High-school shop students attract skilled-trades job offers | Hacker News Reader

High-school shop students attract skilled-trades job offers

wsj.com

256 pointslxm492 comments

To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.

A trade being any job you can do with your own tools and is universally useful to people. So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need. Ideally you could arrive in a new town with only this skill and your tools, and begin to eke out an existence. I favor trades that are also useful to oneself, so the building trades are good because everyone needs shelter-may as well build your own or at least understand what you are buying. Doctor also works as a trade, because the need is so basic and universal.

A profession being anything else, basically, especially if it generally requires an employer (major capital investment) to be a useful activity. Interestingly, being a farmer falls into this category, since it requires land and equipment. Even if you own the land and equipment, you could lose it, and then your livelihood is out of your reach. So that’s a profession, by my narrow practical classification.

I figured with a trade and a profession, young adults are much better prepared to roll with the punches in the inevitable chaos they will confront, and be empowered to walk away from situations that are untenable. The power to walk away is highly underrated.

For myself, I have benefited greatly from my practical upbringing, and am a sophomore journeyman in many trades but my happy place is creating things. Electronics, a little mechanics, and software to breathe life into the soul of a new machine. Fortunately I have been hardcore unemployable by nature for decades, so I have developed the freedom to follow my own path, which is deeply gratifying. But without a strong trades type background this would not have really been possible.

I grew up in a trade. My folks ran a small auto repair business, and as such, I'm more than competent in a lot of automotive related things and a barely competent in a lot of the trades (carpentry, electrical, tile, accounting, taxes, etc). Essentially, anything we needed to get done to make the business run, I did alongside my folks and family.

I'm decidedly out of the trades as an adult.

Mostly, this is because of my folk's parenting in general. I was not good, due to the stresses of said work and business. But I imagine that's true of most small business owners.

But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body. I'm fully not kidding here when I say that my jeans were so dirty that they stood up on their own. Again, kid's jeans, and it wasn't every day, but at least twice a week. Heavy machinery like lathes will literally tear your arms off and beat you to death with them. I've grabbed 220V before and my Dad had to break the circuit with a broom handle, leaving quite the bruise on my arms, not to mention the near death of that kind of shock. Don't get me started on car exhaust and brake cleaners.

Auto repair may not be very exemplary of the trades as a whole, but I choose to take showers after work now.

> But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body.

Most of my friends are blue collar, and aged 20 years in the last decade.

One can't hear as well as he used to from impact guns hammering away, back problems, knees, and more.

You can deal with it at 25, but time comes at you fast.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, my hearing is shot too. My spouse is always having to say things louder and slower to me. Not a lot of fun for them to do. I also can't smell certain smells; I suppose this is due to the aforementioned brake cleaners (spray acetone really), but am not very sure.

Totally depends on the trade. Concrete foundations, roofing, anything that uses a wheelbarrow, etc. will eventually break you. Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in, but digging post holes or hauling shingles up a ladder is not the same beating as hanging cabinets, or wiring circuit breakers. Just saying there are different kinds of hard.

Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of "go into trades" rhetoric is that most trades people either get into management as fast as they can, a small amount start their own business and a share of that small amount are very successful, or a large amount of people trade $$$ for future health problems (not just joints, many of the materials used in trades are awful and many never wear proper PPE). It's important to look at the trades without the veil of blue-collar romanticism; the trades can be lucrative but tradesmen will be very quick to give you the tradeoffs.

Yes, all of this is very easily seen by the BLS statistics about the average/median wages of trades.

For every anecdote of a plumber making $20k/month in a HCOL area, there are probably 3-4 plumbers who are barely pulling $70k/year in M/LCOL and end up having health problems.

For my family it really wan't a trade off. This jobs was the only one we could do to make end meet.

My family is the 'petite bourgeois'(owners that labor alongside their workers[0]) that Marx said were the only people that actually had a choice in the class war and were the breeding grounds for fascism.

We did management too, but labored with the employees all the same. Did we get paid more? Sometimes, but we had to go without pay a lot and pick up other jobs. Still, my sibling and I went to college debt free, none of the employees' kids did that [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...

I actually wouldn't be suprised, running your own shop in a trade or in software bootstrap day to day mode has to be remarkable similar. Including consulting gigs to keep yourself afloat.

For sure. I believe that a a person should work towards working more with their mind than their back, long term. A lot of professions are good vehicles towards that goal. But being able to do what you need to, and being able to make ends meet in a worst case scenario are both great sources of strength and significantly reduce your economic fragility.

Yeah, I agree with both your replies here. The certainty that I had when I was starting out in life that I could walk into pretty much any auto shop and have a job in a week, I dunno, I think I took that for granted. In that, I never really thought about it and my profession was more of a choice to me; I always had a backup. I guess a lot of my friends and coworkers really didn't have that sense about themselves, maybe.

The real question, per the WSJ article here, is: How does a kid go about getting this back up? I got it by virtue of birth. But some other kid would have to go seeking it out, at the expense of time they could spend studying or, you know, just being a teenager. I'm not sure that teenage me would have taken the 'learn a trade as a backup plan' route. In fact, I know I would not have done that.

I prefer trades as a backup to a profession, for sure. A trade can give you the runway to put yourself through school or to ramp up your capabilities in other ways, leading to a better long term plan. Getting old Is a bitch, to be sure.

I think that the connectedness of cars (requiring dealer-level tools for some operations, even if available to independents at a cost that’s difficult to recoup) and the prevalence of pre-paid service bundles with new and CPO car sales is moving mechanic higher up the capital intensity (or employer/pool required) scale.

I'm getting increasingly relevant personally as a double-whammy hacker and mechanic towards liberating people and the machines they fucking bought from daddy Chevrolet who doesn't want them to control their own machinery.

It's still possible, even if for some you need to swap the entire engine controller, to take that control back. Ultimately all these damn modules have to eventually switch bare copper conductors to make all the stuff work in the car, and if we have to, we can swap ALL the silicon involved.

I would love some actual right to repair legislation but our government is too occupied undermining people's civil rights and pissing off every other market on the face of the Earth.

I will never ever pay a subscription fee for my fucking heated seats even if I have to bridge the 12V across a big toggle in the dashboard and wire the stupid thing myself. You gotta draw a line somewhere and that's mine. Fuck ALL the way off with subscription gating features in the machine I already bought.

Every industry is feeling the same pressures. Even in "simple" trades the latent cost of running a licensed business is so high that you almost can't be in business yourself or with a couple people, you need to have a dozen guys running around doing gravy work (that nobody else can do, because no license, and that no other licensee will undercut any other on, because they're invested) under your license in order to stay above water in some markets.

There are a lot of things that work for one person or 10 people, but growing from 1-10 is the hard part. Even things like lawn care, as soon as you grow beyond what you can do, the first employee needs a duplicate of all of your truck, trailer, and other equipment, plus they aren't going to work as hard as you do and probably expect to be paid better than you pay yourself.

Yes, this is becoming more and more relevant. There are a lot of things that need fixed besides cars though.

> carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer

programmer, then also?

Sort of?, if you are sufficiently well rounded and can implement solutions from start to finish. It’s sort of Art adjacent, or entrepreneur adjacent. Still, I’d encourage strongly to learn carpentry, as in the rough construction level carpentry for anyone who is likely to focus on anything extremely cerebral. It is empowering to know you can build your own shelter, and construction carpentry tends to be a touching grass type of outdoor activity.

Programming also is kinda iffy as a trade in the “I just got dropped off in the middle of BFE and I need to eat” kind of way. It sort of requires a bunch of fragile situational trimmings that are not really under individual control … so I’ve looked at software as a profession, really. It doesn’t quite pass the doctor test. Not everyone needs a programmer, but everyone needs shelter.

But programming can be done with less starting-capital than carpentry, realistically.

Maybe, but carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, etc all typically have apprenticeship opportunities and its extremely rare to encounter anything in the tech field like this.

Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things, while the tech industry loves to re-invent the wheel frequently.

> its extremely rare to encounter anything in the tech field like this.

That depends on where you are. In the US, it's rare, but our Japanese office actually had a pretty rigorous system for career growth, that involved what is, for lack of a better word, "apprenticeship."

> Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things

I wouldn't say that. I know a lot of mechanics, and they have experienced a big change, over the last decade or so.

One of the things about being a mechanic (or appliance repairman), is that you are responsible for maintaining a huge range of stuff; including things that are decades old.

I have a friend that sets up and maintains professional sterile stuff. This is big juju. These aren't little autoclaves, and they incorporate pretty much every trade you can think of, like plumbing, electrical, metalshop, mechanical, etc. Many of these units are huge. They also tend to be run by fairly advanced computers.

These units cost six- or seven-figures, and the customers like to keep them going for as long as possible. I often hear him talking about having to work on a decade-old sterilizer, in the sub-basement of some research lab.

Unless you plan to work for a large tech employer, you can completely ignore the movement of the industry. Most of it is noise that isn't going to give you a productivity boost as an individual.

Setting up websites for people/small businesses? Give them each a virtual host/directory with mod_php if you need some CRUD. No k8s or AWS or react or anything needed. Your client's site is all in a tidy directory you could zip up and give to them if they want (e.g. you're going to move out of the business, or they want to work with someone else). I despise working with PHP, but it's the obvious choice if you were going to be a "trade web programmer" doing small jobs for people.

Writing custom software for someone? Do it with Qt's drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor and deliver it as a .zip or .apk or whatever.

It probably won't be as easy money as a SaaS megacorp, but I'm sure there is plenty of demand for programmers' services out there in the same way that you can find people looking for contractors for home renovations. If you're doing custom work, you can use whatever tools make you productive.

Tradeskill work can have a "quality appraisal" by the customer. A good car shop, a good painter, a good gardener. Code by an individual programmer is more difficult to appraise.

Tradeskills are also not scalable.

Many of the trades you listed require licenses, apprenticeships, or trade schools. Usually high schools make you choose between a college prep track or vo-tech track, so you can't do both. Also, those the tools for those trades (if going beyond a handyman level) are a significant capital investment.

> So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need.

I've hired all of these trades for my basic needs and I've never seen their licenses. They don't need no stinking license to get lots of residential work around here, just word of mouth that they are competent.

Just because you don't see fhwm, doesn't mean they don't have them or need them. I would bet your state/county requires electricians to have a license, and your mechanic is likely ASE certified.

Yeah, it would be impractical to do them all lol, but you can get set up either by high school graduation or within two years afterward. So you go to college , if desired, at 19 or 20.

As far as the “track” available in high school, I’ve found it trivial to basically ignore it. You can pick and choose, but you may have to demonstrate ability to skip prerequisites, so that means independent study -a critical skill anyway. Also, summer school or community college in the summer can move a student ahead significantly.

Having raised 5 kids under this pattern it hasn’t been problematic or expensive. If the plan is to go to a prestigious university, you will need to do some extra academics or work yourself into a university program to make it obvious that going to a trade school doesn’t define your potential, usually completing a year of community college or participating as a research assistant etc by high school graduation is sufficient.

As far as tools cost, being a mechanic is the pricey one, with basic set of tools around $3000 these days because of the technology component.

But the other trades are not so bad.

If you don’t try to buy all new and vanity brands, you can get set up around $1000. Used tools are generally nearly as good as new ones. If you need advanced tools they are nearly universally available for rent, and often the first time you need to rent a tool, the job you do will pay for you to buy one for next time.

I think most people overvalue the dominant paradigm and pattern copying. It’s fine (even desirable) not to look like the usual applicant as long as your lumps are interesting or signal value to an institution.

$3k seems extremely low unless you're offering only a subset of services. Things like tire machines, alignment racks, and even just a smaller/non-shop air compressor is pricey. If you want to contract at a shop that has those, they typically want an ASE cert too

That’s only an obstacle if one believes education should be finished by 22-23 years old. Doing another few years of formal education isn’t a huge impediment and is probably pretty beneficial before even considering GP’s main point.

My nephew hates math. So he's not going to college right now. Instead he's going to vo-tech school. Where he takes math.

Anyway, he seemed very interested in being a part of the FBLA and went to the various functions and conventions that the organization had. I encouraged him to keep in the back of his mind that one day he's not going to be young anymore, he's going to be tired of someone else's shit, every person in their mid 50s and over he knows who is in a trade has needed multiple surgeries just to function on a daily basis, and he's going to be frustrated that his boss is buying a motorcoach to drive to his vacation home while he's struggling to pay the note on his truck. Learn a trade. And then learn to run a business. So that you can run a business while working your trade.

>To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.

I think one or the other is ok. My main thing is that you have to have some sort of plan. You can plan to be a software engineer or a hairdresser or whatever else, but you need to have some sort of plan. You can always update your plan, but you should at least have some vague idea of what it is. The 'failure to launch' folks that I know are all the ones that didn't have some sort of plan so they end up bouncing around from one low paying job to another without any sort of career progression. Even if they end up doing OKish as an office administrator or assistant retail manager, if/when they lose that job (often due to economic realities outside their control) they end up starting back over at the bottom.

Unfortunately a lot of people just “sleep through life” as i like to say. They are physically awake, but they make decisions like they don’t have any agency. Almost like they are asleep.

They think some higher power will magically drop a plan into their lap.

What I’ve seen that drives my ideas on this are:

I believe a professional skill is an important educational goal, and insofar as a person is capable and interested they will more likely thrive with a professional skill.

But: professional skills tend to require a lot of dependencies and connections, can be heavily reputation based, and you can find yourself in a dead end of many kinds.

Having a trade gives you an opt-out so you can always move laterally and reposition yourself, probably to get back into your profession or a related one. Also, it creates a way to take a “break” to avoid burnout. And being skilled in trades, you can easily “earn” tens of thousands of dollars a year as a homeowner by not having to pay a premium for life’s demands unless you want to.

Just being able to credibly walk away is a huge advantage in negotiation. And even if you won’t, knowing that you could, really could, is a huge boost to well being.

It all boils down to plotting a course based on options rather than only constraints. Empowerment.

Thing is, most people won’t use that fallback, but it still provides a great advantage. With a fallback, you can take risks that can position you ahead of more timid strategies. Same as owning a little land with a simple cabin on it, outright.

For a few thousand dollars or even less, the worst that can happen is that you might have to go “home” and recoup. You always have a place to be. Even if you rarely go there.

So we'll all be living in wood huts because there are no architects and civil engineers and if break your leg the doctor will saw it off because no one studied biology and chemistry so pharmaceuticals don't exist...

Sounds great! I love libertarianism!

What? I’m not advocating for forgoing education. On the contrary. I advocate for deeper, broader education and life experience. Not quite sure where you get that?

OTOH we’d be better off living in well built wood huts than in the conditions that people with a high degree of specialized education but no practical education can provide. I have a great respect for knowledge, science, and learning in general… but the “incompetent intellectual“ stereotype, so effectively weaponized in the culture wars, exists for a reason.

In the end, individuals and societies benefit from well educated people who have a well rounded education in not only the arts and sciences, but also in practical physical affairs of urgent application, AKA applied engineering or applied science.

Probably they misread you while arguing with their own ghosts. Your idea is perfectly reasonable and sound. It allows the lived experience to shape youngsters minds.

Yeah! Hit that straw man!

You could caricature libertarianism, or you could engage with understanding what it actually is, whether or not you choose to agree with it.

> You could caricature libertarianism, or you could engage with understanding what it actually is, whether or not you choose to agree with it.

Why is it that 99% of people arguing for libertarianism do a much better job making a caricature of it than anyone else that's intentionally tried?

I've tried to engage with them in good faith but ultimately all their arguments devolve into abolishing taxes and keeping track of existing bureaucracy on an individual level. Every. Single. Time.

It's not a practically tenable position. It's a youthful fantasy on the opposite side of the spectrum of property rights (the other side of the spectrum is communism).

A friend is dropping out of IT to pursue welding - but knows the money just isn’t there. She’s starting a 5:30am 10 hour shift at a manufacturer to be able to move onto welding and CNC. She’s autistic so can struggle sometimes but is also one of the smartest people I know and does physics puzzles for fun and builds shit all the time.

Skilled trade jobs value paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.

Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck.

"Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck."

My oldest son is 17 years old and graduated one semester early from high school.

He now works full-time as a welder and heavy equipment mechanic with a base rate of $25/hour and will get many, many hours of overtime this summer.

He will easily gross > 70k this year.

Granted, this is in the Bay Area (so add some inflation there) and he has certain physical and interpersonal attributes[1] that make him special ... but this is, indeed, happening and my impression is that it would be repeatable for others like him.

FWIW, he's very proud of himself and we're very proud of him but ... we're also trying to impress upon him that wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security. Owning things is[2].

[1] He's a big strong guy, projects as aged 20+ and is very outgoing and charismatic.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

"many hours of overtime this summer."

I think the biggest misconception with any of the trades jobs is that yes, you can make 70K+, even 100K+, but that involves lots of overtime.

At least in the trades the overtime is a well-understood part of the bargain. Plenty of white-collar employees work 60+ hour weeks with no additional compensation except the possibility of a larger-than-average bonus.

Physical labor is very different from white collar work.

Yes, continue and elaborate? Mental (white collar) work has more of that feeling of dread I think. Maybe physical “overtime” has a physical limit, not sure how often you push yourself into burnout in those fields? Curious and asking here, don’t read in too much here.

You can google "retirement age plumbers" and see stories of people's bodies giving out at age 50. There are some things you can do to mitigate that risk, but physical labor jobs frequently land you into unplanned early retirement, with the rest of your life in pain.

There are reasons the welding movement isn't going to spread to the UK. More general awareness of the risks, less cultural passion for the optics

https://breathefreely.org.uk/guidance-on-exposure-to-mangene...

>The WEL for Manganese (since 2018) in the UK for those small particles that reach the deep lung (known as respirable particles) is 0.05mg/m3 (8hr TWA), a tenth of the previous WEL.

This change is significant as much of the manganese in the fume will be respirable. It is likely that the respirable limit will be exceeded during many welding activities unless effective controls are introduced and used properly.

https://www.hse.gov.uk/welding/health-risks-welding.htm

I think if you really want to make a proper living from the trades, you need to at some stage plan to move "off the tools" and into starting your own welding/plumbing/whatever business.

If you can do that successfully, you can get FAANG money.

With overtime as a freelance software developer I felt my brain developing faster. With overtime as a mailman I felt it decaying faster.

Both jobs drained my will to live though. The mailman job was actually much nicer, just the pay was total ass.

Yes, but I don’t see why that means overtime is compensated in one but not the other. If anything blue collar workers are more upfront about their time being valuable, while in white collar work there’s an unwritten expectation that you’ll suck it up and get the job done. Talking about money is taboo, but who does that benefit?

This doesn't mean that the concept and value of overtime is different between the two

If you talk to someone in the trades yes, it's understood that overtime is required to make good money. When you see people promoting the trades to highschoolers though, they are not talking about that fact.

Yes, white collar jobs can require overtime but not all and not always but that is kinda besides the point. Why are we promoting work that requires 50-60+ hours a week to get by?

Yet I see tradesmen who have started their own contacting businesses and poorly paid software engineers who somehow just make Wordpress themes.

At the end of the day, people need to discover themselves and find what they excel at. Who am I to tell people that they’ll enjoy my job and be as good at it as I am. No one should tell me to start a career in chemistry or playing an instrument. I’ve already tried it.

Yeah, is it really a good indicator if you need to work 20 hours overtime every week to make the median household income? That's just exploitation.

We also just know that, blue or white, there is no raise structure in society anymore. You can't just do honest work or even be loyal and expect it to pay off financially.

Median household income is household income, not personal income. Median personal income in the US for all people with an income is (as of 2022) $47,960. [1] For those in full time year-long employment, it's $60,070. And note because that is for all employed persons, that's including people with years of experience in their respective fields.

Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

HN comments are so out of touch with reality that you see people sneer at someone running a business in Russia that earns them $100k annual profit.

I'm "out of touch" for not accepting 1.5x overtime in order to have a median income? Meanwhile 60, 70+% is going off to rent.

I don't care if someone compensated highly chooses that lifestyle, but not someone "average".

>Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.

I'm scoffing at a kid needing to work 60 hours a week in order to earn an income barely above the median. I'm scoffing at the idea that people think 70k is liveable in high COL areas without sharing multiple roommates.These aren't things we should normalize.

If you really think this isn't bad, you're the ones out of touch with how expensive it is to survive these days.

Not everything that is hard or unpleasant is exploitation. 50% of jobs will pay below the median income. That's what median means. The existence of jobs paying below the median income is a mathematical certainty, not exploitation.

That's fair, but if you want to frame a job as a "good" one, you'd expect to be on the other side of median.

"Good" is always going to be relative. Is it good if your other option is to be a programmer? Probably not. Is it good if your other option is working retail for minimum wage? Yeah, then it's probably pretty good.

yeah but their point is 60+ hours workweek for a median income

So it's a below median income job (as 50% of all jobs necessarily are) with the option to increase your income by working more. Still not exploitation.

There are salaried employees making less who also work 60 hours a week and don't even get overtime (granted, their jobs are likely less physically demanding).

> or even be loyal

What's loyalty got to do with this? I'm not "loyal" to my employer and I don't know anyone who is. If I find a job that pays better, and offers better conditions, I'll take it. Why would anyone do anything else, and why would anyone put any value on that?

I actually don't believe it. Most people work not only for the pay check but also for some concrete project they want to see completed (or a customer problem they want to see fixed, etc). Omo economicus is a very simplified theoretical model of only one aspect of work.

There are options other than "loyal to the company" or "always choose option which pays most"

For example someone might like their co-workers, enjoy the projects they work on, and want to see the current product (that they have invested so many time into) succeed. But at the same time, they might not care about company itself at all. If the project got closed and co-workers left, they will move to a new company with no hesitation.

I don't believe in loyalty to an employer but I've had and seen numerous employers who said they valued loyalty. Those employers didn't pay for that loyalty and didn't deserve, yes.

But that is the point of the GP. Ostensibly, employers once paid for loyalty by offering consistent raises. That is done now.

Thanks for agreeing with me. Older generations have a notion of "be loyal and reliable and you'll move up". The last few decades broke such a social contract.

It probably deserved to be broken but the point overall is thst job progression isn't just a given built into most structures anymore. You gotta fight or bounce around and keep proving your worth.

Tribal knowledge and company familiarity should justify the employer in offering raises to keep the employee around. Hiring someone new almost assuredly costs more in both the front-end and the back-end.

GP is suggesting that the lack of loyalty nowadays is part of the issue.

Yes, loyalty is a two way street. If they aren't loyal to you, you're not getting any payoff by being loyal to them. Times have changed (IMO for the worse).

By comparison I was making $75k in the Bay Area as an entry level software engineer with no overtime and only because I was afraid of negotiating higher (I think 85-90 was on the table).

This isn’t to take anything away from your son’s achievements and congrats to him and you all should of course be proud of his accomplishments. I think though it’s useful to compare and contrast blue collar and white collar wages in terms of effort per dollar earned as well when discussing options to kids. There’s nothing wrong with working harder for that amount, especially when you love the work because then you get even more pride out of it, but some kids may want to work harder in the “short” term via a professional education for the long term easier path or have better job stability even in the face of physical ailments.

At a prior gig we stepped up a machine shop and ended up hiring a stinky kid who I thought was someone's homeless brother. Extremely talented, after our program wound down he started his own machine shop and now does multiple millions of dollars of revenue yearly, has staff etc, in his mid 20s now.

He's a special case sure, but if you have business sense you don't have to top out at the high end of the hourly scale.

And Vitalik Buterin was a billionaire before the age of 30 with a CS degree as was Bill Gates and Lebron James was set by the time he was 18. What's the point of talking about outliers?

It feels dubious to appeal to job stability with software in modern times. Companies in the past were hiring and building out during unprecedently great times, and there's no reason to think those times will return. And on the issue of physical ailments - the one ailment we all hope to suffer is growing "old."

In software there's widespread "age discrimination". Mostly it's companies not really valuing experience in software much, so they'd rather hire a younger guy for much less. But the outcome is the same - software is a relatively shortlived occupation for most people, and that's after spending another 4+ years in university, then spending however much time paying off your debts, and then finally seeing your full salary.

By contrast working in the trades until retirement is entirely possible. And it's undoubtedly better for your body as well. Our bodies are meant for doing things - not idle sitting and staring at screens. I did software and CS, but will not be recommending it to my children. At this point I think the best future proofing is some sort of field where computer science is applied, rather than the occupation itself, like electrical engineering.

>At this point I think the best future proofing is some sort of field where computer science is applied, rather than the occupation itself, like electrical engineering.

Amazing words for everybody to consider.

Some people like physical work and don’t place high value on office jobs [1][2]

[1] I did not say some people don’t enjoy physical work but do physical work anyway.

[2] I did not say there is anything wrong with a preference for office jobs.

I think a lot of people actually like physical work and the day passes faster when you aren’t sitting at a desk. But you can’t make the big bucks there unless you are some sort of high end craftsman, and your service life is limited to how long your body stays together.

When was this? Even 6 years ago startups in the bay paid $130-140k to juniors.

But do they pay that to 17 year olds without a college degree?

As an 18 year old without a college degree in 2019, I was making $130k/yr in Palo Alto.

Yes, they did.

+ there is a 10% chance the stock they got is now worth $5mil.

10%? Oh my sweet summer child

15 years ago.

> wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security.

High wages provide the discretionary income required to invest though. So I'd say, they're not the goal, but if the word path is to be used, I'd say they are part of the path. As far as owning things...investments specifically (not two motorcycles and a hummer), the usual advice is a well balanced portfolio. Could be equities, maybe some real estate, maybe even some crypto, all at different ratios depending on your risk profile.

My concern is that we are in a unique time period where all of that is coming to an end and there will be no wealth appreciation even for disciplined investors.

> My concern is that we are in a unique time period where all of that is coming to an end and there will be no wealth appreciation even for disciplined investors.

Everyone always fears the future when their portfolio is down.

The best hedge is to also "invest" in something that has value to you. Like bricks / house.

I'm not the person you're replying to. But actually I've been getting quite concerned about this for some time. Mostly due to the shrinking world demographics on the horizon. Overall growth is slowing and in most developed economies it will be shrinking. Also, increasing wealth inequality tends to lead to lower overall GDP so if that trend continues I expect lower aggregate growth as well.

I think there is indeed a strong possibility that we may see very poor inflation-adjusted growth from an otherwise reasonable and diverse investment portfolio.

Ultimately, the recipe for growth will just not be so simple in a world economy with a dwindling population. Thats a VERY unique situation so a lot of historical wisdom regarding investments I think may not bear fruit like it did in the past.

My approach to mitigate this is two-fold, first I'm trying to be even MORE diversified. I have investments spread out over domestic and international ETF's, real estate, and I work a public sector job with a public pension. In addition, while aggregate growth may become lackluster, certain industries will still do well. Ive run businesses before and I'm looking to start another business in a very well-targeted industry to add an additional potential revenue stream well into the future. And the second prong of my approach is to increase my savings rate much higher than historically safe targets.

I think there is good reason to be concerned about this and it has very little to do with the current market turmoil. (Although there are some indicators of trouble in that too)

One of the things I'm very happy to have is a pension from a very long-ago job that I doubt I gave more than a couple passing thoughts to at the time (as well as another less-insulated annuity that is nonetheless in a very well-funded/managed institution.) In any case, being very cautious about anything near or even mid-term.

Or AI takes off so that labor becomes worthless and owning things is all that matters and labor gets gaslight that it's a them problem until capital has built a big enough army of murderbots to put down anyone who says the emperor has no clothes.

I'm hoping for something inbetween the apocalyptic possibilities.

someone needs to weld those murderbots, or pick up the little piece of scrap keeping the welding bot from making more murderbots, or to take over welding when the murderbots all stop working and start watching Sanctuary Moon 24/7

>The best hedge is to also "invest" in something that has value to you. Like bricks / house.

That makes intuitive sense, but quickly falls apart when you do any rigorous analysis. Buying a house might cover your shelter needs, but you still need to eat, and you can't eat bricks. Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit). Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.

On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks. Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area. If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price. All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.

I can live in it.

I can live in Albera. My commute to my job in British Columbia would be hell though.

Owning a home too far from amenities isn't worth much. Same with living too far from where the weather is hospitable, food is available, or the people with skills I need have settled.

> Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank

>That makes intuitive sense, but quickly falls apart when you do any rigorous analysis. Buying a house might cover your shelter needs, but you still need to eat, and you can't eat bricks.

This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.

>Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit).

This analysis is an edge case and in no way represents the norm. I'm not sure of any area that has gone from Bay Area prices to Detroit prices in a single lifetime.

>Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.

Another crazy edge case. It's saying don't buy a house because an asteroid might hit. I'm pretty sure that newly non-functioning legal system wouldn't protect your stock portfolio either. If it comes to that, best to invest in bullets and whiskey.

>On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks.

Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.

>Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area.

You shouldn't ever put all your money in stocks. Putting money in real estate, bonds, CDs, cash, etc. is the definition of diversification.

>If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price.

Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job. If you lose your job and haven't saved up enough runway, you could default on your mortgage. You could also not pay your rent. You get kicked out either way, but the bank should cut you a check for the equity you have remaining, minus whatever fees they conjure up.

>All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.

All of your points were based on invalid assumptions, edge cases, or are irrelevant when compared to paying rent. Buying a house is a long game.

>This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.

The problem is that in much of the anglosphere, housing is so scarce that you have to ignore such rules of thumb, or live in the middle of nowhere.

>This analysis is an edge case

>Another crazy edge case

If you ignore edge cases, then you're left with just the median case, and that says that at current price levels, houses aren't worth investing in because they have historically worse returns than stocks, and provide poor diversification.

>Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.

This calculator[1] factors everything you listed, and the math doesn't work out for the hottest housing markets. It might work out for Miami or Huston, but not San Francisco or even Albuquerque. Using default assumptions implies a break-even price-to-rent ratio of 14, but most US metros are far above that[2].

The nice thing about the calculator is that if you don't agree with the assumptions, you can plug in your own numbers. I'd like to see what numbers you come up with to make to make the math work out in favor of buying in the top US cities.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

[2] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/price-to-rent-ratio-in-50...

>Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job.

The point isn't that a Bay Area housing market will crash because Google Employee #68908 lost his job, it's that if there was an AI winter/tech crash, that will result in Bay Area housing prices dropping, along with layoffs.

Some conservative investments at the moment? Especially with some known outflows coming up? Sure. But that doesn't imply giving up on investing.

No, of course not but I think you should respond by increasing your savings rate beyond historically safe targets and diversifying even more aggressively.

100% agree. Part of it is age, and part of it is current situation and needs, but I've definitely dialed back on aggressive investments into safe harbors.

I'm not sure what the rest of the US market is like, but the Bay Area has a huge shortage of tradespeople because of the 2008 housing crash and very high cost of living pricing folks out. I knew of this but became much more acutely aware when I started doing transit advocacy. Getting folks to build/maintain HVAC systems, weld, drive buses, etc is getting increasingly difficult.

If your son can avoid having to buy into the Bay Area housing market (by living on property you own/pay for), he can make good money and probably will have little trouble finding work for years to come.

the bay area does not have a shortage of tradespeople. Or any profession, it feels like.

For trades, thousands of people apply to be apprentices, for a few spots

  Granted, this is in the Bay Area

FYI for those not from the bay area: California mandates that chain restaurants pay at least $20/hour. So $25/hour isn't that much more than entry-level at McDonald's.

But McDonalds doesn’t really offer OT, which is a huge draw. Many fast food workers work multiple jobs because they need the hours for money, and none of their employers give OT regularly.

Working 40 hours at $20/hr = 800/week.

Work 40 hours at $25 and 20 at $37.5 = $1750 which is enough to live in the Bay Area.

I'm pretty sure OP wasn't talking about the Bay Area which isn't a sane place economically speaking where 70K isn't all that great of a salary, especially with a ton of overtime.

> He will easily gross > 70k this year. Granted, this is in the Bay Area (so add some inflation there)

Don't waiters in the Bay Area make almost that much? This is not a middle class wage in that region.

Edit: Yes waiters make that much https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/s/JlymaN4MPK

70k doing OT in Bay Area. So what is that in real money, 35k?

Yeah, ignoring the OT, 70k in the Bay Area is ~40k in Omaha, Ann Arbor, Orlando, etc [1]. Without the OT it's more like 30k. And if your brain, like mine, hasn't adjusted to inflation yet, that's ~23k in 2019 dollars [2].

[1] Bankrate

[2] BLS

If you don’t pay rent, it’s pretty much $70k without rent anywhere else in the US but with better economic opportunities and better amenities.

Omaha is cheaper but you can’t go mountain hiking or surfing or skiing on your day off.

Sure, Omaha doesn’t have surfing or mountains, but camping, hiking and other outdoor activities are cheaper, less crowded, and way more accessible. You’re not fighting for a campsite or dropping $50 just to sleep outside, and most hiking is free or near-free. No $25 parking fees or permit lotteries just to walk a trail. And saying $70k goes far in the Bay Area if you don’t pay rent is kind of ridiculous. Almost no one lives rent-free. Every well-paid software engineer I know out there is trying to get out. They’re all burned out by housing costs, crowds, and the grind. Amenities don’t mean much if you can’t afford to enjoy them.

Almost no one lives rent-free.

Most 17 year olds do.

Dispersed camping in National Forests is typically free. Likewise BLM land. There is a lot of both in California. And because public land is your land, permission is usually not required.

Is the Bay area perfect? For me, no. I don’t live there. I live somewhere better that’s within driving day trip distance. But if I was young, it would be a different story.

I mean, even an hour west of Boston, there's a ton of hiking/canoeing/etc. mostly with free or cheap parking (have a free parking pass for state stuff). Mostly just do day-trips so not sure what camping spots run. But there's a ton of cheap/free stuff. No, it's not Yosemite though have a pass for national parks as well but plenty of nice stuff.

70k / 25$/hr / 40hr/week = 70 weeks of fulltime labor

You missed overtime pay

They missed mathematics

2,000 hours / year (straight time, 10 paid days PTO), $35/hour is $70k base.

You are exactly right. This is how I have calculated it since I took MicroEconomics as a Freshman.

P.S. Union Journeyman Welder, Bay Area median salary is $26 ~ $36.82 = $52,000 to $72,400.

"The median household income in the Bay Area was $128,151 in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This represents a slight decrease from $132,586 in 2019. " So.. 56% of median household income? If him, and his gf worked, then they would collectively make 112% of median household income.

>Owning things is"

Yes! I learned this from the infamous "Poor dad, rich dad" book. Being an asset owner is probably the best way to become "free".

> we're also trying to impress upon him that wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security. Owning things is

I'm not a parent, so I'm a little hesitant to disagree, but this seems like the dumbest thing I've heard in my life.

Wages are exactly the path to wealth and security -- the matter is what you do with those wages. You can't own things without receiving wages unless you inherit your wealth.

If what you were trying to say is that the best path to being wealthy is to already be wealthy, then I definitely agree, but for those born missing their silver spoon wages are the only way.

Your kid had his silver spoon (no offense intended here), and it seems like he's going to be a balanced person because he'll probably be able to see and appreciate different worlds, so congrats on that. I find it hard to believe someone can go into a field like welding (knowing tech exists, and having the aptitude).

I am curious to hear though -- what is your plan? In my own pre-parent mind it seems like this is a chance to teach him about as much of the world and the people around him/society above and below him as you can before settles into his life (clearly there's a ton of time left to change, etc). The struggles of the average blue collar worker are very different from that of the white collar worker -- but the right advice about the various big things in life I'd imagine would make a world of difference.

With regard to owning things, knowing things like "banks giving out mortgages are playing a trust game -- and they trust you a lot more if you have 50 working years left". It's possible of course to get a bad mortgage, but the first rung of the ladder is more about projections more than anything for young people. In the Bay Area I'm sure that... isn't reasonable advice though since your housing market is absolutely insane.

Also, is he going into welding with some sort add-on skills? Like welding with a little bit of CS/robotics? Welding with a passion for cooking? etc. The (currently) secondary skill tree can completely change careers.

Banks do not engage in age discrimination in giving mortgages. You can get one at age 20 or age 60, all else being equal.

It’s a secured asset, so if you turn 65 and need to go into a nursing home for some , or die, they’re confident they can recoup the balance of the loan from the house when it is auctioned off or sold to another family member.

> It’s a secured asset, so if you turn 65 and need to go into a nursing home for some , or die, they’re confident they can recoup the balance of the loan from the house when it is auctioned off or sold to another family member.

Thanks for noting this, this was definitely a possibility I hadn't weighed enough, though I'm not sure it's always another family member (I assume you meant another family member or any random bidder)

> Banks do not engage in age discrimination in giving mortgages. You can get one at age 20 or age 60, all else being equal.

I find it hard to believe the suggestion here that as far as 30y loan repayment goes, all else equal, a 60 year old earning 70k a year is similarly risky to a 20 year old earning the same rate? From first principles, this clearly doesn't hold.

Now, I assume you were referring to the illegality of considering age in loans -- it is illegal to consider age, but in this case the "age discrimination" is baked in -- because it's built into credit scores[0][1]. The common sense take prevails here, I think.

Actual results on the ground often differ from what is and isn't legal/right, as anyone who is in an underrepresented class will attest to (I do not mean this in the preachy liberal sense, it's just the best way I can find to say it), I think this might be one of those cases (guess I'll find out when I'm 60?).

[0]: https://www.aarp.org/money/personal-finance/mortgage-rejecti...

[1]: https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-...

The aarp link seems to basically say that a lot of seniors are having loans rejected because of low reported income, so be sure to report retirement income.

The philadelphia fed link notes that older people who apply for loans are being denied more often, but there's lots of potential reasons for that. Aggregate economic stats, other than credit score, in the table at the end look worse to my eye near the top age brackets (but maybe not at the same levels that rejection started climbing).

It's not clear to me when it says age discrimination is prohibited, but mortality expectations are allowed. Seems like the same thing to me.

The paper suggests there may be an element of selection, which resonates with me. Looking at my parents and their siblings, most all of them would have had a mortgage 30 years ago and likely be in these statistics; now, those with higher retirment incomes also seem to be the ones that paid off their mortgages and aren't interested in a new one.

I think all he's saying to the kid is to avoid the wage slage mindset of always being a worker, renter, and consumer. You don't have to be born wealthy to understand that or to work your way out of it. Wages are important but they're a mean not an end.

> Wages are exactly the path to wealth and security -- the matter is what you do with those wages. You can't own things without receiving wages unless you inherit your wealth.

No, you can also build things to achieve wealth – for example, you can build a company and achieve wealth this way. This doesn't necessarily have to be a pump&dump startup, lots of entrepreneurs became wealthy by founding a sustainable business.

  Wages are exactly the path to wealth and security -- the matter is what you do with those wages.

Wages are a path to wealth and security.

But not everyone who became wealthy did so by selling their time to an employer (definition of wage).

I mean no disrespect but I'm pretty sure when someone throws out a salary figure they are assuming 40 hours per week

You're describing someone hustling very hard. Which is great. But a little different?

True, but let's consider the next age group up from 17, ... graduate students earn less than that, don't get paid overtime, and will have to search for a new job in a few years.

That may be true but we're talking about an anecdote. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks that people with a high school education, on average, earn about half of what people with masters degrees earn [0]. It's easy to lose the big picture when focusing on an outlier.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-educatio...

What is a “professional degree”, between master’s and PhD?

That typically refers to a degree like a JD or MD.

> graduate students

Interesting comparison. You’re right. The primary difference I can think of is the training to quickly become an expert in a different topic.

I know plenty of PhD students accepting jobs in unrelated fields and quickly becoming the local expert in that topic.

While possible, it’s far more difficult for a machinist to suddenly become an expert car mechanic like this.

Were you ever a kid?

Kids (kid being someone from 16 to 30 without children of their own, ideally also without substance abuse problem and a home they can sleep in without fear of being assaulted) have nearly infinite energy, capacity to absorb (physical) abuse, and often the focus to learn esoteric subjects, if they're interested in the subject.

So I would fully expect a large fraction of bored kids to potentially become expert car mechanics, or tree pruners, algebraic geometers, hadoop experts, air conditioning duct builders, etc, if given access, mentorship, opportunity, recognition, and compensation.

I don’t disagree. After all, that’s exactly how I became an expert in whatever I do right now.

You seem to have missed my point though, it was about switching tracks to become an expert in a new thing. A random physics PhD grad might not have a burning passion for fintech, for example but still becomes an expert after three months in the job because of the sheer amount of rigorous training.

Honestly, this is a great way of putting it.

And let’s consider the next age group up from that with some graduate students easily clearing 150-200k in total comp. Short term pain for long term prosperity - studies related to me was that on average university graduates end up making $1M more than non graduates in lifetime earnings (of course misleading data since university admission is already selecting for something that correlates with ambition AND the professional world tended to prefer university students with opportunities)

Of course people pursuing higher education are often doing it for personal growth reasons as well.

Haha, can't actually tell if this is satire. If it is, then bravo, sir! If it's not, then it's sad this poor father doesn't know his son has dropped out of high school to become welder who needs a ton of OT to scrape by in the Bay Area.

we'll see who's laughing in five years

Welder employment market is very boom bust (people crowd it when work is well paid because welders are rare, and they leave it when work is not well paid because welders are plentiful), it could go either way in 5 years (programming is the same, but we haven’t had a bust since 2008, and then there was the 80s which was brutal for SWEs).

> paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.

Yes, paying dues, both in the sense of putting in the time to learn the trade well, and very likely for a good paying career in the trade, paying union dues. People have been doing this since the rise of professional guilds in the middle ages.

Today's kids can show aptitude, capability, and interest by doing well in shop class. An employer can take that interested teen or tween on at an entry level, add to their skill level, and make a profit on their labor. The worker can protect their labor value through a union, and probably should if only for the side benefits apart from negotiating contract labor rates.

Should they just go to college instead? Sure, if they have that interest, and can get out without a student loan debt bigger than some mortgages.

Unions are not magic. I have a friend who did belong to the local sheetmetal workers union and she was... not positive. Moved into a non-union shop and was a lot happier.

Similar experience here. Family member went into a union job and discovered that it was great for the old guys at the top who had been there for 3 decades, but it was rather repressive for the new people starting at the bottom. Much easier to pivot into a different job where union seniority wasn’t the defining factor of your entire career.

Sure, but a union is supposed to work better, so if it isn't, by definition it's to some degree corrupted. So it's important to remember that the union itself isn't a bad thing.

A union is supposed to provide for workers in the same way that a software company makes software. If either of them don't, there's something fundamentally corrupt about each org, not with the concept.

But people don't interact with concepts, they interact with individual unions.

In what way was she unhappy?

Also, seniority, which you seem to skip over.

Our high school did something I'll never forget. They offered trade based two hour "block courses" through the school district. We had Electronics and Circuit Design, IT, Auto Shop and Repair, Welding, Aerospace Engineering, and a whole bunch more that I was never interested in and so don't remember.

It was a great program. It was offered in connection with local state and community colleges. You could get credit for some of your high school work if you continued on in the field. The local employers knew about it so they would stop by often to see what students were learning and to suggest new directions for the entire class.

Never seen anything like it before or since which was the 1990s. It was a way to start paying your dues before you even left high school. You wouldn't command an awesome salary right out of school but you could easily insert yourself into the trades with almost no down time.

My high school had something similar. Also in the 90s. The trade program was eventually disbanded. And the shop classes were converted to computer labs. In a similar vein, the nursing program is still going and very popular. You graduate with a CNA, 6 months to LPN, enough credits to get an AS.N in 1 year. A lot of my friends bought their first home before 25.

“Paying dues” is a waste of everyone’s time and the productivity of the market. It means one node of the market was underutilized, purely for ego.

One thing I like about being closer to market oriented trades (or directly trading) is that your compensating is immediately based in the utility you provide. Like in financial services if you provide a service is based on the volume and your toll on that volume.

But yes if you dint have opportunities, like the knowledge, capital and flexibility to leverage it, then there’s entry level grunt work remaining.

It takes time and experience to learn a skill, call it whatever the hell you want.

“Paying one’s dues” has a very different connotation to me than “Learning a skill.” The former suggests a tenure-based system of seniority and pay scales, rather than a meritocratic system based on skill level and actual output.

To me it just says you'll make less for a period while learning the ropes. I suppose there are situations where you need to be spending the time to empty the trashcans but I don't take it that way.

Skilled trades are physical, not software. They're not simulations. Iterations and experience require actual time.

Call it whatever you will, but you're only getting the experience by spending a large amount of time and cycles.

Signed, son of a carpenter than did 30+ years and then taught it to underprivileged youth.

Even in the industries you're talking about you still have to pay your dues by building a client book, learning the industry, etc.

It becomes wasteful when advancement depends less on experience or intelligence and more on seniority or politics.

You have to take into account, that you start to earn money from a very young age. And you don't start your career with huge student debt. Skilled workers have a huge head start and it's easy to find need jobs because of the demand. If you're smart and good at your job, you can create a decent life for yourself with skilled labor. Especially because all the smart kids seem to do the "smart" thing and go to college, leaving more demand for good laborers in the skilled labor market.

The difference between compensation in different countries is fascinating. In OZ/NZ tradespeople are the highest earners. For Australia I suspect this is explained at least partially by mining (I know people who earned $600+ per hour 10-15 years ago, and that included free flights in and out, free accommodation etc), and NZ needed to follow because of the ease of moving to Oz. Mining doesn't really explain why plumbers and carpenters earn like crazy as well though.

The quality of work though is extremely poor if I compare what one would expect in e.g. Germany. I guess that's the advantage of the German apprenticeship system where tradespeople get proper training and not take a couple month course at a tafe and then start their own business.

> (I know people who earned $600+ per hour 10-15 years ago, and that included free flights in and out, free accommodation etc)

I remember countless stories like this circulating when I was in high school. Someone who wasn’t going to college was instead going off to do some obscure thing like work on oil rigs or do welding in hazardous locations.

The hook was always that they heard a friend of a friend brag about some extreme hourly rate they made one time a few years ago and assumed that’s just what the job always paid.

Then they went out and did it, learned that the job was terrible, and discovered that the average pay was a lot less than the all-time highest number that people would quote.

To be fair that bait and switch happens in software too. Not all devs make 500 000 usd.

> I guess that's the advantage of the German apprenticeship system where tradespeople get proper training and not take a couple month course at a tafe and then start their own business.

Plumbers and electricians in Australia both do four year apprenticeships, with some time at TAFE and the rest training on the job.

The quality problems you see are generally less about training, and more the result of financially-motivated corner cutting.

If WSJ publishes an article about your job offer, don’t believe it’s a common occurrence.

I was into machining right out of high school. After layoffs and plant closings I got into IT, now networking. I’d never make the kind of money I do now if I hadn’t of made that career change! I love my job too.

Plumbers make $70k to $200K.

https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/as-tech-job...

You don’t even need to be in the trades to make $70k/year. That’s just about $33/hour, you can make that in a fast food restaurant or grocery store these days on the low rung of management or even just a senior IC in services where I live.

>A friend is dropping out of IT to pursue welding

Why? Sounds like IT is a better fit for her?

Do you weld?

Good welding requires intense focus/nondistractions, which some people on the spectrum really enjoy.

You still need welders to build starships... https://www.spacex.com/careers/jobs?search=weld

On the contrary, I know many tradespeople who are making $70k +.

70k? A more realistic pay is double that if you live anywhere other than the middle of nowhere for electricians, steamfitters, etc.

I own Netgate (hat tip to the haters who will comment), the company that does pfsense and tsnr.

I also own Bump It Offroad in Windsor, CO. We do some CNC (plasma table) as well. I pay welders about $70k/year plus benefits, to start. They’re both college drop-outs, but smart and willing to learn.

Though I grew up in the trades, it’s not about “dues” for me, but more work ethic and willingness to learn.

Very cool. I'm down the road in FtC, and I TRIED to get my daughter to take the Front Range machining program when she was in HS, but it required going an hour away to one of the Denver campuses every day because they didn't have it here. I thought it would be good for her to have as a fallback, and I'd have gotten her a CNC router to learn on. She also really didn't express any interest, if they had a local program I probably could have convinced her to go.

It seems like around here it's definitely some interest in some of those skills. I gather the Bugatti guy has some need of them.

edit: (I've got a 100 series, so I'll keep an eye on BIO)

I have a number of concerns with CSU Ft. Collins. I know people who transferred to Billings because FtC was losing accreditation in some majors. (This was years ago.)

FRCC only offers machining in Boulder Co. Welding (only mentioned because that’s what this tread is about) is offered in Larimer though.

I know of several job opportunities today in the northern part of the Front Range that need toolpath programming.

The kid built a CNC router for his HS FRC/FTC club as an Eagle Scout project, then ended up at Mines.

p.s. We have 100 series product now.

There's not much I dislike more than well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. Don't buy it. If at all possible get a degree, sit at a desk, and earn a living wage. This is your first priority.

Telling everyone to "just learn to code" is worse I think. Especially since I'm not reading about well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. (Except maybe on HN?)

I realized a long time ago that there are a lot of people that absolutely will not function if they cannot do a job with their hands where they can feel like they did something at the end of each day. (In fact I might almost be one of those people.) Keeping some manufacturing as well as good (union?) trade jobs is a smart move for a country/society.

> is worse I think.

Yep.

And on top of the "will not function if they cannot do a job with their hands" issue, the great majority of people are really not potential good coders.

Plus, at any scale, an "everyone codes" society very obviously fails the "where does their food come from ?" test.

Grass is always greener and all that, but at least in high tax Europe and in poorer countries trades can be very well paid.

A whole lot of money can be earned under the table and it lets you work everywhere and under diverse conditions. Lots of people do short term work for a couple months, than vacation at home for a couple months, etc.. This is much more difficult to do in IT.

On my last flight back home I was talking to a guy doing roofing for some data centers in the Netherlands working for some dude from Sri Lanka. We calculated his theoretical salary and he could be making 80k+ euros cash a year assuming he worked normal yearly hours. He was working for a month or two, then chilling for 2-3 months, rinse and repeat. Sure, he's breaking his body, sure his retirement will be nonexistent since he's not paying taxes but he's literally on vacation more than half of the time and has been earning money since he became an adult without the broke student step.

I also have very close relatives with construction businesses and they're dying for skilled workers. It's very well paid if "you're not in construction because you can't do anything else" and they'd hire you for any period of time. Once approved you essentially call your boss the day before you want to work and he tells you where to go and what to do. You can work 7 days a week, you can work every second Saturday to get some movement in...

Seriously. Choosing the skilled trade path makes a lot of sense right now if the default option for you is unskilled work, but the job market isn't so tough that one should abandon the option to get paid much more in a much more comfortable field of work.

Related is a certain actor, clearly following his passions, preaching the same nonsense: "give up on your dreams! go into skilled trade and wreck your body for okay pay!"

Part of the "follow your dreams" advice that a lot of people seemed to miss is that "following your dreams" doesn't mean "major in that subject and try to not get Cs", it means obsess over that thing and work so hard at it you're always in the top 1% or higher for that craft. The reason you should chase your dreams is they're the only thing you can reasonably hope to obsess over enough for long enough to have a competitive advantage.

While not all of them are "rich", everyone I know who sincerely followed their passion to the point that other people thought they were a bit crazy are all able to survive, often pretty well, doing something they love.

Like all advice, it only applies to some people.

Working as a front line trades-person is rough, but becoming a journeyman or master as one step towards a profession (“I’m an hvac technician” vs “I’m in the hvac business”) seems to be a very good career path based on my social circle’s experience.

Another thing I’ve seen in my circle: if you’re going to go to a bottom 25th percentile college, flunk every class for your first two years and be miserable, then you’re much better off not going to college and pursuing a different path, like trades or military. For these people, “go into the trades” is really good advice.

If you’re going to a top university, love classes, and will graduate in the top of your class with a marketable degree and college experience, then you should go to college because you’re much more likely to live a comfortable life than the trades.

I had a lot of friends from high school who would have been so much better off if they had went into the trades straight after high school instead of trying and failing for years in college, only to get a 1.8 gpa in Communications or Psychology that is totally worthless. People need to know other crafts are a viable and dignified option, and a much better option than failing out of no name university.

Yep. My boss bitches about her work all the time. What does she complain about specifically? Having to respond to people on slack. Office workers don't know how easy they have it.

Having done both. Sometimes physical work is easier. Sometimes.

I'd be interested to see what they are telling their own children.

I'm telling mine: 1) try to get a college degree regardless of whether you use it or not (I'm paying for it, BTW) but 2) don't become a programmer like I did though unless you really, really enjoy it.

They (three daughters) have no problem with 2), some struggle though even with 1).

My secretary, single mom pushed my sister to go to college so we would be happier than she was raising two kids and working at more or less minimum wage. (It turned out my degree, Education, didn't figure into my ultimate career as a programmer at Apple but it did allow me to buy a Mac Plus while in college with a student loan and at half the non-educational price — so I tought myself to program, wrote some games. It also introduced me to peers that were unhappy with the otherwise-prospect of playing D&D and working at Walmart for their foreseeable future.)

I guess my point is that when "messaging" our kids, we are reacting of course to what we disliked about the path we took as well as what we liked.

They'll do what they want, live their own lives ... regardless of what I tell them though. I accepted that a long time ago.

I don't mind too much what people tell their children - what concerns me is when people tell their own children one thing but give different generalised advice.

Ideally, if I had a high school age kid right now I would want them to get a 4 year degree but leave college with zero debt and then also learn to be an electrician.

For some, college is an obvious choice. For some, a trade is an obvious choice. For some in the middle, hedging both is probably the best choice.

We have a relatively new option in the UK which are "Degree Apprenticeships" [1]

"A degree apprenticeship enables you to gain a full undergraduate or master’s degree while you work. Degree apprenticeships take three to six years to complete, depending on the course level.

You’ll spend most of your time working and you’ll also study part-time at university. For example, you might go to university one or two days per week, or in short blocks, such as a week at a time. Overall, you spend about 20% of your time studying vs. 80% of your time working."

[1] https://www.ucas.com/apprenticeships/degree-apprenticeships

I have also known young people working in the trades who were all about encouraging others to go into the trades and how much better it was. They all did objectively well for themselves. It is a different life choice that suits people differently.

Neither path is necessarily the correct one for everybody, but the proportion of people going for degrees instead of other paths is too high.

You assume desk jobs still exist in 10 years?

They will. The AI fad however…

Come on, anyone with half a brain cell can see that AI isn't going anywhere. Sure the excitement might die down but we're not going back to pre-AI.

This is like those people that thought smartphones were a fad.

Didn't we hear something similar about computers?

You're right — on both sides. The people that said computers would automate everything were overstating them. At the same time, c'est la vie travel agents. Some jobs truly are gone.

I feel like there's a modern dark-comedy film in there where a guy in the 90's gets a journalism degree only to find the industry collapsing with the internet — so he trains to switch careers to taxi driver....

That 68k/yr wage only sounds good if you're still thinking in circa year 2000 dollars. Nobody is making the mortgage on a house on 68k/year, and they're not starting a happy family if they have to do 20+hrs/week overtime in order to turn 25/hr into 68k/year. I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental, so it's certainly not a great wage today.

The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad.

>I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental

I made $10/hr my first job after college while living in a studio by myself in 2011 (and that was with student loan payments!), and I was barely able to get by, so how were you barely able to get by then on almost $70k a year?

[0] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/

> The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad.

The average rent nationally is $1860. In the Bay Area it’s $2650.

That’s not to say it’s bad. But the numbers are meaningless without some localized pricing or cost adjustment.

$68K/yr is plenty of money for a single person. And that's just an entry level salary, offered to someone in high school - you would have the opportunity to make far more as you gain more experience. By the time you're looking to start a family and buy a house I don't see why that's not a very promising career.

I earned that wage circa 2008 and saved half my salary.

What you say is true, but unaffordable housing is a product of too few homes, and not one of too low wages.

If there aren’t enough homes to go around, home prices will rise to a level that only the wealthier can afford.

There's enough homes.

There is a severe shortage of homes in the United States. The problem is particularly acute in high opportunity cities where the jobs are located. Here is but one of the literally hundreds of sources describing the problem:

https://www.uschamber.com/economy/the-state-of-housing-in-am...

Depends on where you live, I was making $42,000 in 2013 in the Midwest, and was fine. If my now-spouse and I had wanted to start a family then, it could have been done--obviously more doable with both parents working.

Plenty of people get by on less than six-figure household incomes--they just live in lower-cost areas of the country.

Find a spouse with a job.

The opportunity for trades-based small business creation in America would feel a lot more tangible... absent the carried interest tax loophole.

Part of the small business trades success narrative is built upon trust, trust that in youth, doing good work will create a reputation within your community that will be remembered, and form the foundation for a brand (your name) that can attract the next generation of youth to be developed, trained, etc.

If successful small businesses only exist to get acquired, so that both workers and customers suffer, that foundation of trust will struggle to persist.

Is it not also reliant on an affluent customer base that can pay high prices for services? In poorer communities are trade jobs lucrative? Obviously in places like the Bay Area they are VERY lucrative, but is that a sustainable narrative to re-tool the economy around?

> If successful small businesses only exist to get acquired

The average small business does not exist to get acquired. Only a very small number of small businesses are even interesting to private equity.

are you suggesting that eliminating carried interest would deter private equity from bothering with small businesses, and make the remaining small businesses feel like a more reliable thing for workers and employers to engage in? because they won't get shuttered unceremoniously?

if I'm understanding that correctly, I have to giggle, because there are plenty of ways for institutional money to have lower taxes than ordinary income tax rates. waaaay lower than the carried interest "loophole".

also, to me, loopholes are unintended things that no one person in government or branch of government noticed. like a couple of private letter rulings from the IRS combined with an accounting tweak in a budget appropriations bill. carried interest isn't one of those to me when it was directly passed by congress explicitly and deliberately affirmed multiple times in subsequent legislation.

but I could be misunderstanding your post entirely.

Welding isn't a job that you grow old in. It's physically taxing and exposes you to poisonous fumes and low levels of radiation from thoriated filaments. That's part of why kids are getting job offers, there needs to be a steady supply of meat.

On yt I see some people using masks with a separate air supply and filter. I guess this really needs to be more widespread.

I never went to college (high school dropout with a GED). My "formal" schooling was a 2-year, intensive EET (Technician) course, at a trade school.

It had both good and bad traits.

It was very structured and rigorous. When you graduated, you were ready to go directly into full-time work at almost any organization (the NSA and CIA used to recruit from our school).

It stressed practicum, over theory, though, so you came out more as a "doer," than a "thinker." All of my theoretical stuff, I learned on my own, after getting my first job. I did OK with that, as I was fairly quickly promoted into engineering (and was introduced to "exempt" pay).

Can’t really read the article so can’t confirm this. There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades, but doesn’t at least half the country live in a place / have parents that value the trades?

I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools.

Which means that maybe somewhat unintuitively, there are no separate paths — college for good students, trade school and military for I dunno, “non-academic/street smarts or whatever you wan to call it. — trade schools, the military and colleges are actually all competing for the same students.

The second theory is tied to the first one, but for all the marketing on how great these jobs are, there are structural / practical problems with them. From how they pay, to lack of job security to the havoc they can wreak on your body.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell --- I've always described the "Maker Movement" as "Geeks who missed shop class".

Cut my teeth on texts such as:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square

and have bought (and given away) more copies of:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-...

and

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-ge...

than I'd care to count.

Current project has me working through: the _Make: Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ books (and looking for a good book on conic sections which has optimized formulae to speed up/simplify what are currently a series of chained trigonometric functions...).

It's true that bad schools make poor neighborhoods unproductive for military recruiters. They usually don't want recruits who dropped out of high school or have low ASVAB scores. But a lot of young people in those neighborhoods are also disqualified because of poor health (particularly including obesity, asthma, and various mental conditions), history of illegal drug use, and criminal records. These social issues are all highly correlated.

> I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools.

This has been the case for a long time. For almost the entirety of the post-1973 end of US military conscription, a high school diploma has been required to enlist. From a 2008 study <http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...>: "Members of the all-volunteer [American] military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods." Also, "American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree ... Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service."

> One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades

I've got to wonder if a deeper dynamic is that you now have to be relatively "smart" to go into the trades because perhaps the teaching/curricula is lacking, making it so that more base general intelligence / self starting on abstract concepts is required to actually learn in the first place. Trade classes should be an opportunity for people who missed the verbal-communication-of-abstract-topics meta-intelligence to develop their intelligence focused around a narrower topic that they taking a liking to. But if the teacher is really uninspired, and the curriculum shies away from actually creating larger cool things or playing with different techniques, (or becomes about following the manual for procedures for poorly-documented poorly-written throwaway proprietary software) I can see it coming off as yet another "when are we going to need this" high school class.

The same politicians who push trades on America and bash colleges won't send their kids to trade schools but send them to Ivy League Universities instead. I wonder why that is.

> There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades

The conservative / GOP tactics are usually the same, and everyone else has, at conservative urging, disarmed themselves - they've abandoned postmodern understanding of communication, which the conservatives strategically embrace:

They reframe issues: College is reframed - it was that knowledge was power, the key to life, citzenship, work, and sharpening your mind, your critical thinking, with the best thinkers and ideas in history was the most powerful tool. Now college is reframed as a training in employment skills for corporations. Life was about dreams and opportunity, fulfilling your potential and your dreams; now it's about making enough to survive. They refame America: It was the land of opportunity, where by working hard anyone had the opportunity to accomplish anything, not a class-based oppressive system like Europe and elsewhere; now you stay in your socioeconomic lane, take any job you can get, and (again) survive - what does a poor kid need college for?

How you frame issues can determine the outcome of the discussion. 'Should we murder unborn babies?', 'Should we let undocumented criminals into the country?' - obviously, the answer is in how the question is framed (and often the framing is much more subtle than these easy examples). That doesn't mean there aren't merits to both sides but framing is a way to prevent discussion of the merits.

They also demonize: Everything must include a criticism of 'liberals'. Almost as a display of bona fides, you'll see that commentary must always include an attack on liberals, even if it's a critique of something the GOP/conservatives is doing. Similarly they blame 'liberals' for every problem, no matter how absurd. They blame liberals for immigration, health care, lack of green energy, etc. etc. If you read the transcripts of the leaked Signal chats, you'll see their agreed-upon talking points included, without discussion, 'blame Biden'. Biden isn't even in office and will never run again, but that's a must.

And why wouldn't they do these things? They work and nobody puts up any resistance; nobody even tries to understand their tactics or why they work and dominate the public debate. The Democrats play helpless - not a winning strategy and IMHO the reason they lose; who votes for helpless? And many liberals now embrace victimhood -- helplessness + persecution = a lack of personal responsibility for anything -- another winning strategy.

There's also a bit of this that's culture war fodder. A lot of middle-class conservatives send their kids to colleges, their kids reject their parents' conservatism, so the parents think the college has used some kind of magic liberalism ray[0] on their kids.

The reality is, of course, that their kids weren't nearly as conservative as the parents thought. But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges.

Trade schools come into play mainly as a totem to hold up against liberal colleges. They are being played up as a sort of bastion of conservative thought, mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system.

There's a kernel of truth in all of this, in that there's some trades that shouldn't have been left out of the STEM paths that colleges like to push as an obvious moneymaker. The culture war is ultimately one of mottes and baileys, where you take some truth and ride it as one's political hobby-horse. Hell, just to explain why this happens I've already had to do the same thing.

[0] In the same way that some people think tech companies can "hack our dopamine loops" or whatever

hmm... the U.S. economy might stand to benefit from adapting a school system more akin to the German model?

Specifically, offering a track similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_school

I have heard complaints that the German system is pretty class-based and forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary. The result is that upper class kids stay upper class, working class kids stay working class.

It's already been offered. The issue is automation remains cost effective because salaries remain relatively high.

$24 an hour for a fabricator out of high school is easily 20-30% higher the salary for a similar role in Germany.

US manufacturing remains competitive industries where a $20-40 an hour salary can be reasonably offered WITHOUT union guarantees. Otherwise the options were offshoring or automation. And for the kind of manufacturing roles that can afford to pay a relatively high salary, a college education is expected.

Skilled Trades increasingly require a college education, because understanding classical mechanics with calculus, being able to script in domain-specific CAD tooling, or understanding how to synthesize a compound does require at least an AP level education.

Doesn't matter because U.S. ruling class doesn't agree.

I wonder how long it will be until AI is making all the CAD/CNC models with just a check by humans. Same with the laser cutter they mentioned, water jet cutter, etc. It can't be that hard to have a model trained to take a technical drawing and generate the CAD model.

I think if I lose my current job (on a PIP), that I should be a CAD designer (entry level around $75k). But then I'm concerned that I'll be out of a job in a couple years.

For what it's worth, /r/welding seems to think this claim is complete bunk:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Welding/comments/1khd9aj/this_is_co...

If you read the threads in /r/construction that come up about this or adjacent topics ("trades are a guaranteed job, better than college") they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.

Personally, my friend is a carpenter and lives with his dad to save money. This is in Seattle so tons of construction and work to go around. He says he wishes he studied computer science in college (has an english degree).

>> they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.

Worse yet, when your body does fail or is injured, that wage tends to stop. Most tradespersons are working for very small companies, often incorporated as their own one-person company. If you cannot work, it all just stops.

One thing that makes the military different it that while the military can be very hard on your body (infantry) your wage does not stop if you are injured. A civilian carpenter with a broken leg must live on savings for a month. A military carpenter with a broken leg just won a month of desk duty without any drop in pay.

Absolutely. Some of my family owns a construction company and the career path for all employees in that company is basically to work your body while you're young and then move into management/estimating jobs before you do too much damage to your body.

The military equivalent is to work a few years as a grunt until you qualify for some sort of free higher education. Then you come back as an officer and get to boss around all those sergeants who once yelled at you. Depending on your exact path, its all generally pensionable time worked for the same company.

Indeed it’s hard to retire from the US military as an officer because there’s a big filter at Major. You generally need to reach LTC to make 20 years. Enlisting for four (or more) then going officer makes it easy to get 20 years and retire.

That is why the US armed forces has a rep for being so young. Other countries they dont kick people out so easily, but promotions are also much more difficult. Talk to a canadian or a brit. It is not unussual for them to be in 30+ years. And i've met canadian army captains who have been captains for 20 years, giving them more experiance than most american LTCs.

Despite how maligned they've become, there are still some US trade unions who take care of their members in these situations.

But, yeah, on the whole this business about the virtue of trades and Boomer Facebook making baseless claims about how much money there is to be made is ... problematic. I've been there and these folks face all sorts of risks in the near (e.g. falls, electrocution) and long (e.g. Mesothelioma, (increased risk of) Parkinson's, etc.) terms. Working conditions have improved and seemingly everyone wears hiviz nowadays (possibly performatively / to virtue signal) but corners are absolutely still cut and I've heard many jokes and seen many eyes rolled on OSHA's account.

A counter argument to this.

My old man is a tradesman, qualified as an electrician, worked and kept studying as he went and ended up as senior management.

My little brother has severe dyslexia and ADHD, couldn’t even finish school so went into trades, did some time as a diesel mechanic and qualified as a welder. Now builds race cars for a living ( Dakar ) and is a senior mechanic on track for management.

Ambition and luck plays a role but although yes both of their bodies are a little more beat up than mine, they get actively headhunted and even when they don’t have a full time job they can very easily fall back on the skills they have to fill gaps, people always need tradesmen.

Neither of them are struggling in life, other than some bad decisions.

Both of them are also on most countries critical skills list and emigration has always been an option if the local market drops off.

For those reading this, trades are not nearly as bad as is being described here, there are plenty stories of SEs working for horrible companies.

Pay differs a lot from place to place and sub-industry to subindistry. It's not uncommon to see people comment on redding claiming pay for something or another is far lower than I know of people earning in that field. To go by reddit you might conclude programmers make $40k/yr, since thats what they make in Japan or whatnot.

Not to say they they aren't correct here, but you shouldn't put too much stock in it.

Welding itself is also a pretty broad scope-- are you taking on broken trailer hitches or are you talking about underwater welding of pressure vessels? Programming robots to do automated welding? etc.

They are extrapolating the $70k figure:

"When Rios graduates next year, he plans to work as a fabricator at a local equipment maker for nuclear, recycling and other sectors, a job that pays $24 an hour, plus regular overtime and paid vacations."

This sounds like a union job, and the $70k figure sounds like towards the upper end due to hierarchy, so realistically he'll be earning maybe half of that for a couple years first.

48k at 2000 hours. Getting to 70k would need roughly 600 hours of overtime at time and a half but some of these places do double time on weekends nights holidays etc.

I’m curious what the distinction is. I assume that the article isn’t just a complete fabrication, but maybe they highlight the 20 best stories and everything else is meh.

Kinda like saying you should go to code school because you can land a 175k/year entry level job at Google. Technically true.

P-hacking is allowed and encouraged outside physical science where getting stats of medicine and building a bridge wrong have obvious side effect

News media will whittle down their data set to get a result that only matters where cost of living is high, and there’s a tiny number of the workers overall.

Leads the innumerates in rural Somewhereville, Flyover, USA, to be all confused they don’t make SF salaries in the middle of nowhere.

That’s my take.

Yea, welding offshore/underwater pays very well. Food-grade welding a bit less. Both have fairly miserable working conditions, are hard on your body, have some amount of danger, typically require lots of OT to make the claimed income, and unless you’re union, with mediocre benefits.

Great job for those who enjoy that type of work and/or want to hustle and save then move on. But any claim that it’s easy money or typicsl is just wrong.

We don’t Reddit in my household so I can’t respond directly, but there’s nothing strange about going to a welding class, picking the best student and offering them a $24/hr job with a lot of potential overtime. If you can make a clean weld they don’t care where you came from.

"We don't Reddit in my household"

Woah.

Can you explain this?

Not OP, and I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but why? Reddit now blocks many IPs (requires login/signup to see the page now). Plus the site takes a few years to load, if you don't know about old.reddit.com. I imagine many people no longer go to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc anymore because of this. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I don't have a problem with site loading at all, and I currently don't even have an account although I've had probably a dozen since the site started.

I'm asking the op in particular about what seems like maybe some kind of stance.

Reddit has about 500 million users. That's about 7500 million non-users, or 850 million English-speaking non-users. (Assuming all reddit users are english-speaking? Don't know if the site supports other languages.) Just looking at those numbers, I'm confident there's plenty of other people like me who looked at the site once or twice, found it unpleasant to use and with a low level of discourse, and never bothered actively going back; and these days stumbling upon it in web search is indeed actively unpleasant because of performance and UI issues.

How common it is to have shop classes in schools in USA?

For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects.

There are vocational schools, but they're known to be awful quality and you don't go there if you want to earn trade, but if you're an awful student. And if you aren't awful student, then you'll most likely end up as one - as your peers will most likely be :(

There are also "technikum" which is a mix of these two, but it's not for trade per se, and statistically chances you'll pass your end of school exams are smaller.

The answer is probably, unhelpfully, "it depends". I attended a fairly large high school, and we probably had a dozen shop class offerings. A much smaller school just a few miles away had no infrastructure to support any shop classes.

It's probably even more nuanced than that, though. My parents both attended very small schools in small towns, and both offered shop classes. All four schools mentioned were / are located in the Midwest, though, and none in large cities.

If I had to guess, I'd say probably the majority of schools in the US offer some form of shop class(es). But I don't believe any would necessarily be part of the standard curriculum. Generally, these classes are elective.

Our area in San Diego, CA has different public high schools have a different offering that maybe all high schools would have had in the past. They are not vocational schools, but schools that offer specialized programs for you to use during your electives (2 of your 6-7 classes you take you get to choose yourself).

For example we have a high school with a culinary program, another with an auto program, another with a guitar building program, another with a music/theater arts program. These are all academic, public schools in the same district. You are assigned the school near* to your home, but you can petition for a different school.

*there is gerrymandering here too

> For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects. There are vocational schools

The US doesn't really differentiate between Lyceums/Gymnasiums, Vocational High Schools, and Technikum.

All tracks tend to be offered at the same school, but with students given the option to opt into vocational tracks.

Furthermore, a lot of skilled trades/"blue collar" (I hate that term) jobs have become increasingly specialized, so you anyhow have to attend a Community College or even a normal College to get the skills needed to land a job.

I went to law school with a guy who grew up in a state with "normal" highschools and "technical" schools for those not earmarked for higher education. Being a big football-type guy, he was directed to the latter. His mother fought to get him back into the "normal". Had she not done so, we would never have been classmates at law school. The technical school lacked the higher-level math and language courses that are important when applying to university.

I went to maybe slightly above average high school for my area and didn't have one. But there were programs where the school partnered with community colleges and students maintaining decent grades could attend classes elsewhere. And those had shop as well as other vocational programs.

They probably sent us home with a pamphlet with information at the beginning of the year, but I don't remember.

Larger high schools have them, in the Midwest US at least. College prep is pushed pretty heavily though, other tracks are looked down upon.

A tradesman I knew said find a career that doesn't destroy your body. Some tradesmen I've met say it's best to become an inspector or move into management.

My school dropped their shop classes about 20 years ago. Costs, potential liability, and a view that they were obsolete skills without value were cited as major reasons, but even for the last 10-20 years they did still have it it was 60% of the time just a class to throw kids into that didn't have the best grades and/or were bored of class work that they could be given an easy A in and push up those kid's grade point averages to try and secure more funding.

Very common, although many of the students don't take them (none of the girls as I recall). I took 'wood shop' in 8th grade, and there were shop classes (as well as 'auto shop') at my high school.

Even if Career Technical Education (CTE) classes are offered, there is a large variation in their quality. For me, the question would be whether a graduate from a CTE program is more likely to be hired and receives higher wages (initially) than a non-CTE program completer. My 2-minute Google Scholar search hasn't found anything on the topic.

At the end of the day, a 3-course sequence in a CTE pathway (which is the CA requirements for a high school CTE certificate in California) doesn't prepare you for a career in the same way as being in journalism class prepares you to be a journalist or being in theater prepares you to be an actor. Students will most likely need to pursue some form of post-secondary training (either through a community college or on-the-job) to become somewhat competent in their field.

I mentored two FIRST robotics teams.

One was at a well-funded school with a big honors program. All of the students were smart and engaged and clever and ambitious. They designed an extremely clever, complicated robot that looked really cool on paper and was completely impractical to actually build and they did poorly overall, barely getting an extremely-stripped-down version of the design up and running, losing every match with usually no points scored.

The other was at a poorly funded school with no honors classes. The students were just as intelligent and just as hard working, but instead of AP math and physics they were taking auto shop and wood shop. And they knew how to quickly design, build, and test simple, reliable solutions that got the job done. They fared much better in competition.

Me personally, I did mechanical work for a decade before getting a CS degree and a desk job. And I'm really glad I did. Welding and machinery were a heck of a lot more fun than debugging distributed software systems, and I'm glad I spent my 20s doing the former instead of the latter.

There was a time when high-school shop and home ec was normal.

In something like a century now of obsession with higher ed, America seems to have forgotten about the concept of trade schools. Now companies hitting on the idea of recruiting out of shop class makes the a WSJ headline in 2025. LOL!

Works where archive.ph is blocked:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-high...

Text-only:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1EjI7E

The problem with skilled trades is they put you inside a very limited skill box. You're stuck monetizing that trade for decades, with very little business opportunities outside that box. Swings in the economy and your health will not neatly follow this model of one-and-done.

Non-paywalled version here: https://archive.is/mhFn0

You need 200k/yr to be comfortable in Alabama. These headlines are for older generations who think that is too much money for a young person. Meanwhile, they’d never be able to afford the homes they now live in.

There is a classic capitalist ploy, documented in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, where business owners vastly over-advertise the abundance and remuneration offered by a certain area of work. Then many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field, so supply and demand pushes down wages, benefitting the owners.

> many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field

uproot from what, though?

It's not like people disrupt their investment banking careers to become plumbers.

The alternative (perhaps a pointless college degree with debt + barista job + realtor license) is worse.

More people should go into the trades. Says the aristocrat with legacy admission kids making sure they can hire a plumber for their next remodel.

If you've got ambitions to be a small business owner trades are a fair place to land. If you don't then avoid it like the plague.

Just like the software industry!

"learn to code..it's the future"

In America 2025, there is no better path to a high income and quality of life than learning a trade, then learning how to manage other tradespeople and then owning a company for such a trade.

In the trades, if you are slightly smarter than average, have a good work ethic and an inkling of entrepreneurial drive, you will be very successful.

I would like someone to mythbust this belief as it seems like it runs off nothing but anecdotes. White collar folks seem to pull this one out as a grass is greener take on a different life path when their industry is starting to unwind.

I can't speak for all trades, but in my experience 'owning a company' and 'high quality of life' rarely go hand in hand. Owning a company is hard. It's a 24/7 job where you are managing customers, employees, accounting, etc., and you can hire people to help but ultimately it's on you if someone screws up and orders the wrong cabinets.

I'm happier working for Big Corp in an air-conditioned office.

trades are becoming the next walmart job in both pay and quality. you cant have a surplus and expect the system to be sustainable.

Do you work in the trades?

Programming used to be another skilled trade, before big tech and big money took over everything and corrupted it all.

If there's good money in the trades, what's to stop them from similarly consolidating into national mega corps like every other field? Especially once we start encouraging former tech bros and VCs in, bringing with them their former mindsets?

Skip the trade, go to a 2 year tech school and start at 60k as helpdesk and work your way up from there. I don't know why you'd bother with a trade.

I love this. This is what we need more of. My only concern is who will challenge their thinking? Who will teach them critical thinking skills? Who will give them a broader more holistic understanding of the world if not at a university?

I fear we will get ( because we need them ) many thousands more skilled workers in the trades to build more again but they’ll also be too easily bamboozled by charlatans like Trump and vote in policies that will screw us all

I don't think there's unanimous consensus that universities teach "critical thinking skills."

Isn't this backwards? People who want the broader education will naturally gravitate towards college. It's not that college actually teaches these things, it's just a magnet for people who care about them.

Most people will still be going through education with specific career goals in mind, however lamentable that is. And then they will claim they also learned critical thinking.

> Who will give them a broader more holistic understanding of the world if not at a university?

I'm going to guess the kids that are inherently interested in this will research it themselves. The ones who are not, won't. I'm one of the former.

Those who want education on subjects they are not employed in or "a broader more holistic understanding of the world" (whatever that means) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to college. College is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 13 in K-12. It has no special properties.

Ironically the assumption that a broader more holistic understanding of the world comes from a university or humanities in general is itself a rather under-examined assumption treated as sacrosanct. It seems very reverse reasoned akin to virtue ethic's notorious tendency towards narcissistic self-praise.

A broad educational basis may have virtues but it is very unlikely the only path towards it. Even putting aside how 'holistic' critical thinking tends to be held as diametrically opposed to the practical. Often straw-manning the practical as robotic or inhuman. The idea that the practical is opposed to a holistic understanding is simply not true at all. Ask anybody who took and understood Calculus for one.

The concept of the practical as intrinsically bad is a stupidity of considerable vintage, dating back to at least Ancient Greece for reasons which is of course totally unrelated to the intellectuals of the day being funded by slave owners trying to purchase self-justification from those trying to avoid physical labor. That was sarcasm by the way, just to be clear. That same diseased thought of the practical as unworthy should have been put to bed by the Industrial Revolution at least.

good for them

the world is changing.

I was raised to believe that going to college was the only right path. But later, a friend of mine dropped out and started training as a machinist—and somehow, he ended up living much more freely than most of us. He’s not what you'd call especially “smart,” but he has this intuitive sense for metal, welding, and machines.

Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories—about the machine he fixed, or how he spotted a tiny issue just by the sound it made.

That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk.

Sometimes I wonder if being truly respectable isn’t about how much you earn, but whether you feel proud of what you do.

I've been trying for a long time to understand all the anti-education, anti-science sentiment we've been seeing in the US for so long now. I think a lot of it comes from how much college is emphasized over everything else in k-12 education in the US.

My son is heading to high school next year, and in the big welcome event for incoming 9th graders every mention of post high-school life was phrased as "college and career". I tried to listen with the mindset of someone who didn't go to college, and was doing quite fine. It definitely felt like those people were being spoken down to. There were no overt statements against non-college outcomes, but the emphasis was quite clear.

I've watched this play out in my own family. A bunch of extended family members have become quite successful without any college education. When I talk to them today, decades after graduating high school, they still carry so much resentment about how they felt they were treated back then.

>> Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to ...

Well, everyone has this energy at 18. Can you do this "sweating through long manual labor shifts" for 10, 20, 30 years?

If you get hurt or just your body gives up (back pain, neck pain, arthritis or what else), you're in a much worse position as a "trade worker" than an office worker.

Not mentioning how much they'd love to replace you with machines, immigrants or younger workers. This is true in an office setting also but bureaucracy somehow finds a way to survive.

“Average” people with grit are capable of much more than lazy intelligent people.

The "immediate seeing result" is what draws me to Embedded system.

When i was a kid, i'm always fascinated with toys that my best toys is the screwdriver that i used to take apart other toys.

Now, seeing a line of code somehow make the machine break in flames still very amusing to me.

We have a real problem in the way we think about intelligence. There are so many dimensions to intelligence that having a single scalar value is very counterproductive.

Your friend seems to have a certain type of intelligence, while you and your other friends have a different type of intelligence.

Part of the current political situation is in part due to the traditionally intelligent people looking down on the rest of society.

For a functioning society we need all types of intelligence, and we need to value them all. Equally.

If you are interested, you can do both. I work for a company that produces machines that tend to get integrated in automation cells for aerospace/automotive parts manufacturers. As the field technician, it's my job to know how our machines play with everything else in that cell so I can fix issues for our customers when things break (and they will break, eventually, for a wide variety of reasons which creates a weird fragility to the whole automation system, but that's a different post).

This requires that I know what's going on mechanically _and_ at what expected behavior of the embedded systems should be (PLCs, device firmware/software packages, network security, etc).

Like you, I was pushed to go to college after high school, only to find out later that college is an industry, not an institution, so the rhetoric about not being able to get a good job without a degree was really just a sales pitch to get my lower-class parents to take out loans they could not afford so me, a veritable child at the time, could make a major decision that would set the tone for the rest of my life. It's a lot of systemically flawed Capitalistic nonsense.

In my field, we _desperately_ need people who understand (at the very least) basic electronics and mechanics, but also the software side of things. The amount of techs from other companies, companies with a much larger and more public reputation than my employers mind you, that do not seem to have a grasp on the basics is astounding and alarming. But even the competent electromechanical techs are weak on how the software or firmware functions, which is often a big key to the "wtf is wrong" puzzle.

I'm not even a coder/programmer, but I know enough to get by and make effort to learn something about programming embedded systems or software for Controls every day, and while I am still an amateur, my god, it gives me quite the edge over a lot of the other guys.

You don't have to be trapped at a desk. Mechanical aptitude can be developed, but it starts by not being afraid to take the screws out and seeing what you can just figure out. The pride you mention comes from that, but you also touched on something else; tangible results. Believe me, I have respect for devs who can create a piece of software from start to finish, but when I manage to bring a slag-crusted horrifyingly-neglected machine back to live after a catastrophic failure that had Automaker X sweating $10000 bullets, it is a real thrill, one that infuses me with great energy for days, sometimes weeks. That's why your friend likes sharing those stories!

> Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories

That's because he's only sweating through those long shifts, and not thinking through them. I bet I would have more energy to clean the house after work than he would.

Yeah I would like to do that too but I have no interest in working for $60k for the rest of my life.

>That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk.

I take it you are not a SWE then? This is a pretty ubiquitous feeling for most engineers I'd think.

I think you are discounting how smart your friend is.

Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries? Pick the right tool for the job. If you’re wrong, or don’t know how to use your tools / understand the metals, you in for some trouble.

Most programmers think too highly of themselves.

Software projects have the exact same problems as construction jobs, with the main difference liability.

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