261–270 of 915 posts
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This is the reality of all jobs where you work for someone else. You're selling your time, and your body to someone else.
Sure, but the wear-and-tear on your brain from an office job will always be significantly lower (and thus remain a viable job for much longer) than a job in the figurative or literal trenches.
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Many adults were told college was the only way to go. Those who went through college and those who didn't. Doesn't matter the debt. It's always better. Except it's not. First, society is going to have too few skilled trades folks in the coming years due to people retiring and not being replaced. Second, a lot of college degrees can't get someone a good job. I remember someone telling me they had a business degree and…
A business degree makes the candidate over-qualified for managing a mall store is the likely reason. They are afraid of the employee using the position as a stepping stone to a higher paying, higher status job.
It was considered the fallback degree when I went to college 20 years ago, since anyone could graduate with it with minimal effort.
"We need more tradespeople" seems to be an evergreen news article. My brother in law is an electrician. He is paid alright, enough to live on. But there are HUGE downsides. He does not receive health insurance. He does not get paid vacation. In order to match decent white-collar pay, he needs to work overtime. His company pushes hard to get jobs finished fast, causing people to cut safety corners. Many of his coworke…
Every time I employ a tradesman to fix something around here, I get an astonishingly high bill.
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Yeah it's weird right, how can we make homes and rent cheaper without more supply of homes?
i think that , if land and materials were cheap, genz or genX or any gen would learn to build their own homes. We ve actually been doing that for thousands of years
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Every time I employ a tradesman to fix something around here, I get an astonishingly high bill.
The company sending you a high bill doesn't automatically mean the guy who fixed your house gets paid well though, does it?
20 years ago, the going rate for installing a socket in an existing wired and ready to go junction box was $50. It's about a 5 minute job. I know it's about 5 minutes because I've done a lot of them myself.
I'm sure prices have gone up a lot in the last couple decades.
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> First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. Something strange is happening here that I can't quite understand. Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that are way older than me and I first started college in 1999. Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me. Of course I knew that some maj…
Same. Early '90s. Nobody was telling us "any degree will do". They were saying "You should go to college, and if you do , major in computer science, engineering, pre-med, biotech, (sometimes) business, and so on." I remember that as a pretty consistent message during high school career guidance talks and through freshman and sophomore years in college.
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Yes! I grew up in California and my dad was a tradesperson. The union is the only reason my siblings and I had health insurance growing up. He never got any vacation time though, insurance was the main benefit of the union I think. Unfortunately, other states in the US have much weaker unions or none at all, especially in the south.
I am English but moved to the Bay Area a few years back and became friends with a union electrician from Alabama so this conversation comes up a little - it sounded like unions are supported in the south even if they look a little different. However I’m not American and am not certain about that at all :)
Then there was that famous failed attempt at unionizing the Amazon warehouse in Alabama? I think? Yeah there was a lot of shady stuff going down but it just does not look good among all the other failures.
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By imaginative, do you mean restrictive?
I assume the opposite. like other sectors in the US economy (MDs), its likely we're going to have to keep importing people to take care of us since we're all focussed on winning and don't have time to wash our own socks or bend our own conduit.
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I'm a millennial. First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. So everyone went and got a college degree, and since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job. And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless. Then we were told to go into STEM. So lots of peop…
> First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. Something strange is happening here that I can't quite understand. Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that are way older than me and I first started college in 1999. Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me. Of course I knew that some maj…
Now it's just too common for any old degree to matter. I think perhaps for Ivy League this strategy still works.