No one is deciding to work a trade instead of going to Stanford.
"How many trade workers are even capable of going to Stanford?"
People like to talk about "grit" in white collar circles. If you want to see real "grit" go talk to the blue collar people who do shitty jobs at the expense of their personal health so their kids can have a better life.
The working class has an understanding of self sacrifice that is largely absent from more well-off groups.
Yes! People take "simple jobs" like hauling trash or cleaning sewers or welding pipes because it's stress free! Unlike those high-stress jobs at Facebook where you take the free party bus to the office, get free food, drink, gym, yoga, and massages, and even have internal message boards where you're encouraged to post about how horrible you're being treated. So stressful! I bet all of those 10xers at the FAANGS wish they could be maintenance workers.
For every person working at a FAANG you can probably find 1,000 working in a place with the same shitty working conditions most people are subjected to.
As a counter example cops can make $200k a year doing detail work (standing around) and retire with a pension after 20 years. There are similar situations (with lesser pay) for a lot of city and state level civil service.
There are shit jobs that will wear you down in every field. They're the jobs most people are working.
The non-trade courses of study aren’t particularly popular with college students anymore. I don’t know many people with degrees in english or latin or history or philosophy. And the few that I do always planned to go to trade school (law school) so their undergrad course of study didn’t much matter.
Well good luck communicating with other people because is not how anyone else anywhere uses the word ‘trade’.
They’re not ‘trades’ they’re ‘professions’.
And I would guess you already know this and you’re trying to be contrary rather than you’re genuinely misunderstanding a basic word.
I don’t think I’ve used the word outside of its definition:
> 3. b : the business or work in which one engages regularly : OCCUPATION
> 3. c : the persons engaged in an occupation, business, or industry
Have you never heard people make a distinction between tradespeople and professionals?
What do you think the words in this article mean? Are they completely new concepts to you?
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/business-income-man...
> A ‘profession’ historically meant the three learned professions of the Church, Medicine and the Law but today the term goes much wider and normally involves some substantial exercise of intellectual skill.
What is the distinction between a chef trained at a vocational school and a lawyer trained at a law school? Or a programmer trained at Stanford?
Chefs produce something tangible, you might say. Lawyers do, too. We draft briefs and contracts and court filings. Or maybe you’ll point out that a chef has learned a skill that takes a certain je ne sais quoi that cant be taught but can only be acquired with deliberate practice? I would say the same of programmers. (And attorneys, for that matter.) Coding is as much an art as it is a science.
And I don’t think the document you’ve linked excludes professional trades. Lawyers and doctors and programmers all provide a service:
> ‘Trade’ therefore takes its ordinary meaning, which normally involves commercial operations by a trader who provides goods or services to his or her customers in exchange for a reward.
One is considered by society to be a 'tradesperson', while the other is considered a 'professional'. Society considers law to not be a 'trade' because it is a 'profession' instead and society sees these as mutually exclusive by definition.
I think what you really mean is you don't agree with society's definitions. That's fine - it's an interesting discussion and I didn't express any opinion on it myself. But I don't think you were ever really mistaken about what the original comment meant - you were feigning confusion as a rhetorical device, which is why I think other people down-voted you.
Without that, a meeting of a profession is commonly called a conference.
The software industry would benefit from moving in the direction of being either a "trade" without the manual labor, or toward being a real profession, but it currently occupies a weird middle ground.
Those are all things that are near-universally features of working a trade, so what exactly is the difference between a trade and a profession?
So I guess software development is just basically like bagging groceries. Totally informal.
I wouldn't believe the stories on candidates failing FizzBuzz until I saw it with my own eyes, several times!
You’re right there is a legitimate distinction, but maybe we should stop. It is 2020 and thinking you’re “better” than other people for relatively arbitrary reasons is passé.
The common factor turns out to be accountability. If the childminder falsely certifies an application, Ofsted will revoke her registration for dishonesty. A military officer will be cashiered. A teacher sacked and added to the barring list. So even those posts which are not 'professional' have enough consequences for acting falsely that the state relies on them to be honest.
I never seen anyone talk about medicine as a trade nor mean doctor when they said trade.