go to a 2 year tech school and start at 60k as helpdesk and work your way up from there. I don't know why you'd bother with a trade.
I love this. This is what we need more of. My only concern is who will challenge their thinking? Who will teach them critical thinking skills? Who will give them a broader more holistic understanding of the world if not at a university?
I fear we will get ( because we need them ) many thousands more skilled workers in the trades to build more again but they’ll also be too easily bamboozled by charlatans like Trump and vote in policies that will screw us all
I don't think there's unanimous consensus that universities teach "critical thinking skills."
Isn't this backwards? People who want the broader education will naturally gravitate towards college. It's not that college actually teaches these things, it's just a magnet for people who care about them.
Most people will still be going through education with specific career goals in mind, however lamentable that is. And then they will claim they also learned critical thinking.
Mandatory humanities electives broaden horizons at least a bit. Most trades programs don't make you take stuff that's specifically relevant to the certification; although if you're getting an Associates degree at the same time, you probably will need those.
> Who will give them a broader more holistic understanding of the world if not at a university?
I'm going to guess the kids that are inherently interested in this will research it themselves. The ones who are not, won't. I'm one of the former.
Those who want education on subjects they are not employed in or "a broader more holistic understanding of the world" (whatever that means) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to college. College is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 13 in K-12. It has no special properties.
High School is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 8 in K-8. It has no special properties.
Those who want education on subjects taught in high school (whatever their value is) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to high school.
Between American states rolling back child labor laws, and the current federal administration's promising vision of factory and coal jobs for children and their future generations, there will be enough jobs that don't require useless high school diplomas.
Eliminating income tax and increasing tariffs to gorillion percent is just part of the equation. Rolling back of high school education is critical to truly achieve the dream of the "good old days."
> High School is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 8 in K-8. It has no special properties.
This is probably also true. High school standards have been lowered so much that everybody with a pulse can graduate so the degree is meaningless in terms of educational achievement. Basically just a filter now that says "I am at least one tiny step above a total retard or a complete 100% screw up."
I worked jobs part time as young as 14. Child labor laws are mainly about keeping kids in school rather than protecting them from anything bad because with our society defined around credentials, failing to obtain them is bad for that child's future. But that's just a rule we made up. There's absolutely no reason that a 14 year old who has finished 8th grade and knows how to read and do basic math couldn't go off and apprentice to a trade and be successful. In 1910 only 10% of Americans had finished high school and we still had a perfectly well functioning society. And at that time only 2 % had college degrees and still we were in an era of rapid scientific progress and economic growth.
Ironically the assumption that a broader more holistic understanding of the world comes from a university or humanities in general is itself a rather under-examined assumption treated as sacrosanct. It seems very reverse reasoned akin to virtue ethic's notorious tendency towards narcissistic self-praise.
A broad educational basis may have virtues but it is very unlikely the only path towards it. Even putting aside how 'holistic' critical thinking tends to be held as diametrically opposed to the practical. Often straw-manning the practical as robotic or inhuman. The idea that the practical is opposed to a holistic understanding is simply not true at all. Ask anybody who took and understood Calculus for one.
The concept of the practical as intrinsically bad is a stupidity of considerable vintage, dating back to at least Ancient Greece for reasons which is of course totally unrelated to the intellectuals of the day being funded by slave owners trying to purchase self-justification from those trying to avoid physical labor. That was sarcasm by the way, just to be clear. That same diseased thought of the practical as unworthy should have been put to bed by the Industrial Revolution at least.
good for them
the world is changing.