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This misses out on the culture problem.

A lot of high schools teach kids they must go to college. Kids feel like failures to consider the route of skilled trades. Many schools have removed the hands on classes that prep people to be comfortable working with tools and their hands. So, kids have less prep to go out there. There is a culture element to this.

> You first have to do 6-12 months in a state-approved trade school (costs $15-20K on average in CA).

This isn't everywhere. Many other states have a much simpler setup to get into trades. Sometimes there is a trade school (and sometimes the industry covers the cost). Sometimes you start a job and learn on the job. You take certification tests along the way. What you describe for CA isn't everywhere.

Everyone keeps saying this but it doesn't really make sense. People chase money, not social expectations. Heck open up OnlyFans for the perfect example of this. More and more schoolteachers (a historically respectable career) are becoming sex workers (a historically disreputable career) simply because it makes more economic sense.

Let's say we do somehow make trades popular and everyone goes to trade school instead of college. What then? Is there magically going to be more state funding for apprenticeship programs? Will there be better union representation? Will states make better laws around workplace injuries? Will wages somehow get higher? (Quite the opposite in fact if more people are entering the profession).

You have to fix all this first, and that in turn will lead to better public perception of the profession. It can't be the other way around.

Most college educated people do not make the salaries that software people do. So, we shouldn't expect that. Making better than the mean or median within the US should be noted.

High schoolers don't make decisions on economic realities for themselves. Many will make decisions on economic ideas that often don't match reality. Ideas they are taught through the school systems and that their parents by into as well.

I know many people in the trades. Many places in the US are not like CA. Some places it's much cheaper and easier.

A lot of people who go through college and get a lot of debt hate their job and only make a median level salary. They did it because they thought that's how you make it. Many would be much happier and make better money in the trades.

People chase net gains. Social standing and achievement, as well as personal satisfaction of say seeing a child learn a new skill, are gains even if not counted in dollars.

These are somewhat individual-dependent. Onlyfans has a pretty big personal cost to subtract if you're a family oriented individual from a highly religious community that dislikes nudity, and you value continued social standing in that community. If you're an orphan who for whatever reason has little personal connection to mainstream society, it probably will come at a lower personal cost to you to be seen as a sex worker. So with sex workers, you're probably gonna disproportionately see people with weaker affiliation to mainstream society and/or connection to conventional family members and values.

Greater social acceptance of sex workers is the worst possible thing that can happen to the open-minded schoolteacher and others already in the game as it gives the out-group a less-worse comparative cost. Greater acceptance means lower personal cost / barriers to be seen as a sex worker, so wages depress. Eventually if it's seen as no different than working at McDonald's your stuck competing with literally anyone either attractive or charismatic and it becomes more profitable to at least pick something with a higher barrier to entry like teaching.

> What you describe for CA isn't everywhere.

It is for electricians. I come from a family of electricians working in many states, including the so-called "red" states. This is the process. It was designed to impede entry into the skilled trades. That may have been a good strategy in another era, but it's not a good strategy now.

Perhaps those barriers are higher than they should be but for something this critical it's a good thing there's process, training, and regulation. Safety and reliability are more important than speed.

Software engineering could probably use a few barriers. There's some exceedingly shitty software out there getting pumped out by people who hop in to make quick money and get hired by companies who don't care and just want to pay people less.

The world needs to catch up to how critical software is and course correct away from it becoming a race to the bottom.

The barriers have nothing to do with safety - they are a moat designed to keep competition out and wages high.

The moat worked a generation or two ago - you could make a good middle class living as a tradesperson. It doesn't work anymore, now we just have a shortage of tradespeople and nobody wants to jump through the hoops when there are easier ways to make higher wages.

As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The NEC is fairly complex, and there are lots of gotchas and techniques that you really only learn by doing it for some time alongside someone experienced that can guide you. If it was your house, would you want the equivalent of a bootcamp electrician mucking around with minimal oversight? Sure, there are inspectors, but they can't be expected to catch 100% of the issues, and most people wouldn't want the job to take 3 times as long as the junior electrician is forced to redo huge amounts of work.

That said, there should be stricter requirements for offering apprenticeships. If the law requires it to work, anyone that has achieved that status should be mandated to take on X apprentices over their career.

> and get paid a whopping $12/hour.

It’s even worse than this in the UK. For the first year of your apprenticeship you get paid £4.81 per hour which works out at $5.78 an hour. Unless you’re living with parents who won’t charge you rent, the apprenticeship route is off limits unless you find a company that pay a proper wage. They do exist but competition for the places is extremely fierce.

The wage does go up in your second year to your age band’s minimum wage, so if you’re 23 you’ll get a whopping (/s) £9.50 an hour, but if you’re 18-20 you’re on £6.83 and if you’re still under 18 you’re stuck on the £4.81. Absolutely disgraceful.

> No shit smart people are studying coding instead

It's hard to come anywhere close to software money as a licensed EE designing the electrical things, let alone as the one building them.

> Do this for a decade or two and gain experience and you'll be making like $80K/yr

Hey, that's good evidence that the supply isn't actually very constrained. (But yeah, apprenticeship terms are bullshit.)

And by the time you reach that point, you have a broken back and a shitty attitude.

> No shit smart people are studying coding instead.

Unless you are playing the long game. With the advance of AI… 20 years from now he’ll have a stable job in a severe Electrician shortage, while the Silicon Valley teams will have replaced themselves and be out jobs.

I think that is closer than SV wants to admit. Outsourcing is getting higher quality, economic downturns are already hitting SV with layoffs, low-code is getting better… and ChatGPT, doing programming in 20 years? Seems pretty dang certain to me.

Software engineers in this country are perpetually on the brink of extinction. 20 years ago people would discourage you from the career because all the jobs were going to India. 10 years ago there were supposedly too many CS graduates and there could never be enough demand to sustain them. Today everyone is convinced that the AI takeover is just around the corner. I'm not panicking just yet.

> Today everyone is convinced that the AI takeover is just around the corner

Yup, just like FSD AI replaced truck and taxi drivers five years ago. Everyone now has a truck driver shortage.

Remember, all it takes is a blockade, not even an invasion, of Taiwan and new computing projects are on indefinite hold. And we will start de-computerizing industries out of necessity. It could be that quick.

That's a fascinating perspective. Okay, so Taiwan is blockaded and we can't get any more computer chips for the near future. Then somehow we decomputerize industry? Why wouldn't we just start using older computers, of which there is a glut of them? (Just check ebay.) Also many industries, after seeing efficiency gains, are unable to decomputerize. What happens to them?

eBay creates the appearance of a glut. But if you actually count, it wouldn’t sustain more than a few days of sales, or even more than a few days of hardware failures. Especially when they get scalped.

Intel still makes most of its stuff in the US. TSMC is building two new fabs in Arizona, which AMD, Nvidia, and Apple all plan to contract with. They're also building one in Japan.

If China is going to squeeze the global semiconductor industry, they'd better do it soon.

Yes, I know. But if you look inside a computer, you’ll quickly realize there’s a lot more than an Intel CPU and Chipset making the computer work. Everything from networking NICs to audio. Not much of a computer when you don’t have the Taiwanese chips for Ethernet. Or when you find out your BIOS was stored in a ROM chip that’s unobtainable.

I doubt the new fabs will produce things only from the companies I listed. You're right that a blockade would cause shortages, but I'm skeptical that it would be as bad as you're suggesting. The only industry that I'm aware of that was "de-computerized" during the recent shortage was the auto industry, and even that was just manufacturers temporarily leaving certain features out of new vehicles.

No, the moment that happens, the computing projects are going into defense contracts. Like image recognition homing missiles, electronic warfare, intel gathering, logistics. We've all seen how the Russians were doing without it. Talking on the mobile phone got them killed.

All of the history of programming has been magnifying the value of programmers by automating more of programming.

Automation doesn't replace automators (it makes their work more abstract and productibe, but that just increases the application space and quantity of output consumed.)

Hypocritical that you got downvoted when the same people downvoting are probably downright gleeful at automating everything else. :)