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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

You can witness this happening in the trades right now. A whole generation of people were told to goto college and to avoid the trades, and now here we are in possibly the most significant manpower drought the trades have ever experienced. And this has a ripple effect as the older generations retire out, and take their hard won experiences with them with nobody to pass their knowledge onto. Can't tell a carpenter to go type that shit into Confluence, let alone tell the kid to look in the knowledge base first.

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And yet the trades still have uneven access (or none at all) to health coverage, retirement planning options, etc.

As an American parent of young children, I keep being told that college is a scam and I should steer my kids toward the trades. 90+% of the time, I am being told this by a white-collar worker who went to college themselves, and is just bloviating.

When we reach a real crisis point, severe enough to actually consider granting skilled tradespeople access to a fraction of the privilege enjoyed by white-collar workers, then I might consider nudging my kids toward electrician or plumbing work. But under the current social caste system, of course I am going to do everything possible to give my kids access to college and steer them that way.

I believe that virtually everyone, white-collar and blue-collar alike, quietly feels likewise. We make a pretense of giving contrary advice, but mostly just in hopes that other people will move in that direction for us. To take the bullet and help with this imbalance, and also to relieve the intense competition our own kids face.

> I am being told this by a white-collar worker who went to college themselves, and is just bloviating.

Exactly. When I talk to plumbers, electricians, etc. many of them express the desire to leave because the hours and environments are hellish. Meanwhile some full of themselves tech bro is babbling on about how everyone (not them of course) should go into the trades. Or they pull some vague anecdote out of their ass about how someone they know makes a gazllion dollars in the trades after 20 years and starting their own business, which is about as valid as telling someone to go into software development because they can become a billionaire, and throwing out some anecdote about a startup founder they know who got aquired.

My read is that the people who do well in trades are smart, hard-working and ambitious. That combination of traits tends to do well no matter where they are applied.

While there is plenty of money to be made in the trades, one thing that gets ignored is, as you said, the working conditions. Further, those working conditions compound over the years and absolutely wreck bodies.

Sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day will wreck your body too, don’t worry about that.

The happiest I’ve been in my life is spending about 2-3 hours a day at a desk. It’s a shit life but we don’t see it like that coz we love sitting on our ass.

> Sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day will wreck your body too, don’t worry about that.

But not anything like 8+ hours a day of manual, repetitive, physical labor!

Come on, there's no comparison to desk work.

Sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day will wreck your body too, don’t worry about that.

Except that can be trivially counteracted by get up to stretch every hour, taking a 20 minute walk at lunch and hitting the gym a couple of times a week.

>wreck bodies.

I think how hard the trades can be on your body is under appreciated

It is an interesting game we are playing as a civilisation since without people skilled at making our material environment the quality of life we enjoy will most likely drop.

We seem to have structured things in a way where what is individually optimal and desired is very opposed to what we need at larger scales. It does seem like the system is maintained only by inertia at this stage.

My brother in law is an electrician.

He does not have paid vacation, good sick leave policies, or good health insurance through his employer. He has witnessed a bunch of on-the-job injuries and one near-fatality, largely caused by his employer pushing hard for the team to complete jobs as fast as possible. He is paid alright, but less than the norm for the people I know with college degrees even after we exclude everybody in software. His job is also physically demanding and may cause problems later in life.

Not exactly a "hey, pick this job and you'll have a great career" story.

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