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The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

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Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. You cherry-picked that single report, which was based on 76 turbotax returns. I suspect their data is wrong or corrupted, because making $160k as a journeyman lineman is only achievable with a decade experience and a truckload of overtime. Look around a bit further, or talk to actual linemen or unions, and you'll see the average salary for a lineman is about a hundred thousand dollars a year less than th…

Read some Reddit posts where people ask linemen how much they make. People reply with over $200k.

Have you considered that they may not be telling the truth?

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a similar disconnect in expectations of outcomes. The same days when people "wanted" overtime were the days where people expected to get ahead by busting their asses; sure, you could work short hours, play with your kids, have time to develop a hobby, but then you wouldn't become wealthy. That option is still there today, to work only enough to sustain oneself at a lowered standard. But it seems that there is…

> ass-busting outcomes without the busting of the ass. Perhaps. But one only needs to look up to the original post to see that is not what we're talking about here. Busting of the ass for $25-30/hr plus overtime...not exactly getting wealthy here.

I don't know where GP's old employer was located, but it sounds like it's in a low cost-of-living area, the kind where homes can be had for under $100k. Earn $50-60k a year, pay off your house in maybe ten years instead of thirty, save a little each month and invest and let it compound over time; at the end you could have enough for a comfortable retirement and maybe even have some left over to hand down to your children.

It's not "fly to Paris on a whim"-level wealthy, but it sounds like a life well lived to me. What is your definition of wealthy?

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#333
post #302
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The target worker in this case is people in Gen z? They're young out of school and own nothing. It doesn't cost anything to move in that case. I moved across the country with a suit case. My only cost was the plane ticket

So that didn't cost you nothing then. Then what did you do when you got off the plane? Presumably you paid a security deposit for an apartment and didn't just camp on BLM land. For someone with no credit history, a landlord might ask for 4 months rent as a deposit these days.

When I was working shit jobs for minimum wage in Washington I hitchhiked to North Dakota's oil rush and slept in a train yard. It literally cost me nothing.

When an able bodied, single, mentally competent and healthy young person says they don't have enough money to move across country it is actually code for "I have no initiative so I will sit and cry like a pathetic child." Meanwhile people are successfully walking across the Darien gap and the Sonoran desert with entire families to find success.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#334
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a contract to sell parts then your incentive to give higher salary would also be greater, given contracts would have penalties for failure to deliver. The companies are apparently in equilibrium with this situation, so either shortsighted in management or complain because effectively they want to pay less than they currently do.

It's not the pay that's the problem. if it was, people that work at McDonald's or Walmart would be beating our door down to double their salary

McDonald's in my small 5k population town in Montana (which has a bit of a reputation for shit wages) was advertising $20/hr (might be $19 and I'm mentally rounding up) last summer including paid leave. McDonalds is nearly to your starting pay. The market has adjusted.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ass-busting outcomes without the busting of the ass. Perhaps. But one only needs to look up to the original post to see that is not what we're talking about here. Busting of the ass for $25-30/hr plus overtime...not exactly getting wealthy here.

I don't know where GP's old employer was located, but it sounds like it's in a low cost-of-living area, the kind where homes can be had for under $100k. Earn $50-60k a year, pay off your house in maybe ten years instead of thirty, save a little each month and invest and let it compound over time; at the end you could have enough for a comfortable retirement and maybe even have some left over to hand down to your chil…

Certainly nobody can reasonably conclude that "working long hours to live a basic life in an extremely low cost of living area" is "wealthy".

We can all agree that we have different definitions of wealthy. But I think we can also all agree that your description of that life, which is maybe "well-lived", is not one of wealth in the context of this discussion. It is certainly not an "ass-busting outcome".

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#336
post #136
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, tradespeople will be replaced with lego buildings, the same way that furniture makers were replaced with ikea

Will that happen faster than the shift of AI into knowledge work? Because the current trajectory has robots taking our "manipulate bits" jobs far faster than our "move atoms" ones.

Who knows. On the one hand there have been attempts to get rid of the "manipulates bits" people forever, GUI/Drag and Drop code editors, outsourcing etc. and it always comes back to the edge cases never working and every projecting having tons of edge cases. Maybe this will finally be the time or maybe the AI still can't handle the edge cases. Seeing as how the market is slowly walking away from self driving promises(probably due to the edge cases) maybe we aren't there yet.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The electrician is not charging to do a 5 minute job. They do not know that when they accept the job over the phone. They are charging for their time to drive to and from you, the possibility that the job is more involved than described, and the liability from doing the job. And the opportunity cost of not accepting a different job due to your job.

That's the price I was quoted to do the whole house, not one socket. $50 per outlet. If I hired one to come out and do one socket, I'd be sure to get a $200 site visit charge added on.

This is what a contractor does when he doesn't want the job because it's basically too small and would be more of an annoyance than anything worth doing. Bid an outrageous amount and then if the client says "yes" at least you're making some money.

He's probably got a backlog of large jobs he can make more money on. So if he's going to come out and do outlet installation on one house, he's going to bid an amount that is worth delaying other work.

For small/simple household jobs, you should call a handyman not a trade contractor.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#338

"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…

Is this more of a US issue? I'm ex tradesman and know a lot of tradespeople in my part of the world and they're often some of the best off and fittest people I know. Being on your feet all day and moving around seems to be good for the human body rather than sitting behind a desk for 8 hours which we now is incredibly bad for you.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely easy to clear more than 25-30 an hour waiting tables in a lot of places.

The places where you can easily clear more than $25-30 an hour as a waiter are also places with high cost of living and expensive housing. As a counterexample, in my area (a midsize city in a low cost-of-living state), restaurants universally suffered from sharp labor shortages last year. $25-30 an hour would let you live comfortably here, meaning they should have had a lot of applicants; therefore the money just was…

My wife was a waitress for years (but not in the last decade or so). A four hour shift at Sizzler (yes, the stake house that everyone loves to hate) would get her about $25/hr on average easily. A decade ago. In a small town in the Inland Empire of SoCal, amongst the lowest cost of living in California.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#340
I remember back when I was 17 in 2004, I applied for an apprenticeship to work at Jaguar-Land Rover as an Electrical Engineering Technician. I turned up to the interview to be told that there were 2 welding apprenticeships left and those would be filled from the 150+ candidates that turned up.

Without an apprenticeship you couldn't study a trade at college. You couldn't get an apprenticeship unless you knew someone that worked at the company or were highly qualified; enough to get into university. That's what I ended up doing. Studying CS.

Even if you were lucky enough to get one, they could legally pay you far less than the National Min Wage which wasn't enough to live for most people and is still the case today [0].

[0] - https://www.acas.org.uk/national-minimum-wage-entitlement

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