The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
npr.org
npr.org
My brother in law is an electrician. He is paid alright, enough to live on. But there are HUGE downsides. He does not receive health insurance. He does not get paid vacation. In order to match decent white-collar pay, he needs to work overtime. His company pushes hard to get jobs finished fast, causing people to cut safety corners. Many of his coworkers have been badly (in one case, nearly fatally) injured on the job. There are no meaningful raises.
It isn't a bad career, but there are major reasons why it would be unattractive.
Personally I sometimes wonder if I'd have enjoyed plumbing water more than plumbing code as I'd be meeting more people face to face, physically active, and it can get surprisingly complex (Berkeley, I think, offers a postgrad cert in plumbing buildings like sky scrapers which I saw advertised the other day)
Unfortunately, other states in the US have much weaker unions or none at all, especially in the south.
Then there was that famous failed attempt at unionizing the Amazon warehouse in Alabama? I think? Yeah there was a lot of shady stuff going down but it just does not look good among all the other failures.
Unions might exist, but they might not have the same teeth they'd have in states with friendlier organizing laws.
My brother in law lives in SC where unionization and labor protection is especially weak. I don't think that the balance of power is going to shift away from the bosses and towards him any time soon.
It's probably not as bad as tech support, where you can guarantee that the person on the other end of the phone is angry. But it's probably at least as bad as retail, and nobody ever says "I love meeting people so I'll go handle cash from strangers".
I know that there are extroverts in the world who get a charge out of meeting new people every day. And there's a big bonus to not sitting in a chair in front of a screen, especially if you're one of those. But I've got a feeling you're a lot happier with coding-level salaries and meeting strangers after you clock out.
I get it, trades are important, but let's not glamorize them.
Depends on the type of plumber.
Plumbers doing boiler installs or hydronic heating systems aren't dealing with toilets at all, they are doing applied engineering and math however.
I've know trades folks who are electricians, plumbers, carpenters, work in road construction, etc. They typically work reasonable hours, have medical, and are paid at or above the median income for where they live. They didn't rack up debt getting into this either. This is not a bad deal for many people.
Outside of big cities, there may not be enough demand, esp. consistent demand, to justify good pay and bennies.
My uncle is a welder, has a lot of specializations including some underwater stuff. No shortage of offers... for 6 weeks of work in nowhere-ville, often requiring you to supply your own transport and housing. 3 months in FL, 6 months in NC, 8 weeks in GA. And they all pay crap.
I guess that depends how far outside cities. In the suburbs there is demand.
There is a shortage of trades and many trades folks are older in age. When they retire there isn't the back fill behind them. And all of this is happening as the population is growing.
Largely for residential, which is relatively cheap and lower-skilled. (Not low-skilled, but the barrier to entry is lower.)
And those people are filling trade skill jobs. [3]
> More than one-third of construction laborers (686,000 workers), at least 30 percent of carpenters (382,000 workers), and 45 percent of painters and paperhangers (264,000 workers) are immigrants.
And without them the population long term would decrease (which is obvious from the low fertility rate). [4]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/us/immigration-census-pop...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
[3] https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/covid19-immig...
[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/census-finds-us-population-will-de...
The person that does travel welding usually has a setup like a big truck and a pull behind RV. They jump from job site to job site staying campgrounds, county / public property where overnight parking was allowed (previously Walmart parking lots).
As long as the job site is further than 50-100 miles from home you get paid a per diem which granted won't pay for a 4 star hotel, but at 65$ a day (rate depending on location) x 30 (6 5 day work weeks) $1950 then another $25 a day for food $750. This is untaxed and on top of your normal hourly rate. These jobs tend to need to be done on a quick time frame so most do not only work 40 hour work weeks but most are working 60-80 hours. So there is also an insane potential for overtime.
You're selling your health and body as a tradesman. If you can make the transition to running a trades business, then you're selling your brainpower more than your body.
Success stories in the trades are fairly consistent in this matter.
Selling your brainpower meaning managing the people who will sell their health and body as tradesmen. A minor racket.
A racket? He just became a 'wealth creator'! How dare you compare a visionary entrepreneur to a pimp!
What ambiguity? A pimp IS an entrepreneur! And in many cases here the investors are pimps - selling teams of people with questionable output to the public via IPO!
Then there is also someone that is 100% sarcastic and that if you look at society closely, that exchange is probably one of the least exploitative in present day society. I mean we take the healthiest demographic on the planet, force them to be sedentary for 8+ hours per day, submitting themselves constantly to eye strain, and we make them pay for it. Now that's a racket.
If you don't like the current breed of disaster capitalism, and the fact that most of your productive output belongs to someone else, you have failed in life and must be a jealous socialist.
If you are successfull and wealthy, you are even worse - Champaign socialist.
If you are actually Schumpeterian, tou are still gonna be called a socialist because they are economically illiterate.
I mean, yeah, on balance I’d rather be an API plumber than an actual physical plumber — code smells are less nauseating than poop smells — but there are advantages to jobs that keep you moving around.
I don't think most employers would fire an employee for taking drugs to improve their performance.
Regardless of safety (and I say this as someone who used to take prescription Adderrall myself) there are negative side effects, and long-term effects.
Also couldnt help but laugh at you reporting people to HR. That is cute.
"Well if you aren't in one of the good areas you'll get fucked" doesn't tend to make it into articles like the linked above and I think it is worth knowing.
And so what? "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles" is a very different narrative than what is usually presented.
There isn’t any automatic get rich easy scheme. To some extent you have to keep your wits about and make sure you are getting your worth
Everyone I know in the trades "put in their dues" with at least 10 years of working for someone else, doing the shit jobs, working outside in the rain, in the mud, in the heat, in crawlspaces, in attics, etc.
The smart, driven ones learn all they can, advance, build relationships and reputation, and start their own businesses. The lazy or dumb ones continue to do the crap jobs for their entire career.
And even that, management and business skills are not the same thing as being good tradesman. Just like with programming, you can be smart and driven and not be management material.
The question was whether trades arw good occupation. Not whether you can be better off by stopping being tradesman and going into management.
Imagine this for software engineers. "Yeah, SWEs get paid shit and have a bad working environment but some of you will become managers and get paid bank." That wouldn't exactly be a "wow software is an incredible field to be in" situation.
If people want to say "we need more tradespeople - going into the trades will be good for your career" then it better be the case that the actual laborers are getting decent pay.
In a poorer society equivalent menial labor is more poorly paid than in a richer society. Edit to add: And in a poorer society some of the highly paid menial labor that exists in richer societies may just not exist, or at least not in the same amount.
All the other stuff like expertise and value is, counterintuitively, near irrelevant. For instance postdocs are some of the most highly educated and ostensibly highly skilled individuals - and many have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get to where they are, yet they earn about as much as a plumber does, because there's far more supply of postdocs than there are jobs/positions for them.
So putting all the theory into practice. There are usually three possible reasons. Supply is too high = excessively high rates of software training/education. Demand is too low = not many roles for software developers. Or the companies that are hiring aren't making much themselves so the "maximum affordable cost" is relatively low.
Ah, the social mobility of the american dream.
unless its UK, then the house with that pricetag was last fixed in the 60's, needs total rewiring, and has energy efficiency of a damp tent.
Fair point about scale of jobs however. Things need done and eventually a real world timeframe.
There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.
Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.
A jobbing plumber just needs to text his buddies asking if they've got any work for him this week, do the job and leave with cash in hand the same day.
If you're good at plumbing but disorganised or don't have great self-discipline, the latter is a much simpler way of working.
Going into freelancing, the first thing you should be thinking is "I am a business that employs one person: me."
> There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.
> Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.
Did you think about possibility that his current employer will crush him like an egg for competing with him on weekends?
sometimes licenses are different between working for yourself vs someone else. Other times your employer can't take on jobs without you and your license present.
Then there's insurance differences between self-employed and employed ______ tradesperson.
From other specialist non-trade business I'm familiar with, people are normally aware of new employees coming to town before they even start working. People talk to each other.
> Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.
You can’t do a good business without leaving visible traces - permits, customers, suppliers, etc. all provide ways for information to leak. If his employer is exploitative, he has above average odds of correctly fearing retribution and depending on the area that could mean unemployment. It’s not exactly uncommon for companies to discretely agree not to hire certain people.
This is the key reason why for most jobs, small town America is flyover country, an economically inefficient, exploitative, broken system. Without a large labor & employment market within easy commuting distance, your skills aren't portable if you get fired, and your boss can't readily find a replacement, so most employment relationships end up in a reluctant, often abusive state from one or the other.
This is why the normal trajectory, for a skilled tradesman, is apprenticeship -> experience -> accumulate clients -> go independent.
If you want to go independent in something like software you need, among other things, a good idea. If you want to go independent in the trades, all you need is a good reputation and enough people with your card. You don't even need to try either really. Do a good job and people themselves will proactively ask for your contact information. Finding a good and reliable tradesman is not easy.
Plumbers, HVAC, Electricians, General Contractors, etc
"I'd love to but it will be 8 months or so and I can't imagine you'd want to wait that long".
"Oh no, well wait!".
And the list grows longer.
But there is a finite end to the career - when your body gives out.
That's the biggest problem with the trades, you're selling your health and body. And eventually the body parts will wear out, on a schedule decided as much by genetics as how you live.
this actually brings to mind something else:
I think the idea of a career is dead for a lot of the 40 and under set. The idea that you'll have the same job for decades is just nonsense so any job that feels too specific also feels like a it'll bite you in the ass in 5 years.
I'm more talking about situations where it's not mostly for the money but rather continuing the things people have enjoyed doing professionally without doing it full-time and without most of the downsides.
We're probably just nit-picking over definitions but a career, in my opinion, is not "having the same job for decades." A career is a decision to specialize in a particular craft, trade or profession. The opposite of a career is someone who takes odd jobs. Hospitality one day, transportation the next, might dabble in manufacturing. These jobs pay the bills, and there's nothing wrong with "just" doing that, but they are disconnected jobs; not a career.
I consider myself to have a career in software engineering but I have had multiple "jobs" over the decades that have contributed to that career. The career is the knowledge, the experience, the speciality, the reputation, the time spent focusing... all accumulated over my time developing that career. A career could be made by having a single job lasting from graduation until retirement, or it could be a handful of jobs that put to practice and develop the same skillset and knowledge.
No, that's fair. Like "carpenter" and "programmer" are both very broad professions of course. I think there's something about the way various industries get hit by down turns more or less visibly (like when construction goes down it feels like it's everybody, and so every framer, every concrete layer) that creates an (often false to be sure) sense of narrowness.
But also Plumber, Electrician, Carpenter, etc. are very broad trades and even though articles get written using those words because everyone knows what they do, the articles are often really talking about the lack of elevator technicians, crane operators, industrial HVAC, PLC programmers, train conductors, air traffic controllers those more niche trades. A lot of machine operators end up so niche that their current company is the only one in a state that could employ them. My sister makes M&Ms, other than company policies about like sanitation she'd be no better than a new hire on the Twix line.
Blame Reagan. Seriously. I am not joking. Blame Reagan. These need to be union jobs. These used to be union jobs.
For a more nuanced history read https://wwnorton.com/books/Invisible-Hands/
^ That was how I was imagining it. Am I wrong in thinking this way? Or is the argument that the urge to specialize is independent of wage?
Let's look at ATC as an example:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/a...
> Their work can be stressful because maximum concentration is required at all times. Night, weekend, and rotating shifts are common.
Well, maybe there could be better agreements than rotating shifts on a very stressful job, don't you think so?
Generally, the more specialized labor is, the higher wage and benefits they can demand in a capitalist labor market. Supply and demand. For less skilled labor like general electricians I can understand the role of the union in negotiating for wages, benefits, and safety standards. For highly skilled labor like an HVAC tech, I don't see it.
Back in the day you could live a comfortable life off of your 40-odd year job, nowadays the advice given is to change jobs every few years because the increase in wage will outweigh any raises at your current job. Cost of living is going up faster than annual wage increases. Minimum wage in the US hasn't been updated since the 2000's, and if you do get paid minimum wage, it's your employer saying "I'd pay you less if I was allowed to". But a lot of wages will be based on minimum wage, so if that stagnates, so will other wages.
ON THEIR BREAKS.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/False-E...
Those meat slicers give me the heebie jeebies.
Sorry about your thumb.
Still better than my grandfather who lost all the fingers on one hand to a hay bale elevator chain. It was after dark so while his wife drove him to the hospital the kids had to go look for them.
And then NPR writes insipid think pieces wondering why nobody wants to work in the trades anymore. If only we could put a finger on it…
(Edited for spelling)
I think it's different for "unskilled" labor, such as working in a warehouse, but it's not like being a plumber or an electrician is that hard on your body.
I mean part of that can be blamed on themselves - a lot of people seem to pressure themselves to stay busy, to work 14 hour days, to do all the things, keep up with all the things, have a day job and a side gig and passive income and contribute to open source while reading X books per week and doing meditation to try and compensate for not taking downtime.
But others can be blamed on the industry / environment; think excessive meetings so that the non-developers feel useful, forced social events, or piling on more and more responsibilities onto people (just think of how many languages, environments, frameworks, applications, etc you're expected to know at your current day job.). Under the cool names of "full-stack developer" or "DevSecOps teams".
Football players ruin their bodies through accumulated injuries, not wearing their bodies out.
Do athletes wear their bodies out? I've never heard of that. How does doing plumbing/electricioning wear your body out?
Edit: Downvote me all you like. I've done yoga, I've done plumbing, I've done electrical. Yoga takes the cake by a mile for most painful contorting.
And yet I know an 86 yo woman who has been doing yoga 3 time a week forever and is fit and sharp.
When you're doing an electrical job, you might have to put your body in strange contortions that don't follow any harm reducing "correct" forms.
There's your speculation and incredulity, and then there's all the people I've talked to who do it. They disagree with you.
I found out when waterskiing that you don't get strong waterskiing, you get injured. You have to spend a lot of time in the gym so you don't get injured waterskiing.
Back when I was younger in Seattle, lumberjacking was still a thing. They told me that the limiting thing was injury. They'd work into their sixties. There aren't many jobs harder than lumberjacking. I wouldn't mess with any of them, either, they are freakin' strong and I'm sure they could cleave me from head to toe with a casual swing of the axe.
I'm not in the least surprised that people working in trades mess up their backs, nor do I doubt that they do. But injuring one's back is not the same as wearing it out.
>Do athletes wear their bodies out? I've never heard of that.
Isn't "[ruining] their bodies through accumulated injuries" the same thing as wearing their body out?
Not taking precautions, for instance, when driving over potholes can wear certain facets of the car down without doing significant immediate damage, the same way that taking certain falls or hits can wear a body down. You don't need a crash.
Edit:typo
Via cumulative tissue, bone, and sensory damage. Also known as workin' hard.
On the car side, every time you bend a piece of metal it gets weaker. It cannot repair itself. It cannot get stronger from use.
No, I'm not lifting 400 lbs. Weightlifters lift insane weights, does that compare to what physical laborers lift?
I'm a cyclist and a lot of other cyclists are ex-runners whose joints are shot from running. They prefer to cycle because it's easier on the joints but it offers the same headspace as a long run. I also do some climbing and frequently hurt my joints (shoulder and elbow are frequent ones, wrist from time-to-time.) I have lots of friends who also climb who have had to take short or even long breaks from climbing due to the effects on their joints. Lifting on a jobsite is more dynamic than weightlifting and closer to climbing.
It's not about actually wearing out your joints (which can probably take crazy amounts of load and stress over years if you use correct form and rest appropriately), it's more accumulated injury from incentives to use bad form.
I've been running for 40 years. I suffered from knee and hip pain from it, until I read about the biomechanics of running. I ran doing the "heel strike", where the heel hits first. I could feel the shock in my knee and my hip with every stride.
I decided to switch to "ball strike" where I landed ball of the foot first and then rolled onto the foot. I did not feel the shock in my knee or hip after that. A couple weeks later, the joint pain began to subside, and for the last decade has not bothered me.
It takes a while to switch to ball strike, now it feels perfectly natural. Try this experiment. Run with your shoes on, and note your heel strike. Take your shoes off and run again - you'll run on the balls of your feet. This was the epiphany for me.
Running also builds up your heart, lungs and muscles quickly, but the tendons and joints and bones need years to adapt. A lot of people get into trouble by feeling strong and overdoing it. Ya gotta hold back and give it years.
I agree that if you're still having trouble with running, biking is a great alternative.
With your back, take the time to do proper back strengthening exercises. They greatly helped reduce the rate and severity of my repeated back injuries. I strongly recommend talking to a doctor to get a regimen of these exercises. They paid off for me big time. More that once I thought oh crap, I hurt my back again. But nope! Woo-hoo!
I'm not at all suggesting that tradesmen don't get injured on the job and the accumulation of such can be crippling.
Any good resources on this? Getting into running in my early 30s. Already switched to zero-drop, I think I'm ball-striking.
But most of us are way less than that, more like 10 hours a week. And if you are careful your body rebuilds stronger each time.
My knees are not shot from running. In fact I’d wager they are in better health than a desk potatoe that never exercises.
Irrespective of job or sports people can randomly develop degenerative diseases as they age that can be exacerbated by work.
Compare to someone that lifts for 1 hour 3x a week. He will have stronger bones and joints than either a desk potatoe (no stress = no buildup) or the tradesmen (too much stress without rest = failure)
Respectfully, pedantically limiting the phrase "wearing out" to some subset of conditions that conveniently excludes accumulated injuries, the deterioration of cartilage, and other load/repetition-induced joint debilitation adds nothing to this conversation.
Climbing ladders. The knees go.
Electrictions can work over their head with screw drivers for weeks at an end. There are plenty of bad working positions for their body.
But I did figure the electricians knew what they were doing, so I watched them. I bought the same tools they used, and went to work.
Not to mention major injuries are still a big risk factor. Broken fingers, destroyed shoulder joints, missing fingernails, deep burns, scarred cuts, etc. Often never seen by a doc too and never healing properly.
massibe ignorance of basics of life, and anything outside their bible
An intelligent man lacking empathy and the ability to put themselves in someone else's shoes.
And like lots of people have damaged their knees running. It isn't obscure.
Joe Thomas, one of the greatest left tackles of all time, retired because he was going to need a new knee. His back also had a lot of issues. Losing a bunch of weight has allowed him to put off some of the surgeries, but he said his knee was bone on bone by the end.
Get a hobby that isn’t focused on making money. HN isn’t the real world.
Man, this bothers me in software, where physical human safety isn't even on the line. I can't even imagine dealing with that when somebody could actually die.
Doesn't the career path in the trades lead to owning your own business? Obviously, not for everyone. But the scope for advancement and riches is certainly there.
If you stay as a line worker in a union you will do OK but won't be rich (unless you live frugally and save/invest a lot).
Is he doing residential wiring? That’s the bottom of the barrel for electrical work, unfortunately. The commercial market is where the bulk of the good work is.
First I thought the person you were referring to was self-employed but if they're an employee, why don't they get vacation or health insurance?
20 years ago, the going rate for installing a socket in an existing wired and ready to go junction box was $50. It's about a 5 minute job. I know it's about 5 minutes because I've done a lot of them myself.
I'm sure prices have gone up a lot in the last couple decades.
They are charging for their time to drive to and from you, the possibility that the job is more involved than described, and the liability from doing the job. And the opportunity cost of not accepting a different job due to your job.
If I hired one to come out and do one socket, I'd be sure to get a $200 site visit charge added on.
He's probably got a backlog of large jobs he can make more money on. So if he's going to come out and do outlet installation on one house, he's going to bid an amount that is worth delaying other work.
For small/simple household jobs, you should call a handyman not a trade contractor.
In some jurisdictions you may be able to get away with one GFCI outlet per circuit, but then you're paying for their time to map out which circuits are which.
As in, they're probably not working steadily, 40 hours a week, every week, but they still have bills to pay, and this down time must be factored into their rates for the profession to be sustainable.
On the other hand, if they DO work 40 hours a week, every single week, they can probably afford to raise their rates...
Have not been an electrician, but I have been a software contractor, and the idea is the same.
But the reality is they've also got the businesses expenses of maintaining their work vehicle, their insurance, their healthcare, etc. That $50 probably only translates to $20 into usable income.
He gets the bill and says "That's outrageous, that's more than I make as a doctor".
The plumber replies "Yeah that's more than I made as a doctor too."
I was pretty happy to pay the 4 or 5 times what the day rental for machine would have been. Took em about 25 minutes.
You rarely see older guys going for cheap and it's because they know it's a foolish thing to do.
Large corporations are already legalised collusion. Allowing those with competing interests to "collude" at the same level is a necessary counterbalance to that.
He is working for the wrong people! I was given the option for both when I was in the trades, and I wasn't even part of a union!
Sounds like software contracting.
For example; for two weeks they need 60 hours each, the next three week only 40.
It's cheaper to have one employee with overtime then hire two employees.
Low barrier to entry means if prices rise, more people join the industry and drive prices down again. When overtime and overworking becomes too much, people exit or don't join and prices rise.
The more realistic scenario is less pay in exchange for slower hours.
Quality and availability. Fewer better paid jobs in the pipeline means they can decide to pay extra for less waiting and a not-rushed job.
Yes, the CEO was going down to yell on the blue collar workers making pennies.
Tell him to look at moving to New Zealand. Good salary (for NZ), 4 weeks paid vacation and plenty of paid public holidays (mandatory) and a lot of jobs going. No health insurance but few people here have health insurance, and anything accident related is covered by a mandatory insurance (basically a tax) scheme.
He joked about it but, ya, no thank you.
Linesmen do it quite a lot.
Linesmen is also one of the most dangerous jobs
Not to mention, 735kV, yes kilovolts, is a lot of juice.
2 things that make welding relatively safe from electrocution are: (1) the steel you're welding on makes a much better path for electricity flow than your body (especially when you're wearing heavy welding gloves), (2) welding in a dry environment (not raining, not standing in water, not drenched in sweat, etc.).
I've also heard that there are a lot of electrocuted singers. I was never sure if that's a myth though
Please don't take that as "Citation needed!" but rather genuine interest.
Someone can be a part time office worker, part time tradesman.
This part-time aspect was one of the appealing aspects of ride-sharing apps when they first appeared. People with cars could have 9-5 jobs and before and after the job, exactly during rush hour, give a lift to a few people. Of course, they turned into the new taxi but controled by multinational corps and almost impossible to hail without a smartphone.
We are speedruning Tolkien's law of decay.
Health is the opportunity cost otherwise, but it's hard to price health. And I don't mean that it's priceless; the price is ambiguous - is my health worth less or more than what half my salary buys me?
For software engineers, this is a difficult question to answer. If I were working an entry-level job, my health would be more valuable to me. If I were at the peak of professional development (a figurehead at a massive company or someone whose work changes the world), my work would be more important. SWE work makes a lot of money, but somewhere in the range of where I value my health.
How much $ a year is your health worth to you? Not a rhetorical question, would be interesting to see some answers if anyone can come up with a figure.
Right, I think you would need to check stats on how many people dropped out over the years due to health issues leaving behind these super healthy old guys to get an accurate picture.
https://time.com/5159857/amish-people-stay-healthy-in-old-ag...
https://time.com/5159857/amish-people-stay-healthy-in-old-ag...
It might not compensate all the sitting and typing fully but it's pretty good - I don't miss doing a day of physical labor.
I would probably be in better shape if I was moving all day everyday but I'm pretty sure my body would start to break down as well. I know not everyone has as much freedom but if you work from home it isnt that hard to squeeze in a pretty decent amount of exercise during the work day.
I’d love to talk with any of the millions of voluntary and involuntary manual laborers from the past 200 years and learn about how they made it through their lifetimes working in fields and factories in stress positions under substandard conditions.
To be honest, I guess we could just interact with and ask present day laborers across the globe cranking out products for Western mass consumption.
It’s got to be about the same I’d guess 1822 to 2022, no?
Lets imagine a hypothetical a job like unloading 50 kg bags from trucks and say you carry them up stairs to the 3rd floor. Or let them be 20 kg bags, 1 floor.
You can find a person who can do one 50 kg bag + 3 floors, lots of people can do multiple 20 kg bags. But how many can you expect an employee to do in a day? How fast is a reasonable demand? The answer is simple if you look at it from a training program perspective: If you can do 1 bag (of either kind) you keep doing it until you are tired or until it starts to hurt ever so slightly. You do this 3 days per week. You grow and grow until eventually you can hurl bags easily for hours. You could in theory keep training until you can comfortably do 50 kg bags, 3 floors, 8 hours long. It would take forever ofc. 20 kg, 1 floor is doable. You train until you can do a whole shift 3 days per week. Keep at it for a while then add a 4th day and eventually a 5th.
If you however push yourself a bit harder than you should, by not quitting when you had enough and/or going for 5 days to early you don't grow! You just destroy your body and if you destroy your health sufficiently you wont get used to the work in this life time. One slightly to long vacation might break you.
The moral of the story is that in some places you see these seemingly impossible mountains of men do absolutely insane amounts of absolutely insane work and it doesn't seem to bother them.
The bean counters understand non of this. They want 8 hours, preferably on a salary that doesn't afford a perfect diet and adds extra units of stress that should be subtracted from the training results or added to the injury list.
In many countries you cant even take employees blood pressure, measure heart rate or test their blood for nutrients. Some guys driving a desk decided that is a violation of peoples privacy.
Manual laborers 200 years ago spend a good amount of time outside and got a good amount of vitamin D.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15050-vitamin... > Vitamin D deficiency is a common global issue. About 1 billion people worldwide have vitamin D deficiency, while 50% of the population has vitamin D insufficiency. Approximately 35% of adults in the United States have vitamin D deficiency.
If you are looking to push the human body to the limit the year round getting out of the deficiency zone is not enough. About 100% gets insufficient D the year round.
I tell our bean counters that if they want to see more work done they have to give us a solarium with UVB lamps and pay people to use it.
There is nothing like seeing people hold 2 contradictory thoughts at the same time. They all know I'm 100% right and they know it 100% cant happen.
Unless ofc they subscribe to the official pseudoscience: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/indoor-tannin...
Good level D is positively correlated with endurance performance, muscle strength and with a lower rate of injuries. Anything less and you become fragile or a jellyfish. If you see someone do hard work your limbs snap off.
I also suggest they serve the employees meat (protein) during work to avoid them eating something stupid like sandwiches during lunch then a pizza or mcdonalds after work.
It honest to god feels like talking to a different species.
Recently they tried to explain to me the concept of working harder because they cant find employees. I tried to explain them being unable to find employees means I'm going to do less work and go home early. We all have our tasks. I did a great job. They couldn't find employees? It seems so simple? Give me more money, I will do more work, others will come if the price is right?
It's a lovely job, I bust my ass, pay is crap but my thoughts are my own and the employer has to put up with my bullshit. I can just walk away, there is plenty of grunt work and I can jockey a desk too! I drive a really fast desk. It's lovely to see a plan come together or to slap a bunch of code together and see it do its thing. It's all the same really, you get to be impressed by your own abilities, accomplishment or if both fail by the compensation :)
I could imagine the trades being more attractive in countries with better labor laws and social safety net.
They even joke about having to learn portuguese if you want to work in construction due to the massive number of portuguese tradesmen across Europe
Other fact fewer kids are getting born with muscle area which forma carpal tunnel. Evolution in progress.
Skilled trades are not limited to back breaking labor. Some and most of it is labors of love like farming. You have the right equipment it isn't back breaking.
I'm pretty sure not enough people have died/failed to reproduce due to carpal tunnel syndrome for that to be true.
your brother in law sounds stout, and at risk of getting into a bar fight i gotta say it: it just doesnt sound like hes there yet. if he had trade certifications, state certs and experience on his own, there isnt a shop i can think of in the midwest that wouldnt offer everything the HN hacker crowd gets at a white collar interview. hell, skilled cert welders in the midwest pull down enough to pay off a new f250 in a couple of years. electricians ARE a valid and important trade, and linemen are the pornstars among their ranks. he needs to seek out a better shop too, but that goes without saying.
the progress is: work hard, get promoted to job captain or foreman, and eventually if you want start your own shop. if not you eventually wind up a shop manager or something with more pay than title.
Making journeyman in most trades around here means a comfortable middle class salary, sending you kids to the less expensive private schools, a boat if you save up. Beats what you’d make being a teacher, social worker, or librarian.
Strong bank profitability and lending are basically the bedrock of our economy, people's homes have appreciated so much they're able to borrow obscene amounts to renovate, and the construction industry as a result is incredibly strong.
In state with occupational licensing for trades, they do have decent wages. In states without that licensing, hiring immigrant workers is the way to drive down wages/costs.
Doesn't help either I'm sure that unions, the organizations willing/capable of marketing-to, teaching/training people and giving them some sense of camaraderie, have been attacked for decades as being variously inefficient to straight evil.
Except it's not. First, society is going to have too few skilled trades folks in the coming years due to people retiring and not being replaced. Second, a lot of college degrees can't get someone a good job. I remember someone telling me they had a business degree and couldn't get a job managing a store at the mall.
It was considered the fallback degree when I went to college 20 years ago, since anyone could graduate with it with minimal effort.
Communications can be good if your school is in the middle of a communications hub. Which, for US students, boils down to Los Angeles and New York City. But a lot of the worth of that degree comes from its ability to unlock internships and networking inside the two biggest media markets in the US, if not the entire world.
So not entirely worthless but only lucrative in specific cities and markets, and for mostly shibboleth reasons (many friends with communications degrees who also went to school in either city pull in mid-six figures working for big entertainment companies).
But hey, at least you don’t have to actually study anything while spending most of your week at unpaid internships and networking events!
I never considered studying the things that actually interested me because I knew they were going to end up in dead end careers, and I didn't want to be broke my entire life. It's the same reason I didn't go to the top schools that accepted me. Hell, I didn't even go to the top schools that offered me scholarships because I was afraid of the cost. It's also why I ignore the pleas of people who came from substantially better backgrounds during the internet era and claim that they couldn't have known better and deserve debt forgiveness.
They SHOULD have known better. They had every resource to know better.
I also think there's a stigma associated with the trades which doesn't necessarily permeate mixed middle class neighborhoods. I grew up in a situation where the majority of adults in my hometown did not have college degrees. Thus, college degrees became things to aspire to instead of things we MUST have. Plenty of my classmates then, and plenty of kids graduating now, are not going to college. For some, they've been told by their folks that they can stay at home and save up their money for the 4 years after getting out of trade school to put a down payment towards a house. Granted, the culture I'm from doesn't negatively view 20-something men hanging out on a porch with beers after dark. Cheaper than the bars, after all.
Then we were told to go into STEM. So lots of people went into STEM even though they didn't want to, there are not enough STEM jobs for all of them, and in some cases the reason there are always jobs available is because they chew everyone up and spit them out (looking at you, Amazon). I got lucky. A lot of folks did not.
Then we were told what we really need is nurses. So folks went to nursing school in droves. I'm not sure where we are with that, because it seems like hospitals still never have enough nurses but that those folks that went to nursing school also didn't manage to improve their situation much.
Now we're told the money and demand is in trades. And that might be true, and that might remain true, but we've been given the wrong advice for so long we just stopped listening.
> we've been given the wrong advice for so long we just stopped listening.
Gen Z & younger Millennials constantly get shit for blaming everyone else for everything always, and taking no responsibility or being accountable for their own actions...but I would argue that comments like the above aren't going to dispel that.
Maybe it reads different than it's intended, but a huge part of being an adult is adapting to an ever changing world and finding a path forward towards your goals.
(Edited to remove what could be perceived as a bit harsh..)
So why aren't Gen Z taking this magical advice on trades? Because they know older generations don't have a crystal ball, they've seen what happens if they listen to that crystal ball advice, and they're not falling for it. And if you talk to Gen Z, they have very little hope for the future, given we are doing very little to stop climate change, runaway capitalism, and they're watching jobs get automated without any change to the "cost of living" agreement when people are watching jobs disappear.
Boomers don't have to worry about any of that anymore. And there's nothing more tone deaf than Boomers giving advice on a world that no longer exists for younger generations.
> The original premise was that trades are where all the money is
> My point is that we were previously told: the money is in college degrees, the money is in STEM, the money is in nursing. And people invested a lot of time and money in taking that advice and it went nowhere.
Everyone learns the law of supply and demand before adulthood, or if they haven't then they shouldn't be going to college anyway. So if the supply of labor in a field increases beyond the demand, what would we expect to happen?
Also, if you're really good at something people will generally pay you more than they'll pay people who are mediocre. Maybe the problem is younger generations can't wrap their heads around the fact that a lot of people are mediocre. Not everyone is special or a superstar or whatever, so maybe this egalitarian mindset is the issue.
This isn't boomer shit, I'm far too young to be a boomer. It seems like common sense. Is this not common sense?
And wow, look, we're commenting on an article about how kids aren't rushing to go become plumbers so you're here saying what exactly?
Or did you just want to go on about kids-aint-shit and the die landed on joecot this time.
> imply kids probably shouldn't all rush to go be plumbers
Makes sense, right?
People learn it, but I don't think many Americans actually believe it. Exhibit A is housing. Exhibit B is this bandwagoning effect around career choices.
Yeah, the problem is that the "law of supply and demand" is a simple metaphor to help children gently begin learning economics, not how anything actually works. Almost no price any real person encounter anywhere in their daily life is actually determined in any meaningful way by "supply" or "demand" -- unless you stretch the definition of those two words so thin they're practically meaningless. They're potential factors, sure, but only small ones.
As one of a bajillion examples, see how every hospital is short staffed (low supply) and desperate for nurses (high demand), while we also see them constantly lay nurses off or reduce hours (and nursing has consistently-fixed low salaries, despite the shortages). Same for CNAs, nursing home staff, etc.
Case in point.
> how every hospital is short staffed and desperate for nurses (high demand), while we also constantly law nurses off or reduce hours (and nursing has consistently-fixed low salaries, despite the shortages)
How many paying patients are they turning away on account of this supposed shortage?
There isn't a national nurse shortage. Nurses are being overworked. And in some regions, there are shortages, though that's out of an inability to pay traveling nurse rates.
That's not how it works. Generally speaking, any publicly funded hospital in the US must take patients by law, they can not turn away patients except under very specific circumstances.
> There isn't a national nurse shortage
Literally everyone disagrees with you:
- The New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/us/hospital-nursing-short... - University of St Augustine - https://www.usa.edu/blog/nursing-shortage/ - University of California SF - https://scienceofcaring.ucsf.edu/patient-care/nursing-shorta... - Center for American Progress - https://www.americanprogress.org/about-us/ - McKinsey and Co - https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/policy-value-based-care/st... - Both the US Democratic Party and US Republican Party - https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/347826-bo...
> that's out of an inability to pay traveling nurse rates.
If you pay extra to import a nurse (traveling nurses) you remove them from the area they were previously. That's great, but it's not a fix for a shortage, that's just relocating the shortage somewhere else.
And, if they're short, why aren't they able to pay traveling nurse rates? Medical revenues are at an all time high, prices too. There's no reason a hospital couldn't pay higher nursing rates, they just choose not to, because again, that figure is not determined by supply or demand.
Not all nurses are employed at hospitals. I said paying patient, but I should have said deniable. Someone seeking out the sorts of care hospitals start denying when they face an actual emergency.
> everyone disagrees with you
Oh, I've seen the meme. I'm just casting it a bit more cynically. Nobody wants to pay nurses more. So we need more nurses, whether out of nursing school or through immigration.
> if they're short, why aren't they able to pay traveling nurse rates
They did [1]! When they needed them. Because there was demand for them. When there wasn't, they didn't.
> no reason a hospital couldn't pay higher nursing rates, they just choose not to, because again, that figure is not determined by supply or demand
This is how supply and demand work. They're not paying more because they don't have to.
[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/nursing/the-complexity...
I was aware of it but I only remember seeing it taught in Econ 101.
Most majors don't require Econ 101 to my knowledge.
STEM is not a great term in general given how broad it is. The pure sciences as a career path for someone with just an undergrad degree have not been that great since I was in school which was a long time ago. Those degrees can be parlayed into other things that are connected to the degree--or not. Pre-med was the historical reason a lot of people majored in biology or chemistry.
Engineering broadly is not a bad degree to have even if you don't ultimately work in the area you majored in; I only did so for about three years.
Nursing was never near the level of doctors in terms of compensation. But it has been pretty much middle class pay at the cost of what, to me, would be difficult working conditions.
If someone's good with sitting in an office and developing some appropriate skills for that, I wouldn't necessarily recommend the trades. But, if someone doesn't like school, book learning, etc. it seems a pretty reasonable option.
And there are degrees of things. Trades also includes working for things like construction engineering firms. Have a friend who didn't go to college but has worked in various roles of this sort. (My one real mechanical engineering job wasn't all that different in many respects at the end of the day.)
What are you talking about?
The main responsibility of adults is to prepare the next generation. Realizing that failure is not being jaded, it's confronting reality about the failures of adults.
> And when those kids grow up to be adults and realize that the advice they were given was all bullshit
The harsh truth is just because you can get a degree in something doesn't mean you'll be any good at it, and ultimately if you're not any good at something why would you expect people to pay you money to do something poorly? So the real question is: at what point should young adults be responsible for recognizing their aptitude and interests enough to make their own career decisions without blaming others? 18? 21? 25? Never?
Something strange is happening here that I can't quite understand. Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that are way older than me and I first started college in 1999. Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me.
Of course I knew that some majors were more lucrative than others. Of course everybody else around me knew the same. Of course people my age at the time actively engaged in conversations about "what will you do with this degree when you're done?" Of course people who majored in less practical subjects thought about this (when they weren't actively trying to put it out of their mind).
A character (played by pre-hairplugs Jeremy Piven) in the movie PCU (released in 1994) ridicules a student for majoring in Sanskrit, saying, "You're majoring in a 5000 year-old dead language?" Everybody in the audience is supposed to get why that's funny.
And yet I keep hearing people say they had no idea that any of this was true. It strains credulity.
Frankly, people have been repeating this line about how they couldn't possibly have known all this for so long that kids in college today weren't even born yet when it started. Eventually people are going to have to admit that they did know (or should have).
I have already had versions of this conversation with my own daughter, who is now 12. We've talked about college, when it makes sense, when it may not, and how to make that decision based on life goals. She's plenty smart enough to understand that she doesn't need a career goal at her age, and that even when she becomes an adult it might change, but what she won't be doing is blindly wandering into college with a random hope of success at the other side.
Sure but that never stopped anyone from pulling out BLS statistics showing life-time earning potential of an BA in english vs a highschool diploma.
But the point of bringing up "any degree" isn't that any student thought (or any guidance counselor said) that underwater basket weaving and electrical engineering had the same potential it's that we were told to go to college even if we had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives. A degree was the important thing even if it was in something that we didn't want, even if we didn't want a degree at all.
There's a fairly long history of people inventing what they think is taught at colleges as a straw man to then criticize them in some way and it doesn't contribute to anything for the usual reasons a fallacy doesn't.
Hell, I audited the main American art course. We spent multiple weeks on indigenous textiles and pottery (not quite baskets I guess), multiple weeks on modernist and feminist painters. We didn't even touch american sculpture and spent less than a week on 'serious' painters. Saint gaudens, Sargent and the Boston painters, not even mentioned.
How many jobs there are which require a knowledge of "American Sculpture"?
It's going to be less then the number which require a knowledge of the history of feminism and social justice.
Which is to say, by making the changes you are implying should be made...you'd probably be more unemployable at the end of it because their ain't that many museums.
Of all the people from high school still working dead end service jobs, I don’t know any with a college degree.
Sure there are people who studied English who aren’t making tons of money, but they also aren’t stuck working at Walmart like some of the people who don’t have degrees are.
An English degree isn’t enough to get you a $100k a year job out of college, but it is enough for just about anyone to get their foot in the door to a career where they can make close to that eventually.
My anecdote is much closer to BLS statistics.
When you say they are all making double minimum wage at best, that’s less than the bottom decile for college graduates. Your not experience is not representative at all.
Now it's just too common for any old degree to matter. I think perhaps for Ivy League this strategy still works.
Sure, she would have never gotten those jobs with an English degree but stressing over whether to study the exactly "correct" degree for your career goals isn't necessarily worth the calories.
The change for the current generation is that for everyone graduating in underwater basketweaving in say 2000, many would find unrelated careers and, because they had a college degree, do fine. With rising college costs and more expectations that workers in high paying fields have specific degrees, that's no longer true.
I went to school in 2001 and computer science was one of the hottest fields around by that time, significantly more so than a BA in English. The Georgia institute of technology (Gatech), my alma mater, had a highly competitive computer science career path.
In fact the general advice was that if you really wanted to major in English that it was better to pursue a degree in an adjacent field such as communications so you could more easily transition into journalism, etc.
STEM (doctors, scientists, engineers, etc.) has almost always been a safer career path than liberal arts, assuming you're cut out for it.
Ha! By whom? We had a pretty good idea that it was a solid choice in the early 90s and before. We teased my older brother for going for a bachelor's in business while I went into CS, because we were pretty sure the CS degree would be worth a lot more. He's doing just fine, but mostly because he backfilled the equivalent of a CS education into his work experience.
The glut of graduates that have come off the pipeline due to the hot tech sector prior to the bust fell off after 2-4 yrs. This actually led to the huge lack of supply of CS graduates in the ensuing decade!
I think it is partially responsible for the high salaries that CS graduates get (of course, it's a small portion of the cause, the bigger factor being huge growth in the sector).
I certainly knew people in ~2000 who were going to college to study things like psychology, who felt the abstract skills of 'learning to learn', writing, reasoning with a bit of statistics and spreadsheet operation would help them get jobs like marketing, sales, analysts, strategic consulting, HR etc.
I suspect if you got your degree in psychology from Harvard, that might be true - but if your degree is from a mediocre university, probably not.
And you don't need to go to Harvard at all. Certainly the school you go to counts for something, but it's not like psych is an "indulgent" degree that needs a good college to "compensate" for. It's a very normal degree. The social sciences tend to translate very well to the business world, a good blend of quantitative research together with qualitative analysis that mirrors business initiatives well.
* You should go to college.
* You should do what you love.
* Sure some jobs pay more that others, but that doesn't matter if you are doing what you love.
What was completely left out of the discussion was that some degrees won't actually enable you to do what you love. They'll just load you with tons of debt, making it harder to even get by let alone do what you love as a side gig. I never once heard a guidance councilor or other adult tell that to me or my peers. The "it is rare to get that sort of job" speech was reserved for people who wanted to play sports or be rock-stars, not those thinking about an academic degree. Maybe it was because I was from an underprivileged community, and any students who showed a desire to go to college were encouraged, not stifled.
They always listed the jobs you could have with a degree instead of the jobs you would have with a degree.
My wife got a GIS degree. They told her about all the map making jobs. They didn't say 95% of these jobs were oil and gas.
Now granted they both worked crazy hard in school, but the idea that it's "obvious bullshit" isn't true at all. Archaeologists and historians are real jobs that exist. I say that with a straight face.
I'm not saying that it's easy to become either, and you're definitely not going to become rich doing either of them, but they're certainly attainable if you're truly driven and love that kind of work. They're not get-lucky fantasies like NBA star or celebrity influencer.
I have 1 friends who is tenure track (stem which is significantly easier) but 14-15 who got PhDs weren't able to find tenure track position. But two friend started an internationally acclaimed bands. And another who is an internationally published author.
So sure these jobs exist but archaeologist and historian are probably closer to rock star or NBA player than they are accountant or developer.
I’m reminded of a friend who moved - with no prior experience living outside of the U.S. - to Tasmania because that’s the one place in the world where their partner could get a permanent job when they were on the market. That’s worked out well for their family but it’s nothing like the way a software developer can be flexible.
But if you've really got your heart set on archaeology/history, they're not fantasies. They're just extremely niche. You're right that the parallel isn't "developer", it's more like "database engine developer". Albeit much much lower pay, in most cases. ;)
One of the biggest differences though, is you figure out whether or not you're getting into the NBA at aged 20, after going to school on an athletic scholarship.
You figure out you're not going to get tenure at 32 after finishing up your 3rd post doc, with 250k in student loans.
That seems to be a somewhat US-specific problem. In many other countries, university education is much more affordable, in some cases even entirely free. In my country (Australia), the government pays two-thirds of the tuition cost of most undergraduate degrees, and will lend you the remaining third - while that debt is still a burden for some, it is nowhere near as bad as the US. Other countries (such as France or Scotland), the government pays 100% of tuition
There are new houses being built on the coast in my country less than a meter above the high water point. At king tides, their sections are already getting lightly flooded.
When sea levels rise, those same people will complain to the council (which is still letting them build there) and seek compensation, even though sea level rise is well understood and anticipated.
People know the risks but carry on because the rest of the herd is doing it.
I was told not to major in "underwater basketweaving" in 1983, or otherwise I'd be garbage man--as if that were not one of the most important jobs in a society! It's been the same class-warfare BS for coming up on half a century: demean low paying jobs at all costs for reasons I still don't understand.
A lot of the demeaning came from the low wage workers themselves. Both my grandparents were blue collar. One painted houses, one was an elevator mechanic. They essentially forbade their children from going into the trades. "Learn to make a living with your brain, not your back" was what my dad heard constantly from his father while growing up. And so my father went to college and became an engineer.
In 1983, finishing high school in NYC, we were told to consider being garbage men because the starting pay was higher than most college graduates got!
[regarding weird man examining dozens of eggs]
Customer: They call it "shell shock". It seems to only happen with guidance counselors. They use to make a big deal of it but they let just let it go now 'cuz they always pay for whatever they break and they never bother anybody.
Dante: Well, why guidance counselors?
Customer: Well, if your job was as meaningless as theirs, wouldn't you go crazy too?
Randal: Come to think of it, my guidance counselor was kinda worthless.
It is certainly true, and probably still true, if you go to a truly elite school that any degree will do (consulting will hire any young grad from a top school with good grades), but it has been a long time since you could get any degree from any school. People are badly misinformed if they think you can go to a third-tier state school, get poor grades in a random major, and have an easy time making a lot of money.
I started college in 2002 for frame of reference.
This makes it sound like a degree is worth less today than it was in the past, which is not true. The income and wealth gap between college degree holders and non-degree holders is higher than at any point in history, and it grows bigger very year.
Most degrees have an unemployment rate of about 5-6%. That's not bad, but it does mean that there are over 2 million college-educated Americans who got degrees and can't find jobs. This minority is much more visible today; they get lots of press coverage and talk about their struggles through social media. This makes it seem like things are getting worse, just like how people tend to think that crime is getting worse, but the reality is things are getting better and college becomes a better deal every year.
>Then we were told what we really need is nurses. So folks went to nursing school in droves.
And generally this paid off, since nurses are in demand and make well above the median salary.
>Then we were told to go into STEM.
Which is decent advice, with a caveat. Most people with STEM degrees could easily pivot into something highly profitable like software development. What people weren't told is that it's difficult to land a profitable role doing research/pure science, especially if you don't have a PhD.
>And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless.
Which is mostly incorrect. Even folks majoring in stuff often touted as "worthless" like art history or gender studies still tend to do better than people without degrees. The catch is that you might end up working a business analyst or a project manager instead of an Egyptologist or whatever you actually majored in. The biggest offender here is Psychology: many new graduates are shocked to discover that no, you cannot actually become a psychologist with just a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, nor are there profitable research opportunities at that level. A psychology degree still looks great on a resume if you're applying to be an HR representative or something, though.
Honestly I'd modify this to say that unless your Ph. D is in physics, mathematics (and you're willing to go into finance) or data science... you're not going to be that much better off.
And the time you spend out of industry you'll never make back. Take a CS degree, go work for any of the big ones and get "senior" next to your name as soon as possible.
The earlier comment about competent plumbers making more than doctors in Slovenia; I can believe that.
It's the white collar compensation inversion.
FWIW, the St Louis Fed publishes stats on incomes of degree holders, and I recently read them and found out that the average 4-year college degree holder has 2x the income of non-degree holders. (3x for advanced degrees.) Twice is a really big number and it surprised me, it’s much larger than I had suspected. Obviously some degrees make people more money than others, engineering and sciences tend to yield higher incomes than the arts. But, with an average of double the income across all degrees across all people in the US, it’s easy to see why people recommend any ol’ degree at all, and statistically speaking, it’s a valid point and good advice.
BTW, you used the word “value” with gender studies but then acknowledged in your last sentence that education has value that is non-monetary; please be careful about using language that conflates income with value (only mentioning since you did it in another comment as well). Gender studies might have people earning relatively lower incomes compared to some other degrees, but that doesn’t mean it has low value; as sub-branch of history and anthropology, and at a time when society is fiercely debating gender, gender studies is particularly relevant and useful and socially valuable today.
As far as underwater basket weaving, if you don’t have any actual examples and have to make up a fake one, then it sounds like the point you’re trying to make probably has no basis in reality, and probably isn’t true. That’s what use of the term “underwater basket weaving” by anyone tells me, and it tends to get trotted out more often on Fox News to make a straw-man point than by reasonable people having a reasonable discussion.
As far as Wikipedia links (or any references), it’s true that not everything needs one, but sometimes they’re helpful to support & clarify a discussion. It wasn’t clear that you knew underwater basket weaving wasn’t a degree, but I also added it because the article contains some interesting and humorous history behind the term “underwater basket weaving”. You could maybe use one or two links here in this thread to back up your claims, for example, about what “people” lambast & talk about, and what “widespread cultural awareness” exists. As it stands, you’ve stated a lot of opinion and assumptions without demonstrating much relevance. Who cares if someone somewhere lambasted their biased idea of a useless degree? Why should that have any bearing on what anyone else does? Answering those questions thoughtfully might require a link or two…
That's completely foreign to me.
It was well understood that degrees in English, psychology, and the wider arts were useful for teaching, but they weren't going to pay well, unless you were the exceptional minority that had a clear idea of what you were planning on doing.
I really think millennials should have got more real world work experience and internships before committing to overpriced degrees in industries that they didn't really want to work in. With a broader view of the world, one can make better decisions for happiness.
To be fair, we just had a pandemic, and we're still reeling from that. Lots of folks quit because of burn-out.
The only addition being "learn to code/program", but now interest rates are starting to narrow the reliability of that avenue.
Trust me, once the all-in comp/lifestyle of a welder becomes better than say a paralegal, you won't need to tell anybody anything, they'll find you.
Entire game dev industry is built in finding passionate young people, underpaying them and putting them through the grinder till they burn out. And there's no shortage of applicants.
So the Boomer parents saw this going on and encouraged their kids to go to college, which was the last generation where that advice mostly worked, and we, seeing our uncles and cousins and highschool friends struggle, doubled down with the thing that seemed to help us, but was already starting to look like a crapshoot when we went through the system.
It's all class warfare, with a heavy dose of horizontal aggression.
My toilet is leaking? 10 years ago I'd call a plumber. Now I diagnose the problem and determine if it's within my skill level to learn the repair (it usually is). For me, this wouldn't be feasible without online how-to videos.
A plumber/carpenter/electrician will charge me $50-$100/hr for work that I can do myself for just the cost of parts. The cost savings really adds up over the years. Not to mention, I'm getting increasingly self-sufficient as time goes on and I become more confident doing larger repairs and projects.
Most of my friends and acquaintances have fallen into the same path.
It’s like insurance at this point. I can probably cover 90% of the small stuff. But when the big stuff hits, I call someone.
As an example, I wanted to have a new water heater installed and replace the improper vent. When I asked plumbers for a full quote, replacing the vent added thousands of extra dollars because I would have been paying plumber rates for it. But I was able to pull a permit and replace the water heater myself, and then hire someone much less expensive than a plumber to replace the vent.
Your mileage may vary, but there could be a few steps in a multi-step process that are significantly raising the costs because the only people you can hire by law are expensive, but are also simple and legal to do yourself.
We aren’t losing any business to YouTube. We only do service for commercial businesses, and the house engineer isn’t going out of the way to do any more work than what is absolutely necessary.
You will still need a plumber if you do a large remodel or new construction. Good on you for learning how to do more yourself, but this trend has negligible impact on the industry at large.
Most contractors: Doing the absolute minimum necessary and cutting corners
Most homeowners (product managers) want the cheapest (fastest) thing that fixes (delivers) a working home (feature) to them. When given the options those are generally what people choose.
Sure some contractors (software engineers) always cut corners, but I believe many take pride in their work and given the option would prefer a solution they take pride in.
YouTube changes things for sure, although I am unsure if that's the cause of fewer folks going into the trades. Demand over all seems higher than ever in my area. Very hard to get good trades people, or even bad ones a year ago!
The contractor just needs their work to fail not-before the warranty period expires.
Think of them more like foreign software contractors being paid per JIRA ticket, rather than in-house long-career developers.
That's a very valid point. The question is who has more skin in the game. Contractors have more of a positive feedback: if I am satisfied, I will recommend them to my friends and relatives. YouTubers may have more of negative feedback (not that much since dislike button is gone), but it takes someone to call their bullshit and write a refuting comment. I don't think lots of core YouTube userbase is inclined to do so, the default behavior there is to make a "pffff" and swipe away.
If that was an unintended pun, I LOLed really hard xD
(Sorry in advance for the low quality comment)
In any case, the fact that skilled trade work is still extremely expensive where I live and has not gone down post-pandemic points to the fact that these tradespeople are having no trouble finding jobs.
I'm sure you realize that most people make quite a bit less than this, though.
> Why anecdotes are not data: I have the exact opposite experience.
> In my opinion
This only applies if you had to use your normal contracting time to fix the toilet. If you're doing it on personal time the value isn't as obvious.
Hey hinkley, how come you know how to fix these things? PBS. And living in a fixer-upper as a child. But mostly PBS.
I don't know about you, but my repair self-sufficiency came out of being poor and having to do things myself because I had an excess of time but not an excess of cash. This seems to be a rather common divide I see in people. Though I'll be honest, I don't think most people even want to learn these things, even if they are strapped for cash.
So the interesting factor I see here is really about a wealth distribution. A fundamental aspect of capitalism is that money needs to constantly be changing hands. There are many factors in an economy that can slow down the exchange of capital and this seems to be one of them.
Or, of course, you could do it yourself - but there's no way you'll ever get your house insured unless certified professionals sign off on inspection.
And that is for a good reason - shoddy electrical work can burn down the house, while shoddy plumbing can cause extensive damage.
Same answer for the shortage as everywhere that the economists don't want to hear: pay more, allow more immigration, get better benefits especially for parents.
Edit: also in this case universal healthcare, universal mandatory PTO, would also extremely help
Seems not the answer.
The volume of plumbing problems is going to increase at least linearly with the housing supply, which (theoretically) increases more-or-less linearly with population. Plus, people move around, so there will be concentrations of problems, and those concentrations will move with the population.
That doesn't account for how technology and building codes and material changes have made previously simple plumbing problems more complex over time.
Software jobs are many X what they were 30 years ago, while I doubt plumbing jobs have change that much above what they were relative to the population 30 years ago.
I sit at a computer all day and it’s not good for my body either as I’m more sedentary than is healthy. I would say that my work is equally unhealthy but in different ways.
I have my own home too and the times I’ve done my own plumbing work were hard. And that’s one of the physically-speaking easier jobs, never mind Roofing, I wouldn’t last a week.
If not I think that still hits the "knees give out by 55" issue.
Edit: Thank you for all the downvotes for me calling out the weird correlation between tech benefits/politics and plumber skill-shortage + high-reward wages. Your wokeism will forever benefit society.
Normally it just means you get to pay the full cost of your health plan, which is often double or more what you were paying as an employee. It's just so you're not immediately ineligible for the employer's group.
Unless yours is also paying the premium those 18 months, which I've never heard of but I suppose is possible.
They even have metal levels so you know you are getting the same actuarial value. A silver BCBS plan from an employer is basically the same coverage as a silver BCBS plan from healthcare.gov.
The state of things here:
1) Most insurers don't offer anything on healthcare.gov. Most years, there are two providers on there, though sometimes one will drop off and another will come in, so it does vary a little year-to-year.
2) Zero insurers here offer individual plans outside hc.gov, so if they're not on there—and most aren't—you can't get one. Seriously. Ask them, ask insurance brokers: "nope, no insurers offer individual plans in this state anymore—if it's not on hc.gov, it doesn't exist"
3) The networks for the hc.gov plans usually suck compared to the ones available to businesses. This may not be captured in the "actuarial value".
4) I've also never seen an employer mention which metal-level their plans is so you can compare them, but maybe they can find out if you ask. I know for a fact the top-level employer plans cost quite a bit more than the best-available plans on hc.gov (and they're waaaaaaay better)
You mention BCBS. They do operate in this state. They are not on hc.gov (not the version we see, anyway) and will not sell you an individual plan outside of it, either.
NJ even has a public document listing all the insurance prices, and they matched the amount quoted to me by the insurance agent for my business.
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
BCBS is also a network, not the insurance company. So you never buy insurance from BCBS, but rather whichever insurance company has chosen to be a franchise, such as Regence, Horizon NJ, Independence, Elevance, etc.
In my experience, for a typical ACA bronze plan, the annual maximum out-of-pocket payout is roughly $20,000, and the monthly dues are about $700, meaning worst case you're looking at ~$30,000 out pocket for a year. Add about 50% if you have children. Sadly, none of this is tax-deductible as far as I can tell.
Another issue with ACA marketplaces that I found was they churn a lot; every year when you have to renew coverage you can have an entirely different set of providers and plans. The constant enrollment and transfer paperwork becomes non-trivial, even without trying to qualify for an income-based discount.
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
The annual max family out of pocket is legally capped at $18,200, but most plans will be less than that.
>Another issue with ACA marketplaces that I found was they churn a lot; every year when you have to renew coverage you can have an entirely different set of providers and plans.
This is not my experience, I have been able to purchase the same BCBS health plan from the same insurer for many years.
In NJ, I would budget $30k per year for premiums for a gold level plan for a family of 4, assuming you are not getting any premium tax credits. Of course, out of pocket maximum is up to another $18k.
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
>Sadly, none of this is tax-deductible as far as I can tell.
It should be tax deductible if you are self employed:
https://www.healthinsurance.org/obamacare/self-employed-heal...
And if you are working for a small business that does not offer a group health plan, you should be able to get premiums reimbursed from employer with pre tax income:
There are a bunch of restrictions and loopholes though. I once opened an HSA and then actually had to close it because it turned out my insurance plan had *too* high of a deductible to be eligible, go figure.
You can see premiums for 2023 for NJ here for all ages and plans, and adjust up or down 20% for other states.:
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
The average salary for a journeyman lineman in Michigan is $161,000 per year
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/journeyman-... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/DTE-Energy-Journeyman-Linem... https://www.linemancentral.com/states/michigan
Do you think they don't earn 30-40 per hour and have the ability to make tons of overtime?
The power company pays office workers time and a half to do "line watch" where they just park by a downed power line with a light on their roof until a crew shows up to fix it.
I would not accept their personal anecdotes over documented tax returns.
That will turn out well for them.
Not saying someone’s life choices are right or wrong one way or the other in this case. I’m very grateful for my position but would be lying if I didn’t say I day dreamt occasionally about quitting work and living like a backpacker.
And then when enough do, and the result becomes a lifetime of un/under-employment, then they want the retirements or lives of those before or around them, who do you think will pick up the slack?
Sure, quit and be a backpacker. Doing it a while is fun, probably even healthy, but a lifetime of it will not end well for many people. And generally if enough people do it, then society as a whole will have to pay for it.
Machines? Volunteers? Hobbyists? Artists? Researchers? Bored people?
Humans aren't the ones changing, society is. And its failures are its own.
To be fair, I do agree that on an individual level there are tons of people screwing themselves over and messing up their lives, being a burdon on their parents or whoever ends up supporting them financially, etc. I don't think most of these people are refusing to work out of activism or anything. But from a sociological perspective it's a natural response to a problem(a problem that goes much deeper than low wages imo, but I won't get into that) that acts as a corrective measure to one of the main symptoms of that problem.
In other words: there will always be a bell curve of in terms of competence and work ethic, and from a relative perspective the curve will maintain it's shape throughout time periods/generations among large enough populations. The people on the low end of that curve deserve the same amount of criticism(how much, if any, they deserve, is up for debate) regardless of whether the curve itself shifts towards one side or the other - as movements of the curve in it's entirety can be attributed to social/environment factors. I do think we've seen the curve move towards it's lower end recently, and I have plenty of headcannon about why that may have happened, but I can't see any reason to blame all individuals within an entire generation, and I can't see the point in condemning the low end of the curve for a certain generation over that same portion of the curve from other generations.
Those jobs also result in products being more costly, so that the current low end wages are actually lower nominal value.
I find people using terms like "fair wage" end up making wishes and policies that end up hurting the poor, not helping them, by not understanding economics.
Fair is what a person can command from competing for jobs, and jobs competing for workers. Anything else ends up unsustainable, which usually ends up hurting the least able workers.
Mandating wages leads to lower employment - so sure you can help some by pricing others out of work.
>To be fair, I do agree that on an individual level there are tons of people screwing themselves over and messing up their lives, being a burdon on their parents or whoever ends up supporting them financially, etc.
Agreed - but who it will hurt the most is future workers, including them, as the economy is not as good and then there are less resources for everyone, including them. Of course they will continue to blame a "system" when they got what they earned.
>I do think we've seen the curve move towards it's lower end recently
Total remuneration, even at the low end, is higher than nearly all of history. And post-tax transfer it's much higher.
For example, the lowest 20% of households saw their post-tax income go from $18,900 in 1979 to $32,800 in 2018 [1], and that's not even including that households on average have shrunk in size. Per worker the returns are even higher.
A good analogy: if you tell kids that blue eyed kids are the devil, they will act like it, pass laws, and believe it. If you tell people immigrants are killing them or taking jobs, people start to believe it, and enact laws that hurt all. Similarly, if you tell enough people how bad the economy is, regardless of solid evidence, they will act like it, and in the case of an economy, they bring the doom to pass.
>I can't see any reason to blame all individuals within an entire generation
I wouldn't blame them all. But if enough act a way to make their economic outcomes worse, then all of them will suffer over time. And they'll take others along for the ride.
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-income...
Unsustainable, huh? I'm from the Netherlands where we've had minimum wage since 1969. The job market hasn't exactly broken down in those 53 years. Actually, we have the lowest unemployment in recorded history. Also, minimum wage just got upped by more than 10%.
You know why? Because otherwise people working full-time can't even afford the basics. Even if you have zero empathy in you, how exactly does it benefit society to have productive members of society suffer, become homeless, resort to crime, go hungry and freeze?
If low-end workers' wages double and that makes costs go up 10%, or even 20%, pretty sure they're still ahead.
The problem isn't "lack of immigrants". The problem is that when surveyed, 25% of Gen-Z said they plan to pursue a career as "influencers". My opinion is that younger generations have been brought up in a world where they don't need to take personal responsibility or ever get their hands dirty.
I think it's mostly harmless and of course most kids will grow out of it. It's definitely like wanting to be a rockstar, but I think the scale is larger and the barrier to entry so much lower that they seem much more convinced it's actually a viable option than what I thought being a rockstar was when I was a kid.
My guess is for many of them it will be a second "wait, Santa isn't real?" moment when they get a bit older and realize that power law distributions are a thing and that's just how it is. Followed by fun times reminiscing about it with each other as adults.
In a way I find it a little sad, as a reminder humans keep getting more isolated with tech. Where 30 years ago we wanted people cheering us on, chanting our name, etc... people now seem to desire views, likes, and whatnot.
I'm not saying one is better than the other, it's just really hard for my brain to process as I don't understand it.
> My opinion is that younger generations have been brought up in a world where they don't need to take personal responsibility or ever get their hands dirty.
An opinion as old as recorded history at least. It wasn't novel or insightful when Horace said it in 40BC and it isn't now.
6-figure incomes for plumbers are rare.
It's not rocket science. People aren't getting paid for the value of their labor, and productivity has rocketed up while wages have stagnated for decades. Your plumber charges 200 an hour and doesn't make anywhere near that much, because they work for a company who profits massively off their labor and exploits him as far as the law and supply and demand will allow.
Do most plumbers responding to house calls work for an employer? There aren't many economies of scale in that work.
Being an independent plumber means handling: marketing, networking, customer service, etc, plus plumbing. Like any other freelance position it's not easy to break in and get enough work to live. And we're not in the days of people just opening the Yellow Pages and calling a random plumber. Now it's a labyrinth of competing search engine results, yelp reviews, HomeAdvisor references, etc.
Some people will take the time to find an independent plumber. Most people call RotoRooter or whatever company has advertised the most in their area. The plumbers, electricians, handymen I call are all independent, but they're also old, at the end of their careers, having a set of regulars they could take with them going independent, and having saved a bunch of money because they were getting paid fair wages in their prime. There are economies of scale in the skilled trades, they're just not the trades themselves.
Also, you're probably paying the company which manages the plumbers, of which the plumbers don't directly earn that.
If you're hiring a plumber directly, I'd assume it's a more experienced one running their own business. In addition to charging you $200/hr for the work, they're probably doing their accounting and business management, billing, ordering parts and equipment, replacing tools, and communicating with clients.
I could see that only resulting in 10-20 billable hours per week.
Also, if many of their jobs are paid in cash, it's possible there's a significant amount that is unreported to the agencies generating these statistics.
If there is no work, the plumbers don't get paid.
For someone to come work in your house for 30 minutes, they have to compensate for 2-3 hours of time doing everything else.
Also it sounds like you live in a high cost of living area if you are paying that much for plumbers.
Sure there are a few good jobs plumbing new commercial construction that makes good money, but there is far more need and demand for people to crawl down into some residential crawlspace nobody else has been in for decades to fix and retrofit old garbage and clearing toilets and replacing wax rings or installing faucets or garbage disposals. Those aren't really money making jobs, especially when you have no idea what you might run into once you are down there.
Seriously, this has been done since forever, and it's such a tired trope.
And why the hell shouldn't they want to be influencers? They're responding to the world they've been handed. Why is that different than "I want to be an NBA player", or rock and roll singer before that, or baseball player before that?
Gen Z will be just fine, even if Gen X doesn't understand how.
Generations share a "core" of experiences that happen during some of the most impactful years of their lives. First geopolitical event I remember was 9/11. For some it was the Great Recession or COVID. Those big events end up exerting a lot of influence on age groups.
I think Generations can be overused in the sense that it's used like a monolith when it's not. The clickbaity "Generation Z doesn't want to work" is actually the less clickbaity "Many in Generation Z find working a less attractive option because of these specific shared experience/values..."
My (parents’) CompuServe and (due to living in the Central Valley but most of the BBS’s I had info on being in the Bay) phone bills fron the 1980s tell a very different story.
My family didn't have internet until around 1998
Working with awkward heavy things tends to wear out your joints
I'm all in favor, but that exists elsewhere, and there's a labor shortage too.
As you say in your post, paying more might do it. I’m sure businesses would pay more if they needed the employees and could profitably employ them at a higher wage. Surely they’d rather make less money per employee than not make any money. So, they must not be able to pay more than they are.
We could lower the minimum wage; maybe there are employers who would employ those 10 million men if they could do it at a lower cost, but still the workers wouldn’t be willing to work any more than they are now.
That leaves raising the opportunity cost of not working, e.g. not paying people who won’t work as much to not work. That’s the answer that the people who have answers “that the economists don’t want to hear” don’t want to hear. UBI/negative income tax or cutting welfare programs would help those folks get jobs, but with the risk that some might not, and would end up on the streets.
Many are dependent on wives/parents to get by. So not paying welfare probably won't help much because those men aren't on it to begin with.
If you want people to work, you need to be willing to take on some of the opportunity risk and train them. If you want them to work in the trades, you probably need to train them and pay them well.
Even then the status issue wrt blue-collar work is hard to get around without a significant cultural shift.
[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2016/08/15/men-not-a...
Why don’t they do it? Because sitting in a nice cozy chair and having opinions backed by nothing is much higher social status.
It’s like this constant gas lighting from elite sources:
“Hey can’t buy a house? How about being knee deep in toilets all day and having zero respect in society.”
The government and our society has completely failed to "incentivize it" even as it was obviously necessary to do so.
Yet, "try telling that to Gen Z." Pfft.. "try telling that to Congress."
Over the past decade I've come to hate "journalists" more than I do lawyers, car salesmen, and politicians. They are one of the chief drivers behind many of the problems we face as societies today.
Is that really how you see it? I've never felt that way about the contractors coming to do work at my house. On the contrary, after I fork over a thousand bucks a day (minimum) for their expert work, I'm wondering if they're in fact a bit higher in the social hierarchy than I am. I feel a little self-conscious sometimes admitting that I move bits around on a screen for a living and have to hire someone to do the real work when it's time.
In fact, the vast majority of occupations today are ones society could do without as far as hard requirements are concerned. So long as there are the farmers and the trades, society will work just fine; everything additional is a luxury.
I realize that "plumbers crack" is a meme, but plumbers are some of the most highly respected people I've worked with. I completely don't understand the second clause there.
And, frankly, opinion columnists (rightfully) get less respect than ever.
Electricians, millwrights, CNC machinists... we couldn't find enough of them.
I get it. Nobody wants to stand in front of a machine (or 5-6 machines) for 10 hours a day. Nobody wants to be in a 90 degree factory all day. Nobody wants to work 2nd or 3rd shifts.
The pay isn't incredible. $25-30/hr. You get overtime. You get health insurance. You're a union member. As long as Boeing and Airbus are still flying planes, you'll have a job.
But we just flat out didn't get many applicants. And the people that we'd get, would only work for a couple days, or a couple weeks.
Some people think it's because there's drug testing. Some people say young people "don't want to work". All I know is if I needed a job, I'd apply.
However, our Seattle location has that problem. It was almost closed down because of competition.
edit: can't reply to the person who replied below, but if you have a contract to sell parts to a company you can't just increase your worker pay to whatever you want and have it be sustainable.
But that doesn't answer the question. If you can't get people to apply for a physically demanding job, despite other benefits like stability, unionization, etc, at $25-30/hr then it seems rational to try $35-40/hr unless the need really isn't there. We've been living with so much inflation relative to such little wage growth that if I was told things are more expensive because machinists want a wage they can use to buy a house with I would still chafe at the inflation but the justification would be a lot more palatable than "the board raised the prices and did a stock buyback with the profits".
Hiring movers to pack your stuff and move it across the country costs a few thousand dollars, and it's never been easier to rent an apartment via online showings. Your competition is a lot broader than your immediate geographic area.
When an able bodied, single, mentally competent and healthy young person says they don't have enough money to move across country it is actually code for "I have no initiative so I will sit and cry like a pathetic child." Meanwhile people are successfully walking across the Darien gap and the Sonoran desert with entire families to find success.
Might want to add 'male' to that. I'm a female with a damn high risk tolerance (I worked third shifts in major cities, lived alone in one of the most dangerous cities in the country, and had no problem walking alone in a Middle Eastern country where I didn't speak the language well) and I wouldn't hitchhike. And I definitely am not sleeping in a train yard. So that cuts out half of Gen Z right there.
People were asked "If you had a sudden $500 expense, how would you pay for it?" with options like ["cash", "checking account", "credit card", "pay-day loan", "borrow from family"] and unsurprisingly many people said "credit card". This then got repeated and reported as "Americans can't pay $500 without going into debt".
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/2014-report-econo...
If you look at the discussion this statistic has started, it's basically a pissing contest of more and more extreme means that either help or hinder one's ability to move. But both sides of the argument are total strawmen: a vast majority of Americans can cover a $500 expense. Most people can find a way to move if they really want to. Those who can't are likely people you wouldn't want to hire.
The funny part is fifty years ago people were moving to the area to work here.
Companies are afraid to spend money training when they don't think they will have reliable people (based on past experiences)
> don't think they will have reliable people (based on past experiences)
People who have been burned become insecure. Insecurity can lead to irrationality. This is something which effects relationships.
It seems to me that companies have unrealistic ideas about what they need to do in order to attract employees. Start training again. Cross-train, even, if the boredom issue is a real one. Make work floors more hospitable (provide heaters/fans, lower noise, etc.). There was a time when typists and "computers" worked regimented shifts in sweltering/freezing, warehouse-style offices, too; very few workers will put up with being triple-layered at their keyboards or drowning in their own sweat these days. Maybe that needs to change for trades; or, businesses need to pay more to reflect the trouble people are putting themselves through for their paycheck.
You need to take the training classes and then wait for an apprenticeship opening (get in line and you better know someone)
You have to fill out this form apparently.
https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=4c142ca25712bc94&from=se...
So, I shouldn't be around there?
> you can't just increase your worker pay to whatever you want
I respect that it's a challenge, but job seekers aren't responsible for solving Boeing's supply chain problems. Either the job is important enough to draw people into it, or it isn't.
Renegotiating a contract sounds more sustainable than not having workers.
The bottom line is always that the pay to quality of life at work is insufficient.
>Nobody wants to stand in front of a machine (or 5-6 machines) for 10 hours a day. Nobody wants to be in a 90 degree factory all day. Nobody wants to work 2nd or 3rd shifts.
>The pay isn't incredible. $25-30/hr. You get overtime.
For this much, there are lots of office jobs in front of a computer with zero risk of injury where you can sit. And overtime is not worth much if you do not get to enjoy life outside of work.
Fire whoever quoted the job such that the contract doesn't pay enough to hire workers to fulfill the contract. They are worse than useless.
I think this comment represents a fundamental disconnect in cultures. The days of people "wanting" overtime are kind of gone. If I saw "overtime pay" on a job description all I am seeing is "work long hours, never see your kids, no time for hobbies, etc".
Maybe that translates to me "not wanting to work", but that's the situation.
That option is still there today, to work only enough to sustain oneself at a lowered standard. But it seems that there is a part of the millennial/gen-Z culture that expects ass-busting outcomes without the busting of the ass.
Perhaps. But one only needs to look up to the original post to see that is not what we're talking about here. Busting of the ass for $25-30/hr plus overtime...not exactly getting wealthy here.
It's not "fly to Paris on a whim"-level wealthy, but it sounds like a life well lived to me. What is your definition of wealthy?
We can all agree that we have different definitions of wealthy. But I think we can also all agree that your description of that life, which is maybe "well-lived", is not one of wealth in the context of this discussion. It is certainly not an "ass-busting outcome".
What makes you say that this middle-class life where you own your home free and clear and have time and money for the occasional indulgences of life is a "basic" one? In other words, why is your bar calibrated so high?
Granted, for the equivalent of $100k you could maybe erect a 1100sq ft house at best, but that's because prices exploded due to the pandemic and Russian invasion.
And yea obviously wealth is relative. But to anyone accustomed to living in a reasonably developed country what you’re describing is not wealthy. We both know this. Not sure why you continue doubling down.
I want to know what that something is, in what way it should be different, and why you think that difference will lead to the difference in outcomes you anticipate.
My original response was about how “kids these days” expect “ass busting results without the ass busting”, and I was pointing out that that is definitely not the case with OP’s job offer of $25-30/hr plus overtime, which is the exact opposite…ass busting without the results.
But if you must, Let’s say somewhere in the top 50% of asset holders is a reasonable line for “wealth”. Do with that whatever you like.
Among households that hold at least one asset, to filter out those who don't own anything, the median sits at $228k. Again, that's a nice home in a modest area or a modest home in a nice area, even before the recent real estate craze. Or from another perspective, someone making $60k a year (full-time employment at $25-30 an hour with no raises ever, which is an unreasonable assumption) who works for 40 years and manages a slightly above-average (remember, ass-busting) savings rate[1] of 10% will have that by the end of their career. We can conservatively assume that by investing their savings in a broad-market index fund they can at least match inflation.
Which is to say, entering the top 50% of asset holders from below is by no means unreasonable even for someone who isn't making a cushy $400k a year working at a FAANG. It just won't be overnight and it will take some amount of busting ass.
Your perception of how wealthy the median person (or asset-holder) is may be skewed by what you observe in a presumably very wealthy location.
[0]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf20.pdf
Even the "$100k" house your example uses does not get you to the median (you don't get to casually add 20%+ to the house value just to get to the median). And you're, again, still living in a tiny house in the poorest areas with the worst amenities, the worst healthcare, the worst education, the worst economic prospects for your children, the worst obesity, the worst of the opioid epidemic, etc, effectively zero disposable income, zero college savings, zero travel, crappy old used cars, thrift shop clothing, pinching every penny just to pay down your mortgage quickly and get to the 40-45th percentile of wealth statistically. Worth it? Not for me.
It's a perfectly "fine" life, if that's what you want. It does not meet a reasonable definition of wealth in the US.
You can stop any time.
15 years ago it might not have been so bad. But now you would get a run down shack on a tiny plot of land and you are living in a poor as hell area deep in the sticks where the nearest store besides walmart or dollar tree is minimum 60 miles away and your only choice for internet is 4G wireless that is shoddy going through all the trees.
Your area seems to have a particularly disadvantaged income to home value ratio. Is there some other factor involved? From what I understand parts of Montana, for example, are like that, where there is no economic base to support higher wages but nonetheless the natural beauty of the area drives up home prices from out-of-town buying and whatnot.
I think the number of people who become "wealthy" due to salary income alone is probably small and shrinking. You used to be able to buy a house in 12 months instead of 18 months if you worked overtime. Todays economics make it so working overtime lets you buy a house in 13 years instead of 17 years.
Actually, if 50 years ago you used to be able to pay for a house in 18 months, today you should be able to pay for a house in ~30 months: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco.... You're thinking of a time that didn't exist, perhaps outside of when people were granted plots of land and built their own houses on it.
Blame the Fed and idiotic policies at every level for that, anyway; the economics of housing is totally skewed by artificial scarcity on one hand and asset inflation on the other.
I don't disagree that capital has more power now due to the effects of technology, but I also believe that culture has been shaping away from the idea that we are masters of our fate; both due to technology, which becomes increasingly harder for laypeople to understand as it gets more advanced, and regulation forced by that technological advance, where the universe of economic activity one can engage in without needing the state's permission is getting smaller and smaller. Not to mention all the effects that social media has on envy.
Perhaps I sound like I'm repeating the age-old mantra of the old complaining that the young are ruining the country ;-) you decide.
Inflation only accounts for 12x since 1950.
I think "median' might be adding some error to your analysis: I suspect skilled trades were probably earning more relative to median in 1950 than today's skilled trades earn relative to today's median. But wasn't able to find good historical numbers with a quick search.
Compared to the median tradesmen salary it has not kept up to inflation: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472061.htm
But to be quite honest, those are exact comparisons, but it was what I found in like 5 minutes.
Many of these policies were voted in at the local level by the populace. It isn't the government's fault if every city counsel member who supports upzoning loses their next election.
But we're still full of idiots who think sacrificing your twenties to never see the sun is going to make the rest of their life easy, instead of full of health concerns. And divorce.
These are not assembly line skills. If the work environment is so shit they leave in days I would take a guess that the problem is more than the low pay.
> The number of young people seeking technical jobs — like plumbing, building and electrical work — dropped by 49% in 2022 compared to 2020, according to data from online recruiting platform Handshake shared with NPR.
> Researchers from Handshake tracked how the number of applications for technical roles vs. the number of job postings has changed over the last two years.
> While postings for those roles — automotive technicians, equipment installers and respiratory therapists, to name a few — saw about 10 applications each in 2020, they got about five per posting in 2022.
I.e. the evidence is in terms of applications per job posting, but the claim is about the number people seeking jobs. These are not the same. If it's understood that it's a job-seekers market, the same number of job seekers in 2022 could reasonably each have applied to half as many positions each, and be pickier about which postings they pursue.
Look, as long as we have a market economy, here's how you tell it to Gen Z: raise the wages for carpenters and plumbers (and if necessary shift some of that forward into subsidies and incentives for people to train as carpenters and plumbers) until you get as many as you say you “need”.
If America isn’t willing to pay enough to get X carpenters and Y plumbers, it doesn’t “need” them.
Most “we need more blue collar labor” arguments trace back to elites who want to retain more profit by paying less per unit blue collar labor.
I've known Gen Z folks who thinks it's better to work at a sandwich shop or small restaurant than skilled trades. They were raised up (through the schooling environment) to look down on trades. Even if it pays them significantly more with better benefits.
Many places in the US school system they only prepare people for college. Schools do this in subtle ways like providing AP courses while cutting hands on shop classes.
When it comes to subsidies... there are some trades areas where you can be trained for free. The people are needed so the training has already be made really easy. Sometimes it's on the job training and you're paid well while you learn.
This is very much a cultural view of skilled trades.
People work preferences not being what you'd like may make the cost of motivating them to behave the way you want higher than you would like.
That’s part of how market’s work—you don’t get to choose other people’s utilitt function. If you “need” for them to act in a particular way, that means you need to offer them a sufficient incentive to do so given their actual utility function, not the utility function you wish they were operating under.
> I've known Gen Z folks who thinks it's better to work at a sandwich shop or small restaurant than skilled trades.
Yes, some people’s subjective preferences aren’t yours or those that would be most convenient for your preferred outcomes.
> This is very much a cultural view of skilled trades.
“Cultural view” is just another way of saying “subjective preference”, and, yes, that’s how utility functions work.
Blame whatever you want, Gen Z is mostly a little late for changes to parenting or schooling policies, even if one had a set in mind and the power to wish it into being, to shift this much, so, the bottom line still is, if you want to “tell Gen Z” about your perceived “need” for more tradespeople, you need to do it through sufficient incentives giving their actual values and preferences.
I make most of my money now doing odd side-jobs of my choosing, the combined trades knowledge is useful but its not true trades work. Building someones home hobby aquarium or researching and installing high efficiency grow lights pays far more than doing plumbing or electrical trade work does. But if i didn't do this work? I would still go back to a sandwich shop for a minor pay decrease rather than fucking around with tradework that will cut 20 years off my life with inconsistent and unpredictable hours and jobs and constant boom and bust cycles of construction and trade work.
Could it be that after starting their own company, they found it difficult to hire additional journeymen at the rate of $24 per hour which they themselves had previously earned as a journeyman?
When everyone can get $125 an hour, there is suddenly a shortage of cheap labor! Big surprise.
Also retrofitting into older unknown shit is WAY more of a pain in the ass than doing new construction too. So if I have enough work to do 40 hours on new construction, im not even going to entertain something like retrofitting a new panel into an older electrical system unless the pay is significantly higher.
Neither is the apprentice that probably is doing half the work.
Talked to the guy doing the painting, he was getting $80/hr.
(Related: IMHO my neighbor sucks at finding affordable prices for painters!)
This was found specifically to be the case for American men in a Boston Fed study last month: as the wage paid for trade-skill jobs shrinks over time relative to the wages paid to school-degree jobs, men increasingly refuse to work trade-skill jobs.
> The evidence from this study shows that the widening earnings gap between highly and less skilled workers over the last four decades is closely connected with the decreasing labor supply of prime-age men
> The decline in relative earnings is associated with a 0.49 percentage point increase in the exit rate, accounting for 44 percent of the total growth in the exit rate among non-college men over the 1980–2019 period.
https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/research-department-w...
Caveats. There are almost certainly further coincident reasons for the decrease in “blue collar” trade-skills workforce, both for men and for all genders; this particularly study should not be considered an exclusive factor, merely a relevant one. Please consider the constraints documented at that link before overextrapolating; for example, “non-Hispanic” which rules out biological causes, and so on.
It's also not clear that this platform is representative of the market. I've never heard of it before, but it bills itself as "The #1 way college students get hired" which seems questionable.
"But Mwandjalulu, who makes nearly $24 an hour as a carpenter, said he's still had trouble convincing his friends, whom he keeps in touch with on Facebook and Snapchat, to follow his path."
There you go. This is minimum living wage right now. We're fighting to make this amount the minimum wage now. Meanwhile this is the prospect of this job.
It doesn't pay. People rather go into tech work or anywhere near tech work.
I'm happy with my home office programming jobs, even though it is pointless and unfulfilling.
The US and European economies are increasingly becoming service economies and the middle class is eroded. People nowadays are too poor to pay for skilled domestic labor, only cheaply produced trinkets from overseas are still affordable. I think the only time, if ever, that production and building will become popular again is when China will finally cut us off und people realize that you can't eat software, metaphorically speaking.
Low barrier of entry? For trades? I've always been under the impression that software engineering is one of the lowest barriers-of-entry jobs there is, while skilled trades are pretty difficult to get into.
You can take web frontend dev bootcamp for a few weeks and probably land a job pretty quickly, if "any job at all" is the standard you're aiming for.
Similarly, you can get licensed as a bookkeeper (another "white collar" profession) by taking a course that'll take no more than a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the skilled trades frequently require apprenticeships of roundabout three years, during which time you'll make only a symbolic amount of money. If you want to get into one of those, you better do it while you're young and still living, for free, at "hotel mommy", because there's just no way you can afford it when you're a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities and financial burdens.
> Meanwhile, the skilled trades frequently require apprenticeships of roundabout three years
What you conveniently forgot to mention is that they also start much earlier. An apprenticeship in the trades usually starts after 10th grade (in Germany) when other students seeking a college education still have a minimum of 5 years of schooling in front of them that pays jack shit, even costing you money. With an apprenticeship you start your earnings much earlier, which makes it appealing to students from poor families where the parents are unwilling to finance them any longer (requires less parental support = lower barrier of entry). My cousin who did an apprenticeship (white-collar job though) now owns a house, while I can barely afford a car.
> If you want to get into one of those, you better do it while you're young [...], because there's just no way you can afford it when you're a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities and financial burdens
That is definitely true, but applies all the same to bookkeeping (which also requires an apprenticeship in my country) and college education.
You can do a web dev bootcamp, find clients who need websites, and just get started making websites and getting paid as a contractor (sole tradership). There is no legal hurdle, even the bootcamp is not legally required.
Similarly, you can go out and find businesses who need help with bookkeeping, and just start doing some bookkeeping and getting paid as a contractor. Where I live (in Germany), there is no legal hurdle, other than a few weeks of coursework with a test, as long as you don't do any year-end tax accounting.
If, however, you learn how to do horseshoeing (say someone teaches you on an informal basis), and you go out shoeing people's horses for money, you'll be in big trouble, legally. -- In the U.S. it's a 6-week trade school that you have to do, in Germany it's a 3-year apprenticeship. And the fact that these kinds of legal requirements differ so much country-by-country is a testament to how arbitrary they are.
...now, non-self-employed work is a whole other ball of wax, where there's clearly a problem of qualifications-inflation, and the required qualifications no longer bear any relationship to the skills that will actually be needed on the job.
> I've never personally seen a bootcamp graduate at my job.
Just as an employee at your company, or anywhere in the industry? If the former, then see above, what I wrote about qualifications-inflation. It also may be a reflection of the socioeconomic cluster you (respectively your company) is a part of.
Within my 13 years in software engineering, I've seen more than half a dozen companies from the inside, and I've come across many white collar executives without college degrees. Particularly, the company that I was with the longest and paid the best (a very recognizable brand on the web) had a CTO who hadn't gone to college and in fact had held no other jobs, prior to lucking into the employee #1 spot working for what turned out to be a hugely successful startup. Other example: I once worked with a retail insurance underwriting company where there didn't seem to be any college-trained Mathematicians as far as I could make out.
> > If you want to get into one of those, you better do it while you're young [...], because there's just no way you can afford it when you're a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities and financial burdens
> That is definitely true, but applies all the same to bookkeeping (which also requires an apprenticeship in my country) and college education.
The point I was making is that you either have to decide to do it when you're a kid, or the ship has sailed. The same is not true for being a software engineer.
I know lots of people who became software engineers after not having studied anything related to software engineering. E.g. I had a colleague working at a financial trading firm whose background was as an econometrician, who had never done any programming in college. While on the job, he gradually shifted from Excel, to picking up a bit of R on the job, to taking evening classes in C++ and immediately applying what he learned on the job, to being a C++ developer.
Have I ever heard of a farrier who didn't apprentice as a farrier when they were a kid? I haven't. I know someone who shifted from being a carpenter to being a roofer, but even this is something that they did when they were young, and there are special privileges implying they didn't have to do a full three years on the second apprenticeship. If the 3-year apprenticeship-requirement is legally fully in effect, barring you from entering the trade, it's a very difficult hurdle to clear.
Without an apprenticeship you couldn't study a trade at college. You couldn't get an apprenticeship unless you knew someone that worked at the company or were highly qualified; enough to get into university. That's what I ended up doing. Studying CS.
Even if you were lucky enough to get one, they could legally pay you far less than the National Min Wage which wasn't enough to live for most people and is still the case today [0].
[0] - https://www.acas.org.uk/national-minimum-wage-entitlement
The fun thing is that my dad got the job at the plant he worked for because of my grandfather and older brother. During a tech downturn, I applied for a few of these jobs. My dad refused to vouch for me, claiming that he didn't want to continue the cycle of nepotism. Sure didn't hate to earn huge bonuses from that cycle, though.
Doesn't change the fact that the pay rates haven't changed in 15 years for those who are getting into the career and will have to work for others to learn.
In 2009-10, he had no work. I don't think people realize how hard recessions hit trades. You don't become "unemployed." You have to go to work then stand around half the day not getting paid until enough people stop showing up that there's enough work. All of my friends working in trades from when I was younger switched careers in the Great Recession (the military was a decent option, since they'd fast-track skilled people to E-5).
This is the real reason why millennials are under-represented in the trades. The media prefers to just call us lazy.
Owning a “family” farm basically doesn’t make economic sense anymore and hasn’t for awhile. The cost of equipment, maintenance, fertilizer, seed, and chemicals have all gone up significantly and at the same time are now offered under more and more one-sided terms to the detriment of farmers without mass capital backing.
Operating a farm is a game of desperation to cash flow your payments for everything while still eeking out basic subsistence, and the payback periods run most of a lifetime to sometimes effectively infinite (a lot of modern farming systems are subscription based).
Most farms don’t even have farmhands. You have kids, kids who hate being stuck in the middle of nowhere as they’re exposed to idealized city life through media and the Internet. Kids who leave as soon as they’re able so they don’t get stuck in a dying small town, scraping by, with no relationship prospects, and no positive future in sight.
You are unhinged if you think farming is easy.
- Signed, one of the kids who fled to the city/tech.
What is amazing is that these guys just do this again and again. You want to know who has boats and planes? These guys!!! Richer than I'll ever be.
I suspect the volatility is much higher for possessing the skill to be able to “cash out” $30M+ regularly, compared to going to a nice undergrad school, getting a job at a prestigious big company, then going to a selective business school, and then landing a gig in private equity.
But if I had worked as hard as I did earlier in my career at a trade business (remember - much lower risk than a startup as the market is very well known and demand omnipresent), I would be much richer now.
The guys who create these companies you purchase have a local a network in the industry-- That is to say: The guys who create & run the companies are able to find labor.
This article is about a labor shortage...
Apparently a few tradesmen are able to recruit other tradesmen, and perhaps pay them well, in the right geographic locations where there are enough skilled tradesmen (or train-able interested apprentices) to hire.
But it sounds like the vast majority of Tradesmen company founders are unable to find labor.
Of course I have selection bias. But I would say if you took a y-combinator founder and said "start a trade business", in 10 years that founder would have >50% chance of cashing out for $30M or more. (Which means $5M EBITDA, on typically a 30% EBITDA margin business. So $15-20M revenue.) And they would be able to cash flow it. AND they would be taking the profits out as they go.
In the past, when you started a trade, you could apprentice with a small, locally-owned and operated company. If you worked at it long and hard, you'd have a good chance at being able to buy the company or a stake of it from the owners as they enter retirement. I've heard that in many areas, like veterinary clinics, this was a very common path forward for people entering the career.
But nowadays, all these small local companies are increasingly owned by private equity groups from afar that have their eyes on profit. You'll have no chance of working up to an ownership stake. And once the private equity group takes over, you can be sure that your work will be increasingly optimized to maximize profit, which could be good, but it can also mean cutting out the parts of your job that are less profitable but more enjoyable. The path forward is harder. To be a real business owner, your only real option will be starting a new firm from scratch.
So anyway, I don't mean to be overly critical, and it's great to see someone in private equity posting here. If you have any thoughts on my comments above I'd love to hear them. Cheers.
And fundamentally in a market where the talent is tight, you HAVE to treat your people well to keep the lights on.
I truly believe there is a giant untapped value creation potential for tradesfolk. What I see is the gap is basic "management" of the business. It is really hard for "doers" to become managers and leaders. And of course, these industries are not known for leveraging technology. (I mean, if your HVAC guy used a scheduling app he'd automatically be in the top 5%!)
Of course we are talking selection bias with the businesses I'm talking about (just like startups here on Y combinator!) But I would argue the overall risk is lower, and the expected value is higher if you applied the same rigor to the business.
There is no yCombinator or Harvard b school for trades. And that is what sets the ones that I see apart - they have leaders who naturally figured out how to lead, set up processes, do marketing, manage talent, etc. This is a huge gap for most high school path tradesmen as they've never "seen what good looks like," so most get stuck pretty early.
20ish years ago this was a working class satellite to a small industrial city, just a few shops and a petrol station. Most of the houses were fibro-cement and most of them empty except for a few weeks in summer when tourists came, but even then it wasn't really thriving, too flat for ocean views, the ocean was on the other side of a enormous dune. There had been a fishing industry here once but that was gone. Nearby Torquay launched the companies quicksilver and rip curl and a surfing culture. This town started to attract student doctors working in the city teaching hospital who wanted to be near the ocean, more than half of them are women, and many of them met young tradies who lived here for the surf. And then a momentous event, the town was used as the set for a tv show about people leaving the city for the coast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaChange
A really common story in this town is a couple where one partner works in the hospital as a health professional, which meant they had a steady income to borrow for a cheap block of land, and the other partner is a builder or a carpenter or an electrician, who sub divided the block and built a couple of units.
These couples who have combined the low risk well paid and regular income of a health professional in Australia's public health system, with the higher risk irregular income of small scale property development have mad astonishing amounts of money, all while surfing a couple of days a week.
All these weird trade jobs have these ridiculous requirements as if it's actually mentally challenging to learn them. If you want to shoe horses you need to do a fucking bachelor's degree equivalent in horse shoeing. If you want to remove ingrown toenails it's the same. I could learn that shit in a week and you're telling me I'd have to spend half a decade gaining a piece of paper just because they want to pretend it's hard? You're hammering nails into a fucking horse.
Which will typically get you arrested, unless you know how to do it right.
I don't know if you know anyone who knows anything about horses, but if you say 'founder' near some horses they drop over dead an instant later. Literally cheaper to set wheelbarrows of money on fire. You have to really love horses to deal with them, and even then some of them complain endlessly to their friends about it so much that their friends and/or their friends' kids (well hello there) stat to think they must be nuts.
I don't think there are laws against trying to shoe your own horse and doing it badly if that's what you mean.
I'm a horse owner who works as a software engineer for a living, and I'm so enraged by how much I have to pay the farrier and other horse-related tradespeople that it has very seriously crossed my mind, many times, to take the other side of the trade and give up software engineering to become a farrier.
It's the horse owners who are burning money, not the professionals.
I used to live in Munich, which is an insanely expensive city to live in (with only mildly higher income levels than the rest of Germany), and it has a shortage of farriers. Farriers commute hundreds of kilometers to work here, and still horse owners struggle to find them. If you set up shop there as a farrier, your books will be full in no time. Marketing & Sales? Screw that. Horse people all talk amongst each other and when there's a new farrier in town, word gets around like wildfire. Admin overhead? Nope! The way it used to work in my old stables, one of the horse owners would painstakingly coordinate timeslots with ten other horse owners in the same stable to keep a farrier busy for a day. All they have to do is show up, shoe 10 horses (they don't even have to do that if they have apprentices), and take home maybe €2000 in revenue for a day's work.
That revenue is all cash, of course. Report some of it for income tax (how much is basically up to you), and use the rest in the "informal economy" paying cash to other tradespeople to work on your house on weekends (who, in turn, do the same). If the ministry of finance knocks on your door, asking about this house that you suddenly own debt-free that seemed to have come out of nowhere, you've just been busy at work there by yourself, they can't prove otherwise.
But you probably won't get arrested for attempting this and getting it wrong.
If you have a well-behaved horse and you take a course, like they have in those trade schools in the U.S., where they give you a hoof from a cadaver and just let you practice driving a nail into it 100 times, and then you do it a dozen times while getting feedback from a pro, then it seems quite doable. But those courses don't even exist in Germany, as the trade is that keen on preventing these kinds of skills from becoming too widespread.
In the US, you're in "Gen Z" whether you're a 20-year-old first-generation immigrant, like the carpenter in the lede, or a 20-year-old 10th-generation American.
But immigration's changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Before the pandemic, the number of immigrants has increased, but the age, class, and education levels of those immigrants have also. Asia overtook Hispanic regions as a source of immigrants in 2009; more than half of 2018 immigrants from Asia had a bachelor's degree or better, compared to more than half of 2018 immigrants from Mexico not completing high school. The proportion of undocumented immigrants has also dropped, while non-criminal deportations have increased.[1]
This largely translated to a relative decline of younger, less-educated, poorer immigrants for whom the trades are the most accessible means of financial security, and a shift toward most total US immigrants (51%) having already lived in the US for more than 20 years. There's also a much larger proportion of recent immigrants age 25+ with at least a bachelor's degree (more than 45% from 2014-2019, vs. less than 35% for both US- and foreign-born immigrants prior to 2014). And when counting both immigrants and their children — whether immigrants or US-born — the population dropped by nearly 1 million between 2020 and 2021.[2]
Which leads to the pandemic: net immigration, across the board, cratered so hard in 2020 and 2021 that there were fewer total foreign-born immigrants in 2021 than there were immigrant visas — not work visas, not student visas, but just permanent resident visas — in 2016.[3]
The easy framing is to pin it on "Gen Z", but the missing context that the lede just hints at changes the story dramatically.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...
2: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
3: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/net-internati...
Instead people think they have to make top dollar just to survive and avoid lots of otherwise fulfilling jobs.
What would help is restricting foreign speculation and appropriately taxing corporate ownership of homes. A good example is what's going on in Canada [1] & Vancouver [2].
It's not like other countries haven't made meaningful attempts to address their population from buying homes. It's just that the US doesn't want to do it because the elite who own & constitute the political spectrum think it's bad for their bottom line and don't care if it's destabilizing the rest of society.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/01/business/canada-bans-home-pur...
[2] https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...
If you follow the bog standard construction methods, there are only a handful of dangerous or bad things you can do. Like pulling wire through sharp metal conduit holes and not using grommets. Or sticking your furnace up tight against bare wood boards or paneling. Or being completely clueless and ignoring the instructions printed on your insulation and creating a plastic trap for moisture to accumulate. Using brittle screws instead of nails for framing. And almost all of these things would be caught by an inspector immediately if you even tried.
The salary difference between say a software dev and a trade worker is pretty small (perhaps 30% less after taxes).
The body breaking down aspect is still an issue. Younger people in these fields seem a lot more aware though - they're practically health freaks compared to your stereotypical 50-ish somewhat round trade worker with back pain issues.
I guess we'll have to wait and see how that generation fares with 4.5 decades of phyical work. Japan is probabably the place look at for research.
That's a lot of money...
I was pointing out that there is a significant difference in quality of life, and lifestyle, between a person on 70k and 100k.
Which the poster in was responding to seemed to think was not the case.
Regular people work hard for their money and therefore they don't part with it easily... You don't want a job where you'll end up working for regular people. Money printer recipients had it easy so they toss suitcases of full of cash at you. That's the kind of customers you want.
My impression is that there's no reluctance to go into these lines of work for young local people here. I imagine it would be the same in the US.
In the cities where there are more office work opportunities for young people, even without any qualifications to speak of: it seems like there are a lot of people from eastern Europe working in these fields.
Even in this thread there are people contemplating switching to trades and asking how to even start.
The often attempted solution in Europe is commonly funded training in these fields. Germany does it the best, I think with a very formalized education/trainee system. Not sure how/if they deal with older people who need a new job.
This reality becomes painfully obvious if you try to hire the trades to do anything at all. All you get are fly by night operators, no shows, and the insanely expensive brand names.
Probably a big caveat exists for businesses that get into contract bidding, as that’s different.
There’s 1x old plumber in my town who does honest and on time work and he’s a spry 70 year old. And charges a hefty but honest hourly rate given the service. There’s no plumbers behind him.
Whenever Ive thought I might not make it in tech, a trade and running a business on it was the backup plan.
*edit the nuances I’ve seen that are worth mentioning is if you’re not in that owner/operator role, the work can get bad. Know enough friends who:
- slipped in a construction site moonlighting a demolition job and now limping and can’t afford a doctor.
- Electricians who got their in around a strict union hierarchy but also zapped themselves pretty bad early on.
.. and folks, the mystery of dropping application rates has been solved.
The consensus is that GenZ's work ethic can be summed as "do the bare minimum not to get fired" and that they "work to live, not live to work."
Not that either ethos is a bad thing necessarily, it's just that they generally don't care about work as much as previous generations did.
My father's generation, employees stayed at their company until they retired. Mine, we switch jobs every 2-5 years. Early in my career, older individuals would question "why I switched jobs so frequently." Now, no one bats an eye at a 2-year stint.
House prices, rent prices, politicians pandering to the elder generations, allowing young people to get addicted to social media and all the psychological issues that causes, wilful destruction of the education system, removing third spaces etc.
In the UK this was through the older generations consistently voting for right wing governments.
Is it any wonder it looks like they gave up? Can’t afford a decent house, can’t afford to save for a decent pension etc
At least in the US, policies have become much more friendly towards younger folks than they have ever been.
Federal student loan forgiveness, LGBT+ anti discrimination policies, individual medical insurance exchanges, are a few off the top of my head.
The cost of living and cost of education has far outpaced income growth, which does affect younger people disproportionately more, but the impact is not localized to only the young.
It’s the cost of greed, not the cost of living. Too many ills in this world are the result of older generations’ greed.
And I could also say your opinion of gen z is also equally influenced by social media.
Cost of Living is a standard used in the US, and it's not uncommon for annual raises to, at the very least, include a "cost of living" adjustment.
Also, you really think people have to be from the US to understand such simple concepts?
I've family members who are tradesmen, this issue has been coming down the pipe forever.
What's killed em is apprentice wages haven't kept up with inflation for fucking years, and as for the treatment of apprentices and helpers? Garbage.
Basically decades of absolute pisstaking and abuse of newcomers ("hey, everyone goes through it, its fine!") has predictably resulted in a shortage of newcomers.
Are they willing to up the apprentice (and journeyman...) wages? Fuck off, of course not.
Almost every tradie ends up telling their kids to go to college and whatever the fuck they do, stay out of the trades.
I know it sounds extreme, but consider that in the next couple of decades there may very well be factions fighting for finite water and air conditioning and there won't be enough to go around to offer a comfortable life for as many as it does now.
If there's more demand than supply, increase the price and the supply pool will increase as well.
There needs to be ramps built directly at the high school and community colleges level. It amazes me that community colleges have all these classes on excel, art, dance, music, health, languages, but generally nothing for the trades. I honestly think it would be easier to find a trustworthy, affordable class for Mongolian Throat Singing than a plumbing class.
already happening and has not much to do with labor shortage.
There's nobody in trades anymore, their wage increases far outpace inflation
I can see that some trade jobs in Europe are paid even more than software engineering, however I don't want to end up with a broken back.
Thanks!
Hence why Home Depot’s program to train and educate.
2) A path for immigrants to legally work in those fields would likely push down wages, but it would also reduce the cost of those services! Housing could become cheaper, so could the ongoing cost of owning a home. That could potentially reach a nice equilibrium.
>Carpenters and Plumbers (electricians, mechanics, etc) are _not_ unskilled
Is a load of shit. At least in the USA, you can have one person (typically business owner) get licensed in the trade and then lease out that license for his unskilled immigrant labor force. He can run his own business and his "apprentices" are taught enough to do the work. This is the vast majority of construction. You got union projects which are a whole different ball game but union jobs do not represent the vast majority of construction in the USA.
>A path for immigrants to legally work in those fields would likely push down wages, but it would also reduce the cost of those services!
It doesn't reduce the cost of shit because real estate is a racket. It's not a free market economy driven by community college level econ courses. In any metropolitan downtown area that you visit most of the buildings are owned by a handful of firms. Real estate properties are increasingly managed by (you guessed it) management firms that are part of publicly traded corporations (REITs). These guys extend way beyond any downtown area and are the majority of rented out properties in cities and adjacent suburbs.
Construction is a ghetto that is flooded by illegal immigrant workers. Business owners are complicit in the practice of hiring said workers to squeeze out margins. As long as liability can be passed down to someone holding some kind of license, that's all that matters.
If you actually want to enter a successful trade in construction become an elevator engineer. You are 100% union and obscure and niche enough with significant safety risks that nobody is able to undercut you because there's a LOT of regulation in place to make sure people don't get stuck and die in elevators.
They are not lazy, but forward thinking. Who wants to become a plumber when that job may be automated in 10 years
For example, I've been putting off hiring a plumber to replace the old drum trap behind my bathtub with a p-trap. I can't even fathom how a robot would go about doing such a thing when a plumber needs to sit there and think about how to do this: open access, judge where the pipes are going (without even seeing some of them), the amount of space, whether they'll need more space and cut in from the ceiling below, etc.
Things are already steadily marching this way this way. Drop $5k on tools and the dumbest rock in the pile can assemble propress or pex fittings leak free every damn time. The capital investment that the business owner makes pays for itself in short order by taking cheaper labor as an input and getting results you didn't used to be able to get with that input. In the electrical world they are always coming out with new fancy connectors and fixtures that you literally can't screw up no matter how dumb you are. Internet comment sections of non-electricians love these, electricians don't like them as much because they often trade off flexibility requiring more parts kept in stock though sometimes they make up for it in speed of install.
On top of the huge supply shortage, consider that the majority of the U.S. housing stock was built during the Baby Boom suburbanization from 1950-1970, and that the average lifespan of a house's internal systems (plumbing, electrical) is about 65 years. There's a massive maintenance bill coming due right around 2025. Right as the housing stock is largely owned by boomers on fixed incomes who won't have time, money, or health to fix it. Millennials will start inheriting houses en masse around 2035, which solves the housing crisis, but they're going to be houses in various states of disrepair.
There's probably also a lot of room for innovation in home construction and repair - possibly an area where robotics could make a big difference. Unfortunately this is a known "hard problem", where past attempts at mechanization haven't really helped much.
Price goes up dramatically in the face of supply shortages, because when there's a shortage you pick your customers instead of them picking you, and some customers have a lot more money than others. Same reason software engineers make $300K/year after a few years experience (when I started my career 15 years ago $100K was considered a very good mid-career salary, and still is in some locales), and good childcare in the Bay Area now runs about $3000/month, and homes are $3M.
The government is increasingly ignoring the problem, the higher-education-industrial-complex is grabbing workers that would otherwise go into the trades, mass-importation of unskilled labor is slowing down as it becomes more of a political minefield (In the EU and the US).
The confluence of all those factors will squeeze a limited labor pool, and prices will continue to increase. I think it's not unlikely that in 5-10 years we enter a crisis where critical infrastructure starts failing and the government has to start up a "Learn to Weld" program instead of "Learn to Code" program because things have gone so far out of balance.
ConstructionPhysics has a pretty good series about why the construction industry never really realized economies of scale the way most other industries do. Even when you have large homebuilders like D.R. Horton, their primary competitive advantage is usually reduced cost of capital, which goes away if capital becomes expensive for everyone.
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-there-so-...
With a nest egg you keep in your back pocket that can get you out of a shop hierarchy and into ownership quickly, accounting for Lego houses and whatever other innovations, programming some of your own stuff as needed, there’s a path for honest workers who are really good and on time to make good money. Pick a wealthy area as your operating zone. Leverage the SWE social class and your trade skills.
My relatives who own mom and pop contracting and plumbing companies have carved out solid lives for themselves and their kids. The downside is they’re working into their 60s, but with a good nest egg from tech that might be different.
My relatives who rode the MBA and finance paths ended up all over the map - didn’t survive the Great Recession, did fine, are in tech but it’s lost the shine, ended up as a total goober as retired executive without a company to exec…
I got into software engineering when it was a high-5-figure to low-6-figure job. At the time, conventional wisdom was that the money was in finance, law, or medicine. Medicine has held up well, but wages in finance and law have fallen well below what software engineers make. Hell, lawyers frequently make less than plumbers do now, hence this joke:
Edit: seemed worth noting that my starting pay for any employee is around ~$25 an hour. Granted I live in a large metropolitan area but when I started doing this work 20 years ago $11 to $12 an hour was pretty standard entry level pay. That number is just to hire anyone that will show up consistently because the market has gotten so crazy in the last couple of years. I would pay considerably more for someone with the necessary skills to let me take a more hands off approach.
You're not stationary, you're on the move and your day has variety. You spend a lot of time in the physical world and meet lots of people. Your work might at times be smelly but is rewarding in a very direct way. You helped solve a tangible problem and your customers are grateful for it. The range of problems to solve is large, and if you widen your skills, you can grow into a generic handyman that can fix almost anything. Pay should be decent enough and by mid career you might even take a plunge at freelancing.
Where I live, the expensive cars are driven by the skilled trades, not by office clerks. But money isn't my main point, it's physical and mental health, clear purpose, impactful and rewarding work.
Bonus: AI isn't coming for you anytime soon.
Extra bonus: no office politics.
Frankly, it's exactly what Gen Z needs. They're all so cynical and divorced from the physical world and real people. Should they go into an office job, nearly 100% of their life would be digital, perpetuating and accelerating their issues.
Digital sucks. It has no soul. Chose wisely.
That said, my friends in the trades are regretting their choices as they age and their physical ailments add up. I think it's a solid option for the first 15-25 years as long as you have an exit plan as your body ages.
(Note: I want to speak that this is perceived status and this has side effects. That I don't prove my status through a car or that there is a perceived need of those in the skilled trades to do so does not make a value judgement.)
The vast majority of my friends are in the trades (I'm the outlier with an office job) and over the course of 20 years, many things have improved. Better tools, machines to do the very hard parts, etc. Some trades aren't super physically taxing, whilst other are, like plasterers.
So the comparison is complicated, and you'll also have to take into account the physical and mental wear of an office job.
It's a completely legitimate given those two roles carry far more social capital than being a plumber or electrician.
I make dramatically more than my parents did when they were buying their first house around my age, but as a fraction of my income and savings, housing costs vastly more.
(It’s also not clear that the skilled trades jobs Gen Z apparently doesn’t want actually pay more than the alternatives. See other comments on this post.)
1990(Q1) average home price $124,000
2020(Q1) average home price $329,000
1990 average interest rate 9%
2020 average interest rate 3%
1990 average monthly mortgage payment $998
2020 average monthly mortgage payment $1387
1990 Average Wage Index (AWI): $21,027.98
2020 Average Wage Index (AWI): $55,628.60
1990 average monthly mortgage as a percentage of AWI 4.7%
2020 average monthly mortgage as a percentage of AWI 2.5%
I'm stopping pre-covid as it doesn't seem like the real estate market has not had time to figure out the rapidly increasing interest/AWI rates.
All of the numbers are based on US numbers.