The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by brianwawok » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:08 PM UTC

eddsh1994 wrote: post #251

peruvian wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have done far worse than wade through poop water on my knees when I worked as a teenager on a paintball site / as a rifleman in the army! But to each their own :)

Wading through poorly made npm packages with no docs is not that far from literal poop water. Maybe harder to wash off in a shower.

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

#412

Post by quercusa » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:08 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #117

mfer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the case for all trades people. It might be a bad area or a bad employer. I've know trades folks who are electricians, plumbers, carpenters, work in road construction, etc. They typically work reasonable hours, have medical, and are paid at or above the median income for where they live. They didn't rack up debt getting into this either. This is not a bad deal for many people.

There's a semi-retired craftsman I watch regularly on youtube - Essential Craftsman. Almost all long-term success stories in the trades which he tells directly or gets from his friends involve transitioning from a tradesman to an employer. You're selling your health and body as a tradesman. If you can make the transition to running a trades business, then you're selling your brainpower more than your body. Success st…

Essential Craftsman is a great watch - highly recommended.

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

#413

Post by roflyear » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:09 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #364

WalterBright wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sitting in a chair all day is not good for your health long term.

No one is forced to sit. For example, sit stand desks, and waking breaks.

They're forced to sit in many offices.

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

#414

Post by bruceb » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:09 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #119

bruceb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges. One assumes there is a relatively fixed supply of plumbing problems. Software in the last 30+ years has created new industries which require more software people.

> One assumes there is a relatively fixed supply of plumbing problems. The volume of plumbing problems is going to increase at least linearly with the housing supply, which (theoretically) increases more-or-less linearly with population. Plus, people move around, so there will be concentrations of problems, and those concentrations will move with the population. That doesn't account for how technology and building co…

On the other hand we now have waterless urinals. Maybe plumbing tech and equipment costs have eliminated some jobs and made some jobs less skilled as it cheaper just to replace than do repairs that take knowledge.

Software jobs are many X what they were 30 years ago, while I doubt plumbing jobs have change that much above what they were relative to the population 30 years ago.

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

#415

Post by dinkumthinkum » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:09 PM UTC

welshwelsh wrote: post #233

joecot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.…

This will upset a lot if people buy there are also a lot of college degreed unemployed or minimum wage earning young people that don’t take their careers seriously. The stories of PhD baristas or whatever are nonplussing.

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

#416

Post by radiator » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:09 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #43

nostrademons wrote: post #24

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…

Tradespeople will definitely not be making 300k+ off a few years of experience five years from now.

Tangential, but inflation is so high, we could all be earning millions by the end of the decade.

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

#417

Post by el_benhameen » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:09 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #361

dionidium wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me. I certainly knew people in ~2000 who were going to college to study things like psychology, who felt the abstract skills of 'learning to learn', writing, reasoning with a bit of statistics and spreadsheet operation would help them get jobs like marketing, sales, analysts, strategic consulting, HR etc.…

I dunno, I studied psychology at a good-but-not-great university and knew many psychology majors. I eventually Learned to Code (TM), but it seems that plenty of my peers leveraged those soft skills you mentioned to get pretty decent career-oriented jobs in the fields you mentioned. I would probably do things differently with the benefit of hindsight, but I have no doubt that the soft skills were a benefit to my peers, and even to me in my tech career.

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

#418

Post by RC_ITR » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:11 PM UTC

Avshalom wrote: post #36

A lot of these threads devolve into "have you tried paying more" but I'd also like to highlight "have you actually tried telling Gen Z that". I'm 35, from basically as early as I can remember until sophmore year of college I was told constantly by every adult (and I mean every adult not just the ones that had degrees) in my life to go to college, get a degree, any degree. So yeah I went to college. It was aggressivel…

>A lot of these threads devolve into "have you tried paying more" but I'd also like to highlight "have you actually tried telling Gen Z that".

Trust me, once the all-in comp/lifestyle of a welder becomes better than say a paralegal, you won't need to tell anybody anything, they'll find you.

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

#419

Post by citizenkeen » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:13 PM UTC

throwaway675309 wrote: post #378

threetonesun wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? I'm not sure where you pulled this concept of that English vs computer science were in anyway comparable in terms of overall pay even in the early 2000s but you might want to cite your sources. 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 compe…

I remember seeing something in the late 90s / early 2000s (when I was in college) that broke down the incomes of liberal arts majors who went to law school and those who didn't. It should have convinced me to switch to STEM, but all it did was convince me to go to law school.

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

#420

Post by Raidion » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:16 PM UTC

pleb_nz wrote: post #345

dimator wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Older generation complains about newer generation's work ethic and goals, news at 11. Seriously, this has been done since forever, and it's such a tired trope. And why the hell shouldn't they want to be influencers? They're responding to the world they've been handed. Why is that different than "I want to be an NBA player", or rock and roll singer before that, or baseball player before that? Gen Z will be just fine,…

Generations isnt even real. People change year on year little by little not once in 20 years. It's a gradual shift not some shift that happens new years eve one year.

It's a gradual shift that's no so gradual when looking at the block of population. Gen X are those that didn't have any digital connectivity while growing up. Millennials grew up connected through text/chat/email/very early social media, but without being constantly connected to the internet. Gen Z has grown up being connected and with information and entertainment available the time.

Generations share a "core" of experiences that happen during some of the most impactful years of their lives. First geopolitical event I remember was 9/11. For some it was the Great Recession or COVID. Those big events end up exerting a lot of influence on age groups.

I think Generations can be overused in the sense that it's used like a monolith when it's not. The clickbaity "Generation Z doesn't want to work" is actually the less clickbaity "Many in Generation Z find working a less attractive option because of these specific shared experience/values..."