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'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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] who then never shows up on time and charges too much. But that's a whole nother story about where I live...
Roofing might be relatively worse than electrical, but both are definitely harder than sitting an air-conditioned desk.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
programmer, then also?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deserted islands don't have libraries.
Carpentry offers limited applicable skills if they're stranded 1000 miles away from the nearest Home Depot.
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."
Mental capital is still capital.
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.
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.
Thanks for that!
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.
Tradeskills are also not scalable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I could literally rebuild it 3x for the all the bullshit insurance and regulatory costs were it I got inspections, licensing, and insurance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$10-15k is a more realistic number for an auto mechanic, and many of them have $50k+ into their tools.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds great! I love libertarianism!
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you can do that successfully, you can get FAANG money.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472152.htm https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-busi...
Both jobs drained my will to live though. The mailman job was actually much nicer, just the pay was total ass.
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?
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.
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.
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_...
I don't care if someone compensated highly chooses that lifestyle, but not someone "average".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
>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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
But that is the point of the GP. Ostensibly, employers once paid for loyalty by offering consistent raises. That is done now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amazing words for everybody to consider.
[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.
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.
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 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)
I'm hoping for something inbetween the apocalyptic possibilities.
Based on how the rule of law is going, maybe we're already there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
For trades, thousands of people apply to be apprentices, for a few spots
Granted, this is in the Bay Area
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.
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
[1] Bankrate
[2] BLS
Omaha is cheaper but you can’t go mountain hiking or surfing or skiing on your day off.
Most 17 year olds do.
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.
2,000 hours / year (straight time, 10 paid days PTO), $35/hour is $70k base.
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.
Yes! I learned this from the infamous "Poor dad, rich dad" book. Being an asset owner is probably the best way to become "free".
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.
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 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.
Right now I imagine the average “Baby Boomer” is more creditworthy than the typical Gen Z borrower.
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.
Wages are exactly the path to wealth and security -- the matter is what you do with those wages.
But not everyone who became wealthy did so by selling their time to an employer (definition of wage).
You're describing someone hustling very hard. Which is great. But a little different?
[0] https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-educatio...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now, how much of this is actual expertise and how much wealth extraction, I really don't know.
Of course people pursuing higher education are often doing it for personal growth reasons as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It becomes wasteful when advancement depends less on experience or intelligence and more on seniority or politics.
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 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.
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.
https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/as-tech-job...
Why? Sounds like IT is a better fit for her?
Good welding requires intense focus/nondistractions, which some people on the spectrum really enjoy.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
"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
Neither path is necessarily the correct one for everybody, but the proportion of people going for degrees instead of other paths is too high.
This is like those people that thought smartphones were a fad.
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.
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....
>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 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.
If there aren’t enough homes to go around, home prices will rise to a level that only the wealthier can afford.
https://www.uschamber.com/economy/the-state-of-housing-in-am...
Plenty of people get by on less than six-figure household incomes--they just live in lower-cost areas of the country.
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.
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.
The average small business does not exist to get acquired. Only a very small number of small businesses are even interesting to private equity.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...).
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
Specifically, offering a track similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_school
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
$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.
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
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Welding/comments/1khd9aj/this_is_co...
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).
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.
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.
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.
Kinda like saying you should go to code school because you can land a 175k/year entry level job at Google. Technically true.
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.
Woah.
Can you explain this?
I'm asking the op in particular about what seems like maybe some kind of stance.
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.
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 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.)
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
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.
They probably sent us home with a pamphlet with information at the beginning of the year, but I don't remember.
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.
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.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-high...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1EjI7E
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.
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.
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'm happier working for Big Corp in an air-conditioned office.
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.
Not that different from engineers. Very few have business skills, but those who do, do very well.
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?
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 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.
Now these industries should only be treated as a hobby or something that is expected already like knowing English language for writing corporate emails.
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 couldn't imagine having to keep up with all of it. I'd guess many don't...
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
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6176062
(& this supports your point somewhat in that unconditional praise is also suboptimal)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I take it you are not a SWE then? This is a pretty ubiquitous feeling for most engineers I'd think.
Most programmers think too highly of themselves.
Software projects have the exact same problems as construction jobs, with the main difference liability.
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.
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.
Yes.
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'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.
That’s kind of hard with a foundation, or other materials
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.
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.