Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnarcoregrizz | Hacker News Reader

50k/year is high paying? also, construction seems more prone to boom/bust cycles. the outlook looks good though considering the pent-up demand.

you can make a lot of money in the trades (really, a lot) if you open your own business though, but that's a whole different skillset.

edit* 50k in seattle

View on HN

It is actually pretty high for an individual earner. According to this (https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/) which is sourced from the Census Bureau, it's at approximately the top 25% of earners in the US.

this article is about seattle though. sure there are a lot of places in the US where 50k goes far enough, but I don't think it does there.

also, what is the upwards mobility like in these types of jobs? anecdotally, it seems like managers on construction sites went to college. I imagine it tops out, kind of like software development, until you reach a managerial or director level.

Good points. I have heard that some trades have a hard ceiling, since managers do tend to have college degrees. I don't know much about it, though.

That is skewed by non-workers and part-time workers. Median for a full-time worker is about $45k[1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm

It is skewed by part-time workers, I suppose, although I don't see why they should be excluded, but it explicitly states that it does not take into account non-workers.

For a 20 year old guy? What do you think people get paid?? :)

The median HH income in the US is 60k/y. So he is almost making the median, and that's as a newbie, and with no partner. If he had a partner making minimum wage, he'd be over the median. After he gets a few more years of experience, he'll be over the median. Yeah, I'd say that's pretty good.

Its probably pretty close to the average starting salary of college grads without having to be out of the workforce for 4 years and paying tuition.

Probably, might even be better, but what is the likely salary progression. College grads still earn nearly $1MM more over their lifetimes.

Do you happen to know if that is the mean or median, or how it skews? I've heard this statistic before and I'm curious about the details.

I've seen charts on the BLS site that show percentile vs. percentile and at the median salaries, it was about $1MM. It goes down, but there is still a substantial gap for the 10th and 25th percentile, and the gap grows for higher percentiles. I can't find it right now, but here is a comparison of weekly median salaries in 2014: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/more-education-still-means...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com