Young workers face a new challenge: Older workers aren't retiring | Hacker News Reader

Young workers face a new challenge: Older workers aren't retiring

washingtonpost.com

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In the machine shop world, the greybeards are retiring and young workers aren't interested in being machinists. It's turning into a crisis.

It's a national trend, and I see it specifically in the Seattle area as one can no longer get engines remachined. The shops I used in the past are all gone. Boeing is also having a lot of trouble replacing their greybeard machinists.

Sounds like a problem that paying fair wages could solve

Yea, I do metal working as a hobby and would love to try being a professional machinist, but I'm not willing to do it for 25% of my current comp pushing bits around transistors.

Pay a decent wage and people will do almost anything. Problem is that while the new narrative is praising blue collar work and encouaraging work in the trades, you are supposedly (love for others to chime in with experience) paid peanuts, maybe even below minimum wage, for a 2-3 years apprenticeship before you can start doing real work.

So, you basically go to college with none of the college experience. You're not in debt but you also don't really have loans to live on either. It's just not feasible unless you already have a living situation, and those that can pay for that will simply send the kid to college anyway. It's a mess all around.

Even with all that, in my area it seems like you also need to already know people to get into one of the trade unions. At least of people I know of trying to get in are having issues.

The blue collar workers I actually know do not make very good money. I was literally talking with my parents last night about my cousin's baby-daddy. He's worked in HVAC, painting, and now in warehouse door repair/maintenance (a speciality that I didn't know existed but makes sense given modern logistics). The last job is seen as a real career (with health insurance even), but he's unable to move out of his parents' house for some reason. He's had some problems, but as far as I know has worked full time for most of the last decade.

My brother is one of the most skilled carpenters that I know and did some really good home reno type work, but finally put his ME degree to use and got an engineering job that's construction adjacent. He was also amazed to get health insurance and paid time off.

Two examples among many that I know. I often see people on forums like this talking about how trades are a sure way to a middle class life, and I don't know what reality they're inhabiting.

Skilled machinists are not like house painters. They get paid well.

Maybe sometimes but generally not. Machine shops are a race to the bottom on competing for jobs/contracts. There are always exceptions though with everything

It will truly be a crisis with the greybeards retiring and the knowledge they take with them.

> Machine shops are a race to the bottom

It's not a race to the bottom. It's movement towards where the Supply and Demand curves intersect.

If it was a race to the bottom, skilled machinists would be paid minimum wage.

Your average university student will be earning a similar income (if they're lucky) while studying, and then be saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by the time they start doing real work.

The average debt at graduation for bachelor's degree student in the US is around $30k. Perhaps you are thinking of law school or medical school?

I would say it's not that "young workers aren't interested in being machinists" it's more of "Society has not incentivized young workers enough to want to become machinists."

It's probably a combination of things (high schools telling every student they need to go to college, wages too low to attract new talent, other things?), but there is a low chance in my mind that 16-25 year olds are not interested in working with their hands.

The DIY / Hobbyist community has never been larger or more available. High school robotics is bigger than ever, 3D-printing and related things are very popular....

The whole period of time forcing the idea that everyone must go to college has come home to roost. At the same time trade schools were panned while also filled with scam schools. Some people just do not need/want the full rounded education nor the expense of it all.

The worthless college degrees are the "gee, math is hard" ones.

At Caltech, you could get a soft degree, but you still had to pass 3 years of math, 2 years of physics, and 1 year of chemistry. There weren't any "weeder" versions of them, either.

P.S. I could work the quantum mechanics problems, but was uncomfortable because I didn't understand QM. Years later I learned that nobody understands QM, they just know the math works :-)

At the same time high schools have cut a lot of this stuff out of their curriculum. I mean, no more woodshop, no more metal work. And it's not like these kids can go home and work on their car. Cars these days are too complex for that.

The crisis is an inability to find workers unwilling to accept low wages as structural demographic decline continues. Great for workers, terrible for poorly constructed socioeconomic systems.

Are they paying them more than software engineers? If not, that is the problem. Increase the pay and they will come.

Bay Area software engineers are a pretty tiny portion of the population, despite this community's outsized view of itself.

Society has spent the last few decades pissing on highly skilled, well paying and essential blue collar jobs.

We have been actively discouraging kids who would excel in the field from pursuing it, in favour of getting them to into comparatively useless university degrees that they have no interest in or aptitude for.

My guess would be that most people working in their 70s (or 80s!) would very much like to retire, but can't.

I'm 65 and wish I could have retired 10 years ago. After 40 years in industry I'd really rather be doing something else.

This seems like a direct consequence of eliminating pensions.

I genuinely feel for the people who had to navigate the transition from defined-benefit to defined-contribution. When it happens halfway through your career, you are likely unprepared and haven't saved enough. But for those workers where defined-contribution has been the way their entire lives, they went into it with all eyes open and should have saved sufficiently. Everyone who entered the workforce after, say, 1995 or so, knows that their retirement will be entirely self-funded through savings and investment. It's not a mystery. You don't get to wake up at 75 one day and act surprised that you can't retire yet.

People today are being told they need to save around $4m to retire (70% of income for 18 years). That's about $2k a month for 37 years (ideally with sub 3% inflation and 5-6% returns on your investments throughout). That's a lot of money, even at an above median income. It also doesn't account for having to pay for inflated housing and college loans.

As for people looking to retire today, given the market issues which reset more than a few 401k portfolios and the unexpected lack of job wage growth (compared with inflation and/or housing), it's not too surprising. Live longer than expected, or get a bad medical bill, and it's really unsurprising.

Peple in their 30's today, may never get the chance to retire. Not if things keep operating the way they do.

I mean, almost everyone will retire from work unless they die at their desk.

We should stop thinking about retirement as if it is necessarily a binary switch where you "voluntarily deciding to stop working when old." We can be forced into retirement due to layoffs and a tough hiring market. We can be forced into retirement due to sickness or needing to care for a family member. Our bodies wear out, we get less cognitively sharp. It's not about whether or not we get the chance to retire--we will all eventually have to. So these people in their 30s today need to be planning for how they will deal with it, not worrying about whether they will deal with it.

> No one wants to force older workers out of jobs.

<ahem> IBM </ahem>

They mention startups as a way for younger folks to do OK, and they're right, but not everyone is cut out for eating ramen for two years.

Personally, I would have been happy to join a startup. I had my retirement set, and didn't need to make a bunch of money. I am also quite willing to work long hours (I do that now, but for free). I also have multiple decades worth of experience, shipping software and hardware, running teams, and managing budgets.

But I guess there's no market in startups for us olds. The couple of startup "interviews" that I had, were really just insult sessions, where the interviewer was working through their daddy issues.

> but not everyone is cut out for eating ramen for two years

We all know failure rate in startups is somewhere around 95%, so young folks are mostly being already smart to not listen that much to those few loud ones with survivor's bias. And even those who don't fail, owners often screw early employees out of any meaningful compensation as company grows.

Its fine to eat for 2 years ramens, but then if its still probable you will have nothing to show afterwards apart from worse health and wasted life for somebody else's success, that's fail right there. Even corporations are better proposition in such case - 2 years of solid effort under good manager can land you a nice senior job with adequate compensation (or just ask for it elsewhere, thats how to elevate one's salary a few times).

As for general topic - if folks want to retire, most of them will, either by assessing well their declining physical and mental health, or simply having other passions. Life can bring so much more beauty to those few remaining years compared to anything coming out of sitting in front of screen, but not everybody had the luxury of discovering this.

In general, the only decently paying job titles in the startup world are "Founder" and "Co-founder". Everyone else is probably better off working for a medium-sized boring tech company, outside of the unicorn startup outliers we've all heard of.

> Life can bring so much more beauty to those few remaining years compared to anything coming out of sitting in front of screen, but not everybody had the luxury of discovering this.

Being forced out of the workforce was one of the worst things to happen to me.

Being forced out of the workforce was one of the best things to happen to me.

I was quite angry, but, not having someone destroying my work, and blaming me for it, has been great.

But I am looking forward to spending the rest of my life, standing (not sitting) in front of a screen.

The difference is that I do it on my terms.

Maybe one of the more gratifying things that has come from this, is the realization that I was mostly right, and my bosses mostly wrong; even though they were constantly telling me that I was wrong.

Not to worry, many of the youts that started with HN are now seeing the other side of not being a culture fit.

But what's to stop a bunch of experienced olds from doing a startup?

I think that's happened, a number of times. There was a survey, not too long ago, that (I think) said that most successful startups, were comprised of generally older folks.

However, I like working with younger folks. I enjoy the enthusiasm and creativity. I can provide some structure and help to unwind some of the problems we face, but there's a lot to be said for heterogenous teams.

It's just that, given their preference, people like working with others, that don't challenge them, so you have teams of olds, yutes, women, men, etc.

I worked for a couple of decades, in a company that had very heterogenous teams (people think Japanese companies are a bunch of old men, but I have found that not to be the case).

I feel that, in those teams, the "olds" had a bit too much authority (I was a yute), but it was educational.

I got used to being in environments where I wasn't the smartest person in the room, and I got challenged a lot. Not comfortable, but we did do some interesting stuff.

My company sells systems to DMVs, during some small talk one of the folks from the DMV said that they keep having retirees come back after retiring, the main reason: Healthcare. Working at the DMV is obviously a pretty easy job (compared to say... a roofer or even retail) so they just go back to work to save on Health Insurance. The DMV gladly hires them back too, they have the experience, know how things work, show up and do their job, etc.

I feel really bad for young people out there trying to get their foot in the door somewhere.

Similar anecdote. My father worked in a supermarket before a pivot to real estate. After the 2008 crash he wasn’t able to retire on time and went back to the supermarket to stock shelves during the night shift…at 70 years old

The lack of stable health care understandably scares older people. It’s concerning to see so many seniors in jobs that have traditionally been done by high schoolers or folk in their 20s

I worked in a supermarket in my early 20s doing just that, and most of the folks I worked with were otherwise semi retired and working a few nights a week.

Feel this in my bones even as a non-young worker. I'm almost 50 and am still a lowly individual contributor worker-bee with no direct reports, no budget, no real P&L responsibility... The mass of legacy employees perpetually above me weighs heavily. It feels like people have to literally die before any advancement can happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Where I live, there is such an acute shortage of skilled tradespeople, that prices are through the roof.

It seems that the world is reverting to a point where humans are in demand for hands-on jobs as opposed to BS jobs like layers and layers of white-collar management.

The government also just revised its employment numbers down by over 800,000. That's going to make it harder to find jobs.

I don't follow how one follows from the other. If the government suddenly states that the employment numbers went up by 800,000, would that make it easier to find jobs? What if all those 800,000 jobs are all as Walmart greeters? Or neurosurgeons?

That’s totally irrelevant. The jobs were not there due to a measurement issue. The measurement is in any event very hard to do.

It means there are 800,000 fewer jobs available.

Those 800,000 jobs never existed, so there aren't any fewer. There are just fewer than people thought. The correction to that statistic doesn't affect how easy or hard it is to get a job.

My yardstick is bad doesn't change the reality of thing don't fit.

https://archive.ph/OI6x3

Older workers haven't been paid well enough to retire.

FTFY, WaPo.

The root cause of the problem is not between the generations.

And yet we still have a pensions crisis.

They can still collect their government pension, they are just working while doing so.

The working career should be 45 years. I never understood why pensions were granted after 20 years. That means one can easily get double pensions.

Pensions aren’t granted, it’s part of your salary that’s deferred. If you want to defer it longer then you’d need to pay a higher up-front salary.

You are quite correct. The problem, though, is unions and government employees complain about their salaries, but they never account for the value of the very generous pensions. (Government pensions are projected to bankrupt several states.)

Hence, it's propaganda.

I wouldn't consider pensions generous, and I also wouldn't blame pensions for bankrupting states.

The states are in trouble because they're shit at spending tax dollars. They burn money on shit that doesn't make money. Sprawling roads, suburbs, malls. On a local level these developments don't earn the state more money back via commerce, they actually drain money just to maintain.

Next to that, many states went all-in on the industries that were vibrant in their states. Of course they never accounted for the greed of corporations. Those corps left, and behind them death and decay. Entire cities, billions and billions of dollars in infrastructure, left to rot. Now a liability, but moreover, a lost tax revenue source.

When the pensions are the largest item in the budget, they are the cause of the bankrupting.

I disagree because it's not this simple. Those employees produce VALUE. That money isn't being burnt. You can't do simple math like this when it comes to human beings.

IF those employees stick around AND the industries in the state continue then the state earns more money from said industries. How much money do you think Detroit, once the most profitable city in the US, brought in?

Now, Detroit has been sucked dry and left to rot and the state is on the hook for those pensions. But did the pensions cause this? In my opinion, no. I think people like to blame the pensions because it's easy and simple, and also because many inherently have a bias towards defending the private sector.

> Government pensions are projected to bankrupt several states.

Because someone stole the money earmarked for the pensions. That money was supposed to be invested conservatively and at scale to the benefit of both taxpayers and government employees.

This isn't a taxpayer or worker problem. This is a problem for whoever made off with that money.

These are not independent issues. The pension crisis is part of why the older workers aren't retiring.

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