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A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

bloomberg.com

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Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#41

Post by AndrewKemendo »

gorkonsine wrote: post #28
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I want people who work for me to retire in their 50s and own their own boats,” she says. God that sounds terrible anyway. Do that many people want to retire - literally have nothing greater than themselves that requires their input on a daily basis - and go sit on a boat? What a waste.

>God that sounds terrible anyway. Do that many people want to retire - literally have nothing greater than themselves that requires their input on a daily basis - and go sit on a boat? What a waste. I do! Not necessarily a boat, though; I'd rather have a nice house in the woods, and spend a lot of time traveling the world. But you seem to think it's a "waste" if someone doesn't want to spend their whole life working.…

Who said anything about working in an office?

Out of all the HN readership, I'd guess that less than 5% actually does anything that's lasting and useful to society.

I'd put it at closer to 1% - and that's the point. You have the causation backward though. If the purported goal is this mundane, hedonistic "retirement," then nobody will ever do anything lasting and useful because you can find an easy niche to fall into that lets you maximize your "leisure time."

Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#42

Post by AndrewKemendo »

RealityNow wrote: post #31
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I want people who work for me to retire in their 50s and own their own boats,” she says. God that sounds terrible anyway. Do that many people want to retire - literally have nothing greater than themselves that requires their input on a daily basis - and go sit on a boat? What a waste.

Retirement = freedom. I don't know about you, but I want the freedom to not have to work for anybody else.

No, Power & Wealth = Freedom. The freedom to act as you want and to prevent others from acting on you.

Retirement means you have taken yourself out of the power dynamic and limited your wealth potential.

Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#43

Post by AndrewKemendo »

cm2012 wrote: post #36
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I want people who work for me to retire in their 50s and own their own boats,” she says. God that sounds terrible anyway. Do that many people want to retire - literally have nothing greater than themselves that requires their input on a daily basis - and go sit on a boat? What a waste.

I am a succesful, ambitious person by any measure and would do nothing but chill on a boat all day if I could.

That sounds like the antithesis of ambition. I think you need some self reflection.

Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#44

Post by thephyber »

sgt101 wrote: post #33
fuzzybeard wrote: post #5

> “You can go to college and learn the theology of the Roman Empire,” says Kleis, who just completed a three-day training program at 84 Lumber’s rural Pennsylvania headquarters. “You learn all this ridiculous nonsense, and when you get out, what are you applying that to? I know how to frame a house.” This is so incredibly vapid and such a poor argument to make in favor of what is otherwise a valid case being made by…

Yes, a knowledge of history is hugely valuable in understanding what's happening in the world.

I don't think that's what the parent was trying to convey.

The quote is a strawman fallacy and it's comparing apples-to-oranges. It's pretty clear that the kid was trying to compare a 4-year liberal arts degree to a 3-day course (or a series of courses) in management that only applies to lumber/construction.

It's probably not a bad deal to get paid $40k a year to learn to be a manager in construction, but your job prospects are far narrower than with a 4-year liberal arts degree and I can't imagine 84 Lumber got to be a $2billion without attacking conditions to their training programs (eg. you are liable to pay back some formula of your training expenses if you don't complete training and work for the company for some set amount of time).

Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#45

Post by cm2012 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #43
cm2012 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a succesful, ambitious person by any measure and would do nothing but chill on a boat all day if I could.

That sounds like the antithesis of ambition. I think you need some self reflection.

I own a consulting firm and make probably top 5% of income for my age bracket. I'm just ambitious to do well to get freedom faster.

Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#46

Post by gorkonsine »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #41
gorkonsine wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>God that sounds terrible anyway. Do that many people want to retire - literally have nothing greater than themselves that requires their input on a daily basis - and go sit on a boat? What a waste. I do! Not necessarily a boat, though; I'd rather have a nice house in the woods, and spend a lot of time traveling the world. But you seem to think it's a "waste" if someone doesn't want to spend their whole life working.…

Who said anything about working in an office? Out of all the HN readership, I'd guess that less than 5% actually does anything that's lasting and useful to society. I'd put it at closer to 1% - and that's the point. You have the causation backward though. If the purported goal is this mundane, hedonistic "retirement," then nobody will ever do anything lasting and useful because you can find an easy niche to fall into…

>Who said anything about working in an office?

You said before: "Do that many people want to retire - literally have nothing greater than themselves that requires their input on a daily basis"

What else would people be doing if they don't retire, than working? And working means having to deal with all the crap that goes along with working: the open-plan office, meetings, the daily stand-up, office politics, etc. Why would anyone sane want to put up with this crap if they can afford not to? I sure wouldn't.

>I'd put it at closer to 1%

Yeah, I was being charitable.

>If the purported goal is this mundane, hedonistic "retirement," then nobody will ever do anything lasting and useful because you can find an easy niche to fall into that lets you maximize your "leisure time."

Yeah, but I don't see any alternative. Sure, I'd like to spend some of my time working on something really useful to humanity, and in fact that's one reason I got into engineering. The reality has been entirely different; nothing I've worked on has been important at all, and very little has even gotten any use. Most stuff just goes nowhere, gets canceled, etc. It's not like I can just go pick exactly what I want to work on. Notice how many applications NASA gets for the astronaut program, and how few of them are accepted. And even if I could pick some great project to work on, I don't want to do it if I have to work in an open-plan office, and I don't see office environments ever becoming a place where I'd be really excited to go every day. (i.e. cubicles were better than today's open-plan offices, but still pretty miserable.)

So it's pretty simple: if I can afford to not work, I'd rather just do that than to put up with the annoyances that are unavoidable at work. If that means nobody ever does anything lasting or useful, then so be it.

Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#47

Post by dang »

fern12 wrote: post #37
dang wrote: post #10

We have replaced the article's title with a representative phrase from its body in the hope of saving this thread from the dreaded title fever.

Thanks, this is my first case of title fever. Hoping to develop some immunity.

Heh. It's actually fun to find just the right phrase embedded in the text, that can be swapped in as an HN title—it's like mushroom hunting. There almost always is something suitable, but this time it was a perfect specimen, down to punctuation.

Of course we only need to do this when the original title is baity or misleading (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but we've learned that when it is necessary, it's far better to take language from the article itself than to make up one's own. If you find the right phrase, ideally you don't even to change a word. The only thing I did after pasting the above was s/a/A/.

Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#48

Post by gorkonsine »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #42
RealityNow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retirement = freedom. I don't know about you, but I want the freedom to not have to work for anybody else.

No, Power & Wealth = Freedom. The freedom to act as you want and to prevent others from acting on you. Retirement means you have taken yourself out of the power dynamic and limited your wealth potential.

What exactly is the point of having wealth if you have to put up with the same ol' rat race?

Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#49

Post by thephyber »

micaksica wrote: post #8

While this is a clickbait article, it's probably worth many high schoolers recognizing that compensation is simply unevenly distributed. There's an increasing realization that going to college does not give you a fast track to FTE status in many industries anymore, and there needs to be a better understanding of the fact that the job market is, well, a market, and salaries will adjust based upon the supply of that ma…

> it's probably worth many high schoolers recognizing that compensation is simply unevenly distributed.

As are large lottery jackpots, but Americans are playing them in record numbers. I'd like to think that most people are capable of seeing this kind of sales technique for what it is, but it seems to me that people are largely swayed by persuasion techniques and far less so by cold, rational calculation.

Re: A labor market conundrum: Skilled and high-paying blue-collar jobs go unfilled

#50

Post by afuchs »

zucchini_head wrote: post #21

I have a little story about this kind of thing, where doing something rather simple and low-skill can make an absolute fortune. One night I was talking to an older friend of a friend, 50+, around a year ago now. We were talking about what we did for a living and what we got paid. We started off with what he did: He's a bricklayer, nothing more, and told me that they get paid per brick they lay. It's something like £4…

> I asked, as any sane person would, something along the lines of "why isn't everyone and his dog laying bricks?". And the reply was very intriguing. He said essentially that younger people these days (my age) don't want to lay bricks every day now, or don't have the stamina. They want to go on their phones and become world-famous and important and work on new gizmos and apps every day and be looked at by everyone and be payed attention to, etc, etc.

This sounds too familiar, like an employer talking about how they can't find anyone while plenty of unemployed or underemployed workers are willing to do the job.

There are plenty of people out there willing to this type of work, especially if the pay is that good.

Where are these jobs, and how does one get them?

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