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You're arguing with people who have never been on a real job site. Here, they think job site means monster.com or indeed.com.

I spent about a week at a natural gas power plant in Oregon being built to work on some telecom. Welders there ranged from 80k-120k that I knew. To be fair, I don't know of any welder above water that could make 150k. I only know the 150 range to be for deep sea oil guys. But that's just my experience. Either way, it's not like you get out of the gate being that class of welder. It's getting cert'd in difference environments, tolerances and types of welding, along with experience that get you to that level. And I don't know a single career blue-collar that thinks otherwise. Unless they're really stupid and anything above 30k a year is unbelievable to them.

"You mean you have to develop extra skills that separate you from the herd to get paid more? No! Really?" Same goes for programming too if we're all being honest.

> I only know the 150 range to be for deep sea oil guys.

I've read about these "saturation divers". Guys that go down inside a diving bell for weeks at a time and breath a mix of helium. Only highly skilled divers can do this (ie, lots of experience), and if I remember correctly, have to stop by age 40(ish). So there's this narrow window of time where they can make that kind of money. But these guys could make $175-$200k.

Obviously this is a tiny, tiny fraction of welders for only a portion of there career. I just found it really fascinating how the whole process works. Living down there for days or weeks at a time.

Yeah, I grew up in a very rural area with a major natural gas pipeline running through it. I know a lot of folks who work on pipelines. Welders who have all of the certifications/etc needed for that job do quite well. ~$100k is pretty standard for someone who meets the qualifications, and that's in an area with a dirt cheap cost of living.

It takes a lot of work experience and education to meet those qualifications, though. You're welding specialized alloys and need to make absolutely airtight welds in weird orientations and tight spaces. Mistakes get expensive fast. These folks aren't just out of tech school. They're mid-late career professionals who are _really damned good_ at what they do.

Saturation divers (i.e. "deep sea oil guys") and even some salvage divers can all make significantly more, but that's an additional, hard-to-find skillset tacked on top of the welding certifications and it's often contract work instead of full-time. It's also a lot more physically demanding and damned dangerous. The $150-200k/year welders exist, but an awful lot are ex-Navy folks with a decade or so of experience working in very extreme environments.

I was also told that you got excellent pay working on welding for chemical plant. But all welds are checked, and one serious mistake meant you lost your job at that level permanently (no one would hire you anywhere for that job). Anecdotal of course...

Well, that's the one downside to becoming the "best" in a field. There's fewer and fewer at your caliber. Thus, your name technically has more meaning. That goes outside blue collar too.

That's the funny part when you mention specialized alloys. There's a whole bunch of people out there, even though they don't have a college degree, who have an amazingly keen sense and in-depth knowledge of these specialized alloys and how to manipulate them in the real world. These are the folks that get the high range salaries, for very good reason. Now, it may be unfair that I say no college degree. They do take classes and other courses. But that's where we try to make a difference between trade/vocational school and college.

While I do see the value in theoretical and academic knowledge. I really do. There's zero fucking reason to assume it's grander than practical/vocational knowledge. One of the few jokes I like out of the Big Bang Theory (fucking hate that show but my ex loved it), the group was driving out somewhere for some reason, but the car breaks down. Whoever the main guy was says "Who knows anything about internal combustion engines?". All of them start saying they know plenty, yada yada. "Who knows how to fix one?" Silence.

Both sides need each other, academic and vocational. Neither side can advance without the other. But I'll gladly be the one to rag on academics if they act superior to the tradesmen until that stupidity ends.

The Navy has drydocks and whatnot, they regularly commission and decommission boats. Why do they need relavitively so many more specialists?

> they're highly skilled former Navy machinists.

In general, no. Professional welders who do well economically typically have a few things in common that have nothing to do with their origin or education:

* They work very hard (60+ hours a week or more), usually on an hourly wage and make overtime pay/holiday pay/hazard pay

* They work either for themselves or in a small shop rather than for a large business or manufacturer. Large businesses typically cap salaries for their workers at a number high enough to attract the skills they need, but low enough to protect profits for the shareholders.

* The welders have the needed certifications or specialty skill set to meet the demand in a particular niche of the market

* They live near or are able to commute or move to an area with significant demand for their particular specialty.

The most obvious example at the moment are the welders in the oil patch (Bakken shale) in North Dakota. Many of the welders working there are working nearly 24/7, making a lot of money because oil production requires pipeline welders and the oil companies are paying lots of labor overtime to avoid any interruptions in production.

For the most part, the only qualification needed is the welding certificate for the type of welding they'll be doing. The employers don't care that you didn't finish high school or that you are an ex-con, as long as you have the paper (you passed the welding tests) and can read basic instructions you're paid a decent hourly wage.

Since there's such demand, you can work as much as you want, and since you're hourly you get overtime and holiday pay.

Another example is nuclear welders... TIG welders who are certified for welding stainless, monel, or other piping types used in nuclear reactors do fairly well. They have to have certifications in the welding types used (TIG or specialized stick, mostly) and they have to pass the basic security checks needed to work on a reactor site. Reactors need maintenance, and they aren't going away soon, so there's a demand.

The myth of welders being rich is something pushed by the various politicians who benefit from being able to say that student loan debt isn't a problem. It's true that a welder CAN make a ton of cash, but those examples aren't the entire workforce and there's always a price to pay. An underwater welder can make over $1 million in take home pay over a 5 year career that usually ends due to chronic injuries from high pressure environments that last a lifetime.

I object to the labeling of Associates Degree programs as 'shitty'. In my experience, AS programs are just far more practicality oriented than academic BSs.

You want to learn how the math behind Dijkstra's algorithm works, get a BS. You want to learn how to build a network, get an AS.

You might be right regarding computer associates: but getting a degree in something like welding is just increasing the number of firey hoops someone has to jump through to do a job he can be trained on the job for, or in a union apprenticeship program.

I myself learned welding on the job: at a muffler company, and again later in a government lab. The answer to social problems is not always "more school."

This is in fact quite common in the welding world. Several other comments mention companies that hire anyone and train them to weld. I've also read articles from the oil field companies that they do the same. So does the military, if you pass the aptitude test at least. That said, my community college will teach you to run a CNC laser welding machine, a CNC plasma table, a robotic arm MIG, etc. Getting into all of that off the street is rare.

The trade skills degrees have their place, but the 'shitty' descriptor really applies to AS degrees in academic theory-- an AS in CS from University of Phoenix or Full Sail or whatever will cost way more than a BS from a proper university and the credits only selectively transfer to other AS-level programs.

It's such a waste of money it should just be considered fraud.

That AS probably doesn’t cover anything complex like BGP, right? You can teach yourself how to “build a network” with a couple of books and a few hundred in equipment off of ebay.

Yeah, sure, or you could spend the same few hundred on classes instructed by someone who works or worked at that job and receive a piece of paper saying you did so.

I could say the same about a BS couldn't I? How was it put in Good Will Hunting? “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”

My experimental concept for post-secondary schooling goes as follows:

Spend four years at junior college(s) taking useful sounding classes. German, welding, programming, calculus, jazz band, EMT, with no intention of getting an associates degree (which is of little value in any case).

Cheap, and you might actually learn something. In the modern era, I'm not so sure that following the obvious path is the right idea anymore.

> Nobody believes an average welder makes $150k a year. In fact, we know what they make: a lower middle class salary.

I think the ongoing repetition of the claim, and the fact that it seems to work for those repeating it, would suggest otherwise?

"Nobody believes an average welder makes $150k a year."

The main point of the article is that politicians from a particular party say that they do. It then goes into a lot of examination as to why that's not true.

But someone needs to grasp at straws and keep the idea that the only key to success is a college degree alive!

I love how liberal press screams "blue-collar workers can't get jobs", but if you try to hire plumber or electrician for a day job you will be lucky to schedule someone in the next few weeks and then will pay $1000 for a 6-hour visit.

That doesn't mean much.

The usual problem is that there are big swathes of the population living in regions without a healthy/diverse/growing economy. (Eg areas that are or once were monocultures of one particular sector, and/or are/were based on natural resource extraction. So basically fossil jobs and auto making are the prime examples.)

The needed retraining, relocation, and/or regional revitalization is completely non-existent in the Trump era, and it wasn't really effective/serious during the Obama administration either.

So, nothing to do with how much a plumber makes in a big city.