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Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a welder but I have friends who are and it seems like this is painting the most difficult, least lucrative way to go about this as the norm(ie the whole thing is a strawman) and then crapping on it.

My friends who got into welding mostly did so through aprenticeships with unions or on the job non union apprenticeships.

They will probably not become millionaires selling their time as welders but they are solidly middle if not upper middle class. They go on international vacations and eat at fancy restraunts. They are fairing on average far better than my friends with "soft" liberal arts degrees.

Yeah it's not a total panacea easy road to riches but learning a trade like welding seems like a super high EV move for a lot of people who want a stable career right now.

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Although unions have their flaws, they do help to keep wages high for skilled workers, both in terms of the prevailing wage but also in enforcing overtime rules (double time for Sunday work, for instance). They also prevent out-of-area workers from coming into an area when times are good. Skilled union workers in the Bay Area can work 168 hours per week right now if they want to.

The primary mechanism unions use to keep wages high for union members is to limit supply by lobbying to keep "un-certified" or "non-union" members out of the market. This provides a nice buffer, keeping the poorer class poor and protecting the middle class.

Do you have a source for this?

Nobel Economist Milton Friedman, for one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzYgiOC9cj4 If you watch to the end he fully explains how the net effect of unions is to raise the pay of high paid workers and lower the pay of low paid workers.

You might also like "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell which talks about this phenomenon also.

Welding sounds pretty good after a career doing software.

I mostly like the idea of it as a means to an end. Not so much a way to make money working on trailer hitches but as a necessary skill for a race car fabricator or artist.

Truth is, we should probably all start over every decade or so. It's impractical, but you'd go to your grave with a more interesting resume.

I'd love to explore other lives, and I sort-of have. But with a family, the reality of our economy is that there isn't any support for that. Just throwing away good medical insurance is enough to stop most people. I know from experience it only takes starting over and going broke once to really regret ever thinking it was a good idea and romanticizing how "interesting" you are. I speculate based on extrapolating my experience that you probably get more time to learn how to weld race cars and art as a software engineer than you ever would as a welder.

Same story. I used to work with welders (I was a test engineer) and they had all apprenticed and not gone to "welding college."

Could be myopia on the part of the author in looking at a college-trained welder, since the author seems to imply traditional college is a better path to financial stability than welding college (which may be entirely true).

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