I made good money doing it, but the work was hit or miss and it wasn't really the welding I was getting paid for, it was knowing how to cut up vans and modify them for severely handicapped people and I'd learned how to do that by building "custom cars" with my father who was a "bodyman" by trade and went on to become a "custom car builder".
By the time I quit customizing vans for the handicapped the State of California required you be a "certified welder" to do the work I did on the vans and cars they purchased for people who were in wheelchairs so you had to pay to go to a "welding school" to get a certification.
But none of those welders I met who did that actually knew how to weld. How to lay down a bead that penetrated the steel. They all did what those I learned from called "bird shit" welds. A cold weld that laid on top of the metal and didn't penetrate all the way through, and were thus prone to fail. And none of them started those jobs for much more than $5-$7 an hour.
That's when I decided to learn how to code. It was only a few years after that when the Internet started taking off, so I learned HTML and Perl by buying books written by the likes of Steven Brenner, "Selena Sol", Lincoln Stein and Randal Schwartz and there were no college level classes that taught it. I got invited to teach some after hour classes at SMS because they didn't have any at the time.
Now, more than 20 years later companies want to hire someone with a CS degree, and really they often don't know any more about it than those guys who took those welding classes did about laying down a bead that stuck.
But in both cases those who sold the classes lobbied their State Reps to make them mandatory and raked in the cash afterwards.