371–380 of 915 posts
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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.
i moved into someones spare room
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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…
Yeah I'm 10 years older than you and never had any thought that "any degree will do". Although perhaps I'm old enough to see that this was legitimate thinking in my predecessors. There was a time when just completing college was fairly uncommon and acted as a class signifier. I believe having a degree, any degree, would have made you an officer automatically in the military (and still does?) and would have opened the…
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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…
>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 This makes it sound like a degree is worth less today than it was in the past, which is not true. The income and wealth gap between college degree holders and non-degree holders is higher than at any point in history, and it grows bigger very year. Most degrees have an unemployment rate of about 5-6%.…
The earlier comment about competent plumbers making more than doctors in Slovenia; I can believe that.
It's the white collar compensation inversion.
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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…
You made it fine, and others who try and hitchhike sometimes end up robbed, kidnapped, or worse. Don't blame an entire generation for not doing something that you know for a fact comes with a ton of risk.
I would love some of the journalists who write these article to volunteer to take these jobs by quitting and becoming plumbers. Why don’t they do it? Because sitting in a nice cozy chair and having opinions backed by nothing is much higher social status. It’s like this constant gas lighting from elite sources: “Hey can’t buy a house? How about being knee deep in toilets all day and having zero respect in society.”
The government and our society has completely failed to "incentivize it" even as it was obviously necessary to do so.
Yet, "try telling that to Gen Z." Pfft.. "try telling that to Congress."
Tradespeople will be the new software engineers in the late 2020s through 2030s. Enough that I'm considering leaving my cushy FAANG engineering manager job to become an electrician. On top of the huge supply shortage, consider that the majority of the U.S. housing stock was built during the Baby Boom suburbanization from 1950-1970, and that the average lifespan of a house's internal systems (plumbing, electrical) is…
You are going to leave your mid 6 figure job to do a physically demanding mid 5 figure job? Good luck!
I got into software engineering when it was a high-5-figure to low-6-figure job. At the time, conventional wisdom was that the money was in finance, law, or medicine. Medicine has held up well, but wages in finance and law have fallen well below what software engineers make. Hell, lawyers frequently make less than plumbers do now, hence this joke:
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> It isn't a bad career But there is a finite end to the career - when your body gives out. That's the biggest problem with the trades, you're selling your health and body. And eventually the body parts will wear out, on a schedule decided as much by genetics as how you live.
I'm not sure how your body parts wear out. Football players ruin their bodies through accumulated injuries, not wearing their bodies out. Do athletes wear their bodies out? I've never heard of that. How does doing plumbing/electricioning wear your body out?
Not to mention major injuries are still a big risk factor. Broken fingers, destroyed shoulder joints, missing fingernails, deep burns, scarred cuts, etc. Often never seen by a doc too and never healing properly.
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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…
As someone who went to school for English in 2000, I can say that while those jokes existed the context here is misunderstood, they were told by business majors about the liberal arts, or anything academic. Heck in 2000 a CS degree wasn't positioned as that much more valuable than an English degree, and if you looked at the preceding decade you'd see that was statistically true. The change for the current generation…
I went to school in 2001 and computer science was one of the hottest fields around by that time, significantly more so than a BA in English. The Georgia institute of technology (Gatech), my alma mater, had a highly competitive computer science career path.
In fact the general advice was that if you really wanted to major in English that it was better to pursue a degree in an adjacent field such as communications so you could more easily transition into journalism, etc.
STEM (doctors, scientists, engineers, etc.) has almost always been a safer career path than liberal arts, assuming you're cut out for it.
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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.
https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=4c142ca25712bc94&from=se...
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This is why Unions exist, no? Personally I sometimes wonder if I'd have enjoyed plumbing water more than plumbing code as I'd be meeting more people face to face, physically active, and it can get surprisingly complex (Berkeley, I think, offers a postgrad cert in plumbing buildings like sky scrapers which I saw advertised the other day)
Tech people always say this but forget that being a plumber means being on their knees wading thru poop water and likely being unable to work when you reach a certain, fairly young age. I get it, trades are important, but let's not glamorize them.