"We need more tradespeople" seems to be an evergreen news article.
My brother in law is an electrician. He is paid alright, enough to live on. But there are HUGE downsides. He does not receive health insurance. He does not get paid vacation. In order to match decent white-collar pay, he needs to work overtime. His company pushes hard to get jobs finished fast, causing people to cut safety corners. Many of his coworkers have been badly (in one case, nearly fatally) injured on the job. There are no meaningful raises.
It isn't a bad career, but there are major reasons why it would be unattractive.
There is another aspect too. It completely breaks your body. Electricians get carpal tunnel worse than information workers by constantly squeezing lineman pliers, knees get shot. Your career path is work like that and hopefully before you get older, start your own company and hire younger people to do the body breaking work. But not everyone in the field will end up doing that so many end up in bad shape
And you have to go do it. I love working behind a computer. I sit in a chair. Waking up at 5am to go to a client site to do some physical labor 40+ hours a week for my entire life sounds like hell. Even if the money was incredible it would suck.
It may feel better at the time but repetitive motions in most physical jobs will eventually catch up with your body. In an office job you can exercise on your own terms and without long term chronic pain.
I don't know, when I used to work on farms, the old guys were a lot healthier than most of the people I see in tech nowadays. Although, most of that work isn't unhealthily repetitive, like jack-hammering or something, so perhaps not a great example. But, use-it-or-lose-it is a real thing.
>when I used to work on farms, the old guys were a lot healthier than most of the people I see in tech nowadays.
Right, I think you would need to check stats on how many people dropped out over the years due to health issues leaving behind these super healthy old guys to get an accurate picture.
I think that's a bad comparison. Farm work is a lot more varied than the repetitive tasks that most trades work involves. It's not like jobs requiring, for example, wearing a hazmat suit and/or respirator all day, or constantly being around extremely loud noises.
Nah you've got it right and there are a shitload of studies that prove it: the most effective way for a human being to wreck their health is sitting on their ass all day.
Someone can be a part time office worker, part time tradesman.
This part-time aspect was one of the appealing aspects of ride-sharing apps when they first appeared. People with cars could have 9-5 jobs and before and after the job, exactly during rush hour, give a lift to a few people. Of course, they turned into the new taxi but controled by multinational corps and almost impossible to hail without a smartphone.
In theory. But in practice, the tradesman hours would be so underpaid compared to SWE hours that I'd either want back into SWE full-time or to have those hours completely free of work as personal & family time. The opportunity costs here don't work out. Spending time away from my family for less money is not a good deal.
Health is the opportunity cost otherwise, but it's hard to price health. And I don't mean that it's priceless; the price is ambiguous - is my health worth less or more than what half my salary buys me?
For software engineers, this is a difficult question to answer. If I were working an entry-level job, my health would be more valuable to me. If I were at the peak of professional development (a figurehead at a massive company or someone whose work changes the world), my work would be more important. SWE work makes a lot of money, but somewhere in the range of where I value my health.
How much $ a year is your health worth to you? Not a rhetorical question, would be interesting to see some answers if anyone can come up with a figure.
You are correct and that is why what I suggested doesn't broadly happen. There is value in specialization. Yet we can't help but ponder whether there might be a better way and what it might involve.
I worked on a hay farm for a few years, and I constantly had injuries to my back muscles. Other employees had constant knee pain and neck pain. Nobody that worked there looked healthy. I was always tired and hated going to work. I feel way healthier working in tech.
Could one of the factors for the Amish be teamwork? Tradesmen are often competing with their peers and working very fast, sometimes too fast and at risk of injury. All of the documentaries I have seen watching the Amish work, they work as a team following the mantra slow and steady wins the race. They work hard, but as a group.
IIRC it's not so much repetitive motions (RSI is a misnomer) but constant tension and constraining of blood vessels and nerves. Carpal tunnel syndrome for example is nerves being constrained from permanently swollen tendons.
I lift weights, walk, or hit some golf balls at the golf range every day during the week, about ~1h / day. Over the weekend I'll play some golf, go for a walk or squeeze in an extra workout.
It might not compensate all the sitting and typing fully but it's pretty good - I don't miss doing a day of physical labor.
I do bjj 4 days a week with two of those days being on my lunch break, the other three days I walk my dog during lunch, I do 6 sets of push ups, squats, or pull ups on work days, and I using a standing desk in the morning. Just bought a little floor tredmill that I can walk on during meetings as well.
I would probably be in better shape if I was moving all day everyday but I'm pretty sure my body would start to break down as well. I know not everyone has as much freedom but if you work from home it isnt that hard to squeeze in a pretty decent amount of exercise during the work day.
As a >20y software engineer who feels a lot of my age and several years of very physical burnout symptoms, I get a lot of relief from the more active parts of my life (mostly having fun with my pup, but I feel similarly about just physical chores and whatever manual labor comes along).
This is why I like automation (actual robots, not scripting and AutoHotKey stuff). You start out in the field doing sparky things (so you get some exercise, you get to travel, and you get first hand experience of a range of industrial stuff) and then if you do the job right, by the end you're sitting in an airconditioned office watching the machine run itself.
I wonder if maybe modern bodies aren’t built for manual labor?
I’d love to talk with any of the millions of voluntary and involuntary manual laborers from the past 200 years and learn about how they made it through their lifetimes working in fields and factories in stress positions under substandard conditions.
To be honest, I guess we could just interact with and ask present day laborers across the globe cranking out products for Western mass consumption.
It’s got to be about the same I’d guess 1822 to 2022, no?
Modern mass production (iirc 1900s and later) where each person basically hyperspecializes in one job on an assembly line tends to cause repetitive strain injuries as people are doing the same handful of movements quickly thousands of times a shift. A good factory will shift people around to different parts of the assembly line to try and delay injuries as those will cause more efficiency loss than the hit you get from moving someone from one position on the line to another (sometimes it's even just as small as just having them be on the other side of the conveyor doing the same job).
All the time at work I wonder if it's a novel modern expectation that aging not contain an accumulation of progressive injuries leading to everpresent chronic pain.
Human bodies aren't built for decades of high intensity repetitive manual labour. They're built for lounging around and running, and occasionally climbing trees and fighting things.
I do quite intense manual labor. The most striking thing to me is that you have to treat it like a training program, then when you do, everything the bean counters say and want turns into complete nonsense. Their thinking in 8 hour blocks is hilarious.
Lets imagine a hypothetical a job like unloading 50 kg bags from trucks and say you carry them up stairs to the 3rd floor. Or let them be 20 kg bags, 1 floor.
You can find a person who can do one 50 kg bag + 3 floors, lots of people can do multiple 20 kg bags. But how many can you expect an employee to do in a day? How fast is a reasonable demand? The answer is simple if you look at it from a training program perspective: If you can do 1 bag (of either kind) you keep doing it until you are tired or until it starts to hurt ever so slightly. You do this 3 days per week. You grow and grow until eventually you can hurl bags easily for hours. You could in theory keep training until you can comfortably do 50 kg bags, 3 floors, 8 hours long. It would take forever ofc. 20 kg, 1 floor is doable. You train until you can do a whole shift 3 days per week. Keep at it for a while then add a 4th day and eventually a 5th.
If you however push yourself a bit harder than you should, by not quitting when you had enough and/or going for 5 days to early you don't grow! You just destroy your body and if you destroy your health sufficiently you wont get used to the work in this life time. One slightly to long vacation might break you.
The moral of the story is that in some places you see these seemingly impossible mountains of men do absolutely insane amounts of absolutely insane work and it doesn't seem to bother them.
The bean counters understand non of this. They want 8 hours, preferably on a salary that doesn't afford a perfect diet and adds extra units of stress that should be subtracted from the training results or added to the injury list.
In many countries you cant even take employees blood pressure, measure heart rate or test their blood for nutrients. Some guys driving a desk decided that is a violation of peoples privacy.
Manual laborers 200 years ago spend a good amount of time outside and got a good amount of vitamin D.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15050-vitamin...
> Vitamin D deficiency is a common global issue. About 1 billion people worldwide have vitamin D deficiency, while 50% of the population has vitamin D insufficiency. Approximately 35% of adults in the United States have vitamin D deficiency.
If you are looking to push the human body to the limit the year round getting out of the deficiency zone is not enough. About 100% gets insufficient D the year round.
I tell our bean counters that if they want to see more work done they have to give us a solarium with UVB lamps and pay people to use it.
There is nothing like seeing people hold 2 contradictory thoughts at the same time. They all know I'm 100% right and they know it 100% cant happen.
Good level D is positively correlated with endurance performance, muscle strength and with a lower rate of injuries. Anything less and you become fragile or a jellyfish. If you see someone do hard work your limbs snap off.
I also suggest they serve the employees meat (protein) during work to avoid them eating something stupid like sandwiches during lunch then a pizza or mcdonalds after work.
It honest to god feels like talking to a different species.
Recently they tried to explain to me the concept of working harder because they cant find employees. I tried to explain them being unable to find employees means I'm going to do less work and go home early. We all have our tasks. I did a great job. They couldn't find employees? It seems so simple? Give me more money, I will do more work, others will come if the price is right?
It's a lovely job, I bust my ass, pay is crap but my thoughts are my own and the employer has to put up with my bullshit. I can just walk away, there is plenty of grunt work and I can jockey a desk too! I drive a really fast desk. It's lovely to see a plan come together or to slap a bunch of code together and see it do its thing. It's all the same really, you get to be impressed by your own abilities, accomplishment or if both fail by the compensation :)
Whenever tradesmen come to my house for a job, the ones who are my age, 59, are hobbling and broken. A couple other things come to mind: Places where trade work pays more, are probably also more expensive to live in. And the trades are at the mercy of the construction cycle.
I could imagine the trades being more attractive in countries with better labor laws and social safety net.
Nope, most western European countries have extensive labor laws & social safety net and still struggles to find tradesmen. More often than not, they have to rely on immigration (portugal, poland, turkey, african nations, etc.)
They even joke about having to learn portuguese if you want to work in construction due to the massive number of portuguese tradesmen across Europe
Proven fact is that carpal tunnel is a product repeat motion injuries. Changing equipment and regularly exercising against repeat motions prevents carpal tunnel.
Other fact fewer kids are getting born with muscle area which forma carpal tunnel. Evolution in progress.
Skilled trades are not limited to back breaking labor. Some and most of it is labors of love like farming. You have the right equipment it isn't back breaking.
This isn't the case for all trades people. It might be a bad area or a bad employer.
I've know trades folks who are electricians, plumbers, carpenters, work in road construction, etc. They typically work reasonable hours, have medical, and are paid at or above the median income for where they live. They didn't rack up debt getting into this either. This is not a bad deal for many people.
There's a semi-retired craftsman I watch regularly on youtube - Essential Craftsman. Almost all long-term success stories in the trades which he tells directly or gets from his friends involve transitioning from a tradesman to an employer.
You're selling your health and body as a tradesman. If you can make the transition to running a trades business, then you're selling your brainpower more than your body.
Success stories in the trades are fairly consistent in this matter.
Came here to say this. Growing up in the Midwest I saw this all the time. The kids of plumbers that owned a plumbing business lived in a very nice part of town, the kids of plumbers still going to job sites lived in an OK part of town.
Definitely don’t want to cheapen the toll that trade work takes on the body, but do want to note that we all do sell our bodies and health one way or another. Heart disease is one of the main killers of Americans and all the office workers sitting in chairs for ~8 hours a day aren’t doing ourselves any favors there…
I mean, yeah, on balance I’d rather be an API plumber than an actual physical plumber — code smells are less nauseating than poop smells — but there are advantages to jobs that keep you moving around.
Code smells are way more nauseating because they're nearly entirely opinion based, whereas an actual odor can be solved to everyone's satisfaction by clearing a clogged main.
Is that a thing? I don't think taking "performance enhancing drugs" is safe or allowed in my country, and I would definitely report coworkers to HR if I would find out they did. It's not fair to compete against someone like that.
It's absolutely a thing. Rampant in SV from what I hear. Many people get them prescribed (Adderall, Ritalin) for ADD, but it seems like 20-40% of programmers have diagnosed ADD. Others buy from friends who get it prescribed, or on the black market, and they probably don't talk about it at work.
I don't think most employers would fire an employee for taking drugs to improve their performance.
Regardless of safety (and I say this as someone who used to take prescription Adderrall myself) there are negative side effects, and long-term effects.
> You're selling your health and body as a tradesman. If you can make the transition to running a trades business, then you're selling your brainpower more than your body.
Selling your brainpower meaning managing the people who will sell their health and body as tradesmen. A minor racket.
What ambiguity? A pimp IS an entrepreneur! And in many cases here the investors are pimps - selling teams of people with questionable output to the public via IPO!
The beauty of the ambiguity is that you know there's someone on this web site that is 100% serious and believes that all labour is capitalist exploitation.
Then there is also someone that is 100% sarcastic and that if you look at society closely, that exchange is probably one of the least exploitative in present day society. I mean we take the healthiest demographic on the planet, force them to be sedentary for 8+ hours per day, submitting themselves constantly to eye strain, and we make them pay for it. Now that's a racket.
If you don't like the current breed of disaster capitalism, and the fact that most of your productive output belongs to someone else, you have failed in life and must be a jealous socialist.
If you are successfull and wealthy, you are even worse - Champaign socialist.
If you are actually Schumpeterian, tou are still gonna be called a socialist because they are economically illiterate.
As with all businesses, there are good and bad people. Personally, I think it's easy to be good: 1) keep learning and using the best materials 2) pay a little more than a persons worth.
If you were watching that channel, you'd know that he takes great pride in doing the work himself. In his latest series, he's building a garage/workshop for his son almost entirely by himself, just to show what can be done. He's amazing.
It might be a bad area. There aren't better employers in the area. He knows he is being abused. He used to live and work as an electrician in another country where he was treated considerably better. He spends his days wiring new homes that sell for 1.5M+ and gets treated like crap. Moving is unfortunately not an option because my sister's career is very location-dependent.
"Well if you aren't in one of the good areas you'll get fucked" doesn't tend to make it into articles like the linked above and I think it is worth knowing.
New home/residential wiring jobs are basically the entry point for electricians. It's about as mindless and simple as it gets. I'm not sure what the licensing requirements are but those are the sorts of jobs that an electrical contractor puts their new/junior people on.
That's where all the jobs have been in the last five years in his area. His teams are also doing commercial wiring as well, but new builds dominate the work. And they are supposed to complete jobs fast - even if the work is simple doing it fast is not easy.
And so what? "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles" is a very different narrative than what is usually presented.
> "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles"
Everyone I know in the trades "put in their dues" with at least 10 years of working for someone else, doing the shit jobs, working outside in the rain, in the mud, in the heat, in crawlspaces, in attics, etc.
The smart, driven ones learn all they can, advance, build relationships and reputation, and start their own businesses. The lazy or dumb ones continue to do the crap jobs for their entire career.
Basically, you described that it is pretty bad job. And the only way out is to stop doing that job and start being manager who pressures others to be faster at the bad job. Also, work is pyramid. You have one manager/business owner for many ordinary team members no matter how "smart" all of them are.
And even that, management and business skills are not the same thing as being good tradesman. Just like with programming, you can be smart and driven and not be management material.
The question was whether trades arw good occupation. Not whether you can be better off by stopping being tradesman and going into management.
OK. So what you are saying here is that the trades are a bad job. You spend ten years getting treated like crap and then only succeed if you become a small business owner.
Imagine this for software engineers. "Yeah, SWEs get paid shit and have a bad working environment but some of you will become managers and get paid bank." That wouldn't exactly be a "wow software is an incredible field to be in" situation.
If people want to say "we need more tradespeople - going into the trades will be good for your career" then it better be the case that the actual laborers are getting decent pay.
CS obviously makes way more but I hear tons of stories of people working overtime or having shitty bosses in developer jobs too, and yet the narrative I hear a lot is get a FAANG job, make 400k then retire by 30
There isn’t any automatic get rich easy scheme. To some extent you have to keep your wits about and make sure you are getting your worth
I only know a bit more than nothing, but I'd wager anything industrial is considered more interesting. Single-family residential wiring, especially for new construction where there's nothing in the way, is so simple that even I, using just what I've learned being a homeowner, could meet code with it.
commercial sites are supposed to be good; I know a commercial electrician and he'd talk about the many tech company headquarters and new buildings he and his team would wire up and do all the equipment for. This includes outlets, infrastructure like AC and any special equipment like fire alarms smoke detectors, any everything in between. He'd say working for government jobs were too slow, they took forever to complete, it was always more lucrative to go for private industry large construction sites like new malls, big buildings with large square feet footprints. Basically commercial real estate stuff.
Commercial....wayyyyy different. Need to know a lot more. Employment sucks. I knew HVAC people and flooring people who had it made but they worked for themselves.
Talk to contractors in any city with a hardware startup scene and they absolutely are making a killing. Lots of 220V, 480V, miles of 120V. Transformers, machine hookups. You name it.
He should start buying some cheap tools of his own (to start with) and do weekend/night jobs for himself. If he's working on 1.5m homes I guarantee you there are a ton of homeowners who need electrical jobs done. Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.
There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.
Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.
The self-employed plumber has to accept phone calls when they're in the middle of a job, has to do a whole day's work then spend their evenings lining up future work, has to manage their schedule a long way in advance, has to keep commitments even in the face of illness and family emergencies, has to go around giving quotes to people many of whom are just comparing prices, has to manage cashflow and deliveries, has to make nice even with homeowners who are a pain in the ass, has to be able to sell potential customers on the quality of work they haven't yet done, has to deal with complaints, has to chase payment and deal with nonpaying customers, has to keep accounts and business records properly, and so on.
A jobbing plumber just needs to text his buddies asking if they've got any work for him this week, do the job and leave with cash in hand the same day.
If you're good at plumbing but disorganised or don't have great self-discipline, the latter is a much simpler way of working.
A very significant number of freelancers think of themselves as employees. They struggle with "asking for raises," instead of telling their clients "this is my new rate." They are extremely depressed when a contract isn't renewed, or is terminated early "they fired me. Why?" They are dependent on a single client, let themselves form close relationships with that client's employees, have their working hours set for them, etc.
Going into freelancing, the first thing you should be thinking is "I am a business that employs one person: me."
Seems like a startup niche - a more idealized Uber for electricians - abstract the worst parts, help tradespeople keep more of the money their work produces.
That is basically franchising, you exchange some cash upfront and ongoing royalties for a brand name and some level of support with training/business planning/marketing/leadgen/software etc. There’s a franchise for just about anything you can think of, and a surprising number local businesses in the US these days are actually franchises, not just fast food restaurants. Some are excellent and some are scams!
> He should start buying some cheap tools of his own (to start with) and do weekend/night jobs for himself. If he's working on 1.5m homes I guarantee you there are a ton of homeowners who need electrical jobs done. Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.
> There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.
> Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.
Did you think about possibility that his current employer will crush him like an egg for competing with him on weekends?
Employment works very differently in trades than e.g. software. The main thing is that customers don't care about the company they're using, but about the guy that comes out to help them. So picking up a clientele is extremely easy if you do a good job. And word of mouth multiplies that clientele pretty quickly. And the thing about the trades is that they always need to be done, endlessly. Paint starts to chip, electricity eventually breaks, plumbers go without saying, ...
This is why the normal trajectory, for a skilled tradesman, is apprenticeship -> experience -> accumulate clients -> go independent.
If you want to go independent in something like software you need, among other things, a good idea. If you want to go independent in the trades, all you need is a good reputation and enough people with your card. You don't even need to try either really. Do a good job and people themselves will proactively ask for your contact information. Finding a good and reliable tradesman is not easy.
sometimes licenses are different between working for yourself vs someone else. Other times your employer can't take on jobs without you and your license present.
Then there's insurance differences between self-employed and employed ______ tradesperson.
> Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.
You can’t do a good business without leaving visible traces - permits, customers, suppliers, etc. all provide ways for information to leak. If his employer is exploitative, he has above average odds of correctly fearing retribution and depending on the area that could mean unemployment. It’s not exactly uncommon for companies to discretely agree not to hire certain people.
> depending on the area that could mean unemployment
This is the key reason why for most jobs, small town America is flyover country, an economically inefficient, exploitative, broken system. Without a large labor & employment market within easy commuting distance, your skills aren't portable if you get fired, and your boss can't readily find a replacement, so most employment relationships end up in a reluctant, often abusive state from one or the other.
Depending on the size of the town / city, it could be trivial. There's ~6 companies doing electrical work in my town. Not only are they commented on / recommended on local social media, they see each other's quotes all the time when people compare prices. If someone started a new business, I suspect they'd all know within days/weeks.
From other specialist non-trade business I'm familiar with, people are normally aware of new employees coming to town before they even start working. People talk to each other.
Unions pay living wages and provide insane health care and retirement packages. So I supposed when people say side jobs, they imply those working non union jobs.
I’m skeptical of the narrative that trades is some great career choice, but "Well if you aren't in one of the good areas you'll get fucked" applies to pretty much every career choice.
The distribution matters. How common are the bad/good/mediocre scenarios? Some just might be mostly bad, with rare exceptions. While other jobs might be mostly good, with rare bad cases, so you might risk this outcome.
For example being a software engineer outside the US, working for a local business, selling to local customers. In Latin America, programmers can make about 10 or 20 times less than in the US.
Most software ultimately automates menial labor. If the menial labor that's being automated is highly paid, the software engineer is highly paid. If the menial labor is lower paid, the software engineer is lower paid. Adjusting also for the amount of menial labor which is automated.
In a poorer society equivalent menial labor is more poorly paid than in a richer society. Edit to add: And in a poorer society some of the highly paid menial labor that exists in richer societies may just not exist, or at least not in the same amount.
Wages are generally controlled almost entirely by supply/demand. In an area where there are more people interested in doing a job than there is in demand for that job, wages for that occupation will trend towards the lowest possible value. In an area where there is more demand for a certain skillset than exists, wages will trend to the maximum affordable cost for anybody with that skill.
All the other stuff like expertise and value is, counterintuitively, near irrelevant. For instance postdocs are some of the most highly educated and ostensibly highly skilled individuals - and many have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get to where they are, yet they earn about as much as a plumber does, because there's far more supply of postdocs than there are jobs/positions for them.
So putting all the theory into practice. There are usually three possible reasons. Supply is too high = excessively high rates of software training/education. Demand is too low = not many roles for software developers. Or the companies that are hiring aren't making much themselves so the "maximum affordable cost" is relatively low.
Do you own a house? Have something go wrong and get a few quotes from corporate institutions. You'll be seeing insane prices. Some smart tradesmen will look at their call volume and charge more accordingly since more calls means people are settling and paying corporate rates.
It can easily be a bad area for freelancing: imagine if it’s an area where you have big developments and maybe some large commercial or agricultural sites but not a ton of smaller places. The bigger contracts tend to go to the big companies who can handle a ton of work so there might not be that many people looking for small jobs - someone who just bought a new $1.5M home probably isn’t going to be doing much electrical work for years.
Outside of big cities, there may not be enough demand, esp. consistent demand, to justify good pay and bennies.
My uncle is a welder, has a lot of specializations including some underwater stuff. No shortage of offers... for 6 weeks of work in nowhere-ville, often requiring you to supply your own transport and housing. 3 months in FL, 6 months in NC, 8 weeks in GA. And they all pay crap.
The person that does travel welding usually has a setup like a big truck and a pull behind RV. They jump from job site to job site staying campgrounds, county / public property where overnight parking was allowed (previously Walmart parking lots).
As long as the job site is further than 50-100 miles from home you get paid a per diem which granted won't pay for a 4 star hotel, but at 65$ a day (rate depending on location) x 30 (6 5 day work weeks) $1950 then another $25 a day for food $750. This is untaxed and on top of your normal hourly rate. These jobs tend to need to be done on a quick time frame so most do not only work 40 hour work weeks but most are working 60-80 hours. So there is also an insane potential for overtime.
> Outside of big cities, there may not be enough demand, esp. consistent demand, to justify good pay and bennies.
I guess that depends how far outside cities. In the suburbs there is demand.
There is a shortage of trades and many trades folks are older in age. When they retire there isn't the back fill behind them. And all of this is happening as the population is growing.
US population growth is mostly flat, all the growth is from immigration.[1][2]
And those people are filling trade skill jobs. [3]
> More than one-third of construction laborers (686,000 workers), at least 30 percent of carpenters (382,000 workers), and 45 percent of painters and paperhangers (264,000 workers) are immigrants.
And without them the population long term would decrease (which is obvious from the low fertility rate). [4]
Because the states where most of the construction workers are immigrants don't have licensing for tradespeople. They also have laws protecting the builders from "defective house" litigation.
I’m reading the population is shrinking. Isn’t the US below replacement rate? Certainly Europe is. I think immigration is masking that kids these days are not have kids these days
Especially if you are remotely trustworthy and have good people skills. The good tradespeople I know are recommended by everybody else I know and constantly backlogged.
Plumbers, HVAC, Electricians, General Contractors, etc
But there is a finite end to the career - when your body gives out.
That's the biggest problem with the trades, you're selling your health and body. And eventually the body parts will wear out, on a schedule decided as much by genetics as how you live.
I think the idea of a career is dead for a lot of the 40 and under set. The idea that you'll have the same job for decades is just nonsense so any job that feels too specific also feels like a it'll bite you in the ass in 5 years.
> I think the idea of a career is dead for a lot of the 40 and under set. The idea that you'll have the same job for decades is just nonsense
We're probably just nit-picking over definitions but a career, in my opinion, is not "having the same job for decades." A career is a decision to specialize in a particular craft, trade or profession. The opposite of a career is someone who takes odd jobs. Hospitality one day, transportation the next, might dabble in manufacturing. These jobs pay the bills, and there's nothing wrong with "just" doing that, but they are disconnected jobs; not a career.
I consider myself to have a career in software engineering but I have had multiple "jobs" over the decades that have contributed to that career. The career is the knowledge, the experience, the speciality, the reputation, the time spent focusing... all accumulated over my time developing that career. A career could be made by having a single job lasting from graduation until retirement, or it could be a handful of jobs that put to practice and develop the same skillset and knowledge.
>> We're probably just nit-picking over definitions but a career
No, that's fair. Like "carpenter" and "programmer" are both very broad professions of course. I think there's something about the way various industries get hit by down turns more or less visibly (like when construction goes down it feels like it's everybody, and so every framer, every concrete layer) that creates an (often false to be sure) sense of narrowness.
But also Plumber, Electrician, Carpenter, etc. are very broad trades and even though articles get written using those words because everyone knows what they do, the articles are often really talking about the lack of elevator technicians, crane operators, industrial HVAC, PLC programmers, train conductors, air traffic controllers those more niche trades. A lot of machine operators end up so niche that their current company is the only one in a state that could employ them. My sister makes M&Ms, other than company policies about like sanitation she'd be no better than a new hire on the Twix line.
Is the argument here that unions are needed to guarantee minimum pay and benefits for these highly specialized jobs so that they feel safe enough to specialize? Wouldn't that depress effective wages for these techs and make the jobs as appealing as less skilled labor?
The way you guarantee job stability would probably be to pay union members a salary even when they're temporarily not needed right? Then you pay this salary out using union dues. Union dues end up garnishing take-home wages which removes the incentive to specialize.
^ That was how I was imagining it. Am I wrong in thinking this way? Or is the argument that the urge to specialize is independent of wage?
I'm not talking about a generic "unions are good" argument. I know why unions exist, the history behind them throughout much of the West, their ties to worker parties and socialism etc. I'm specifically wondering what about unionizing (or in this case, re-unionizing) makes it more palatable for these highly specialized roles to exist. Is your argument then that working conditions for folks like HVAC techs are poor enough that unions are necessary to negotiate for better working conditions before people want to become HVAC techs?
Generally, the more specialized labor is, the higher wage and benefits they can demand in a capitalist labor market. Supply and demand. For less skilled labor like general electricians I can understand the role of the union in negotiating for wages, benefits, and safety standards. For highly skilled labor like an HVAC tech, I don't see it.
You seriously want me to dig up the stories on how everyone is mistreated? I already did for ATC. You can do your research for the rest. I am reasonable sure every worker in the US is mistreated.
I'm not saying the trades should be unregulated. I think OSHA is an almost unparalleled good. I've just generally thought of the benefits of unionization for skilled trades to lie in the educational and reputational benefits of the union rather than the security aspect of one. Unions for unskilled labor would work differently. My thought, at least.
A good point. I think it's even dead for the over 40 crowd, as they try and slide into a new career which they can work part time and make a living on. Given how questionable retirement as a reality is these days.
In general, reasonably lucrative part-time work for someone coming from a professional role is tricky. And even more so if you really want to have fairly fine-grained control around both weekly workload and longer vacations. Well-paying work that lets you just pick and choose something here and there and then take a month off if you feel like it are pretty uncommon.
You're 100% not wrong. I think in many cases through it's supplementing insufficient retirement funds, so even a low skill low wage part time job (making/selling art, garden fruits/vegetables, foods, etc) may be sufficient to provide enough runway for existing retirement funds.
Absolutely. And some people also seem to like that some of these jobs provide human interaction. Some of my private car drivers seem in this category.
I'm more talking about situations where it's not mostly for the money but rather continuing the things people have enjoyed doing professionally without doing it full-time and without most of the downsides.
It's because sticking with the same job is either not rewarding - you're a number, not a valued employee in a lot of jobs - or not feasible.
Back in the day you could live a comfortable life off of your 40-odd year job, nowadays the advice given is to change jobs every few years because the increase in wage will outweigh any raises at your current job. Cost of living is going up faster than annual wage increases. Minimum wage in the US hasn't been updated since the 2000's, and if you do get paid minimum wage, it's your employer saying "I'd pay you less if I was allowed to". But a lot of wages will be based on minimum wage, so if that stagnates, so will other wages.
Sure, but the wear-and-tear on your brain from an office job will always be significantly lower (and thus remain a viable job for much longer) than a job in the figurative or literal trenches.
As a former chef, I'll gladly take the extra few pounds and minor shoulder issues I've gotten as PM over scalding hot oil being poured on my arms or a meat slicer taking the tip of my thumb mostly off.
My wood shop teacher started by showing us his missing fingers eaten by a table saw. Best safety lesson ever. I always think of that when using my table saw.
It’s fine, I ran to CVS and bought a bottle of super glue to patch myself up. Then I worked a 10 hour shift.
Still better than my grandfather who lost all the fingers on one hand to a hay bale elevator chain. It was after dark so while his wife drove him to the hospital the kids had to go look for them.
And then NPR writes insipid think pieces wondering why nobody wants to work in the trades anymore. If only we could put a finger on it…
Especially since it's a solved problem. SawStop[1] is incredible. Yes, Festool isn't cheap, but neither is an unplanned amputation. Of course it's not perfect, but you'll probably be looking at stitches instead of dismemberment.
Probably, but it still isn't even comparable to the amount of damage and wear done to a body through the trades. Its like comparing some guy who plays bar league baseball to a 1st string NFL player.
Right, but even when you're in poor health from sitting in a chair all day you can keep sitting in that chair and doing the same work. Whereas if you're a skilled trades worker and break your back by falling off a ladder then you can't work at all. So the downside risk is more severe.
Animal cruelty. Not as bad as factory farming but similar in spirit in the restrictions on healthy living and basic biology. Don't get me started on school...
I know someone who works in medical billing (awful soul-sucking field) and they can't even read ON THEIR BREAKS because it will look like they aren't working.
Anecdotally, I know a good number of people "in the trades" and in tech, and the incidence of serious health issues around the age of 40-50 appears much higher in the tech group.
I think it's different for "unskilled" labor, such as working in a warehouse, but it's not like being a plumber or an electrician is that hard on your body.
I'm sorry but I would need some really compelling evidence to believe that's less sustainable into middle age than repetitive, difficult manual labor. The idea seems absurd on its face and I see many people sitting at desks right up till they're eligible for Social Security.
You say that but the number of people I've seen go under from mainly brain work is not to be sniffed at, and once they do they're affected for years.
I mean part of that can be blamed on themselves - a lot of people seem to pressure themselves to stay busy, to work 14 hour days, to do all the things, keep up with all the things, have a day job and a side gig and passive income and contribute to open source while reading X books per week and doing meditation to try and compensate for not taking downtime.
But others can be blamed on the industry / environment; think excessive meetings so that the non-developers feel useful, forced social events, or piling on more and more responsibilities onto people (just think of how many languages, environments, frameworks, applications, etc you're expected to know at your current day job.). Under the cool names of "full-stack developer" or "DevSecOps teams".
Stop working from home, go to the office and socialise. Stop comparing yourself to Netflix $900k jobs. Take holidays. Stop side hustling some SaaS app that will never go anywhere.
Get a hobby that isn’t focused on making money. HN isn’t the real world.
Software development has huge levels of team work and social interaction baked in. And the positions where you don't have that happen to be the ones where no one knows how fast you actually work.
Frequent breaks, knee pads, using a proper respirator, other ppe? Knee pads make a huge difference for me, at least, and a back brace to encourage proper form when lifting, if I'm doing something that involves a lot of weight.
You don’t have to do this and let yourself degrade. Many engineers I know including myself don’t. You have to prioritize your health and there is definitely room to work on software and stay healthy if you make it a priority. The first step is not to work for a hellish company that wants you slugging away 80+ hours a week.
It's not exactly a skill they teach you at college. Once you understand concept of work-life balance by yourself it's a bit late and takes huge effort to recover.
I'm not sure how this squares with the statistics shared in the article that the average (not sure if median or mean) ages of many trades is in the 50s. Evidently they can continue to perform these jobs into middle age and beyond.
If he was union or in an area with a strong union he may not be the one going into crawl spaces and doing more physically damaging work. And electrical is probably the best trade in terms of physical wear and tear, maybe hvac too.
Ask a construction worker in their 50's how their body feels.
Respectfully, pedantically limiting the phrase "wearing out" to some subset of conditions that conveniently excludes accumulated injuries, the deterioration of cartilage, and other load/repetition-induced joint debilitation adds nothing to this conversation.
Not all injuries are at a gross level. Tendons and muscles get micro tears, cartilage gets worn down into mush, bones get tiny fractures. The human body repairs the best it can, but there’s a reason so many older tradesmen have bad backs, bad knees, degenerative arthritis and so on.
Not to mention major injuries are still a big risk factor. Broken fingers, destroyed shoulder joints, missing fingernails, deep burns, scarred cuts, etc. Often never seen by a doc too and never healing properly.
As many others have mentioned, the conditions are far more controlled and consistent for athletes. On another level we're also talking about different socioeconomic classes. For obvious reasons it's much more common for upper class people to talk and think about their longterm health and take both preventative action and spend money and time going to the doctor/PT if something is causing them even minor pain.
You've done some of the work, but do you know many middle-aged or older tradespeople? Their joints are shot and they have aches all over and they fuck up their back on the regular.
There's your speculation and incredulity, and then there's all the people I've talked to who do it. They disagree with you.
I fucked up my back regularly until I'd had enough and started doing a lot of back strengthening exercises, which virtually eliminated the problem. Been doing them ever since. The doc who helped me with this told me that back injuries come from weak backs. You have to specifically work on those muscles to avoid injury.
I found out when waterskiing that you don't get strong waterskiing, you get injured. You have to spend a lot of time in the gym so you don't get injured waterskiing.
Back when I was younger in Seattle, lumberjacking was still a thing. They told me that the limiting thing was injury. They'd work into their sixties. There aren't many jobs harder than lumberjacking. I wouldn't mess with any of them, either, they are freakin' strong and I'm sure they could cleave me from head to toe with a casual swing of the axe.
I'm not in the least surprised that people working in trades mess up their backs, nor do I doubt that they do. But injuring one's back is not the same as wearing it out.
Huh? Yoga poses are purposeful, they're supposed to be beneficial. Contorting your body all sorts of odd ways while performing a trade is an entirely separate thing from a yoga pose.
I've done it many times, even hot yoga. I also have extensive experience wiring up and decommissioning data centers, involving lots of odd contorting. Yoga felt a lot better for me than contorting my body in odd ways.
Agreed - when you're crawling through a tight attic, staying on the joists and avoiding HVAC ducts, going into weird poses to drive j-box mounting screws or something... it's not about staying in "correct" poses.
It’s not a good analogy. If I stress my bone hard, it strengthens. This is why someone that runs has heavier / stronger leg bones compares to a coucher.
On the car side, every time you bend a piece of metal it gets weaker. It cannot repair itself. It cannot get stronger from use.
No. Cumulative load wrecks you in the long run. Consider how many weightlifters end up with multiple back surgeries. They got stronger for awhile, then they couldn’t walk.
There are multiple things being lumped together. The body constantly heals itself, but doing blue collar work the issue is that the cumulative load regularly exceeds your recovery ability. Athletes can stay under the limit if they are careful.
Irrespective of job or sports people can randomly develop degenerative diseases as they age that can be exacerbated by work.
You are looking at the pointy end, people on roids and HGH that lift 8 hours a day.
Compare to someone that lifts for 1 hour 3x a week. He will have stronger bones and joints than either a desk potatoe (no stress = no buildup) or the tradesmen (too much stress without rest = failure)
I've been running for 40 years, and lifting for 15. Lifting has virtually eliminated my back pain. Strengthening the muscles helps a lot in preventing injury.
No, I'm not lifting 400 lbs. Weightlifters lift insane weights, does that compare to what physical laborers lift?
The problem is the conditions under which they lift. If you lift weights, you're probably watching your form and taking rests in between your sets. On a jobsite, you're being forced to bring those bricks or that heavy tool over ASAP, and nobody is going to let you get into proper deadlift form. While OSHA standards exist, most companies and techs are just skirting by because of the margins in the business. There's a lot of pressure to get things done fast so they'll fuck up form just to get things done that little bit faster.
I'm a cyclist and a lot of other cyclists are ex-runners whose joints are shot from running. They prefer to cycle because it's easier on the joints but it offers the same headspace as a long run. I also do some climbing and frequently hurt my joints (shoulder and elbow are frequent ones, wrist from time-to-time.) I have lots of friends who also climb who have had to take short or even long breaks from climbing due to the effects on their joints. Lifting on a jobsite is more dynamic than weightlifting and closer to climbing.
It's not about actually wearing out your joints (which can probably take crazy amounts of load and stress over years if you use correct form and rest appropriately), it's more accumulated injury from incentives to use bad form.
I've been running for 40 years. I suffered from knee and hip pain from it, until I read about the biomechanics of running. I ran doing the "heel strike", where the heel hits first. I could feel the shock in my knee and my hip with every stride.
I decided to switch to "ball strike" where I landed ball of the foot first and then rolled onto the foot. I did not feel the shock in my knee or hip after that. A couple weeks later, the joint pain began to subside, and for the last decade has not bothered me.
It takes a while to switch to ball strike, now it feels perfectly natural. Try this experiment. Run with your shoes on, and note your heel strike. Take your shoes off and run again - you'll run on the balls of your feet. This was the epiphany for me.
Running also builds up your heart, lungs and muscles quickly, but the tendons and joints and bones need years to adapt. A lot of people get into trouble by feeling strong and overdoing it. Ya gotta hold back and give it years.
I agree that if you're still having trouble with running, biking is a great alternative.
With your back, take the time to do proper back strengthening exercises. They greatly helped reduce the rate and severity of my repeated back injuries. I strongly recommend talking to a doctor to get a regimen of these exercises. They paid off for me big time. More that once I thought oh crap, I hurt my back again. But nope! Woo-hoo!
I'm not at all suggesting that tradesmen don't get injured on the job and the accumulation of such can be crippling.
>Running also builds up your heart, lungs and muscles quickly, but the tendons and joints and bones need years to adapt. A lot of people get into trouble by feeling strong and overdoing it. Ya gotta hold back and give it years.
Any good resources on this? Getting into running in my early 30s. Already switched to zero-drop, I think I'm ball-striking.
But do you run and lift for 40-60hrs a week for 40 years? If I did an hour or two of electrical work a day instead of 8 to 10 my knees would probably have lasted longer than 17 years.
How can you be so capable Walter, yet so oblivious to the fact that people who make their money with their bodies end up wearing that body out well before their life is over?
>Just like crashing your car isn't the same thing as wearing it out.
Not taking precautions, for instance, when driving over potholes can wear certain facets of the car down without doing significant immediate damage, the same way that taking certain falls or hits can wear a body down. You don't need a crash.
I got sick of that myself and got an electric screwdriver, which helped a lot. Keep in mind that I did all the low voltage wiring in the house myself, it was a couple thousand feet of wire. A lot of it was overhead work - boring holes in the joists, etc. I wouldn't say it was pleasant, and lifting that heavy 90 degree Milwaukee drill was a chore.
But I did figure the electricians knew what they were doing, so I watched them. I bought the same tools they used, and went to work.
I've got a friend who went into the trades instead of going to university, he (correctly) recognised that what he was passionate about wouldn't even pay for the degree (composing music) so he figured he'd do it on the side and do a trade to earn a living. Unfortunately due to a workplace accident he cut the tendons in his wrist with a box cutter, which means he can't now play the piano for any reasonable amount of time. So i guess it's less "the body wears out" but more "you accumulate a lot of small injuries that eventually prevent you from perfoming your trade"
Football players bodies do wear out, but most just lose too much speed and athleticism before it truly happens.
Joe Thomas, one of the greatest left tackles of all time, retired because he was going to need a new knee. His back also had a lot of issues. Losing a bunch of weight has allowed him to put off some of the surgeries, but he said his knee was bone on bone by the end.
Personally I sometimes wonder if I'd have enjoyed plumbing water more than plumbing code as I'd be meeting more people face to face, physically active, and it can get surprisingly complex (Berkeley, I think, offers a postgrad cert in plumbing buildings like sky scrapers which I saw advertised the other day)
Probably not. Maybe you just really like people, but in a lot of trades, the people you meet are grumpy. They don't want to meet you; they just want their problem solved. Either they're building a new thing (and trying to meet an aggressive schedule... and are probably behind by the time they bring in the plumbers) or repairing an old thing (and dealing with people who are cranky that the thing failed).
It's probably not as bad as tech support, where you can guarantee that the person on the other end of the phone is angry. But it's probably at least as bad as retail, and nobody ever says "I love meeting people so I'll go handle cash from strangers".
I know that there are extroverts in the world who get a charge out of meeting new people every day. And there's a big bonus to not sitting in a chair in front of a screen, especially if you're one of those. But I've got a feeling you're a lot happier with coding-level salaries and meeting strangers after you clock out.
Yes! I grew up in California and my dad was a tradesperson. The union is the only reason my siblings and I had health insurance growing up. He never got any vacation time though, insurance was the main benefit of the union I think.
Unfortunately, other states in the US have much weaker unions or none at all, especially in the south.
I am English but moved to the Bay Area a few years back and became friends with a union electrician from Alabama so this conversation comes up a little - it sounded like unions are supported in the south even if they look a little different. However I’m not American and am not certain about that at all :)
No one is forced to take a union job if they don't want to, those same laws break private contracts between unions and employers and force unions to represent non-dues paying employees.
Does not seem like given a lot of the auto factories in the south are not unionized and multiple attempts to unionize them failed because the workers reject them.
Then there was that famous failed attempt at unionizing the Amazon warehouse in Alabama? I think? Yeah there was a lot of shady stuff going down but it just does not look good among all the other failures.
Tech people always say this but forget that being a plumber means being on their knees wading thru poop water and likely being unable to work when you reach a certain, fairly young age.
I get it, trades are important, but let's not glamorize them.
> Tech people always say this but forget that being a plumber means being on their knees wading thru poop water and likely being unable to work when you reach a certain, fairly young age.
Depends on the type of plumber.
Plumbers doing boiler installs or hydronic heating systems aren't dealing with toilets at all, they are doing applied engineering and math however.
I have done far worse than wade through poop water on my knees when I worked as a teenager on a paintball site / as a rifleman in the army! But to each their own :)
Not all countries have toilets that block as easily as American / Canadian toilets. So wading through dirty water is less likely in the UK for example.
I have no issue glamorizing potentially six figure salaries that are useful to society! Personally I view software as a trade with a bubble salary range atm, but think it’ll pivot towards a trade over the next decade or two.
The people I’ve known in trade unions locally spent a lot of time not working waiting on the bench for the next job. The work was much closer to being a short term contractor not at all in control of finding new work.
My brother in law lives in SC where unionization and labor protection is especially weak. I don't think that the balance of power is going to shift away from the bosses and towards him any time soon.
Is this more of a US issue? I'm ex tradesman and know a lot of tradespeople in my part of the world and they're often some of the best off and fittest people I know. Being on your feet all day and moving around seems to be good for the human body rather than sitting behind a desk for 8 hours which we now is incredibly bad for you.
Depends on your personality and the jobs you've taken. I know auto mechanics wrenching it into their late 60s. A friend's dad owns grocery stores and still does stocking in his late 60s. He puts our step count to shame. I also know fly-by-night moving companies that work kids into the ground by having them lift things in all sorts of bad positions. I know impatient people who will lift with bad form because they're in a rush. (I don't want to imply that these are negative personality traits. Many, many people have a hard time dealing with the patience required to lift things properly for a job.)
20 years ago, the going rate for installing a socket in an existing wired and ready to go junction box was $50. It's about a 5 minute job. I know it's about 5 minutes because I've done a lot of them myself.
I'm sure prices have gone up a lot in the last couple decades.
The electrician is not charging to do a 5 minute job. They do not know that when they accept the job over the phone.
They are charging for their time to drive to and from you, the possibility that the job is more involved than described, and the liability from doing the job. And the opportunity cost of not accepting a different job due to your job.
This is what a contractor does when he doesn't want the job because it's basically too small and would be more of an annoyance than anything worth doing. Bid an outrageous amount and then if the client says "yes" at least you're making some money.
He's probably got a backlog of large jobs he can make more money on. So if he's going to come out and do outlet installation on one house, he's going to bid an amount that is worth delaying other work.
For small/simple household jobs, you should call a handyman not a trade contractor.
FWIW I paid about $100 an outlet recently (as part of a much larger project). Yes you can get 99 cent receptacles at Home Depot, yes they will be crap (residential grade) and likely not up to code. NEC requires all circuits in the kitchen and bathroom be GFCI protected, and all kitchen outlets to also be tamper resistant. A GFCI, non-TR receptacle costs bout $15 at Home Depot, and again you're talking bargain basement units that a professional electrician may not want to install for risk of having to eat the cost of a return visit. Commercial and hospital grade outlets both cost more ($30+, $50+ respectively for tamper resistant GFCI). The outlets with USB A+C ports start at around $60 per.
In some jurisdictions you may be able to get away with one GFCI outlet per circuit, but then you're paying for their time to map out which circuits are which.
One thing about contractors is that you're paying them for the time they aren't working.
As in, they're probably not working steadily, 40 hours a week, every week, but they still have bills to pay, and this down time must be factored into their rates for the profession to be sustainable.
On the other hand, if they DO work 40 hours a week, every single week, they can probably afford to raise their rates...
Have not been an electrician, but I have been a software contractor, and the idea is the same.
It's hardly surprising that a 5 minute job that requires travel to and from the customer site on your own dime costs enough to cover their travel time & costs; 20 years ago they had to read a map, plan a route to their jobs for the day, drive to and from the site.
Then do it yourself. I change my own oil and filters. They're able to charge that much because plenty of people can't do it themselves.
But the reality is they've also got the businesses expenses of maintaining their work vehicle, their insurance, their healthcare, etc. That $50 probably only translates to $20 into usable income.
You're going to pay for a couple of hours no matter what. He isn't just getting salary either. There's employment taxes that need to be paid, tools and transportation costs, insurance, benefits, etc.
Having done one myself, I blew off the fuses and burned some wires, because I bought a wrong thing,so yeah, it's a 5 min job but you still need to know what to do.
Yeah because you are paying for more than just their work on site. You are paying their commute, their time taking calls and finding bids, the maintenance on their vehicles, extra gas because they aren't transporting ladders in a focus, the maintenance and replacement of tools, their insurance, savings for market downturns, etc.
The last time I called a plumber they ran a power snake about 60 feet down the sanitary line and cut out a pretty amazing chunk of tree roots (I called them because water had started to backup into my basement utility sink).
I was pretty happy to pay the 4 or 5 times what the day rental for machine would have been. Took em about 25 minutes.
They are like meaty unreserved cloud resources. You want to call a plumber at any time and they drive out with their expertise, their $200k of vehicle and equipment, insurances and fix something. It will cost!
This is the cost of not having a social safety net and public services, where everybody pays a little bit and everybody benefits. It's not just the people who are self-employed that benefit. Their customers also benefit from lower prices, because self-employed people don't have such high expenses. Of course, it all gets paid for eventually anyway, but consistently over time, and ideally proportional to wealth and/or income, rather than randomly punishing people who happen to need repair work done.
If the parent comment meant universal healthcare, you'd absolutely see the lack of health insurance premiums reflected in prices. As a contractor, it's definitely a chunk of my rate.
But universal healthcare is paid for by taxes on people who earn good money, which these people do. The costs being thrown around in this thread are about on par with the UK anyway.
You miss the point. Universal payer is not the utopia you think it is. People at the bottom may pay less, but people at the top pay more, "distributing and diluting these costs". That results in relatively well earning professions paying high company and income taxes, resulting in identical fees for fitting a socket in the UK (a universal payer society) as the US (a look after yourself society).
Ergo, you've shifted the money around but fundamentally haven't changed anything, you carpenter isn't going to work for minimum wage suddenly because his tax burden won't allow it.
It's also highly dangerous. I knew a guy that was the electrician to a 50+ year old high rise. He could not turn off the power, don't know why, so he worked with live current all the time. He told me that he would go to the main power source and he could hear it crackle, while he worked on it,since there was so much current going through it.
I dont know about residential buildings, but working on live circuits is a thing, and there are techniques to do it safish-ly. Namely dont touch two wires and dont be ground.
Arc, TIG, and MIG welding is fairly low voltage, like 15 - 30 volts. To start the arc there's a brief high-voltage high-frequency burst, but it's current limited. So it's pretty safe as far as electrocution goes.
I'm a hobby welder (going on 2 years). My inverter stick welder will go to 90 amps on a 120V outlet and up to 180 amps on a 240V outlet. It's not uncommon for engine drive welders (like what you see on trucks) to go up to 250 or 300 amps.
2 things that make welding relatively safe from electrocution are: (1) the steel you're welding on makes a much better path for electricity flow than your body (especially when you're wearing heavy welding gloves), (2) welding in a dry environment (not raining, not standing in water, not drenched in sweat, etc.).
Get in a union shop. My father was making between $100k-$150k/year USD (we were in Canada) in a SUPER low cost of living area as an electrician in one of the car factories. He retired 10 years ago so I imagine the salaries have gone up. Now he's living in Spain off a pension from the company, with company health insurance, playing golf everyday.
hi, tradesworker here (IMU union diesel mechanic.) i learn and practice python and pretend i understand ai/ml on hn.
your brother in law sounds stout, and at risk of getting into a bar fight i gotta say it: it just doesnt sound like hes there yet. if he had trade certifications, state certs and experience on his own, there isnt a shop i can think of in the midwest that wouldnt offer everything the HN hacker crowd gets at a white collar interview. hell, skilled cert welders in the midwest pull down enough to pay off a new f250 in a couple of years. electricians ARE a valid and important trade, and linemen are the pornstars among their ranks. he needs to seek out a better shop too, but that goes without saying.
the progress is: work hard, get promoted to job captain or foreman, and eventually if you want start your own shop. if not you eventually wind up a shop manager or something with more pay than title.
I’ve also seen plenty of career helpers, but they’re almost always screw-ups, unambitious, or both. After all half of the population is sub 100 IQ, and some otherwise smart people just like slamming beers, chasing tail, and showing up hungover every shift more then getting promoted.
Making journeyman in most trades around here means a comfortable middle class salary, sending you kids to the less expensive private schools, a boat if you save up. Beats what you’d make being a teacher, social worker, or librarian.
> His company pushes hard to get jobs finished fast, causing people to cut safety corners
Man, this bothers me in software, where physical human safety isn't even on the line. I can't even imagine dealing with that when somebody could actually die.
I feel like it's a weird situation when the pay is low, but there is overtime available and there's pressure to work fast. Why wouldn't a company raise prices, increase pay and slow down if there's more than a standard day of work available and customers ready/waiting? Is it more of industry issue or that specific company issue then?
Because business is a market. If your competitors are offering cheaper, faster jobs why would they pick you? As long as the corner cutting doesn't affect the customer, the latter is a better deal. The cynical reality is that safety violations affecting workers don't really matter to most customers, the end result and the cost of obtain it do.
The more realistic scenario is less pay in exchange for slower hours.
You're missing the part where higher cost reduces your backlog, so there's lower waiting time overall. (I'm assuming there's backlog if the company is trying to rush jobs and allowing overtime)
As a client, I don't care if a contractor has one or a hundred jobs. If one contractor is providing the same quality job at the same price in shorter time, that's strictly better. There has to be a reason to justify higher costs. If that's not either higher quality, or faster time to completion, there is no reason to command a premium.
Why is a market behaving in an efficient manner a weird situation to you? Lower prices for consumers and faster job completion is good for everyone. Use regulation to fix the safety issues and protect workers from exploitation.
Low barrier to entry means if prices rise, more people join the industry and drive prices down again. When overtime and overworking becomes too much, people exit or don't join and prices rise.
In practice I see difference in prices between local companies and there are reasons to not go for the cheapest price. It doesn't make market inefficient if you say you do a better job and will charge more than competition. Some people won't choose you, but then it's about setting the correct pricing/demand point. If there's more demand than can be fulfilled, the prices can raise - that's as market-efficient as it gets.
For a short time I worked as a machine operator in a production company, automotive industry. The CEO used to yell during meetings on the production floor that "the production must be high quality, fast, and cheap; there is no 'choose two' nonsense".
Yes, the CEO was going down to yell on the blue collar workers making pennies.
Doesn't the career path in the trades lead to owning your own business? Obviously, not for everyone. But the scope for advancement and riches is certainly there.
Yes, this is where/how you make money in the trades. Or you specialize in something esoteric and potentially dangerous like underwater welding or high voltage linesman.
If you stay as a line worker in a union you will do OK but won't be rich (unless you live frugally and save/invest a lot).
Those "we need more X" news articles are the standard way for the owners of wealth to complain about high wages - and to encourage younger folks to pick those careers.
In state with occupational licensing for trades, they do have decent wages. In states without that licensing, hiring immigrant workers is the way to drive down wages/costs.
The problem with a lot of trades people is that they think they need to work for other people. I think anyone in a trade should be working on the side and charging what they're worth. I'm a programmer and I typically do my own work around the house. Just recently, I redid my plumbing so that it'd look nice aesthetically and function a bit better. My problem is that most tradesman I come across will sell themselves short but not offer to do the best jobs. For example, I had someone redo the waste water drain because of how he said the job needed to be done. At the end, he messed up and sorta did a safe but half ass job that I could have done. If I had known he'd do such shotty work, I'd just have paid double and gotten someone to add iron pipes.
I assume the opposite. like other sectors in the US economy (MDs), its likely we're going to have to keep importing people to take care of us since we're all focussed on winning and don't have time to wash our own socks or bend our own conduit.
Can you elaborate on his credentials? Is he licensed? The apprenticeship path for any trade can be grueling. You're doing all the grunt labor for low wages because you are getting on-the-job training. You are also YOUNG and able-bodied, typically 18 right out of high school if not younger through a vo-tech. But once you reach to that journeyman level at 3-4 years and get your State License that's when your pay really increases, especially if you start your own company.
> It isn't a bad career, but there are major reasons why it would be unattractive.
Tell him to look at moving to New Zealand. Good salary (for NZ), 4 weeks paid vacation and plenty of paid public holidays (mandatory) and a lot of jobs going. No health insurance but few people here have health insurance, and anything accident related is covered by a mandatory insurance (basically a tax) scheme.
Here's the problem with it all, tradesmen are all too eager to undercut each other for some reason. There's so much work, especially for trades that require a license that anyone that isn't charging premium money is a fool. And there's lots of foolish tradesmen with short term thinking and eager to sell their services as a low price option. Often with low price work to boot.
You rarely see older guys going for cheap and it's because they know it's a foolish thing to do.
Free market competition should be outlawed! Collusion should be legal. Unless I don't like your virtue signals, then you're a greedy capitalist robber baron!
When you "compete" by working in a way that damages the worker's health, yes, that should be outlawed. (Negative externalities are the fancy economics term)
Large corporations are already legalised collusion. Allowing those with competing interests to "collude" at the same level is a necessary counterbalance to that.
I'm not saying anything about that. What I'm saying is a decent amount of tradesmen don't know what they are worth and undercharge. In most instances it's because they underestimate the scope of the job they're taking on and are eager to get business. But business is generally easy to get in non-recession times and they could bid higher and still win jobs. It's often inexperienced guys and it's why you see so many startup construction/trade companies go out of business quickly. There's business - they just don't know how to run one.
Define “white collar job.” Answering the phones at a law firm is now a job that requires a four year college degree. But it pays very little compared to a skilled trade.
Your brother in law should join the IBEW (or leave Arizona or whatever state he is in that has weak unions) as union electricians receive all of the things he does not (I manage union electricians).
Is he doing residential wiring? That’s the bottom of the barrel for electrical work, unfortunately. The commercial market is where the bulk of the good work is.
Unions aren't even the half of it, they're just so in demand.
Strong bank profitability and lending are basically the bedrock of our economy, people's homes have appreciated so much they're able to borrow obscene amounts to renovate, and the construction industry as a result is incredibly strong.
A lot of these threads devolve into "have you tried paying more" but I'd also like to highlight "have you actually tried telling Gen Z that". I'm 35, from basically as early as I can remember until sophmore year of college I was told constantly by every adult (and I mean every adult not just the ones that had degrees) in my life to go to college, get a degree, any degree. So yeah I went to college. It was aggressively marketed to me for over a decade and that affected my aspirations.
Doesn't help either I'm sure that unions, the organizations willing/capable of marketing-to, teaching/training people and giving them some sense of camaraderie, have been attacked for decades as being variously inefficient to straight evil.
I'm a millennial. First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. So everyone went and got a college degree, and since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job. And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless.
Then we were told to go into STEM. So lots of people went into STEM even though they didn't want to, there are not enough STEM jobs for all of them, and in some cases the reason there are always jobs available is because they chew everyone up and spit them out (looking at you, Amazon). I got lucky. A lot of folks did not.
Then we were told what we really need is nurses. So folks went to nursing school in droves. I'm not sure where we are with that, because it seems like hospitals still never have enough nurses but that those folks that went to nursing school also didn't manage to improve their situation much.
Now we're told the money and demand is in trades. And that might be true, and that might remain true, but we've been given the wrong advice for so long we just stopped listening.
> First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do.
Something strange is happening here that I can't quite understand. Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that are way older than me and I first started college in 1999. Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me.
Of course I knew that some majors were more lucrative than others. Of course everybody else around me knew the same. Of course people my age at the time actively engaged in conversations about "what will you do with this degree when you're done?" Of course people who majored in less practical subjects thought about this (when they weren't actively trying to put it out of their mind).
A character (played by pre-hairplugs Jeremy Piven) in the movie PCU (released in 1994) ridicules a student for majoring in Sanskrit, saying, "You're majoring in a 5000 year-old dead language?" Everybody in the audience is supposed to get why that's funny.
And yet I keep hearing people say they had no idea that any of this was true. It strains credulity.
Frankly, people have been repeating this line about how they couldn't possibly have known all this for so long that kids in college today weren't even born yet when it started. Eventually people are going to have to admit that they did know (or should have).
Here is what we were told repeatedly and constantly throughout middle and high school (mid to late 90s):
* You should go to college.
* You should do what you love.
* Sure some jobs pay more that others, but that doesn't matter if you are doing what you love.
What was completely left out of the discussion was that some degrees won't actually enable you to do what you love. They'll just load you with tons of debt, making it harder to even get by let alone do what you love as a side gig. I never once heard a guidance councilor or other adult tell that to me or my peers. The "it is rare to get that sort of job" speech was reserved for people who wanted to play sports or be rock-stars, not those thinking about an academic degree. Maybe it was because I was from an underprivileged community, and any students who showed a desire to go to college were encouraged, not stifled.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about... a friend of mine studied archaeology in college and wound up starting her career in the curation department of a major museum. Another studied history and wound up becoming a tenure-track history professor.
Now granted they both worked crazy hard in school, but the idea that it's "obvious bullshit" isn't true at all. Archaeologists and historians are real jobs that exist. I say that with a straight face.
I'm not saying that it's easy to become either, and you're definitely not going to become rich doing either of them, but they're certainly attainable if you're truly driven and love that kind of work. They're not get-lucky fantasies like NBA star or celebrity influencer.
There are 500 NBA players, and another 500 minor league players and 5000 practicing archaeologists. So it's not too far off.
I have 1 friends who is tenure track (stem which is significantly easier) but 14-15 who got PhDs weren't able to find tenure track position. But two friend started an internationally acclaimed bands. And another who is an internationally published author.
So sure these jobs exist but archaeologist and historian are probably closer to rock star or NBA player than they are accountant or developer.
Except there's orders of magnitude more competition for those NBA players though, than there is for archaeology (or historian). Especially when you realize how mind-numberingly tedious it mostly is, so much cataloguing seemingly endless shards... (Or endless 16th-century documents, if you're a historian.)
But if you've really got your heart set on archaeology/history, they're not fantasies. They're just extremely niche. You're right that the parallel isn't "developer", it's more like "database engine developer". Albeit much much lower pay, in most cases. ;)
Conditional on playing college ball, there is maybe 1 order of magnitude difference in terms of competition. If you play in college there's a 1.2% chance you play in the NBA. And probably a 10-15% chance of working as an archaeologist condition on getting a degree same as getting a tenure track professorship conditioned on getting a PhD in History.
One of the biggest differences though, is you figure out whether or not you're getting into the NBA at aged 20, after going to school on an athletic scholarship.
You figure out you're not going to get tenure at 32 after finishing up your 3rd post doc, with 250k in student loans.
Strong second on this point. It was especially rough on couples since you need to find two jobs and deal with things like what happens if your tenure track job is in a field/area which assumes everyone has family wealth (you’ll see - in 2022 - faculty jobs listed in NYC paying $40k!). Don’t forget there’s often a narrow window: too many years out of your Ph.D program and it gets harder since you’re assumed to be stale/flawed even if the true constraint on the job market was budget cuts.
I’m reminded of a friend who moved - with no prior experience living outside of the U.S. - to Tasmania because that’s the one place in the world where their partner could get a permanent job when they were on the market. That’s worked out well for their family but it’s nothing like the way a software developer can be flexible.
I think a lot of people who major in those subjects with very competitive jobs just don't have it in them either skillwise or motivationwise to work that hard. They have a semi interest in them, and the grading is not as harsh as many STEM fields, and they might like the idea of a not too hard job to get in those fields, but they don't have the mettle for graduate work and several underling stints to really make that a career. And college advisors are doing them a shameful disservice not to mention the actual time and intensity commitment needed to do those things.
> They'll just load you with tons of debt, making it harder to even get by let alone do what you love as a side gig
That seems to be a somewhat US-specific problem. In many other countries, university education is much more affordable, in some cases even entirely free. In my country (Australia), the government pays two-thirds of the tuition cost of most undergraduate degrees, and will lend you the remaining third - while that debt is still a burden for some, it is nowhere near as bad as the US. Other countries (such as France or Scotland), the government pays 100% of tuition
> Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me.
I certainly knew people in ~2000 who were going to college to study things like psychology, who felt the abstract skills of 'learning to learn', writing, reasoning with a bit of statistics and spreadsheet operation would help them get jobs like marketing, sales, analysts, strategic consulting, HR etc.
I suspect if you got your degree in psychology from Harvard, that might be true - but if your degree is from a mediocre university, probably not.
Yup, and I think they were right -- I know a lot of people in marketing, sales, consulting, and program management who majored in psychology. In my anecdotal experience, it opens more doors than an Econ major, for example.
And you don't need to go to Harvard at all. Certainly the school you go to counts for something, but it's not like psych is an "indulgent" degree that needs a good college to "compensate" for. It's a very normal degree. The social sciences tend to translate very well to the business world, a good blend of quantitative research together with qualitative analysis that mirrors business initiatives well.
I dunno, I studied psychology at a good-but-not-great university and knew many psychology majors. I eventually Learned to Code (TM), but it seems that plenty of my peers leveraged those soft skills you mentioned to get pretty decent career-oriented jobs in the fields you mentioned. I would probably do things differently with the benefit of hindsight, but I have no doubt that the soft skills were a benefit to my peers, and even to me in my tech career.
>> Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries
Sure but that never stopped anyone from pulling out BLS statistics showing life-time earning potential of an BA in english vs a highschool diploma.
But the point of bringing up "any degree" isn't that any student thought (or any guidance counselor said) that underwater basket weaving and electrical engineering had the same potential it's that we were told to go to college even if we had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives. A degree was the important thing even if it was in something that we didn't want, even if we didn't want a degree at all.
I’m an older millennial who went to a not great high school and an ok state university.
Of all the people from high school still working dead end service jobs, I don’t know any with a college degree.
Sure there are people who studied English who aren’t making tons of money, but they also aren’t stuck working at Walmart like some of the people who don’t have degrees are.
An English degree isn’t enough to get you a $100k a year job out of college, but it is enough for just about anyone to get their foot in the door to a career where they can make close to that eventually.
Your sample size and personal experiences are small.
I can easily contast your story with my own limited anecdote. I grew up in a poor dysfunctional family in a high school so bad it nearly was state mandated. I dropped out of university two years in. The rich kids in my class and many of my peers got degrees. Yet very few moved away and of those who did they all struggle to be more than entry level office workers or interns making double minimum wage at best Yet somehow I'm making 6 figures.
And my anecdote was in response to the OPs anecdote, which was refuting BLS statistics.
My anecdote is much closer to BLS statistics.
When you say they are all making double minimum wage at best, that’s less than the bottom decile for college graduates. Your not experience is not representative at all.
On an adjacent note, I'm really tired of the "underwater basket weaving" short hand being used. There's either a real degree you think is useless (which the above thread notes doesn't look nearly so useless by statistics) or there's not.
There's a fairly long history of people inventing what they think is taught at colleges as a straw man to then criticize them in some way and it doesn't contribute to anything for the usual reasons a fallacy doesn't.
At the college I went to (low-mid tier state uni) the Art History degree was basically a degree in social justice and feminism. I had close friends in that program and some other humanities and was able to observe the curriculum. The stuff you expect to learn was a tiny fraction.
Hell, I audited the main American art course. We spent multiple weeks on indigenous textiles and pottery (not quite baskets I guess), multiple weeks on modernist and feminist painters. We didn't even touch american sculpture and spent less than a week on 'serious' painters. Saint gaudens, Sargent and the Boston painters, not even mentioned.
All of this is a class about an Art History degree. You know what that isn't? A STEM degree.
How many jobs there are which require a knowledge of "American Sculpture"?
It's going to be less then the number which require a knowledge of the history of feminism and social justice.
Which is to say, by making the changes you are implying should be made...you'd probably be more unemployable at the end of it because their ain't that many museums.
> are way older than me and I first started college in 1999.
I was told not to major in "underwater basketweaving" in 1983, or otherwise I'd be garbage man--as if that were not one of the most important jobs in a society! It's been the same class-warfare BS for coming up on half a century: demean low paying jobs at all costs for reasons I still don't understand.
"demean low paying jobs at all costs for reasons I still don't understand."
A lot of the demeaning came from the low wage workers themselves. Both my grandparents were blue collar. One painted houses, one was an elevator mechanic. They essentially forbade their children from going into the trades. "Learn to make a living with your brain, not your back" was what my dad heard constantly from his father while growing up. And so my father went to college and became an engineer.
Same. Early '90s. Nobody was telling us "any degree will do". They were saying "You should go to college, and if you do, major in computer science, engineering, pre-med, biotech, (sometimes) business, and so on." I remember that as a pretty consistent message during high school career guidance talks and through freshman and sophomore years in college.
I'm a bit older, but my whole life teachers pounded into our heads "go to college" and get any degree. My dad was denied a management position purely because he had no degree (any degree at all would have been enough and he would have got it), so what they said wasn't necessarily wrong, but it was reckless and has led to a lot of hindered lives. I was sorely disappointed when I graduated with my marketing degree and it didn't matter to anybody. I went back and got a CS degree, so I'm ok now, but I did miss the first few years of my kids' lives working full time to support them and also doing a CS degree in evenings and weekends for 4 years. It would have been much better to have just done the CS degree. I am a little bitter.
When I went to school for my Associates, I knew the graduation / hire rate of every program near my major. If you asked any professor in my building, they'd say "Go Biomed, every one of them is hired". Students should be smart enough to know the chances they get a job before they go. Ask around, everyone knows your chances to get a job based on your major, and stack that up a little bit.. I always tell kids "ask what the chances are you get hired".
It was common advice for maybe a 5-year span in the 00s. It was born and died pretty quickly, but did more than a little harm in that time. Trouble was, it was kinda true when people started saying it, but wasn't true anymore by the time the people who receive that advice were graduating.
As someone who went to school for English in 2000, I can say that while those jokes existed the context here is misunderstood, they were told by business majors about the liberal arts, or anything academic. Heck in 2000 a CS degree wasn't positioned as that much more valuable than an English degree, and if you looked at the preceding decade you'd see that was statistically true.
The change for the current generation is that for everyone graduating in underwater basketweaving in say 2000, many would find unrelated careers and, because they had a college degree, do fine. With rising college costs and more expectations that workers in high paying fields have specific degrees, that's no longer true.
> in 2000 a CS degree wasn't positioned as that much more valuable than an English degree
Ha! By whom? We had a pretty good idea that it was a solid choice in the early 90s and before. We teased my older brother for going for a bachelor's in business while I went into CS, because we were pretty sure the CS degree would be worth a lot more. He's doing just fine, but mostly because he backfilled the equivalent of a CS education into his work experience.
Right after the dot-com bust, a CS degree was seen as having no future by a lot of people.
The glut of graduates that have come off the pipeline due to the hot tech sector prior to the bust fell off after 2-4 yrs. This actually led to the huge lack of supply of CS graduates in the ensuing decade!
I think it is partially responsible for the high salaries that CS graduates get (of course, it's a small portion of the cause, the bigger factor being huge growth in the sector).
What? I'm not sure where you pulled this concept of that English vs computer science were in anyway comparable in terms of overall pay even in the early 2000s but you might want to cite your sources.
I went to school in 2001 and computer science was one of the hottest fields around by that time, significantly more so than a BA in English. The Georgia institute of technology (Gatech), my alma mater, had a highly competitive computer science career path.
In fact the general advice was that if you really wanted to major in English that it was better to pursue a degree in an adjacent field such as communications so you could more easily transition into journalism, etc.
STEM (doctors, scientists, engineers, etc.) has almost always been a safer career path than liberal arts, assuming you're cut out for it.
I remember seeing something in the late 90s / early 2000s (when I was in college) that broke down the incomes of liberal arts majors who went to law school and those who didn't. It should have convinced me to switch to STEM, but all it did was convince me to go to law school.
Yeah I'm 10 years older than you and never had any thought that "any degree will do". Although perhaps I'm old enough to see that this was legitimate thinking in my predecessors. There was a time when just completing college was fairly uncommon and acted as a class signifier. I believe having a degree, any degree, would have made you an officer automatically in the military (and still does?) and would have opened the door to all kinds of business professions.
Now it's just too common for any old degree to matter. I think perhaps for Ivy League this strategy still works.
I think the "any degree will do" mindset stems from the fact that so many, especially in non-technical fields, never really use their degree. Even my wife who has an engineering degree has spent more than two decades working and not a single day in a job that directly relates to her field of study.
Sure, she would have never gotten those jobs with an English degree but stressing over whether to study the exactly "correct" degree for your career goals isn't necessarily worth the calories.
Having any bachelor's degree is usually a necessary prerequisite to earn a commission as a military officer, but it's not sufficient. There are many enlisted personnel who have degrees but don't become officers, either because they don't want the hassle or don't meet other criteria.
Same with retail management. Maybe things are different these days, but as of ~2010 the highest position at Target you could work without having a degree was team lead.
I think they realized they weren't going to make as much money, but I don't think they realized they would be poor. Poor people generally have less privacy, less dignity, and a harder life. So, maybe they are frustrated there weren't enough safeguards to prevent them from making a decision that lead to them becoming poor.
Is this another way of saying we need to raise the age of majority to something like 25? At some point we have to accept that people are capable of making decisions for themselves and living with the consequences. We don't have to collectively accept blame when they make ill-advised choices. An adult can do research before choosing to go to college, choosing a degree path, choosing to finance it with debt.
I have already had versions of this conversation with my own daughter, who is now 12. We've talked about college, when it makes sense, when it may not, and how to make that decision based on life goals. She's plenty smart enough to understand that she doesn't need a career goal at her age, and that even when she becomes an adult it might change, but what she won't be doing is blindly wandering into college with a random hope of success at the other side.
There's some kind of herd blindness in humans where they'll go on doing something as long as the rest of the herd is doing it - even if they know better.
There are new houses being built on the coast in my country less than a meter above the high water point. At king tides, their sections are already getting lightly flooded.
When sea levels rise, those same people will complain to the council (which is still letting them build there) and seek compensation, even though sea level rise is well understood and anticipated.
People know the risks but carry on because the rest of the herd is doing it.
Customer: They call it "shell shock". It seems to only happen with guidance counselors. They use to make a big deal of it but they let just let it go now 'cuz they always pay for whatever they break and they never bother anybody.
Dante: Well, why guidance counselors?
Customer: Well, if your job was as meaningless as theirs, wouldn't you go crazy too?
Randal: Come to think of it, my guidance counselor was kinda worthless.
If you had bad grades or your parents thought you didn't have a lot of potential, you probably got the "any degree would do" talk over "go into this hard STEM degree"
What is so weird is the idea that the majority of people would have gone into plumbing or welding if they hadn’t been steered wrong by the dumb college people. Or if they had all done that, would those trades have been as wealthy as they supposedly are?
I do think this was forgotten a bit in the mid-late '90s. In the UK, at least. Deindustrialization was really hitting, the "service economy" was booming, and the New Labour government realised that "number of people getting a degree" was a metric it could make go up by shoving more and more people into worse and worse courses. Nobody sat down and did an end-to-end analysis of society's needs. They just wanted headlines.
I think some wires are getting crossed here. It has been a long time since you could truly get any degree, and everything would work. That's honestly more of a Boomer and before thing when college graduates were sparse (and off jobs weren't that common).
It is certainly true, and probably still true, if you go to a truly elite school that any degree will do (consulting will hire any young grad from a top school with good grades), but it has been a long time since you could get any degree from any school. People are badly misinformed if they think you can go to a third-tier state school, get poor grades in a random major, and have an easy time making a lot of money.
>since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job
This makes it sound like a degree is worth less today than it was in the past, which is not true. The income and wealth gap between college degree holders and non-degree holders is higher than at any point in history, and it grows bigger very year.
Most degrees have an unemployment rate of about 5-6%. That's not bad, but it does mean that there are over 2 million college-educated Americans who got degrees and can't find jobs. This minority is much more visible today; they get lots of press coverage and talk about their struggles through social media. This makes it seem like things are getting worse, just like how people tend to think that crime is getting worse, but the reality is things are getting better and college becomes a better deal every year.
>Then we were told what we really need is nurses. So folks went to nursing school in droves.
And generally this paid off, since nurses are in demand and make well above the median salary.
>Then we were told to go into STEM.
Which is decent advice, with a caveat. Most people with STEM degrees could easily pivot into something highly profitable like software development. What people weren't told is that it's difficult to land a profitable role doing research/pure science, especially if you don't have a PhD.
>And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless.
Which is mostly incorrect. Even folks majoring in stuff often touted as "worthless" like art history or gender studies still tend to do better than people without degrees. The catch is that you might end up working a business analyst or a project manager instead of an Egyptologist or whatever you actually majored in. The biggest offender here is Psychology: many new graduates are shocked to discover that no, you cannot actually become a psychologist with just a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, nor are there profitable research opportunities at that level. A psychology degree still looks great on a resume if you're applying to be an HR representative or something, though.
> it's difficult to land a profitable role doing research/pure science, especially if you don't have a PhD
Honestly I'd modify this to say that unless your Ph. D is in physics, mathematics (and you're willing to go into finance) or data science... you're not going to be that much better off.
And the time you spend out of industry you'll never make back. Take a CS degree, go work for any of the big ones and get "senior" next to your name as soon as possible.
This will upset a lot if people buy there are also a lot of college degreed unemployed or minimum wage earning young people that don’t take their careers seriously. The stories of PhD baristas or whatever are nonplussing.
It was well understood that degrees in English, psychology, and the wider arts were useful for teaching, but they weren't going to pay well, unless you were the exceptional minority that had a clear idea of what you were planning on doing.
I really think millennials should have got more real world work experience and internships before committing to overpriced degrees in industries that they didn't really want to work in. With a broader view of the world, one can make better decisions for happiness.
Where is underwater basket weaving a degree? (The answer is: nowhere, it doesn’t exist.) That term is a 50+-year old fictional pejorative used as a stand-in for useless academics. Sadly, the supposedly humorous point is entirely undermined by inventing a degree that doesn’t exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_basket_weaving
FWIW, the St Louis Fed publishes stats on incomes of degree holders, and I recently read them and found out that the average 4-year college degree holder has 2x the income of non-degree holders. (3x for advanced degrees.) Twice is a really big number and it surprised me, it’s much larger than I had suspected. Obviously some degrees make people more money than others, engineering and sciences tend to yield higher incomes than the arts. But, with an average of double the income across all degrees across all people in the US, it’s easy to see why people recommend any ol’ degree at all, and statistically speaking, it’s a valid point and good advice.
Focusing on the idea that it is a made up degree is pretty weird. Of course it is. It is a way of conveying a point. Not everything needs a Wikipedia link. :) it reminds of people that whip their phones out to look up every minute thing mentioned in a conversation. The point is that people have talked about useless degrees to the point that they are lampooned for, as you say, 50+ years, which certainly predates 90s kids. Therefore, there was a widespread cultural awareness that a gender studies degree is not likely to be as valuable as electrical engineering. I think too often people think college education is not needed because they can just Google things but they don’t think how much more efficient it is to just know things and be able to reason for themselves.
Since you ignored my main point in favor of ad-hominems, I’ll repeat it: the idea that any degree will do is well supported by the fact that degree holders earn 2x over non-degree holders on average. The only relevant question in this thread about gender studies majors is what their income is compared to people without a college degree. It’s irrelevant what their income is compared to EE majors.
BTW, you used the word “value” with gender studies but then acknowledged in your last sentence that education has value that is non-monetary; please be careful about using language that conflates income with value (only mentioning since you did it in another comment as well). Gender studies might have people earning relatively lower incomes compared to some other degrees, but that doesn’t mean it has low value; as sub-branch of history and anthropology, and at a time when society is fiercely debating gender, gender studies is particularly relevant and useful and socially valuable today.
As far as underwater basket weaving, if you don’t have any actual examples and have to make up a fake one, then it sounds like the point you’re trying to make probably has no basis in reality, and probably isn’t true. That’s what use of the term “underwater basket weaving” by anyone tells me, and it tends to get trotted out more often on Fox News to make a straw-man point than by reasonable people having a reasonable discussion.
As far as Wikipedia links (or any references), it’s true that not everything needs one, but sometimes they’re helpful to support & clarify a discussion. It wasn’t clear that you knew underwater basket weaving wasn’t a degree, but I also added it because the article contains some interesting and humorous history behind the term “underwater basket weaving”. You could maybe use one or two links here in this thread to back up your claims, for example, about what “people” lambast & talk about, and what “widespread cultural awareness” exists. As it stands, you’ve stated a lot of opinion and assumptions without demonstrating much relevance. Who cares if someone somewhere lambasted their biased idea of a useless degree? Why should that have any bearing on what anyone else does? Answering those questions thoughtfully might require a link or two…
Not parent commenter, but I heard the same at the time and thought it was lunacy. The justification was “well, [relative/friend/aquaintance] has a great job in sales at megacorp and their degree is in experimental theology.”
We just need to give every high school student a print out and a website showing salary per career, years of college required, and percentage of graduates that find a job in their field.
Is this not a thing in the USA/world? Here there is a government/school system website for careers. Listing educational requirements, average salaries and high/low end ranges, how much demand there is for the career, working conditions, and often interviews with people in industry.
> Then we were told what we really need is nurses. So folks went to nursing school in droves. I'm not sure where we are with that, because it seems like hospitals still never have enough nurses but that those folks that went to nursing school also didn't manage to improve their situation much.
To be fair, we just had a pandemic, and we're still reeling from that. Lots of folks quit because of burn-out.
> we've been given the wrong advice for so long we just stopped listening.
Shouldn't we recognize that things change and life can be unpredictable? Rather than being jaded that every adult in our lives didn't have a magical crystal ball, maybe there are more productive things that can be done?
Gen Z & younger Millennials constantly get shit for blaming everyone else for everything always, and taking no responsibility or being accountable for their own actions...but I would argue that comments like the above aren't going to dispel that.
Maybe it reads different than it's intended, but a huge part of being an adult is adapting to an ever changing world and finding a path forward towards your goals.
(Edited to remove what could be perceived as a bit harsh..)
You expect kids to not heed the advice of the adults around them? And when those kids grow up to be adults and realize that the advice they were given was all bullshit to suddenly not see the utter waste of time and energy into worthless goals put before them their entire lives?
What are you talking about?
The main responsibility of adults is to prepare the next generation. Realizing that failure is not being jaded, it's confronting reality about the failures of adults.
> And when those kids grow up to be adults and realize that the advice they were given was all bullshit
You think the advice of going to college is "all bullshit"? It's still great advice for many people, is it not? I think the point is that it's certainly not for everyone, and because colleges aren't holding up their end up the bargain there are plenty of other ways to earn a living. Some people aren't cut out for the trades, just like some people aren't cut out for many paths available from college.
The harsh truth is just because you can get a degree in something doesn't mean you'll be any good at it, and ultimately if you're not any good at something why would you expect people to pay you money to do something poorly? So the real question is: at what point should young adults be responsible for recognizing their aptitude and interests enough to make their own career decisions without blaming others? 18? 21? 25? Never?
I'm not even sure that all of the advice--with some nuance applied--is even bad today.
STEM is not a great term in general given how broad it is. The pure sciences as a career path for someone with just an undergrad degree have not been that great since I was in school which was a long time ago. Those degrees can be parlayed into other things that are connected to the degree--or not. Pre-med was the historical reason a lot of people majored in biology or chemistry.
Engineering broadly is not a bad degree to have even if you don't ultimately work in the area you majored in; I only did so for about three years.
Nursing was never near the level of doctors in terms of compensation. But it has been pretty much middle class pay at the cost of what, to me, would be difficult working conditions.
If someone's good with sitting in an office and developing some appropriate skills for that, I wouldn't necessarily recommend the trades. But, if someone doesn't like school, book learning, etc. it seems a pretty reasonable option.
And there are degrees of things. Trades also includes working for things like construction engineering firms. Have a friend who didn't go to college but has worked in various roles of this sort. (My one real mechanical engineering job wasn't all that different in many respects at the end of the day.)
The original premise was that trades are where all the money is, and Gen Z should be listening to that. My point is that we were previously told: the money is in college degrees, the money is in STEM, the money is in nursing. And people invested a lot of time and money in taking that advice and it went nowhere. Then we were called stupid and foolish and entitled for believing that advice.
So why aren't Gen Z taking this magical advice on trades? Because they know older generations don't have a crystal ball, they've seen what happens if they listen to that crystal ball advice, and they're not falling for it. And if you talk to Gen Z, they have very little hope for the future, given we are doing very little to stop climate change, runaway capitalism, and they're watching jobs get automated without any change to the "cost of living" agreement when people are watching jobs disappear.
Boomers don't have to worry about any of that anymore. And there's nothing more tone deaf than Boomers giving advice on a world that no longer exists for younger generations.
> The original premise was that trades are where all the money is
Nobody has ever said the "trades are where all the money is". This premise is flawed already.
> My point is that we were previously told: the money is in college degrees, the money is in STEM, the money is in nursing. And people invested a lot of time and money in taking that advice and it went nowhere.
It still is. It sounds like too many people have deluded themselves into thinking college is a public jobs program and if they show up and get a piece of paper they will be the most in demand in those fields. However, that requires an illogical leap on their part to believe that any and every person in a field will be at the top of their field and thus command exorbitant salaries. It defies logic. Plenty of people still make good money in those fields, and still will years from now. But not everyone is entitled to make a ton of money in any fields their heart desires.
Everyone learns the law of supply and demand before adulthood, or if they haven't then they shouldn't be going to college anyway. So if the supply of labor in a field increases beyond the demand, what would we expect to happen?
Also, if you're really good at something people will generally pay you more than they'll pay people who are mediocre. Maybe the problem is younger generations can't wrap their heads around the fact that a lot of people are mediocre. Not everyone is special or a superstar or whatever, so maybe this egalitarian mindset is the issue.
This isn't boomer shit, I'm far too young to be a boomer. It seems like common sense. Is this not common sense?
> Everyone learns the law of supply and demand before adulthood, or if they haven't then they shouldn't be going to college anyway.
Yeah, the problem is that the "law of supply and demand" is a simple metaphor to help children gently begin learning economics, not how anything actually works. Almost no price any real person encounter anywhere in their daily life is actually determined in any meaningful way by "supply" or "demand" -- unless you stretch the definition of those two words so thin they're practically meaningless. They're potential factors, sure, but only small ones.
As one of a bajillion examples, see how every hospital is short staffed (low supply) and desperate for nurses (high demand), while we also see them constantly lay nurses off or reduce hours (and nursing has consistently-fixed low salaries, despite the shortages). Same for CNAs, nursing home staff, etc.
> no price any real person encounter anywhere in their daily life is actually determined in any meaningful way by "supply" or "demand"
Case in point.
> how every hospital is short staffed and desperate for nurses (high demand), while we also constantly law nurses off or reduce hours (and nursing has consistently-fixed low salaries, despite the shortages)
How many paying patients are they turning away on account of this supposed shortage?
There isn't a national nurse shortage. Nurses are being overworked. And in some regions, there are shortages, though that's out of an inability to pay traveling nurse rates.
> How many paying patients are they turning away on account of this supposed shortage?
That's not how it works. Generally speaking, any publicly funded hospital in the US must take patients by law, they can not turn away patients except under very specific circumstances.
> that's out of an inability to pay traveling nurse rates.
If you pay extra to import a nurse (traveling nurses) you remove them from the area they were previously. That's great, but it's not a fix for a shortage, that's just relocating the shortage somewhere else.
And, if they're short, why aren't they able to pay traveling nurse rates? Medical revenues are at an all time high, prices too. There's no reason a hospital couldn't pay higher nursing rates, they just choose not to, because again, that figure is not determined by supply or demand.
> any publicly funded hospital in the US must take patients by law, they can not turn away patients except under very specific circumstances
Not all nurses are employed at hospitals. I said paying patient, but I should have said deniable. Someone seeking out the sorts of care hospitals start denying when they face an actual emergency.
> everyone disagrees with you
Oh, I've seen the meme. I'm just casting it a bit more cynically. Nobody wants to pay nurses more. So we need more nurses, whether out of nursing school or through immigration.
> if they're short, why aren't they able to pay traveling nurse rates
They did [1]! When they needed them. Because there was demand for them. When there wasn't, they didn't.
> no reason a hospital couldn't pay higher nursing rates, they just choose not to, because again, that figure is not determined by supply or demand
This is how supply and demand work. They're not paying more because they don't have to.
"Common sense", "laws of supply and demand" imply kids probably shouldn't all rush to go be plumbers because it will decimate the pay and most of them will end up in poorly compensated jobs because on they are, on average, not special.
And wow, look, we're commenting on an article about how kids aren't rushing to go become plumbers so you're here saying what exactly?
Or did you just want to go on about kids-aint-shit and the die landed on joecot this time.
> imply kids probably shouldn't all rush to go be plumbers
Correct, every kid shouldn't go be a plumber. Kids who might enjoy being plumbers (or electricians, or HVAC etc) should know that they can earn a good living doing it, they don't need to rack up $60k in student loans to go to an out of state college to get a useless communications degree or whatever.
> everyone learns the law of supply and demand before adulthood, or if they haven't then they shouldn't be going to college anyway
People learn it, but I don't think many Americans actually believe it. Exhibit A is housing. Exhibit B is this bandwagoning effect around career choices.
Many adults were told college was the only way to go. Those who went through college and those who didn't. Doesn't matter the debt. It's always better.
Except it's not. First, society is going to have too few skilled trades folks in the coming years due to people retiring and not being replaced. Second, a lot of college degrees can't get someone a good job. I remember someone telling me they had a business degree and couldn't get a job managing a store at the mall.
A business degree makes the candidate over-qualified for managing a mall store is the likely reason. They are afraid of the employee using the position as a stepping stone to a higher paying, higher status job.
Business degrees are good if you leverage the actual purpose of the degree correctly: networking and prestige status.
Communications can be good if your school is in the middle of a communications hub. Which, for US students, boils down to Los Angeles and New York City. But a lot of the worth of that degree comes from its ability to unlock internships and networking inside the two biggest media markets in the US, if not the entire world.
So not entirely worthless but only lucrative in specific cities and markets, and for mostly shibboleth reasons (many friends with communications degrees who also went to school in either city pull in mid-six figures working for big entertainment companies).
But hey, at least you don’t have to actually study anything while spending most of your week at unpaid internships and networking events!
Highly doubtful, you don't just switch careers because comp suddenly rises, social status is very much associated with these decisions, maybe anecdotal but physical labor also has a stigma around it, people working in the field might not be the kind of people you want to be working with, etc.
Entire game dev industry is built in finding passionate young people, underpaying them and putting them through the grinder till they burn out. And there's no shortage of applicants.
Gen X chiming in. Several of my uncles were skilled laborers. It was good work, it paid well, most of my cousins had a pretty good life. Most of them better than mine in fact. But there was always a bit of a stigma over their heads about being blue collar instead of white collar, and the general feeling was that Grandpa's generation never had that problem. This was something new, accelerated by things like the 1980's recession and in particular the rise of imported automobiles.
So the Boomer parents saw this going on and encouraged their kids to go to college, which was the last generation where that advice mostly worked, and we, seeing our uncles and cousins and highschool friends struggle, doubled down with the thing that seemed to help us, but was already starting to look like a crapshoot when we went through the system.
It's all class warfare, with a heavy dose of horizontal aggression.
I guess being a poor kid who went to college in the 90s and chose his major before he had the internet had its perks.
I never considered studying the things that actually interested me because I knew they were going to end up in dead end careers, and I didn't want to be broke my entire life. It's the same reason I didn't go to the top schools that accepted me. Hell, I didn't even go to the top schools that offered me scholarships because I was afraid of the cost. It's also why I ignore the pleas of people who came from substantially better backgrounds during the internet era and claim that they couldn't have known better and deserve debt forgiveness.
They SHOULD have known better. They had every resource to know better.
I think you (and sibling mfer) are commenting on "any degree" instead of my point that "maybe people don't go into the trades because they spend ~18 emotionally formative years of their lives being told to go to college" vs the idea "maybe people don't go into the trades due to wages offered" (which, mind you, I don't mean to discount).
The wages are going to have to necessarily increase, though. Look at how home prices are increasing. Homeowner insurance rates increase respectively, and deductibles increase as well. Intelligent tradesmen are going to keep track of this and price their services accordingly, especially when it comes to maintenance contracts.
I also think there's a stigma associated with the trades which doesn't necessarily permeate mixed middle class neighborhoods. I grew up in a situation where the majority of adults in my hometown did not have college degrees. Thus, college degrees became things to aspire to instead of things we MUST have. Plenty of my classmates then, and plenty of kids graduating now, are not going to college. For some, they've been told by their folks that they can stay at home and save up their money for the 4 years after getting out of trade school to put a down payment towards a house. Granted, the culture I'm from doesn't negatively view 20-something men hanging out on a porch with beers after dark. Cheaper than the bars, after all.
Information is a key part of the rationality assumption of a free market, so having people systematically distort what jobs are available causes problems.
"Youtube university" has most definitely had an effect. Particularly in regards to the lack of pay increase in the trades.
My toilet is leaking? 10 years ago I'd call a plumber. Now I diagnose the problem and determine if it's within my skill level to learn the repair (it usually is). For me, this wouldn't be feasible without online how-to videos.
A plumber/carpenter/electrician will charge me $50-$100/hr for work that I can do myself for just the cost of parts. The cost savings really adds up over the years. Not to mention, I'm getting increasingly self-sufficient as time goes on and I become more confident doing larger repairs and projects.
Most of my friends and acquaintances have fallen into the same path.
I work at a union plumbing company in a major metro area and union plumbers make very good money here (100k+).
We aren’t losing any business to YouTube. We only do service for commercial businesses, and the house engineer isn’t going out of the way to do any more work than what is absolutely necessary.
You will still need a plumber if you do a large remodel or new construction. Good on you for learning how to do more yourself, but this trend has negligible impact on the industry at large.
As somebody that has done both contracting and worked in tech, I hope this comment makes sense.
Most homeowners (product managers) want the cheapest (fastest) thing that fixes (delivers) a working home (feature) to them. When given the options those are generally what people choose.
Sure some contractors (software engineers) always cut corners, but I believe many take pride in their work and given the option would prefer a solution they take pride in.
I really hate this mentality. I don't understand how people do shoddy work on peoples homes. For example, I drilled through my joist and put in these plastic rings to prevent rattling. 100% any other plumber would have just cut holes and left it at that. I originally planned on getting 1 per hole, but thought, it fits two, why not spend another $30 on material so both sides are covered? It turned out that it more than double the pipes rigidness while surely making the pipes silent for life. With one, I could see them eventually moving/popping off or having slight rattling. With both, you could hang off them and they wouldn't budge.
I ended up paying "professionals" to install some vinyl flooring in my house. They were making like 5 of the top 10 mistakes from the YouTube video I had watched the night before. I had to correct them, which was awkward since they had been installing floors for 15 years, supposedly...
YouTube changes things for sure, although I am unsure if that's the cause of fewer folks going into the trades. Demand over all seems higher than ever in my area. Very hard to get good trades people, or even bad ones a year ago!
How can you be sure that the YouTube is right and real life professionals are not? Making money on YouTube ad revenue share is quite popular thing today, and no one verifies what is uploaded there, unless it is a copyrighted material.
It obviously depends on the field. But if the YouTube video explains clearly why X technique is sub par, and demonstrates the failure mode I'd believe it over a tradesperson. Say you see your mechanic tighten the nuts on your wheel hub in a circular pattern instead of a star pattern. Would you point this out?
I'm not sure about your particular example but it seems to me like this argument could be made for something like software engineering too, ie someone watches YouTube on the top web frameworks or SWE best practices and asks you why you're not doing it the way they saw. Sure, the video might show failure modes too, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's always the right way to do it, there are tradeoffs everywhere.
I know nothing about nuts tighten patterns. I always tighten four bolts system diagonally because I saw how things could deform otherwise. But I took it from my own experience, not from some guy with the camera and strong wish to earn money from ads on cloud video platform. Also I am 100% sure that if I first pre-tighten bolts in a circular manner, and then make a second circle of full tightening - it will be okay, just longer.
A good YouTube tutorial would tighten bolts circularly and how the resulting deformation. This is my point: if the failure mode is illustrated in a way understandable by a layperson, it seems totally reasonable to trust the youtube tutorial over a contractor. After all, the contractor is looking to make money, just like the YouTuber.
> the contractor is looking to make money, just like the YouTuber
That's a very valid point. The question is who has more skin in the game. Contractors have more of a positive feedback: if I am satisfied, I will recommend them to my friends and relatives. YouTubers may have more of negative feedback (not that much since dislike button is gone), but it takes someone to call their bullshit and write a refuting comment. I don't think lots of core YouTube userbase is inclined to do so, the default behavior there is to make a "pffff" and swipe away.
A bit off topic, but I’d love to see something like Wikipedia references added to YouTube in some way. Being able to cite something at a point of video would be awsome. Sounds like it might be sorta impossible tho
Youtube basically helps me do jobs I could already do, to a higher level of quality. Like painting a room, I now know the mistakes to avoid. But when it came to major drywall repair/replacement it was no help, there is must too much individual variation that experience trumps information.
This is spot on. We're at a point where the basics of virtually any field can be learned quickly online, but I think becoming an actual expert takes just as long as it always has.
I believe it. For floors, especially, the barrier to entry to the field is very low. Most of the important techniques you can pick up on the job during your first install.
Only on HN would this be so highly upvoted. Most electricians and plumbers are doing commercial work or residential construction. The plumbers and electricians doing house calls are a tiny portion of their business. And before YouTube university people were just as handy and could figure it out by going down to the local hardware store and talking to someone rather than ordering it on Amazon and watching a YouTube video.
Why would I need someone for a small job if I’ve spent years tackling small jobs? It’s the big jobs the OC specifically mentioned maybe needing help with.
It’s like insurance at this point. I can probably cover 90% of the small stuff. But when the big stuff hits, I call someone.
Had a small job recently - install vent from bathroom fan to go outside. Required getting to attic, cut a hole in the wall/roof and install vent. It was too small for most companies i called. Took me 3 month to find someone and it costed 1k cad.
One thing I've found is that you have to call the right people. As tempting as it is to get a professional in the right field, you do find pretty quickly that they don't want small jobs. For that you will be much more successful if you talk to a handyman.
And being aware of how state and local laws could affect the market. Depending on municipality, only licensed tradespeople can touch electrical and plumbing, except for the homeowner, so handymen can't help with certain things.
As an example, I wanted to have a new water heater installed and replace the improper vent. When I asked plumbers for a full quote, replacing the vent added thousands of extra dollars because I would have been paying plumber rates for it. But I was able to pull a permit and replace the water heater myself, and then hire someone much less expensive than a plumber to replace the vent.
Your mileage may vary, but there could be a few steps in a multi-step process that are significantly raising the costs because the only people you can hire by law are expensive, but are also simple and legal to do yourself.
True, electrical and plumbing can be exceptions to the rule. They're also the two areas I've never had any trouble getting help with small jobs, so maybe that's why. But most any construction-related work, I've had to learn to be comfortable with a handyman for all such jobs.
Yeah same here. My dryer stopped working. Had someone come out and tell me the heating element and thermostat needed replacing. $275 for the part, $250 for the labor. That’s a $525 for a $650 dryer. Not worth it. I bought a complete heating element and thermostat kit on Amazon for $29. After a few YouTube videos and about an hour and a half, I had it fixed.
Diagnosing a busted heating element and/or thermostat and/or fuse requires the answer to like two questions. Does it produce heat while it's running? Is it a Samsung? Okay maybe just one question. The $29 heating element comes with a new thermostat and fuse so you just replace them all regardless.
They did not. All they did was turn the dryer on to see if any heat was produced. The dryer spun and seemed like it was working, but no heat. So they said heating element and or thermostat. They replace both as a precaution.
Why anecdotes are not data: I have the exact opposite experience. In my opinion time is money, and $50-$100 is money I can earn a lot faster at my contracting rates than I can fixing my toilet.
In any case, the fact that skilled trade work is still extremely expensive where I live and has not gone down post-pandemic points to the fact that these tradespeople are having no trouble finding jobs.
There's an interesting other factor that I don't think you're considering here. If you had surplus cash I'd be willing to bet you'd be more willing to pay someone to do this rather than do it yourself. Most people aren't going to YouTube University for the pleasure of learning new things, but rather because they need to learn something new and need to save some cash.
I don't know about you, but my repair self-sufficiency came out of being poor and having to do things myself because I had an excess of time but not an excess of cash. This seems to be a rather common divide I see in people. Though I'll be honest, I don't think most people even want to learn these things, even if they are strapped for cash.
So the interesting factor I see here is really about a wealth distribution. A fundamental aspect of capitalism is that money needs to constantly be changing hands. There are many factors in an economy that can slow down the exchange of capital and this seems to be one of them.
perfectly stated. If I am not getting raises, I won't be able to afford to pay more for skilled labor needs. Therefore I'll spend time on YT University. Therefore I'll reduce the amount of flow to skilled labor, therefore they get desperate and exit, and the cycle continues.
It's kinda an interesting thing with a fairly straight forward causal path. I honestly believe that most things in society have similar levels of complexity but we are only looking at single causal factors instead of these higher order terms. Maybe they contribute less, but they need to be accounted for.
I don't know. I was under the impression that a lot of those sort of things are skills you use to learn from your parents, and being able to do maintenance of the things you owned was more common in the past not less.
This era is surprisingly troubled. With the advance of tech, the change in workload (more bs jobs), the distribution of knowledge, the potential coming of robots .. it will alter society's tissue.
That may only work in countries with lax regulations. Some countries, you're barely allowed to touch anything yourself as far as electrical and plumbing goes.
Or, of course, you could do it yourself - but there's no way you'll ever get your house insured unless certified professionals sign off on inspection.
And that is for a good reason - shoddy electrical work can burn down the house, while shoddy plumbing can cause extensive damage.
Same labor shortage as everywhere that the government likes to pretend doesn't exist. 10 million working-age men can't or won't work. Of the ones willing to work, almost none want to spend their time learning skills for back-breaking, barely-middle class skills jobs which they'll be forced to retire from at 55 because their knees give out.
Same answer for the shortage as everywhere that the economists don't want to hear: pay more, allow more immigration, get better benefits especially for parents.
Edit: also in this case universal healthcare, universal mandatory PTO, would also extremely help
Yeah I grew up learning trades from my parents and neighbors and friends, worked in trades a number of years. I left the trades because it isn't worth it. The pay is not much better than working as a cashier or working in the local jail's kitchen around here. The work is inconsistent as hell both on a micro and macro level. And I am currently watching the ravages of their time in the trades on their bodies through my family and neighbors as they live with constant pain and are both literally and figuratively limping their way into retirement with not a whole lot to show for it as their compounding health issues drain most of their savings. Sadly most will never get to actually enjoy retirement, they look and feel 20+ years older than they are and can't afford to vacation or enjoy anything but the most barebones hobbies.
Fitting pipes together is not "back breaking". We're not talking about framing or roofing, in the contracting world plumbing is a light duty skilled trade that anyone with half a brain can earn a 6-figure income on. If you take care of yourself and wear protective equipment, you won't have a problem with your knees in middle age. There's no "forced retirement", someone working as an independent contractor for 25 years is likely more wealthy than the average software engineer in most LCOL or MCOL parts of the country.
The problem isn't "lack of immigrants". The problem is that when surveyed, 25% of Gen-Z said they plan to pursue a career as "influencers". My opinion is that younger generations have been brought up in a world where they don't need to take personal responsibility or ever get their hands dirty.
Older generation complains about newer generation's work ethic and goals, news at 11.
Seriously, this has been done since forever, and it's such a tired trope.
And why the hell shouldn't they want to be influencers? They're responding to the world they've been handed. Why is that different than "I want to be an NBA player", or rock and roll singer before that, or baseball player before that?
Gen Z will be just fine, even if Gen X doesn't understand how.
Generations isnt even real. People change year on year little by little not once in 20 years. It's a gradual shift not some shift that happens new years eve one year.
It's a gradual shift that's no so gradual when looking at the block of population. Gen X are those that didn't have any digital connectivity while growing up. Millennials grew up connected through text/chat/email/very early social media, but without being constantly connected to the internet. Gen Z has grown up being connected and with information and entertainment available the time.
Generations share a "core" of experiences that happen during some of the most impactful years of their lives. First geopolitical event I remember was 9/11. For some it was the Great Recession or COVID. Those big events end up exerting a lot of influence on age groups.
I think Generations can be overused in the sense that it's used like a monolith when it's not. The clickbaity "Generation Z doesn't want to work" is actually the less clickbaity "Many in Generation Z find working a less attractive option because of these specific shared experience/values..."
> Gen X are those that didn't have any digital connectivity while growing up.
My (parents’) CompuServe and (due to living in the Central Valley but most of the BBS’s I had info on being in the Bay) phone bills fron the 1980s tell a very different story.
This is the first comment I have read where "Gen X" is dragged into the generational culture war. The generic brand of that generation made me think it would fly under the radar and we'd break this tired pattern.
Try crawling around in a 2 foot high crawl space amongst spiders and snakes while ripping out old, stinky, dripping plumbing with a sabre saw or arc welder and tell yourself it is not “back breaking” or dangerous.
Where is all the money people paying tradespeople going? If I need any plumbing work done it costs me $200 an hour or more. Even with overhead and expenses, 10 hours a week gets you more than $50k a year. Twenty years ago my grandfather was a marine plumber and made $200k a year. How many apprentices and part-time plumber are in these datasets?
If retail stores are making record breaking profits, why are service workers paid so little? If medical costs are so high, why aren't nurses and nurse aids making more?
It's not rocket science. People aren't getting paid for the value of their labor, and productivity has rocketed up while wages have stagnated for decades. Your plumber charges 200 an hour and doesn't make anywhere near that much, because they work for a company who profits massively off their labor and exploits him as far as the law and supply and demand will allow.
> plumber charges 200 an hour and doesn't make anywhere near that much, because they work for a company who profits massively off their labor and exploits him as far as the law and supply and demand will allow
Do most plumbers responding to house calls work for an employer? There aren't many economies of scale in that work.
Being a plumber who works for a company means you are given tasks and show up at those assignments. You need to know how to plumb.
Being an independent plumber means handling: marketing, networking, customer service, etc, plus plumbing. Like any other freelance position it's not easy to break in and get enough work to live. And we're not in the days of people just opening the Yellow Pages and calling a random plumber. Now it's a labyrinth of competing search engine results, yelp reviews, HomeAdvisor references, etc.
Some people will take the time to find an independent plumber. Most people call RotoRooter or whatever company has advertised the most in their area. The plumbers, electricians, handymen I call are all independent, but they're also old, at the end of their careers, having a set of regulars they could take with them going independent, and having saved a bunch of money because they were getting paid fair wages in their prime. There are economies of scale in the skilled trades, they're just not the trades themselves.
Agree that it isn't easy going independent as a plumber. But it's easier than in, say, construction. That leaves room for trade-offs between ambition and risk on one hand and a safe, secure job on the other hand.
You pay $200/hr for the work you see onsite. What you don't see is overhead, drive time to site and back to HQ and because plumbers aren't guaranteed to work 40 hours a week.
If you're in Oregon or California, it looks like the wages there are much higher.
Also, you're probably paying the company which manages the plumbers, of which the plumbers don't directly earn that.
If you're hiring a plumber directly, I'd assume it's a more experienced one running their own business. In addition to charging you $200/hr for the work, they're probably doing their accounting and business management, billing, ordering parts and equipment, replacing tools, and communicating with clients.
I could see that only resulting in 10-20 billable hours per week.
Also, if many of their jobs are paid in cash, it's possible there's a significant amount that is unreported to the agencies generating these statistics.
To the business owners, towards tool and vehicle maintenance, to time sitting around talking to people on the phone trying to line up jobs or making bids, towards the substantial amount of material stock they need on hand, to saving money for the inevitable down turns in construction, etc.
For someone to come work in your house for 30 minutes, they have to compensate for 2-3 hours of time doing everything else.
Also it sounds like you live in a high cost of living area if you are paying that much for plumbers.
Sure there are a few good jobs plumbing new commercial construction that makes good money, but there is far more need and demand for people to crawl down into some residential crawlspace nobody else has been in for decades to fix and retrofit old garbage and clearing toilets and replacing wax rings or installing faucets or garbage disposals. Those aren't really money making jobs, especially when you have no idea what you might run into once you are down there.
Who do you think unloads the pipes from the truck, carries them up the stairs or drags them into the crawlspaces on their knees? I've never met a plumber over 50 who didn't have chronic pain in their back, shoulders or knees.
> My opinion is that younger generations have been brought up in a world where they don't need to take personal responsibility or ever get their hands dirty.
An opinion as old as recorded history at least. It wasn't novel or insightful when Horace said it in 40BC and it isn't now.
I see this line about kids wanting to be influencers. Is there a credible source? And is this any different than them wanting to be a rock star, movie star, etc.? Most who have this hairbrained dream can fail quickly and hopefully with minimal cost or embarrassment and move on with their lives.
My 7 year old routinely tells me he is going to be a YouTuber. I routinely remind him about power law distributions. So far he has made 2 YouTube channels with a handful of videos each and even less subscribers. I can't recall if it was for his 6th or 7th birthday but he had been talking a lot about wanting his own "merch", so I asked him what kind of design would he put on his "merch" and he told me what he wanted. I whipped one up on a t-shirt making site and got it for him for his birthday. He still wears it and still refers to it as his "merch".
I think it's mostly harmless and of course most kids will grow out of it. It's definitely like wanting to be a rockstar, but I think the scale is larger and the barrier to entry so much lower that they seem much more convinced it's actually a viable option than what I thought being a rockstar was when I was a kid.
My guess is for many of them it will be a second "wait, Santa isn't real?" moment when they get a bit older and realize that power law distributions are a thing and that's just how it is. Followed by fun times reminiscing about it with each other as adults.
I think this comment is the first time I've realized how out of touch I may have become with the world. I had no idea that kids wants to be influencers and Youtubers instead of say, rock stars or sports stars.
In a way I find it a little sad, as a reminder humans keep getting more isolated with tech. Where 30 years ago we wanted people cheering us on, chanting our name, etc... people now seem to desire views, likes, and whatnot.
I'm not saying one is better than the other, it's just really hard for my brain to process as I don't understand it.
I'd be curious what your generation said they'd want to be when surveyed. I'm sure during the height of beatlemania, many people wanted to be a rockstar too.
There was no one with dreams of being a rockstar or actor before influencers. There have always been a good chunk of kids that want to do as little as possible and then they tend to figure something out or wash out. This isn't new or news.
I don’t think it’s correct to characterize the 10 million men who can’t or won’t work as a labor shortage; it sounds more like excess supply. The solution to this is to increase the demand these laborers have for work.
As you say in your post, paying more might do it. I’m sure businesses would pay more if they needed the employees and could profitably employ them at a higher wage. Surely they’d rather make less money per employee than not make any money. So, they must not be able to pay more than they are.
We could lower the minimum wage; maybe there are employers who would employ those 10 million men if they could do it at a lower cost, but still the workers wouldn’t be willing to work any more than they are now.
That leaves raising the opportunity cost of not working, e.g. not paying people who won’t work as much to not work. That’s the answer that the people who have answers “that the economists don’t want to hear” don’t want to hear. UBI/negative income tax or cutting welfare programs would help those folks get jobs, but with the risk that some might not, and would end up on the streets.
Looking at some random sources around [1], some of the studies on this conclude the issue is these men don't want to work for such low status/pay jobs, and the skill bars are too high for the jobs they would work.
Many are dependent on wives/parents to get by. So not paying welfare probably won't help much because those men aren't on it to begin with.
If you want people to work, you need to be willing to take on some of the opportunity risk and train them. If you want them to work in the trades, you probably need to train them and pay them well.
Even then the status issue wrt blue-collar work is hard to get around without a significant cultural shift.
Yep. My partner and I come from blue-collar families. A major motivating factor for each of us getting a tech degree was that we saw how the blue-collar lifestyle physically destroyed our parents. The white-collar sedentary lifestyle requires some maintenance to stay healthy, but I don’t expect to lose any fingers or knees because of it.
Sometimes Econ101 supply and demand theory isn't nuanced enough. Wages can go up at the same time as the supply increases if the amount of money in the system also increases. How do you think software engineer wages rocketed up over the past 20 years?
Outside of FAANG outliers and SV, have software engineer wages really rocketed up? I've worked outside the FAANG world at companies of various sizes and industries for 25 years and haven't seen it. If anything, I'd say wage growth has been kept artificially low by H1B competition from folks born in low cost of living countries under threat of deportation if they object to the abuse they receive. The average corporate IT dept. looks more like a sweatshop now than it did 20 years ago, the ones I've seen anyway.
How quickly do you hit the salary ceiling though? That's what I've seen. Software devs make a lot more than other engineers when starting out. By 7-10 years of experience, the gap is much, much narrower.
Apples and oranges. One assumes there is a relatively fixed supply of plumbing problems.
Software in the last 30+ years has created new industries which require more software people.
> One assumes there is a relatively fixed supply of plumbing problems.
The volume of plumbing problems is going to increase at least linearly with the housing supply, which (theoretically) increases more-or-less linearly with population. Plus, people move around, so there will be concentrations of problems, and those concentrations will move with the population.
That doesn't account for how technology and building codes and material changes have made previously simple plumbing problems more complex over time.
On the other hand we now have waterless urinals. Maybe plumbing tech and equipment costs have eliminated some jobs and made some jobs less skilled as it cheaper just to replace than do repairs that take knowledge.
Software jobs are many X what they were 30 years ago, while I doubt plumbing jobs have change that much above what they were relative to the population 30 years ago.
You could just do what happens everywhere else, price fixing. (I mean everywhere else as in the real world, not the soft interior of an “economics” textbook).
I mean, have you seen how much pay has gone up in low-skilled jobs? There are signs at all the local businesses in my area offering $15+ an hour for cashiers and fry cooks and whatnot. The same kind of jobs I worked 7-8 years ago for $8 an hour. They are taking advantage of supply and demand to force jobs to pay them a closer-to-fair wage, instead of selling their time for less than it's worth and perpetuating the problem indefinitely.
To be fair, I do agree that on an individual level there are tons of people screwing themselves over and messing up their lives, being a burdon on their parents or whoever ends up supporting them financially, etc. I don't think most of these people are refusing to work out of activism or anything. But from a sociological perspective it's a natural response to a problem(a problem that goes much deeper than low wages imo, but I won't get into that) that acts as a corrective measure to one of the main symptoms of that problem.
In other words: there will always be a bell curve of in terms of competence and work ethic, and from a relative perspective the curve will maintain it's shape throughout time periods/generations among large enough populations. The people on the low end of that curve deserve the same amount of criticism(how much, if any, they deserve, is up for debate) regardless of whether the curve itself shifts towards one side or the other - as movements of the curve in it's entirety can be attributed to social/environment factors. I do think we've seen the curve move towards it's lower end recently, and I have plenty of headcannon about why that may have happened, but I can't see any reason to blame all individuals within an entire generation, and I can't see the point in condemning the low end of the curve for a certain generation over that same portion of the curve from other generations.
>I mean, have you seen how much pay has gone up in low-skilled jobs? There are signs at all the local businesses in my area offering $15+ an hour for cashiers and fry cooks and whatnot. The same kind of jobs I worked 7-8 years ago for $8 an hour. They are taking advantage of supply and demand to force jobs to pay them a closer-to-fair wage, instead of selling their time for less than it's worth and perpetuating the problem indefinitely.
Those jobs also result in products being more costly, so that the current low end wages are actually lower nominal value.
I find people using terms like "fair wage" end up making wishes and policies that end up hurting the poor, not helping them, by not understanding economics.
Fair is what a person can command from competing for jobs, and jobs competing for workers. Anything else ends up unsustainable, which usually ends up hurting the least able workers.
Mandating wages leads to lower employment - so sure you can help some by pricing others out of work.
>To be fair, I do agree that on an individual level there are tons of people screwing themselves over and messing up their lives, being a burdon on their parents or whoever ends up supporting them financially, etc.
Agreed - but who it will hurt the most is future workers, including them, as the economy is not as good and then there are less resources for everyone, including them. Of course they will continue to blame a "system" when they got what they earned.
>I do think we've seen the curve move towards it's lower end recently
Total remuneration, even at the low end, is higher than nearly all of history. And post-tax transfer it's much higher.
For example, the lowest 20% of households saw their post-tax income go from $18,900 in 1979 to $32,800 in 2018 [1], and that's not even including that households on average have shrunk in size. Per worker the returns are even higher.
A good analogy: if you tell kids that blue eyed kids are the devil, they will act like it, pass laws, and believe it. If you tell people immigrants are killing them or taking jobs, people start to believe it, and enact laws that hurt all. Similarly, if you tell enough people how bad the economy is, regardless of solid evidence, they will act like it, and in the case of an economy, they bring the doom to pass.
>I can't see any reason to blame all individuals within an entire generation
I wouldn't blame them all. But if enough act a way to make their economic outcomes worse, then all of them will suffer over time. And they'll take others along for the ride.
"Fair is what a person can command from competing for jobs, and jobs competing for workers. Anything else ends up unsustainable, which usually ends up hurting the least able workers."
Unsustainable, huh? I'm from the Netherlands where we've had minimum wage since 1969. The job market hasn't exactly broken down in those 53 years. Actually, we have the lowest unemployment in recorded history. Also, minimum wage just got upped by more than 10%.
You know why? Because otherwise people working full-time can't even afford the basics. Even if you have zero empathy in you, how exactly does it benefit society to have productive members of society suffer, become homeless, resort to crime, go hungry and freeze?
You’d be surprised. Sometimes quality of life is better spent not working when you can lean on family and friends Or your own small retirement fund.
Not saying someone’s life choices are right or wrong one way or the other in this case. I’m very grateful for my position but would be lying if I didn’t say I day dreamt occasionally about quitting work and living like a backpacker.
>Sometimes quality of life is better spent not working when you can lean on family and friends Or your own small retirement fund.
And then when enough do, and the result becomes a lifetime of un/under-employment, then they want the retirements or lives of those before or around them, who do you think will pick up the slack?
Sure, quit and be a backpacker. Doing it a while is fun, probably even healthy, but a lifetime of it will not end well for many people. And generally if enough people do it, then society as a whole will have to pay for it.
That seems like society's problem more than their own problem. Society failed to incentivize them to live a lifestyle that is best for society, and society will pay for it. If it gets bad enough these people won't roll over and die in a ditch, starving people become violent and will take by force what they aren't getting by what they deem is a fair exchange.
Humans aren't the ones changing, society is. And its failures are its own.
I’ve done both kinds of work on my own home. Calling it back breaking is pure hyperbole. Is it physical, certainly. But it’s something you can easily do until you’re 50 without issue and between 40 to 50, you can start taking apprentices that do the taxes that benefit from youth. Of the plumbers and carpenters I’ve hired, they are all in no worse shape than other adults their age.
I sit at a computer all day and it’s not good for my body either as I’m more sedentary than is healthy. I would say that my work is equally unhealthy but in different ways.
Doing one-off projects on your own home is not equivalent to being a full time roofer or tile-layer, or even plumber or auto tech where you are constantly working on your back, hands, and knees.
I have my own home too and the times I’ve done my own plumbing work were hard. And that’s one of the physically-speaking easier jobs, never mind Roofing, I wouldn’t last a week.
My uncles a roofer and did it into his 40s but eventually started his own company when he wanted to stop carrying slate around on roofs in the miserable British winters. I think that's the usual progression - you're not literally laying tiles till you're 67.
It's like a MLM spread across generations of workers. You recruit two workers and they recruit two workers each and then they recruit two workers each.... You even get to be your own {Personal Pronoun}Boss!
If you spend 2/3 of your career as one of the 2 underlings it's not MLM. Body is dunzo by say 50 for trades, which means you get 30 years as a tradesman and 15 years employing two tradesman. Retire at 65.
Or there's an increase in new buildings, or the number of buildings needing repairs increase over time, etc... With trades the number of self-employed or owners is quite high - you can either do Job A by yourself for $X for company Foo, or be self-employed and do Job A by yourself for $X++. Same number of jobs exist, just less monopolized by larger companies. I don't know why, but this is what I found in the south-west of England when I lived there. I think the experienced people tend to start those orgs to charge more then get older and need to hire apprentices to do the work for them, and so the cycle continues.
No, but supervising/managing is pretty viable. Also these aren’t FTSE100 companies, these are small groups of like 3/4 people who spin off and have a few commercial clients.
But not everyone in that business can build their own company unless every single one is an individual contractor. What about the other 80% of those trade workers who are laying tiles until retirement or their body fails them?
Working on something at your house is very different from doing it day in and day out, year after year. I have worked many manual labor jobs over the years and after just a few years started having constant pain in my knees, feet, and lower back. My father has been in a trade his entire life and in his late 50s, he was already having many physical issues from it. Not everyone can just take on an apprentice - especially since this article is stating that nobody wants to do these jobs.
I grew up in a family of laborers and this feels very far from my experience. Can you do this through your 50s? Yes, if you avoid a major injury (your risk of this is high in these jobs). Even if you do avoid injury, your ability to do the jobs starts to rapidly decline because doing a job like this day in and day out does take a toll on your body, even if a single day of work isn't back breaking.
How do you explain all the back, leg, joint problems of tradespeople? I hope you aren’t really basing this on sone work you did in your home. Surely, you know that is not representative of the day-to-day work of plumbers, etc?
Independent plumbers/local plumbing businesses can easily earn $1,000/day with 2-3 service calls. Not sure how universal healthcare, PTO, immigration, and more pay have to do with this.
Edit: Thank you for all the downvotes for me calling out the weird correlation between tech benefits/politics and plumber skill-shortage + high-reward wages. Your wokeism will forever benefit society.
The median annual wage for electricians was $60,040 in May 2021. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $37,020, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $99,800.
No it isn't. You cherry-picked that single report, which was based on 76 turbotax returns. I suspect their data is wrong or corrupted, because making $160k as a journeyman lineman is only achievable with a decade experience and a truckload of overtime. Look around a bit further, or talk to actual linemen or unions, and you'll see the average salary for a lineman is about a hundred thousand dollars a year less than that.
I don't feel the need to read Reddit, since I worked as a lineman for several years. It's possible to make bank in all kinds of trades, but that is absolutely not the norm, or even the average.
Tradesmen are some of the first people to inflate their actual wage because otherwise they not only have a "lower class" career, but they are also not doing as well as everyone else and it makes them feel like shit.
I would not accept their personal anecdotes over documented tax returns.
I know a lot of linemen and they do pretty well. $70k would be zero overtime.
Do you think they don't earn 30-40 per hour and have the ability to make tons of overtime?
The power company pays office workers time and a half to do "line watch" where they just park by a downed power line with a light on their roof until a crew shows up to fix it.
I dislike wokeism as much as anyone else but what does this have to do with being some. I think the idea that plumbers make $1,000 a day as if that translates to their salary is a bit silly. How many plumbers fob you out see riding around in Lambos or do you think they are just too modest for that?
I had to dip into this for a few years. In the U.S., an ACA ("Obamacare") plan is $500-$2000 a month, depending on the state, with extra assistance for low incomes. There are bronze, silver, and gold plans with higher tiers decreasing copays and annual out-of-pocket maximums but significantly bumping the monthly dues. Private insurance also exists but almost universally has inferior terms (payout caps, gaps in coverage, weasel wording, etc.).
In my experience, for a typical ACA bronze plan, the annual maximum out-of-pocket payout is roughly $20,000, and the monthly dues are about $700, meaning worst case you're looking at ~$30,000 out pocket for a year. Add about 50% if you have children. Sadly, none of this is tax-deductible as far as I can tell.
Another issue with ACA marketplaces that I found was they churn a lot; every year when you have to renew coverage you can have an entirely different set of providers and plans. The constant enrollment and transfer paperwork becomes non-trivial, even without trying to qualify for an income-based discount.
The annual max family out of pocket is legally capped at $18,200, but most plans will be less than that.
>Another issue with ACA marketplaces that I found was they churn a lot; every year when you have to renew coverage you can have an entirely different set of providers and plans.
This is not my experience, I have been able to purchase the same BCBS health plan from the same insurer for many years.
In NJ, I would budget $30k per year for premiums for a gold level plan for a family of 4, assuming you are not getting any premium tax credits. Of course, out of pocket maximum is up to another $18k.
And if you are working for a small business that does not offer a group health plan, you should be able to get premiums reimbursed from employer with pre tax income:
If you have a high-deductible health plan, generally you can open an HSA account, which does allow for medical expenses to effectively be tax-deductible.
There are a bunch of restrictions and loopholes though. I once opened an HSA and then actually had to close it because it turned out my insurance plan had *too* high of a deductible to be eligible, go figure.
COBRA is for temporarily keeping employer provided healthcare after leaving a company and is basically a non-option except as a short term bridge to a new employer provided plan. I believe independent workers generally go to the health care exchanges and buy a private health care plan. Rates vary wildly by state, coverage details, and your age but I've recently looked in Washington state for midrange (silver) plans and they are around ~$400 a month (with no dependents).
I know people who surfed the COBRA wave - ie, joined full-time for a company for a month every year or two to keep COBRA going and then going back to contract work in the interim.
Normally it just means you get to pay the full cost of your health plan, which is often double or more what you were paying as an employee. It's just so you're not immediately ineligible for the employer's group.
Unless yours is also paying the premium those 18 months, which I've never heard of but I suppose is possible.
You can find a bronze plan on the healthcare market place for < $300/month. I'm self employed, paying around that for an HSA eligible plan, and haven't seen a doctor in 5+ year. Mostly keep it for the HSA account/investing, or I'd forgo it. If your spouse has a FT/W2 job, they'd likely get solid health insurance to cover the family.
I mean Obamacare exchanges exist but (as the insurance industry wants) it mostly sucks in terms of costs/coverage. COBRA is still better because you get tied to your former employer's risk pool even though you pay employer share of healthcare costs.
You can buy the same health insurance on healthcare.gov that businesses buy from the same insurance companies.
They even have metal levels so you know you are getting the same actuarial value. A silver BCBS plan from an employer is basically the same coverage as a silver BCBS plan from healthcare.gov.
False in my state, at least. And ours is on the healthcare.gov fallback (the state didn't set up an exchange).
The state of things here:
1) Most insurers don't offer anything on healthcare.gov. Most years, there are two providers on there, though sometimes one will drop off and another will come in, so it does vary a little year-to-year.
2) Zero insurers here offer individual plans outside hc.gov, so if they're not on there—and most aren't—you can't get one. Seriously. Ask them, ask insurance brokers: "nope, no insurers offer individual plans in this state anymore—if it's not on hc.gov, it doesn't exist"
3) The networks for the hc.gov plans usually suck compared to the ones available to businesses. This may not be captured in the "actuarial value".
4) I've also never seen an employer mention which metal-level their plans is so you can compare them, but maybe they can find out if you ask. I know for a fact the top-level employer plans cost quite a bit more than the best-available plans on hc.gov (and they're waaaaaaay better)
You mention BCBS. They do operate in this state. They are not on hc.gov (not the version we see, anyway) and will not sell you an individual plan outside of it, either.
BCBS is also a network, not the insurance company. So you never buy insurance from BCBS, but rather whichever insurance company has chosen to be a franchise, such as Regence, Horizon NJ, Independence, Elevance, etc.
Yeah, my impression is that healthcare exchange plans are much better and cheaper in blue states than out here in flyover country. It's a shitshow out here. A wallet-emptying shitshow. Not exactly worse than before—at least stuff like pre-existing condition exclusions are gone—but definitely not good either.
The downvotes should be a hint for you to re-evaluate your position and maybe look for logical errors. Instead you've doubled down and threw in some ridiculous piece of your worldview (that thing with wokeism) to shift the blame away from yourself to everyone around you.
Well here's some logic for you. Before entering enterprise tech (8+ years), I managed a finish-construction company warehouse. Being good at web development, I helped a buddy start a locksmith company and have a small portion of equity for doing all his marketing/SEO (since 2012). He makes close to $1mil/year and lives out of a warehouse... Spare me with your "ridiculous piece of your worldview"...
Is that really how you see it? I've never felt that way about the contractors coming to do work at my house. On the contrary, after I fork over a thousand bucks a day (minimum) for their expert work, I'm wondering if they're in fact a bit higher in the social hierarchy than I am. I feel a little self-conscious sometimes admitting that I move bits around on a screen for a living and have to hire someone to do the real work when it's time.
There is a very real fact of the matter that society can function without programmers, but society can't function without carpenters and other such craftsmen of the trades.
In fact, the vast majority of occupations today are ones society could do without as far as hard requirements are concerned. So long as there are the farmers and the trades, society will work just fine; everything additional is a luxury.
> How about being knee deep in toilets all day and having zero respect in society
I realize that "plumbers crack" is a meme, but plumbers are some of the most highly respected people I've worked with. I completely don't understand the second clause there.
And, frankly, opinion columnists (rightfully) get less respect than ever.
Ah, more journalist hate. Let's blame the journalist for writing a well-researched, thorough article citing multiple primary sources, because it tells us facts we don't like. It's gas lighting by the elites after all! This is why, whenever I read an article about anything, I blame the gas lighting elite journalists in their cozy chairs with their opinions backed by nothing. Those damned journalists, always reporting things.
Journalists would have better rep if they, you know, /journaled/ the goings on in the world instead of crapping out biased opinion pieces passed off as "journalism".
Over the past decade I've come to hate "journalists" more than I do lawyers, car salesmen, and politicians. They are one of the chief drivers behind many of the problems we face as societies today.
Maybe the problem is lumping entirely too many people under the generic term 'journalist.' Then it becomes very easy to find examples you hate. Of course, it should also make it easier to find examples you love, yet it rarely seems to happen that way.
I was working for an aerospace manufacturer for a while. We were getting 40/50 year old apprentices for the trades, guys coming off the production floor.
Electricians, millwrights, CNC machinists... we couldn't find enough of them.
I get it. Nobody wants to stand in front of a machine (or 5-6 machines) for 10 hours a day. Nobody wants to be in a 90 degree factory all day. Nobody wants to work 2nd or 3rd shifts.
The pay isn't incredible. $25-30/hr. You get overtime. You get health insurance. You're a union member. As long as Boeing and Airbus are still flying planes, you'll have a job.
But we just flat out didn't get many applicants. And the people that we'd get, would only work for a couple days, or a couple weeks.
Some people think it's because there's drug testing. Some people say young people "don't want to work". All I know is if I needed a job, I'd apply.
I think this comment represents a fundamental disconnect in cultures. The days of people "wanting" overtime are kind of gone. If I saw "overtime pay" on a job description all I am seeing is "work long hours, never see your kids, no time for hobbies, etc".
Maybe that translates to me "not wanting to work", but that's the situation.
There's a similar disconnect in expectations of outcomes. The same days when people "wanted" overtime were the days where people expected to get ahead by busting their asses; sure, you could work short hours, play with your kids, have time to develop a hobby, but then you wouldn't become wealthy.
That option is still there today, to work only enough to sustain oneself at a lowered standard. But it seems that there is a part of the millennial/gen-Z culture that expects ass-busting outcomes without the busting of the ass.
The ratio of power between labor and capital has swung hard toward capital over the past 30 years.
I think the number of people who become "wealthy" due to salary income alone is probably small and shrinking. You used to be able to buy a house in 12 months instead of 18 months if you worked overtime. Todays economics make it so working overtime lets you buy a house in 13 years instead of 17 years.
> You used to be able to buy a house in 12 months instead of 18 months if you worked overtime. Todays economics make it so working overtime lets you buy a house in 13 years instead of 17 years.
Actually, if 50 years ago you used to be able to pay for a house in 18 months, today you should be able to pay for a house in ~30 months: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco.... You're thinking of a time that didn't exist, perhaps outside of when people were granted plots of land and built their own houses on it.
Blame the Fed and idiotic policies at every level for that, anyway; the economics of housing is totally skewed by artificial scarcity on one hand and asset inflation on the other.
I don't disagree that capital has more power now due to the effects of technology, but I also believe that culture has been shaping away from the idea that we are masters of our fate; both due to technology, which becomes increasingly harder for laypeople to understand as it gets more advanced, and regulation forced by that technological advance, where the universe of economic activity one can engage in without needing the state's permission is getting smaller and smaller. Not to mention all the effects that social media has on envy.
Perhaps I sound like I'm repeating the age-old mantra of the old complaining that the young are ruining the country ;-) you decide.
Yeah, my napkin math is probably superlative. The biggest factor is certainly housing - 1950s homes that cost $20k would easily cost 50x that today with similar lot size, layout and location. I think perspectives on what housing is 'comparable' are pretty squishy.
Inflation only accounts for 12x since 1950.
I think "median' might be adding some error to your analysis: I suspect skilled trades were probably earning more relative to median in 1950 than today's skilled trades earn relative to today's median. But wasn't able to find good historical numbers with a quick search.
> Blame the Fed and idiotic policies at every level for that, anyway;
Many of these policies were voted in at the local level by the populace. It isn't the government's fault if every city counsel member who supports upzoning loses their next election.
It's the other way around. Younger generations have discovered that the busting of the ass in and of itself does not lead to financial comfort or stability. At least going to college and working an office job kind of still holds that promise. Why stand 10 hours a day at a machine, when I can work 7 at my desk for better pay and better long-term prospects?
> ass-busting outcomes without the busting of the ass.
Perhaps. But one only needs to look up to the original post to see that is not what we're talking about here. Busting of the ass for $25-30/hr plus overtime...not exactly getting wealthy here.
I don't know where GP's old employer was located, but it sounds like it's in a low cost-of-living area, the kind where homes can be had for under $100k. Earn $50-60k a year, pay off your house in maybe ten years instead of thirty, save a little each month and invest and let it compound over time; at the end you could have enough for a comfortable retirement and maybe even have some left over to hand down to your children.
It's not "fly to Paris on a whim"-level wealthy, but it sounds like a life well lived to me. What is your definition of wealthy?
Certainly nobody can reasonably conclude that "working long hours to live a basic life in an extremely low cost of living area" is "wealthy".
We can all agree that we have different definitions of wealthy. But I think we can also all agree that your description of that life, which is maybe "well-lived", is not one of wealth in the context of this discussion. It is certainly not an "ass-busting outcome".
OK, I grant that the life I described is perhaps not aspirational for anybody born and raised in a first-world country in the last 30 years or so. (I know many from other backgrounds whose idea of unimaginable wealth is exactly that.) But if it's not an ass-busting outcome, would you say it's a middling outcome? Or the most minimal outcome that anyone should have, regardless of how hard they work?
What makes you say that this middle-class life where you own your home free and clear and have time and money for the occasional indulgences of life is a "basic" one? In other words, why is your bar calibrated so high?
Statistically it is maybe a median level outcome. Maybe. If you’re okay with your kids going to the worst public schools, living in an area with little to no amenities, shopping thrift stores, etc as a trade off to owning your home outright (which itself as a goal is dubious anyhow).
And yea obviously wealth is relative. But to anyone accustomed to living in a reasonably developed country what you’re describing is not wealthy. We both know this. Not sure why you continue doubling down.
I'm doubling down because you haven't offered an explanation of what your counterfactual is. As best as I can guess, are implying that were something to be different, the outcomes will be different, whether that is that people who bust their ass will become truly wealthy (which again, you have not defined) or perhaps that people who don't bust their ass will also be better off.
I want to know what that something is, in what way it should be different, and why you think that difference will lead to the difference in outcomes you anticipate.
I’m not sure why you could possibly want all of that information from me.
My original response was about how “kids these days” expect “ass busting results without the ass busting”, and I was pointing out that that is definitely not the case with OP’s job offer of $25-30/hr plus overtime, which is the exact opposite…ass busting without the results.
But if you must, Let’s say somewhere in the top 50% of asset holders is a reasonable line for “wealth”. Do with that whatever you like.
According to the Federal Reserve[0], the median household net worth (that is, the assets that a family holds minus its liabilities) in the US is $122k, which means that owning free and clear even a modest home in a modest area -- like in the life I've described -- would already put you at the 50th percentile or above.
Among households that hold at least one asset, to filter out those who don't own anything, the median sits at $228k. Again, that's a nice home in a modest area or a modest home in a nice area, even before the recent real estate craze. Or from another perspective, someone making $60k a year (full-time employment at $25-30 an hour with no raises ever, which is an unreasonable assumption) who works for 40 years and manages a slightly above-average (remember, ass-busting) savings rate[1] of 10% will have that by the end of their career. We can conservatively assume that by investing their savings in a broad-market index fund they can at least match inflation.
Which is to say, entering the top 50% of asset holders from below is by no means unreasonable even for someone who isn't making a cushy $400k a year working at a FAANG. It just won't be overnight and it will take some amount of busting ass.
Your perception of how wealthy the median person (or asset-holder) is may be skewed by what you observe in a presumably very wealthy location.
I said "somewhere in the top 50%", not 50th percentile. I was being purposefully vague so that you wouldn't do exactly what you have done and try to pick apart whatever definition of wealth was brought forward. If you like, you can pretend that I said "90th" percentile exactly is the exact demarcation of wealth. Or take 50% as the mean and it's ~$750k net worth. Or take a definition of "poll 1,000 randomly selected Americans if your example is a wealthy person and take the majority vote". Go ahead and take those down also, if that's how you'd like to spend your time.
Even the "$100k" house your example uses does not get you to the median (you don't get to casually add 20%+ to the house value just to get to the median). And you're, again, still living in a tiny house in the poorest areas with the worst amenities, the worst healthcare, the worst education, the worst economic prospects for your children, the worst obesity, the worst of the opioid epidemic, etc, effectively zero disposable income, zero college savings, zero travel, crappy old used cars, thrift shop clothing, pinching every penny just to pay down your mortgage quickly and get to the 40-45th percentile of wealth statistically. Worth it? Not for me.
It's a perfectly "fine" life, if that's what you want. It does not meet a reasonable definition of wealth in the US.
I can tell you: $50-60k is roughly how much I and other software engineers over here in Eastern EU make, enjoying both low costs of living and low taxes(a privilege granted to those the government wants to keep from moving to the west), and that is still not considered wealthy in this region.
Granted, for the equivalent of $100k you could maybe erect a 1100sq ft house at best, but that's because prices exploded due to the pandemic and Russian invasion.
I don't know where you live but in my poor as hell area (12 an hour is considered decent pay), $100K doesn't really get you that much anymore. That is like the bare minimum for a lot in the trees and a small and poorly insulated 2 bedroom house.
15 years ago it might not have been so bad. But now you would get a run down shack on a tiny plot of land and you are living in a poor as hell area deep in the sticks where the nearest store besides walmart or dollar tree is minimum 60 miles away and your only choice for internet is 4G wireless that is shoddy going through all the trees.
I'm in a midsize city in the Gulf Coast region. Not exactly the boonies (though that is very accessible from where I am), and not exactly a bustling metro. One can buy a serviceable house under $100k in a not-so-great part of town. $12 an hour is a little under what people would consider decent pay here.
Your area seems to have a particularly disadvantaged income to home value ratio. Is there some other factor involved? From what I understand parts of Montana, for example, are like that, where there is no economic base to support higher wages but nonetheless the natural beauty of the area drives up home prices from out-of-town buying and whatnot.
In software, overtime pay usually means we aren't going to work you 60 hours a week.
But we're still full of idiots who think sacrificing your twenties to never see the sun is going to make the rest of their life easy, instead of full of health concerns. And divorce.
I'm curious, has your employer tried paying more? There are a fair few desk jobs that pay $25-30/hr, and it's entirely possible that people are trading job stability for something that isn't so physically demanding.
There's not that many jobs that pay that much around here.
However, our Seattle location has that problem. It was almost closed down because of competition.
edit: can't reply to the person who replied below, but if you have a contract to sell parts to a company you can't just increase your worker pay to whatever you want and have it be sustainable.
There's not that many jobs that pay that much around here.
But that doesn't answer the question. If you can't get people to apply for a physically demanding job, despite other benefits like stability, unionization, etc, at $25-30/hr then it seems rational to try $35-40/hr unless the need really isn't there. We've been living with so much inflation relative to such little wage growth that if I was told things are more expensive because machinists want a wage they can use to buy a house with I would still chafe at the inflation but the justification would be a lot more palatable than "the board raised the prices and did a stock buyback with the profits".
>but if you have a contract to sell parts to a company you can't just increase your worker pay to whatever you want and have it be sustainable.
Renegotiating a contract sounds more sustainable than not having workers.
The bottom line is always that the pay to quality of life at work is insufficient.
>Nobody wants to stand in front of a machine (or 5-6 machines) for 10 hours a day. Nobody wants to be in a 90 degree factory all day. Nobody wants to work 2nd or 3rd shifts.
>The pay isn't incredible. $25-30/hr. You get overtime.
For this much, there are lots of office jobs in front of a computer with zero risk of injury where you can sit. And overtime is not worth much if you do not get to enjoy life outside of work.
> There's not that many jobs that pay that much around here.
So, I shouldn't be around there?
> you can't just increase your worker pay to whatever you want
I respect that it's a challenge, but job seekers aren't responsible for solving Boeing's supply chain problems. Either the job is important enough to draw people into it, or it isn't.
If you have a contract to sell parts then your incentive to give higher salary would also be greater, given contracts would have penalties for failure to deliver. The companies are apparently in equilibrium with this situation, so either shortsighted in management or complain because effectively they want to pay less than they currently do.
McDonald's in my small 5k population town in Montana (which has a bit of a reputation for shit wages) was advertising $20/hr (might be $19 and I'm mentally rounding up) last summer including paid leave. McDonalds is nearly to your starting pay. The market has adjusted.
If a large number of people who are already credentialed for a job get it, and then quit soon after, why would it be rational for someone to spend their own time and money pursuing unpaid training in the hopes of also being hired onto that job?
It seems to me that companies have unrealistic ideas about what they need to do in order to attract employees. Start training again. Cross-train, even, if the boredom issue is a real one. Make work floors more hospitable (provide heaters/fans, lower noise, etc.). There was a time when typists and "computers" worked regimented shifts in sweltering/freezing, warehouse-style offices, too; very few workers will put up with being triple-layered at their keyboards or drowning in their own sweat these days. Maybe that needs to change for trades; or, businesses need to pay more to reflect the trouble people are putting themselves through for their paycheck.
> There's not that many jobs that pay that much around here.
Hiring movers to pack your stuff and move it across the country costs a few thousand dollars, and it's never been easier to rent an apartment via online showings. Your competition is a lot broader than your immediate geographic area.
This statistic is so misleading. I know you have honest intentions, but I think you find this statistic appealing because you have a worldview that poor people are helpless. If you read the actual report that statistic came from, you would see that about 40% said they had enough in savings to cover a surprise $500 expense. Another 21% said they would rely on a credit card, while 20% said they’d cut back on other expenses. Another 11% said they’d turn to family or friends for the money. So roughly 92% of people have a way of covering a $500 expense.
If you look at the discussion this statistic has started, it's basically a pissing contest of more and more extreme means that either help or hinder one's ability to move. But both sides of the argument are total strawmen: a vast majority of Americans can cover a $500 expense. Most people can find a way to move if they really want to. Those who can't are likely people you wouldn't want to hire.
That much-repeated factoid is the result of sloppy, clickbait reporting of a lousy survey.
People were asked "If you had a sudden $500 expense, how would you pay for it?" with options like ["cash", "checking account", "credit card", "pay-day loan", "borrow from family"] and unsurprisingly many people said "credit card". This then got repeated and reported as "Americans can't pay $500 without going into debt".
Yeah, would like to see the source of that. My generation puts everything on rewards cards even if they have no debt; so of course $500 is going on a card first lol.
That statistic originates from this report by the Federal Reserve from 2014.[0] In the report they define it as "paying for it entirely using cash, money currently in their checking/savings account, or on a credit card that they would pay in full at their next statement (referred to here as “cash or its functional
equivalent”)."
The target worker in this case is people in Gen z? They're young out of school and own nothing. It doesn't cost anything to move in that case. I moved across the country with a suit case. My only cost was the plane ticket
So that didn't cost you nothing then. Then what did you do when you got off the plane? Presumably you paid a security deposit for an apartment and didn't just camp on BLM land. For someone with no credit history, a landlord might ask for 4 months rent as a deposit these days.
When I was working shit jobs for minimum wage in Washington I hitchhiked to North Dakota's oil rush and slept in a train yard. It literally cost me nothing.
When an able bodied, single, mentally competent and healthy young person says they don't have enough money to move across country it is actually code for "I have no initiative so I will sit and cry like a pathetic child." Meanwhile people are successfully walking across the Darien gap and the Sonoran desert with entire families to find success.
> When an able bodied, single, mentally competent and healthy young person
Might want to add 'male' to that. I'm a female with a damn high risk tolerance (I worked third shifts in major cities, lived alone in one of the most dangerous cities in the country, and had no problem walking alone in a Middle Eastern country where I didn't speak the language well) and I wouldn't hitchhike. And I definitely am not sleeping in a train yard. So that cuts out half of Gen Z right there.
You made it fine, and others who try and hitchhike sometimes end up robbed, kidnapped, or worse. Don't blame an entire generation for not doing something that you know for a fact comes with a ton of risk.
Making a significantly lower wage is probably more dangerous in the long run than hitch-hiking a few trips in a lifetime to relocate to higher wages. That is the relative risk is likely actually negative.
If your try hard enough, you can always find a plausible sounding reason why it's impossible to improve your life. It's best not to take any risks, and always blame others for your problems. You can earn a lot of upvotes that way.
Your info is a little out of date. Two months ago I hired movers to go 150 miles, and I did the packing myself. I have a house rather than an apartment but I don't have that much stuff. Cost was $3500. A full service pack and move across the country would probably be upwards of $5000. Even more if you were moving a whole family.
I literally just had a move from NYC to Stanford quoted at $5,500. A full pack-and-move from NYC to NJ suburbs was $2,500. Perhaps you have more stuff than me. I definitely have more stuff than a young person.
The places where you can easily clear more than $25-30 an hour as a waiter are also places with high cost of living and expensive housing. As a counterexample, in my area (a midsize city in a low cost-of-living state), restaurants universally suffered from sharp labor shortages last year. $25-30 an hour would let you live comfortably here, meaning they should have had a lot of applicants; therefore the money just wasn't there.
My wife was a waitress for years (but not in the last decade or so). A four hour shift at Sizzler (yes, the stake house that everyone loves to hate) would get her about $25/hr on average easily. A decade ago. In a small town in the Inland Empire of SoCal, amongst the lowest cost of living in California.
Relative to what other jobs in the area pay and the cost of living, of course. The competition may in fact be McDonald's paying $12 an hour or Walmart paying $14.
It is interesting that, in a modern machine shop, these are skilled roles. Good millwrights are worth their weight in gold. A CNC machinist has to have a huge range of skills, from understanding tolerances to programming (CAD, toolpaths, gcode).
These are not assembly line skills. If the work environment is so shit they leave in days I would take a guess that the problem is more than the low pay.
While the trend they're talking about may be real, the way they provide evidence for it is sloppy.
> The number of young people seeking technical jobs — like plumbing, building and electrical work — dropped by 49% in 2022 compared to 2020, according to data from online recruiting platform Handshake shared with NPR.
> Researchers from Handshake tracked how the number of applications for technical roles vs. the number of job postings has changed over the last two years.
> While postings for those roles — automotive technicians, equipment installers and respiratory therapists, to name a few — saw about 10 applications each in 2020, they got about five per posting in 2022.
I.e. the evidence is in terms of applications per job posting, but the claim is about the number people seeking jobs. These are not the same. If it's understood that it's a job-seekers market, the same number of job seekers in 2022 could reasonably each have applied to half as many positions each, and be pickier about which postings they pursue.
> America needs carpenters and plumbers. Try telling that to Gen Z
Look, as long as we have a market economy, here's how you tell it to Gen Z: raise the wages for carpenters and plumbers (and if necessary shift some of that forward into subsidies and incentives for people to train as carpenters and plumbers) until you get as many as you say you “need”.
If America isn’t willing to pay enough to get X carpenters and Y plumbers, it doesn’t “need” them.
Most “we need more blue collar labor” arguments trace back to elites who want to retain more profit by paying less per unit blue collar labor.
There is a psychology problem with skilled trades and younger generates in the US.
I've known Gen Z folks who thinks it's better to work at a sandwich shop or small restaurant than skilled trades. They were raised up (through the schooling environment) to look down on trades. Even if it pays them significantly more with better benefits.
Many places in the US school system they only prepare people for college. Schools do this in subtle ways like providing AP courses while cutting hands on shop classes.
When it comes to subsidies... there are some trades areas where you can be trained for free. The people are needed so the training has already be made really easy. Sometimes it's on the job training and you're paid well while you learn.
This is very much a cultural view of skilled trades.
> There is a psychology problem with skilled trades and younger generates in the US.
People work preferences not being what you'd like may make the cost of motivating them to behave the way you want higher than you would like.
That’s part of how market’s work—you don’t get to choose other people’s utilitt function. If you “need” for them to act in a particular way, that means you need to offer them a sufficient incentive to do so given their actual utility function, not the utility function you wish they were operating under.
> I've known Gen Z folks who thinks it's better to work at a sandwich shop or small restaurant than skilled trades.
Yes, some people’s subjective preferences aren’t yours or those that would be most convenient for your preferred outcomes.
> This is very much a cultural view of skilled trades.
“Cultural view” is just another way of saying “subjective preference”, and, yes, that’s how utility functions work.
Blame whatever you want, Gen Z is mostly a little late for changes to parenting or schooling policies, even if one had a set in mind and the power to wish it into being, to shift this much, so, the bottom line still is, if you want to “tell Gen Z” about your perceived “need” for more tradespeople, you need to do it through sufficient incentives giving their actual values and preferences.
I am a skilled tradesmen, or was previously, I quit and did work in a sandwich shop for quite awhile specifically because the tradesmen in my area where barely making any more than the sandwich shop paid. My family is 80% tradesmen, most of them are a bit envious on me living the same level of lifestyle as them without having to do body destroying work.
I make most of my money now doing odd side-jobs of my choosing, the combined trades knowledge is useful but its not true trades work. Building someones home hobby aquarium or researching and installing high efficiency grow lights pays far more than doing plumbing or electrical trade work does. But if i didn't do this work? I would still go back to a sandwich shop for a minor pay decrease rather than fucking around with tradework that will cut 20 years off my life with inconsistent and unpredictable hours and jobs and constant boom and bust cycles of construction and trade work.
I don't understand who is getting paid $24 an hour when I paid over $125 per hour to get a sub-panel installed.
Could it be that after starting their own company, they found it difficult to hire additional journeymen at the rate of $24 per hour which they themselves had previously earned as a journeyman?
When everyone can get $125 an hour, there is suddenly a shortage of cheap labor! Big surprise.
Are you accounting for all the overhead? Commute time, vehicle maintenance, tool costs, having material stock on hand for any and every type of breaker or connector or wire they might possibly need, the time spent on the phone lining up jobs and bidding jobs and everything else.
Also retrofitting into older unknown shit is WAY more of a pain in the ass than doing new construction too. So if I have enough work to do 40 hours on new construction, im not even going to entertain something like retrofitting a new panel into an older electrical system unless the pay is significantly higher.
It's almost as if people are less willing to work jobs that actively harm their long-term physical health (back-breaking jobs) or those harmful for their mental health (generally ones face to face with customers, customer support or high stress jobs), for a relatively small wage to said job's demands and lasting effects.
This was found specifically to be the case for American men in a Boston Fed study last month: as the wage paid for trade-skill jobs shrinks over time relative to the wages paid to school-degree jobs, men increasingly refuse to work trade-skill jobs.
> The evidence from this study shows that the widening earnings gap between highly and less skilled workers over the last four decades is closely connected with the decreasing labor supply of prime-age men
> The decline in relative earnings is associated with a 0.49 percentage point increase in the exit rate, accounting for 44 percent of the total growth in the exit rate among non-college men over the 1980–2019 period.
Caveats. There are almost certainly further coincident reasons for the decrease in “blue collar” trade-skills workforce, both for men and for all genders; this particularly study should not be considered an exclusive factor, merely a relevant one. Please consider the constraints documented at that link before overextrapolating; for example, “non-Hispanic” which rules out biological causes, and so on.
Where are you finding small wage plumbers or carpenters? All the trades here (plumbing, electrical, HVAC, carpentry (perhaps more on the finish side vs framing though) are extremely expensive, with hourly rates between $80-$150/hour. (source - did a lot of renovations on my house, and my BIL is an electrician).
I'm mostly using small companies where it's the owner and maybe his son or 1-2 employees doing the work. Likewise my BIL has his own company that's just him and his best friend. So yeah those guys are all taking 100% of the rate. Granted they have to pay taxes and insurance, and all that like I do, but they're doing well overall.
The median annual wage for electricians was $60,040 in May 2021. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $37,020, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $99,800.
Staring at a computer screen all day, interacting with people exclusively on video chat is good for mental and physical health? Plumbers and carpenters can earn a high wage, with no college debt, and often get a union job. Some of my best friends from high school went into the trades, and owned a nice home before most of our high school class was graduating from college.
If it's such a good deal they should have no problem finding plenty of employees for those jobs. If Gen Z is opposed to those kind of working conditions for some reason, then it's just a matter of supply and demand - like how trash collectors get paid a lot for a relatively low-skilled labor job, because not many people want to deal with trash all day. Whether we share the same aversion Gen Z does for certain types of jobs is irrelevant, nobody gets to be the arbiter of what peoples preferences are
Trash collecting is a much more a cushy job in most cities these days. In mine they don't ever leave the truck. One guy drives, the other operates the hydraulic arm. If a piece of trash isn't in the bin or the bin is not grababble by the arm, they just drive away. A different team handles bulky items that are to be called in by the resident. Benefits include an actual pension.
yeah I was thinking the same thing as I wrote it actually, but went with that example anyway as it's a typical example for a job that pays more because of a lower supply of people willing to do it. Could've used those ice-road truckers or deep sea fisherman or some other risky job as a more clear-cut example, but I think any example works to demonstrate the point
That "Handshake" platform went from 10 applications per role in 2020 to 5 applications per role in 2022, but the number of roles increased. Based on the stats provided, this article just seems like another lamentation that labor has made gains.
It's also not clear that this platform is representative of the market. I've never heard of it before, but it bills itself as "The #1 way college students get hired" which seems questionable.
"But Mwandjalulu, who makes nearly $24 an hour as a carpenter, said he's still had trouble convincing his friends, whom he keeps in touch with on Facebook and Snapchat, to follow his path."
There you go. This is minimum living wage right now. We're fighting to make this amount the minimum wage now. Meanwhile this is the prospect of this job.
It doesn't pay. People rather go into tech work or anywhere near tech work.
Email jobs often pay a bit more than that and half the time they can do Ticktok. If the person isn't passionate about a trade, tadesmanship is not an easy sell.
In contrast to most people here, I have actually worked outside of an office chair, for a short period of time, in a factory and also do woodworking as a hobby. The reason fewer people want to learn the trades is because it sucks. It's usually too hot or too cold, dirty (not just oil, I'm talking about spiders and bugs, nasty customer's homes and so on), loud and dusty, it's hard on your body (try standing for 8h straight without moving or holding a vibrating tool for hours), it's less intellectually stimulating than STEM office jobs and the low barrier of entry, combined with a much lower margin than software makes for low wages.
I'm happy with my home office programming jobs, even though it is pointless and unfulfilling.
The US and European economies are increasingly becoming service economies and the middle class is eroded. People nowadays are too poor to pay for skilled domestic labor, only cheaply produced trinkets from overseas are still affordable. I think the only time, if ever, that production and building will become popular again is when China will finally cut us off und people realize that you can't eat software, metaphorically speaking.
Low barrier of entry? For trades? I've always been under the impression that software engineering is one of the lowest barriers-of-entry jobs there is, while skilled trades are pretty difficult to get into.
You can take web frontend dev bootcamp for a few weeks and probably land a job pretty quickly, if "any job at all" is the standard you're aiming for.
Similarly, you can get licensed as a bookkeeper (another "white collar" profession) by taking a course that'll take no more than a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the skilled trades frequently require apprenticeships of roundabout three years, during which time you'll make only a symbolic amount of money. If you want to get into one of those, you better do it while you're young and still living, for free, at "hotel mommy", because there's just no way you can afford it when you're a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities and financial burdens.
I've never personally seen a bootcamp graduate at my job. Everyone either has a STEM college degree that is definitely beyond the ability of the average tradesman, or has been self-taught since childhood age. I think that programming does require more problem solving skills than trades do (or bookkeeping) and the demographics reflect that. It also requires at least passable language skills to understand what you're supposed to program. Most of the tradesman in my country nowadays are foreigners who never learned the language properly. If the barrier to entry for programming really was lower than for the trades, why don't all the tradesman switch to programming, where they'd make much more money? The answer is that they can't, because they lacked the necessary education and grades to compete against other applicants for better paying white-collar apprenticeships/college in their youth and now lack the discipline or skills to self-teach.
> Meanwhile, the skilled trades frequently require apprenticeships of roundabout three years
What you conveniently forgot to mention is that they also start much earlier. An apprenticeship in the trades usually starts after 10th grade (in Germany) when other students seeking a college education still have a minimum of 5 years of schooling in front of them that pays jack shit, even costing you money. With an apprenticeship you start your earnings much earlier, which makes it appealing to students from poor families where the parents are unwilling to finance them any longer (requires less parental support = lower barrier of entry). My cousin who did an apprenticeship (white-collar job though) now owns a house, while I can barely afford a car.
> If you want to get into one of those, you better do it while you're young [...], because there's just no way you can afford it when you're a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities and financial burdens
That is definitely true, but applies all the same to bookkeeping (which also requires an apprenticeship in my country) and college education.
I was thinking more of legal barriers of entry you face when going into business for yourself rather than getting on someone's payroll.
You can do a web dev bootcamp, find clients who need websites, and just get started making websites and getting paid as a contractor (sole tradership). There is no legal hurdle, even the bootcamp is not legally required.
Similarly, you can go out and find businesses who need help with bookkeeping, and just start doing some bookkeeping and getting paid as a contractor. Where I live (in Germany), there is no legal hurdle, other than a few weeks of coursework with a test, as long as you don't do any year-end tax accounting.
If, however, you learn how to do horseshoeing (say someone teaches you on an informal basis), and you go out shoeing people's horses for money, you'll be in big trouble, legally. -- In the U.S. it's a 6-week trade school that you have to do, in Germany it's a 3-year apprenticeship. And the fact that these kinds of legal requirements differ so much country-by-country is a testament to how arbitrary they are.
...now, non-self-employed work is a whole other ball of wax, where there's clearly a problem of qualifications-inflation, and the required qualifications no longer bear any relationship to the skills that will actually be needed on the job.
> I've never personally seen a bootcamp graduate at my job.
Just as an employee at your company, or anywhere in the industry? If the former, then see above, what I wrote about qualifications-inflation. It also may be a reflection of the socioeconomic cluster you (respectively your company) is a part of.
Within my 13 years in software engineering, I've seen more than half a dozen companies from the inside, and I've come across many white collar executives without college degrees. Particularly, the company that I was with the longest and paid the best (a very recognizable brand on the web) had a CTO who hadn't gone to college and in fact had held no other jobs, prior to lucking into the employee #1 spot working for what turned out to be a hugely successful startup. Other example: I once worked with a retail insurance underwriting company where there didn't seem to be any college-trained Mathematicians as far as I could make out.
> > If you want to get into one of those, you better do it while you're young [...], because there's just no way you can afford it when you're a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities and financial burdens
> That is definitely true, but applies all the same to bookkeeping (which also requires an apprenticeship in my country) and college education.
The point I was making is that you either have to decide to do it when you're a kid, or the ship has sailed. The same is not true for being a software engineer.
I know lots of people who became software engineers after not having studied anything related to software engineering. E.g. I had a colleague working at a financial trading firm whose background was as an econometrician, who had never done any programming in college. While on the job, he gradually shifted from Excel, to picking up a bit of R on the job, to taking evening classes in C++ and immediately applying what he learned on the job, to being a C++ developer.
Have I ever heard of a farrier who didn't apprentice as a farrier when they were a kid? I haven't. I know someone who shifted from being a carpenter to being a roofer, but even this is something that they did when they were young, and there are special privileges implying they didn't have to do a full three years on the second apprenticeship. If the 3-year apprenticeship-requirement is legally fully in effect, barring you from entering the trade, it's a very difficult hurdle to clear.
I remember back when I was 17 in 2004, I applied for an apprenticeship to work at Jaguar-Land Rover as an Electrical Engineering Technician. I turned up to the interview to be told that there were 2 welding apprenticeships left and those would be filled from the 150+ candidates that turned up.
Without an apprenticeship you couldn't study a trade at college. You couldn't get an apprenticeship unless you knew someone that worked at the company or were highly qualified; enough to get into university. That's what I ended up doing. Studying CS.
Even if you were lucky enough to get one, they could legally pay you far less than the National Min Wage which wasn't enough to live for most people and is still the case today [0].
The process operator positions at the local refineries back home are all filled through nepotism. You either had to know someone or your father had to be an operator in order to even get an interview: hundreds of people would show up for the exam and the ones who actually got positions were not the brightest people showing up. They just happened to have dads and uncles who worked there.
The fun thing is that my dad got the job at the plant he worked for because of my grandfather and older brother. During a tech downturn, I applied for a few of these jobs. My dad refused to vouch for me, claiming that he didn't want to continue the cycle of nepotism. Sure didn't hate to earn huge bonuses from that cycle, though.
Trades pay shit. I have friends that are electricians and they made more a decade ago than the current journeyman rate. Nevermind inflation, we're talking only nominal pay.
My dad is a licensed electrician and sewage treatment plant operator. I made more money than he did by the age of 19 with a semester of community college under by belt. He owns a 1/4 share in a business and I'm far from working in a FAANG (meaning, he's near the top of his game and I'm close to middle of mine).
In 2009-10, he had no work. I don't think people realize how hard recessions hit trades. You don't become "unemployed." You have to go to work then stand around half the day not getting paid until enough people stop showing up that there's enough work. All of my friends working in trades from when I was younger switched careers in the Great Recession (the military was a decent option, since they'd fast-track skilled people to E-5).
This is the real reason why millennials are under-represented in the trades. The media prefers to just call us lazy.
I'm in Houston. A "manual" machinist (non-CNC) working in my factory in 1980 could make $25 per hour. In 2020, I was still paying the same machinist $25 an hour nominally, except now he operates a CNC machinist and is vastly more productive. However, his productivity gains have been competed away both domestically and by oversees manufacturing, and via boom and bust cycles in the oil patch that reset wages.
Doesn't change the fact that the pay rates haven't changed in 15 years for those who are getting into the career and will have to work for others to learn.
How much of this is class signifiers in the age of increasingly tenuous existences on anyone but the wealthy? I wouldn’t own a farm even with existing subsidies on agriculture specifically because it will destroy my body and then I’ll be on the hook for all that healthcare.
It's more nuanced than that for a lot of people I think - many people inherit "the family farm/ag. business" so to speak and even if they don't want to get into it they do anyway
LOL, No. Not even close. It wasn’t even like that 30 years ago, it definitely isn’t like that now.
Owning a “family” farm basically doesn’t make economic sense anymore and hasn’t for awhile. The cost of equipment, maintenance, fertilizer, seed, and chemicals have all gone up significantly and at the same time are now offered under more and more one-sided terms to the detriment of farmers without mass capital backing.
Operating a farm is a game of desperation to cash flow your payments for everything while still eeking out basic subsistence, and the payback periods run most of a lifetime to sometimes effectively infinite (a lot of modern farming systems are subscription based).
Most farms don’t even have farmhands. You have kids, kids who hate being stuck in the middle of nowhere as they’re exposed to idealized city life through media and the Internet. Kids who leave as soon as they’re able so they don’t get stuck in a dying small town, scraping by, with no relationship prospects, and no positive future in sight.
You are unhinged if you think farming is easy.
- Signed, one of the kids who fled to the city/tech.
Man, I'm in PE buying these companies and if you want to get rich in America be competent in skilled trades. If you have a little bit of management skill it is very doable. I've been offering 40 year old high school grads $30M in cash for their companies (and they would get that much again as we are doing rollups and they maintain significant equity.)
What is amazing is that these guys just do this again and again. You want to know who has boats and planes? These guys!!! Richer than I'll ever be.
Private equity buying up all these companies is actually a huge part of the problem! IMHO. For the older folks who are selling their company, it's of course a huge boon, but for people entering the trade, it's a huge negative.
In the past, when you started a trade, you could apprentice with a small, locally-owned and operated company. If you worked at it long and hard, you'd have a good chance at being able to buy the company or a stake of it from the owners as they enter retirement. I've heard that in many areas, like veterinary clinics, this was a very common path forward for people entering the career.
But nowadays, all these small local companies are increasingly owned by private equity groups from afar that have their eyes on profit. You'll have no chance of working up to an ownership stake. And once the private equity group takes over, you can be sure that your work will be increasingly optimized to maximize profit, which could be good, but it can also mean cutting out the parts of your job that are less profitable but more enjoyable. The path forward is harder. To be a real business owner, your only real option will be starting a new firm from scratch.
So anyway, I don't mean to be overly critical, and it's great to see someone in private equity posting here. If you have any thoughts on my comments above I'd love to hear them. Cheers.
I would offer a bit of a different take. When you get some scale, you can start to offer real benefit packages. You have a real career path. In many of these subscale ops there is just owner and workers, in stasis.
And fundamentally in a market where the talent is tight, you HAVE to treat your people well to keep the lights on.
I truly believe there is a giant untapped value creation potential for tradesfolk. What I see is the gap is basic "management" of the business. It is really hard for "doers" to become managers and leaders. And of course, these industries are not known for leveraging technology. (I mean, if your HVAC guy used a scheduling app he'd automatically be in the top 5%!)
How much more are these high school grads earning than you? Is it not sufficient to incentivize you to do what they do, or do you not possess the “little bit of management skill” it would take? Or is it something else?
I suspect the volatility is much higher for possessing the skill to be able to “cash out” $30M+ regularly, compared to going to a nice undergrad school, getting a job at a prestigious big company, then going to a selective business school, and then landing a gig in private equity.
Laziness on my part. I'm old and comfortable, and it takes real work for 10 years to get there. And of course it requires technical knowledge learned over those ten years!
But if I had worked as hard as I did earlier in my career at a trade business (remember - much lower risk than a startup as the market is very well known and demand omnipresent), I would be much richer now.
The guys who create these companies you purchase have a local a network in the industry-- That is to say: The guys who create & run the companies are able to find labor.
This article is about a labor shortage...
Apparently a few tradesmen are able to recruit other tradesmen, and perhaps pay them well, in the right geographic locations where there are enough skilled tradesmen (or train-able interested apprentices) to hire.
But it sounds like the vast majority of Tradesmen company founders are unable to find labor.
The skill of management is what allows you to recruit (see above. Good pay, career path, good training, treating people like humans, driving growth which creates opportunities for staff.) Most do not have it.
Of course I have selection bias. But I would say if you took a y-combinator founder and said "start a trade business", in 10 years that founder would have >50% chance of cashing out for $30M or more. (Which means $5M EBITDA, on typically a 30% EBITDA margin business. So $15-20M revenue.) And they would be able to cash flow it. AND they would be taking the profits out as they go.
What does this mean? So the tradespeople are all the ones with the Lambos. I’m not even sure what you’re taking about but whatever is must be a tiny minority of tradespeople. By this logic, we should tell people to skip the trades and study hard for Ivies and get jobs in investment banking because these are the people that own Islands.
I think if you looked at the data of who the $10M+ people actually are, you would see they are actually the owners of these "real" businesses.
Of course we are talking selection bias with the businesses I'm talking about (just like startups here on Y combinator!) But I would argue the overall risk is lower, and the expected value is higher if you applied the same rigor to the business.
There is no yCombinator or Harvard b school for trades. And that is what sets the ones that I see apart - they have leaders who naturally figured out how to lead, set up processes, do marketing, manage talent, etc. This is a huge gap for most high school path tradesmen as they've never "seen what good looks like," so most get stuck pretty early.
I live in an unusual town. Trades here at least are flourishing.
20ish years ago this was a working class satellite to a small industrial city, just a few shops and a petrol station. Most of the houses were fibro-cement and most of them empty except for a few weeks in summer when tourists came, but even then it wasn't really thriving, too flat for ocean views, the ocean was on the other side of a enormous dune. There had been a fishing industry here once but that was gone. Nearby Torquay launched the companies quicksilver and rip curl and a surfing culture. This town started to attract student doctors working in the city teaching hospital who wanted to be near the ocean, more than half of them are women, and many of them met young tradies who lived here for the surf. And then a momentous event, the town was used as the set for a tv show about people leaving the city for the coast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaChange
A really common story in this town is a couple where one partner works in the hospital as a health professional, which meant they had a steady income to borrow for a cheap block of land, and the other partner is a builder or a carpenter or an electrician, who sub divided the block and built a couple of units.
These couples who have combined the low risk well paid and regular income of a health professional in Australia's public health system, with the higher risk irregular income of small scale property development have mad astonishing amounts of money, all while surfing a couple of days a week.
I would absolutely be up for doing a skilled trade as a side job but the problem is I'd have to do a really long course and work as an unpaid slave laborer... to learn how to stick a pipe into another pipe.
All these weird trade jobs have these ridiculous requirements as if it's actually mentally challenging to learn them. If you want to shoe horses you need to do a fucking bachelor's degree equivalent in horse shoeing. If you want to remove ingrown toenails it's the same. I could learn that shit in a week and you're telling me I'd have to spend half a decade gaining a piece of paper just because they want to pretend it's hard? You're hammering nails into a fucking horse.
Programming isn't mentally hard either, it's just hitting keys on a keyboard! There's tons of tutorials online, stackoverflow, and even AI an do it for you now! Could easily learn it in a week, don't see why people spend time studying it or get paid so much,
Which will typically get you arrested, unless you know how to do it right.
I don't know if you know anyone who knows anything about horses, but if you say 'founder' near some horses they drop over dead an instant later. Literally cheaper to set wheelbarrows of money on fire. You have to really love horses to deal with them, and even then some of them complain endlessly to their friends about it so much that their friends and/or their friends' kids (well hello there) stat to think they must be nuts.
> Which will typically get you arrested, unless you know how to do it right.
I don't think there are laws against trying to shoe your own horse and doing it badly if that's what you mean.
I'm a horse owner who works as a software engineer for a living, and I'm so enraged by how much I have to pay the farrier and other horse-related tradespeople that it has very seriously crossed my mind, many times, to take the other side of the trade and give up software engineering to become a farrier.
It's the horse owners who are burning money, not the professionals.
I used to live in Munich, which is an insanely expensive city to live in (with only mildly higher income levels than the rest of Germany), and it has a shortage of farriers. Farriers commute hundreds of kilometers to work here, and still horse owners struggle to find them. If you set up shop there as a farrier, your books will be full in no time. Marketing & Sales? Screw that. Horse people all talk amongst each other and when there's a new farrier in town, word gets around like wildfire. Admin overhead? Nope! The way it used to work in my old stables, one of the horse owners would painstakingly coordinate timeslots with ten other horse owners in the same stable to keep a farrier busy for a day. All they have to do is show up, shoe 10 horses (they don't even have to do that if they have apprentices), and take home maybe €2000 in revenue for a day's work.
That revenue is all cash, of course. Report some of it for income tax (how much is basically up to you), and use the rest in the "informal economy" paying cash to other tradespeople to work on your house on weekends (who, in turn, do the same). If the ministry of finance knocks on your door, asking about this house that you suddenly own debt-free that seemed to have come out of nowhere, you've just been busy at work there by yourself, they can't prove otherwise.
That was a joke about stabbing horses with nails. OP did not say anything about hooves, thus illustrating the point that there are critical details a pro would know.
...ah, okay. Well what I was reacting to was the fact that stabbing your horse with nails is what will actually happen if you try to shoe your own horse and you do it badly, as the inner part of the hoof is "alive" just like other parts of the body and can definitely not accommodate any nails. So the difference between stabbing your horse with a nail and putting the nail where it belongs is something like 5mm, and you have to hit that while the horse (which may be 10x your weight) won't hold still. If it weren't for that minor detail, everybody would just shoe their own horse.
But you probably won't get arrested for attempting this and getting it wrong.
If you have a well-behaved horse and you take a course, like they have in those trade schools in the U.S., where they give you a hoof from a cadaver and just let you practice driving a nail into it 100 times, and then you do it a dozen times while getting feedback from a pro, then it seems quite doable. But those courses don't even exist in Germany, as the trade is that keen on preventing these kinds of skills from becoming too widespread.
The article, maybe unintentionally, frames this in an interesting way by starting with a first-generation 20-year-old immigrant.
In the US, you're in "Gen Z" whether you're a 20-year-old first-generation immigrant, like the carpenter in the lede, or a 20-year-old 10th-generation American.
But immigration's changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Before the pandemic, the number of immigrants has increased, but the age, class, and education levels of those immigrants have also. Asia overtook Hispanic regions as a source of immigrants in 2009; more than half of 2018 immigrants from Asia had a bachelor's degree or better, compared to more than half of 2018 immigrants from Mexico not completing high school. The proportion of undocumented immigrants has also dropped, while non-criminal deportations have increased.[1]
This largely translated to a relative decline of younger, less-educated, poorer immigrants for whom the trades are the most accessible means of financial security, and a shift toward most total US immigrants (51%) having already lived in the US for more than 20 years. There's also a much larger proportion of recent immigrants age 25+ with at least a bachelor's degree (more than 45% from 2014-2019, vs. less than 35% for both US- and foreign-born immigrants prior to 2014). And when counting both immigrants and their children — whether immigrants or US-born — the population dropped by nearly 1 million between 2020 and 2021.[2]
Which leads to the pandemic: net immigration, across the board, cratered so hard in 2020 and 2021 that there were fewer total foreign-born immigrants in 2021 than there were immigrant visas — not work visas, not student visas, but just permanent resident visas — in 2016.[3]
The easy framing is to pin it on "Gen Z", but the missing context that the lede just hints at changes the story dramatically.
i think that , if land and materials were cheap, genz or genX or any gen would learn to build their own homes. We ve actually been doing that for thousands of years
We build houses differently now than years ago. 100 years ago, sure, you can totally make your own house because that used balloon framing. Today, with all the safety features built into a modern house, its a lot harder to take a few unskilled people and raise something up without it being a fire hazard.
I would dispute that. Modern framing and construction is not that difference than 100 years ago, and in many cases is even easier. Oh sure we don't make balloon frame houses now because they are a fire hazard, but the skills used to put a floor in before the second story wall is no different than putting up a 2 story wall and building the second floor onto that, might use a nail gun instead of a hammer because it is 10x faster for sheathing though. And things like plumbing and electrical and drywall and flooring are easier than ever. I don't gotta plaster an entire wall into existence, just the joints between drywall. I don't gotta put ceramic knobs up to wrap my wiring around, I can just pull a shielded wire through the walls. I don't have to cut and solder lead pipe or install ceramic drain lines or huge threaded cast iron pipes, I use plastic which is way faster and easier in every way. I don't have to mend carpets, you buy new, and laminate flooring is cheaper than anything ever before and is so easy ive had a 6 year old child doing it. Tile hasn't changed in like forever.
If you follow the bog standard construction methods, there are only a handful of dangerous or bad things you can do. Like pulling wire through sharp metal conduit holes and not using grommets. Or sticking your furnace up tight against bare wood boards or paneling. Or being completely clueless and ignoring the instructions printed on your insulation and creating a plastic trap for moisture to accumulate. Using brittle screws instead of nails for framing. And almost all of these things would be caught by an inspector immediately if you even tried.
If you have speculators (foreign/corporate) buying all the new supply then does that really help in the long run? We have more vacant homes than we have homeless, for example.
What would help is restricting foreign speculation and appropriately taxing corporate ownership of homes. A good example is what's going on in Canada [1] & Vancouver [2].
It's not like other countries haven't made meaningful attempts to address their population from buying homes. It's just that the US doesn't want to do it because the elite who own & constitute the political spectrum think it's bad for their bottom line and don't care if it's destabilizing the rest of society.
What if we convince them (and I think this is true) that this will make the stock market go up? A lot of real estate in "developed" countries is bought up due to capital flight to relative stability. If that weren't an option, the money would go into U.S. equities instead.
Well for all the broohaha from the "YOU DONT NEED COLLEGE" folks the reality is still that trades are very underpaid unless you run your own business and your body will break down doing physical labor for 8+ hours a day.
The salary difference between say a software dev and a trade worker is pretty small (perhaps 30% less after taxes).
The body breaking down aspect is still an issue. Younger people in these fields seem a lot more aware though - they're practically health freaks compared to your stereotypical 50-ish somewhat round trade worker with back pain issues.
I guess we'll have to wait and see how that generation fares with 4.5 decades of phyical work. Japan is probabably the place look at for research.
30% is few hundred to thousand euros. That is not actually trivial change in income. Specially considering what you have leftover paying for housing, transport and food.
Well relatively speaking your lifestyle isn't likely going to change dramatically between those two incomes. In the US the difference is several hundred percent.
I'm not surprised. It doesn't make sense to work for regular hard-working people. Just work for money printer recipients, it pays better... Big finance, big tech, big pharma, big law, big consulting...
Regular people work hard for their money and therefore they don't part with it easily... You don't want a job where you'll end up working for regular people. Money printer recipients had it easy so they toss suitcases of full of cash at you. That's the kind of customers you want.
I do remote software work from a very picturesque but somewhat remote coastal village in Sweden that has been largely left behind by urbanisation.
My impression is that there's no reluctance to go into these lines of work for young local people here. I imagine it would be the same in the US.
In the cities where there are more office work opportunities for young people, even without any qualifications to speak of: it seems like there are a lot of people from eastern Europe working in these fields.
From my impression and exposure to construction it seems the wood construction techniques are different in Europe (to speak broadly) than in the US. Without getting into details it seems European (and also Aussie) carpenters (and "tradies" to also speak broadly) are paid more than their US counterparts. Have also heard a lot of the "best" carpenters and builders in the States are from Europe - this may be slightly outdated info (a few decades) - I had thought this being due to the more "timber frame" -type construction styles in Europe.
It is the same in the US, but there aren't always opportunities to learn the trades everywhere. I was friends with a welder who learned welding from the garage of an old dude who ran it as an informal school in her town. If she was few towns over, she might have missed out on that career option.
Even in this thread there are people contemplating switching to trades and asking how to even start.
Taking on an unknown, quite likely flakey person could be the death knell for a small company in these fields. You vouched for this person and it worked.
The often attempted solution in Europe is commonly funded training in these fields. Germany does it the best, I think with a very formalized education/trainee system. Not sure how/if they deal with older people who need a new job.
I am simultaneously amazed that new homes can be built in any significant quantity and also not surprised at all that new homes in my area are starting at $400k plus. Due to the lack of and cost of labor it’s just not economically feasible to build lower cost starter homes.
This reality becomes painfully obvious if you try to hire the trades to do anything at all. All you get are fly by night operators, no shows, and the insanely expensive brand names.
welder. learn to weld. take a community college class to get certified. somewhere in there get a job at an abusive shop making $30 migging tube fences and grinding all day. try to find any lifeline to a higher paying less brutal work environment hopefully without assholes constantly doing hinky shit for a laugh
Seems like a trade + honesty + can run a business as an IC/MBA hybrid, you’ll clean up and have a good or very lucrative career. Especially as billing peers cost of living.
Probably a big caveat exists for businesses that get into contract bidding, as that’s different.
There’s 1x old plumber in my town who does honest and on time work and he’s a spry 70 year old. And charges a hefty but honest hourly rate given the service. There’s no plumbers behind him.
Whenever Ive thought I might not make it in tech, a trade and running a business on it was the backup plan.
*edit the nuances I’ve seen that are worth mentioning is if you’re not in that owner/operator role, the work can get bad. Know enough friends who:
- slipped in a construction site moonlighting a demolition job and now limping and can’t afford a doctor.
- Electricians who got their in around a strict union hierarchy but also zapped themselves pretty bad early on.
I’m a so called “blue collar worker” - I supervise the installation of high voltage equipment. I make pretty good money - seems few people want to travel as much as I do.
Most sites I work at, the guys are mostly freelancers. They make about €100/h, pre taxes.
What’s your conclusion? It’s hard for me to make generalizations. The ones who work at my high end FAANG company are all hard-working and driven. But they’re the cream of the crop.
I'm on the side that high performers (across all industries and generations) tend to be outliers.
The consensus is that GenZ's work ethic can be summed as "do the bare minimum not to get fired" and that they "work to live, not live to work."
Not that either ethos is a bad thing necessarily, it's just that they generally don't care about work as much as previous generations did.
My father's generation, employees stayed at their company until they retired. Mine, we switch jobs every 2-5 years. Early in my career, older individuals would question "why I switched jobs so frequently." Now, no one bats an eye at a 2-year stint.
House prices, rent prices, politicians pandering to the elder generations, allowing young people to get addicted to social media and all the psychological issues that causes, wilful destruction of the education system, removing third spaces etc.
In the UK this was through the older generations consistently voting for right wing governments.
Is it any wonder it looks like they gave up? Can’t afford a decent house, can’t afford to save for a decent pension etc
The attitude towards work probably has more to do with social media influence, than it does apathy.
At least in the US, policies have become much more friendly towards younger folks than they have ever been.
Federal student loan forgiveness, LGBT+ anti discrimination policies, individual medical insurance exchanges, are a few off the top of my head.
The cost of living and cost of education has far outpaced income growth, which does affect younger people disproportionately more, but the impact is not localized to only the young.
Thanks for ‘splaining but I know what it means and how it’s used in the US. Though here on the other side of the pond, until very recently, we didn’t use such euphemisms. We just referred to various indexes produced by the Office of National Statistics such as RPI, CPI. Our media has recently adopted the silly euphemistic term and is currently shoving it down everyone’s throats. It’s a a nice redirection from the issue of companies raising prices and capitalism to “oh well it’s just the normal state of affairs of living”
Also, you really think people have to be from the US to understand such simple concepts?
Could this be a place where "automation/globalization/whatever" has actually destroyed the jobs? I'm not overfamiliar with a lot of them, but I could see that e.g. being a carpenter or electrician today might be different from in the past owing to "cruft" -- fewer unions, more gatekeeping in the form of regulations and guild type deals, the unreasonable scale of business, more proprietary crap to deal with, etc?
I've family members who are tradesmen, this issue has been coming down the pipe forever.
What's killed em is apprentice wages haven't kept up with inflation for fucking years, and as for the treatment of apprentices and helpers? Garbage.
Basically decades of absolute pisstaking and abuse of newcomers ("hey, everyone goes through it, its fine!") has predictably resulted in a shortage of newcomers.
Are they willing to up the apprentice (and journeyman...) wages? Fuck off, of course not.
Almost every tradie ends up telling their kids to go to college and whatever the fuck they do, stay out of the trades.
What America needs is to serve 20 people at the top. How many plubers or carpenters do they need? Probably 1. Everyone else better be dancing monkeys on tiktok.
The cheat code these days is either be a skilled technical worker or have generational wealth. The latter also offers positions that are given via nepotism.
I know it sounds extreme, but consider that in the next couple of decades there may very well be factions fighting for finite water and air conditioning and there won't be enough to go around to offer a comfortable life for as many as it does now.
A theory: the tradespeople that young people mostly meet aren’t the elite within the trade. If they meet a welder, it’ll be the guy putting a trailer hitch on dad’s minivan, not the guy welding skyscraper girders. The second kind is more inspiring.
I thought about switching to the trades for a while, but the ramp to learning the technical/business/certification aspects is not smooth enough; especially for an outsider. A bunch of YouTube videos of dubious accuracy is not enough
There needs to be ramps built directly at the high school and community colleges level. It amazes me that community colleges have all these classes on excel, art, dance, music, health, languages, but generally nothing for the trades. I honestly think it would be easier to find a trustworthy, affordable class for Mongolian Throat Singing than a plumbing class.
I live in slovenia, and the situation here is so bad, that a competent plumber or electrician can easily outearn a doctor plus there is a lot of potential for not paying taxes and that means even higher net earnings.
I think "this is what I was told" is a poor excuse these days. Information on jobs & careers is more available than it ever was in your day, or your father's, or his father's. At one time in the distant past, a B.S. in English might give you an advantage in the publishing industry, but those days are gone. If you got a degree without thinking about what comes after, that's on you.
I immediately got reminded of an interesting video I saw from The Honest Carpenter titled "THE TRADES ARE DYING...But The World Still Needs To Be Built! CAN WE FIX THE SKILLED LABOR SHORTAGE?"
It's really difficult to take these articles seriously when they pretend there's a serious distinction of "skilled" vs "unskilled" labor except pay. It's straight disrespectful, frankly. This reads like promotion for the app they mention.
I hire apprentice electricians starting at $80k/yr, journeymen are $120k+ (about 3 years after becoming apprentice). Or for $60k I can hire a guy who smokes meth with the customers neighbors
There's nobody in trades anymore, their wage increases far outpace inflation
People now read that not only do the software engineers earn a lot but they also get to work remotely. This is most likely what influenced the change in 2020-2022 years - everyone else is jealous and would prefer a job that allows for remote work.
One could argue that they HAVE caught quite well: if you consider jobs like web development (opposed to, say, AI/ML development) as a new skilled trade in a world that is becoming more digital.
also, there still is kind of a social stigma with trade jobs, somehow people perceive it as less "successful" than getting a white collar job, which is bullshit, especially that we don't really need white collars as much as we need electricians, builders etc
1) Carpenters and Plumbers (electricians, mechanics, etc) are _not_ unskilled. There's a reason these trades have apprenticeships - there's _a lot_ to know and learn before you're capable on your own.
2) A path for immigrants to legally work in those fields would likely push down wages, but it would also reduce the cost of those services! Housing could become cheaper, so could the ongoing cost of owning a home. That could potentially reach a nice equilibrium.
>Carpenters and Plumbers (electricians, mechanics, etc) are _not_ unskilled
Is a load of shit. At least in the USA, you can have one person (typically business owner) get licensed in the trade and then lease out that license for his unskilled immigrant labor force. He can run his own business and his "apprentices" are taught enough to do the work. This is the vast majority of construction. You got union projects which are a whole different ball game but union jobs do not represent the vast majority of construction in the USA.
>A path for immigrants to legally work in those fields would likely push down wages, but it would also reduce the cost of those services!
It doesn't reduce the cost of shit because real estate is a racket. It's not a free market economy driven by community college level econ courses. In any metropolitan downtown area that you visit most of the buildings are owned by a handful of firms. Real estate properties are increasingly managed by (you guessed it) management firms that are part of publicly traded corporations (REITs). These guys extend way beyond any downtown area and are the majority of rented out properties in cities and adjacent suburbs.
Construction is a ghetto that is flooded by illegal immigrant workers. Business owners are complicit in the practice of hiring said workers to squeeze out margins. As long as liability can be passed down to someone holding some kind of license, that's all that matters.
If you actually want to enter a successful trade in construction become an elevator engineer. You are 100% union and obscure and niche enough with significant safety risks that nobody is able to undercut you because there's a LOT of regulation in place to make sure people don't get stuck and die in elevators.
You need open borders to have a labor market at all. Analysis suggest that the labor shortages today are really from the pandemic reducing immigration these past few years, affecting the entire job market from the ground up.
A lot of this is due to the ancient nature of construction. Allow experimentation with new materials. Allow robots, prefabs etc. I m sure genz would love to program your 3d home printer or assemble your ikea home.
They are not lazy, but forward thinking. Who wants to become a plumber when that job may be automated in 10 years
Plumbing strikes me as one of the very last manual jobs that will be automated, if ever. Every plumbing issue, even the most basic, is different due to the fittings and hardware being used.
For example, I've been putting off hiring a plumber to replace the old drum trap behind my bathtub with a p-trap. I can't even fathom how a robot would go about doing such a thing when a plumber needs to sit there and think about how to do this: open access, judge where the pipes are going (without even seeing some of them), the amount of space, whether they'll need more space and cut in from the ceiling below, etc.
I think there's the additional question of "how often should we just replace a building"? I've unfortunately made the realization after remodeling our 60 year old house that we should have just torn the house down.
The result of tech in construction so far seems to point to a future where there's gonna be a few high skill people supervising a lot of people who passed a drug test and did 8hr of training/on-boarding.
Things are already steadily marching this way this way. Drop $5k on tools and the dumbest rock in the pile can assemble propress or pex fittings leak free every damn time. The capital investment that the business owner makes pays for itself in short order by taking cheaper labor as an input and getting results you didn't used to be able to get with that input. In the electrical world they are always coming out with new fancy connectors and fixtures that you literally can't screw up no matter how dumb you are. Internet comment sections of non-electricians love these, electricians don't like them as much because they often trade off flexibility requiring more parts kept in stock though sometimes they make up for it in speed of install.
Tradespeople will be the new software engineers in the late 2020s through 2030s. Enough that I'm considering leaving my cushy FAANG engineering manager job to become an electrician.
On top of the huge supply shortage, consider that the majority of the U.S. housing stock was built during the Baby Boom suburbanization from 1950-1970, and that the average lifespan of a house's internal systems (plumbing, electrical) is about 65 years. There's a massive maintenance bill coming due right around 2025. Right as the housing stock is largely owned by boomers on fixed incomes who won't have time, money, or health to fix it. Millennials will start inheriting houses en masse around 2035, which solves the housing crisis, but they're going to be houses in various states of disrepair.
There's probably also a lot of room for innovation in home construction and repair - possibly an area where robotics could make a big difference. Unfortunately this is a known "hard problem", where past attempts at mechanization haven't really helped much.
Extend that out to 10 years from now and I'll take that bet.
Price goes up dramatically in the face of supply shortages, because when there's a shortage you pick your customers instead of them picking you, and some customers have a lot more money than others. Same reason software engineers make $300K/year after a few years experience (when I started my career 15 years ago $100K was considered a very good mid-career salary, and still is in some locales), and good childcare in the Bay Area now runs about $3000/month, and homes are $3M.
That part is relatively easy to answer. When there are only enough tradespeople to maintain 10% of homes, the top 10% of income earners will get their services, and the top 10% will spend a majority of their wealth on home maintenance. It's already happening in areas with a lot of rich people and few tradespeople - it costs me $1000 to run a camera down my sewer line, $4K to roto-root it, about $20-30K to fix a collapsed pipe. The top-10% has been doing fine in terms of income, but now that it's so un-economical to go into a field other than tech or finance, they're going to have to spend a lot of that on essential services.
Most of the trades companies around me won't even pick up the phone for a job less than $10K. And even then, they're booked out months in advance. These companies are making a fortune. Not sure how much of it trickles down to tradespeople wages, but from reading other threads on this article, it doesn't look like those guys don't get paid a lot, as a percentage of what's billed to the customer.
I think this is actually one of those predictions that might not turn out the way you think. Economies are all about supply and demand, not how long or complicated the job title is.
The government is increasingly ignoring the problem, the higher-education-industrial-complex is grabbing workers that would otherwise go into the trades, mass-importation of unskilled labor is slowing down as it becomes more of a political minefield (In the EU and the US).
The confluence of all those factors will squeeze a limited labor pool, and prices will continue to increase. I think it's not unlikely that in 5-10 years we enter a crisis where critical infrastructure starts failing and the government has to start up a "Learn to Weld" program instead of "Learn to Code" program because things have gone so far out of balance.
Economies are about supply and demand. But wages are not directly tied to the demand for the trades. Wages are controlled by the bosses. Even if the price of wiring up a new home goes up, I would not expect the bulk of that increase to be reflected in the wages of the electricians (at least in the US).
Trades are one of those areas (along with software engineering) where it is relatively easy to be your own boss. The market in general is pretty competitive on both the buyer (lots of individual homeowners needing work done) and seller (lots of small independent contractors selling their labor) sides; that should make overall prices & wages reflect industry-wide (or at least local) supply & demand pretty well.
ConstructionPhysics has a pretty good series about why the construction industry never really realized economies of scale the way most other industries do. Even when you have large homebuilders like D.R. Horton, their primary competitive advantage is usually reduced cost of capital, which goes away if capital becomes expensive for everyone.
I don't believe those relative wages are going to hold.
I got into software engineering when it was a high-5-figure to low-6-figure job. At the time, conventional wisdom was that the money was in finance, law, or medicine. Medicine has held up well, but wages in finance and law have fallen well below what software engineers make. Hell, lawyers frequently make less than plumbers do now, hence this joke:
Hey y'all, long time reader first time writer. The op is absolutely right that there's a large bill coming due. A lot of the conversation about our infrastructure has been in reference to the New deal projects and Eisenhower projects around the country. However, in addition to our increasingly fragile housing stock the largest transfer of wealth in history is set to happen at the same time these houses will change hands. A poster below commented that a few years of experience won't be enough to be pulling a multiple six figure income when that occurs but I disagree. In most states in the country 5 years is the amount of time necessary to enter a union and gain a master's license. From there you would have the licensure and expertise to start your own company, consult or find a high paying job in the trades. I also think that roboticization is not something that will occur until late in our lifetimes and likely only for new construction projects. I recently started a company in DC called The DC Contractor. I'm looking to expand this year and if there's anyone in the area who would be interested in connecting you can find me online, feel free to send me a message. I believe anyone that would truly find more satisfaction in the trades couldn't pick a better time to start learning the skills even if they aren't hard skills. i.e. learning how to operate a business,project management, financials, DOB regulations, gov regulations for federal projects etc... Could all be immensely valuable and there's a lot of room for creativity in the space. Fwiw, that's my two cents. Happy New Year.
Edit: seemed worth noting that my starting pay for any employee is around ~$25 an hour. Granted I live in a large metropolitan area but when I started doing this work 20 years ago $11 to $12 an hour was pretty standard entry level pay. That number is just to hire anyone that will show up consistently because the market has gotten so crazy in the last couple of years. I would pay considerably more for someone with the necessary skills to let me take a more hands off approach.
With a nest egg you keep in your back pocket that can get you out of a shop hierarchy and into ownership quickly, accounting for Lego houses and whatever other innovations, programming some of your own stuff as needed, there’s a path for honest workers who are really good and on time to make good money. Pick a wealthy area as your operating zone. Leverage the SWE social class and your trade skills.
My relatives who own mom and pop contracting and plumbing companies have carved out solid lives for themselves and their kids. The downside is they’re working into their 60s, but with a good nest egg from tech that might be different.
My relatives who rode the MBA and finance paths ended up all over the map - didn’t survive the Great Recession, did fine, are in tech but it’s lost the shine, ended up as a total goober as retired executive without a company to exec…
That's the plan, but reality currently falls far short of that. My sister's currently looking at modular houses. There isn't much of a price difference between them vs. building on site, and you deal with a lot of hassles around transportation, site preparation, and permitting/paperwork.
Will that happen faster than the shift of AI into knowledge work? Because the current trajectory has robots taking our "manipulate bits" jobs far faster than our "move atoms" ones.
Who knows. On the one hand there have been attempts to get rid of the "manipulates bits" people forever, GUI/Drag and Drop code editors, outsourcing etc. and it always comes back to the edge cases never working and every projecting having tons of edge cases. Maybe this will finally be the time or maybe the AI still can't handle the edge cases. Seeing as how the market is slowly walking away from self driving promises(probably due to the edge cases) maybe we aren't there yet.
I think that's mostly accurate. Demand won't be high forever. A hybrid approach will develop. Software and tech in the day, welding and plumbing in the evening. Eventually, whatever the young employee values more will be prioritized for a career.
If I had to do it all over again, I'd be a plumber.
You're not stationary, you're on the move and your day has variety. You spend a lot of time in the physical world and meet lots of people. Your work might at times be smelly but is rewarding in a very direct way. You helped solve a tangible problem and your customers are grateful for it. The range of problems to solve is large, and if you widen your skills, you can grow into a generic handyman that can fix almost anything. Pay should be decent enough and by mid career you might even take a plunge at freelancing.
Where I live, the expensive cars are driven by the skilled trades, not by office clerks. But money isn't my main point, it's physical and mental health, clear purpose, impactful and rewarding work.
Bonus: AI isn't coming for you anytime soon.
Extra bonus: no office politics.
Frankly, it's exactly what Gen Z needs. They're all so cynical and divorced from the physical world and real people. Should they go into an office job, nearly 100% of their life would be digital, perpetuating and accelerating their issues.
Yeah but could your body handle 30+ years as a plumber? It’s hard physically work, shit hours and uncompensated commutes. You are literally covered in poop some days and working in the wet/cold others. It’s only a good gig once you own your own firm
There's huge differences in the individual trades and what it means for your body.
The vast majority of my friends are in the trades (I'm the outlier with an office job) and over the course of 20 years, many things have improved. Better tools, machines to do the very hard parts, etc. Some trades aren't super physically taxing, whilst other are, like plasterers.
So the comparison is complicated, and you'll also have to take into account the physical and mental wear of an office job.
Fancy cars also have a function of status. I don't need to prove my status, so I drive an inexpensive car.
That said, my friends in the trades are regretting their choices as they age and their physical ailments add up. I think it's a solid option for the first 15-25 years as long as you have an exit plan as your body ages.
(Note: I want to speak that this is perceived status and this has side effects. That I don't prove my status through a car or that there is a perceived need of those in the skilled trades to do so does not make a value judgement.)
I think they are imagining a world where journalism is as well-paid and comfortable as the tech industry, and therefore it's somehow hypocritical for journalists to cover less comfortable industries. I don't really think it's worth responding to to be honest.
that does not follow from the parent comment. it's more of "they are making the problem worse" by (presumably) sending their kids to liberal arts or theoretical studies
It is disheartening to see a recurring theme of individuals expressing frustration over their inability to afford a home or advance in society, yet also expressing reluctance to engage in activities that could potentially bring financial stability. Our predecessors sacrificed their physical well-being in order to construct and maintain the infrastructure and amenities that we now benefit from. In order to maintain a functioning society, it is necessary for individuals to contribute their skills and labor to the greater good. Whether it be through manual labor or desk work, every individual is essentially selling their time, effort, and health to their employer. While it may not be the most desirable circumstance, it is a necessary component of societal functioning.
People not wanting to work is not the main reason we’re seeing more people find housing unaffordable. It’s the extreme rise in price of housing relative to income.
I make dramatically more than my parents did when they were buying their first house around my age, but as a fraction of my income and savings, housing costs vastly more.
(It’s also not clear that the skilled trades jobs Gen Z apparently doesn’t want actually pay more than the alternatives. See other comments on this post.)
I'm interested in what types of media you consume that's helped to shape your worldview. The idea that living in an industrialized nation in 2023 isn't living in a functional society, seems very foreign to me. Which nation and which time period would you choose to live in over an industrialized nation in 2023?
I'd choose stone-age Europe. Die as a tribal warlord or die trying, that's life actually worth living. Being a neutered and fake modern human being even with a lot of printer money is still nothing.
My brother in law is an electrician. He is paid alright, enough to live on. But there are HUGE downsides. He does not receive health insurance. He does not get paid vacation. In order to match decent white-collar pay, he needs to work overtime. His company pushes hard to get jobs finished fast, causing people to cut safety corners. Many of his coworkers have been badly (in one case, nearly fatally) injured on the job. There are no meaningful raises.
It isn't a bad career, but there are major reasons why it would be unattractive.