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The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
811–820 of 915 posts
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#812Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You say that but the number of people I've seen go under from mainly brain work is not to be sniffed at, and once they do they're affected for years.
I mean part of that can be blamed on themselves - a lot of people seem to pressure themselves to stay busy, to work 14 hour days, to do all the things, keep up with all the things, have a day job and a side gig and passive income and contribute to open source while reading X books per week and doing meditation to try and compensate for not taking downtime.
But others can be blamed on the industry / environment; think excessive meetings so that the non-developers feel useful, forced social events, or piling on more and more responsibilities onto people (just think of how many languages, environments, frameworks, applications, etc you're expected to know at your current day job.). Under the cool names of "full-stack developer" or "DevSecOps teams".
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#813I thought about switching to the trades for a while, but the ramp to learning the technical/business/certification aspects is not smooth enough; especially for an outsider. A bunch of YouTube videos of dubious accuracy is not enough
There needs to be ramps built directly at the high school and community colleges level. It amazes me that community colleges have all these classes on excel, art, dance, music, health, languages, but generally nothing for the trades. I honestly think it would be easier to find a trustworthy, affordable class for Mongolian Throat Singing than a plumbing class.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#814Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it's a case of "the grass is always greener", but before I became a software engineer, I felt much healthier doing a physical job.
Ideal career would be a split between office and physical work. 3 days coding, 2 days carpentry etc.
I lift weights, walk, or hit some golf balls at the golf range every day during the week, about ~1h / day. Over the weekend I'll play some golf, go for a walk or squeeze in an extra workout.
It might not compensate all the sitting and typing fully but it's pretty good - I don't miss doing a day of physical labor.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#815Earlier 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…
We just need to give every high school student a print out and a website showing salary per career, years of college required, and percentage of graduates that find a job in their field.
Is this not a thing in the USA/world? Here there is a government/school system website for careers. Listing educational requirements, average salaries and high/low end ranges, how much demand there is for the career, working conditions, and often interviews with people in industry.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#816I would absolutely be up for doing a skilled trade as a side job but the problem is I'd have to do a really long course and work as an unpaid slave laborer... to learn how to stick a pipe into another pipe. All these weird trade jobs have these ridiculous requirements as if it's actually mentally challenging to learn them. If you want to shoe horses you need to do a fucking bachelor's degree equivalent in horse shoei…
> You're hammering nails into a fucking horse. Which will typically get you arrested, unless you know how to do it right. I don't know if you know anyone who knows anything about horses, but if you say 'founder' near some horses they drop over dead an instant later. Literally cheaper to set wheelbarrows of money on fire. You have to really love horses to deal with them, and even then some of them complain endlessly t…
> Which will typically get you arrested, unless you know how to do it right.
I don't think there are laws against trying to shoe your own horse and doing it badly if that's what you mean.
I'm a horse owner who works as a software engineer for a living, and I'm so enraged by how much I have to pay the farrier and other horse-related tradespeople that it has very seriously crossed my mind, many times, to take the other side of the trade and give up software engineering to become a farrier.
It's the horse owners who are burning money, not the professionals.
I used to live in Munich, which is an insanely expensive city to live in (with only mildly higher income levels than the rest of Germany), and it has a shortage of farriers. Farriers commute hundreds of kilometers to work here, and still horse owners struggle to find them. If you set up shop there as a farrier, your books will be full in no time. Marketing & Sales? Screw that. Horse people all talk amongst each other and when there's a new farrier in town, word gets around like wildfire. Admin overhead? Nope! The way it used to work in my old stables, one of the horse owners would painstakingly coordinate timeslots with ten other horse owners in the same stable to keep a farrier busy for a day. All they have to do is show up, shoe 10 horses (they don't even have to do that if they have apprentices), and take home maybe €2000 in revenue for a day's work.
That revenue is all cash, of course. Report some of it for income tax (how much is basically up to you), and use the rest in the "informal economy" paying cash to other tradespeople to work on your house on weekends (who, in turn, do the same). If the ministry of finance knocks on your door, asking about this house that you suddenly own debt-free that seemed to have come out of nowhere, you've just been busy at work there by yourself, they can't prove otherwise.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#817Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
How can you be so capable Walter, yet so oblivious to the fact that people who make their money with their bodies end up wearing that body out well before their life is over?
I'm reading his comments in this thread with increasing incredulity.
An intelligent man lacking empathy and the ability to put themselves in someone else's shoes.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#818I was working for an aerospace manufacturer for a while. We were getting 40/50 year old apprentices for the trades, guys coming off the production floor. Electricians, millwrights, CNC machinists... we couldn't find enough of them. I get it. Nobody wants to stand in front of a machine (or 5-6 machines) for 10 hours a day. Nobody wants to be in a 90 degree factory all day. Nobody wants to work 2nd or 3rd shifts. The p…
It is interesting that, in a modern machine shop, these are skilled roles. Good millwrights are worth their weight in gold. A CNC machinist has to have a huge range of skills, from understanding tolerances to programming (CAD, toolpaths, gcode).
These are not assembly line skills. If the work environment is so shit they leave in days I would take a guess that the problem is more than the low pay.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#819Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way you guarantee job stability would probably be to pay union members a salary even when they're temporarily not needed right? Then you pay this salary out using union dues. Union dues end up garnishing take-home wages which removes the incentive to specialize. ^ That was how I was imagining it. Am I wrong in thinking this way? Or is the argument that the urge to specialize is independent of wage?
A union negotiates salaries and work conditions both. Even with union dues your salary will be higher and work conditions so much better. Let's look at ATC as an example: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/a... > Their work can be stressful because maximum concentration is required at all times. Night, weekend, and rotating shifts are common. Well, maybe there could be better agreements than r…
I'm not talking about a generic "unions are good" argument. I know why unions exist, the history behind them throughout much of the West, their ties to worker parties and socialism etc. I'm specifically wondering what about unionizing (or in this case, re-unionizing) makes it more palatable for these highly specialized roles to exist. Is your argument then that working conditions for folks like HVAC techs are poor enough that unions are necessary to negotiate for better working conditions before people want to become HVAC techs?
Generally, the more specialized labor is, the higher wage and benefits they can demand in a capitalist labor market. Supply and demand. For less skilled labor like general electricians I can understand the role of the union in negotiating for wages, benefits, and safety standards. For highly skilled labor like an HVAC tech, I don't see it.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#820Are there any skilled trades that won't break your body?
I can see that some trade jobs in Europe are paid even more than software engineering, however I don't want to end up with a broken back.
Thanks!