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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

#831

Post by giantg2 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #677
specialp wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another aspect too. It completely breaks your body. Electricians get carpal tunnel worse than information workers by constantly squeezing lineman pliers, knees get shot. Your career path is work like that and hopefully before you get older, start your own company and hire younger people to do the body breaking work. But not everyone in the field will end up doing that so many end up in bad shape

And you have to go do it. I love working behind a computer. I sit in a chair. Waking up at 5am to go to a client site to do some physical labor 40+ hours a week for my entire life sounds like hell. Even if the money was incredible it would suck.

Sitting in a chair my entire life also sounds like hell and has its own risks (mostly cardiovascular related).

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

#832

Post by stakhanov »

tsss wrote: post #189

In contrast to most people here, I have actually worked outside of an office chair, for a short period of time, in a factory and also do woodworking as a hobby. The reason fewer people want to learn the trades is because it sucks. It's usually too hot or too cold, dirty (not just oil, I'm talking about spiders and bugs, nasty customer's homes and so on), loud and dusty, it's hard on your body (try standing for 8h str…

> low barrier of entry

Low barrier of entry? For trades? I've always been under the impression that software engineering is one of the lowest barriers-of-entry jobs there is, while skilled trades are pretty difficult to get into.

You can take web frontend dev bootcamp for a few weeks and probably land a job pretty quickly, if "any job at all" is the standard you're aiming for.

Similarly, you can get licensed as a bookkeeper (another "white collar" profession) by taking a course that'll take no more than a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the skilled trades frequently require apprenticeships of roundabout three years, during which time you'll make only a symbolic amount of money. If you want to get into one of those, you better do it while you're young and still living, for free, at "hotel mommy", because there's just no way you can afford it when you're a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities and financial burdens.

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

#833

Post by meetingthrower »

biofunsf wrote: post #632
meetingthrower wrote: post #360

Man, I'm in PE buying these companies and if you want to get rich in America be competent in skilled trades. If you have a little bit of management skill it is very doable. I've been offering 40 year old high school grads $30M in cash for their companies (and they would get that much again as we are doing rollups and they maintain significant equity.) What is amazing is that these guys just do this again and again. Y…

Private equity buying up all these companies is actually a huge part of the problem! IMHO. For the older folks who are selling their company, it's of course a huge boon, but for people entering the trade, it's a huge negative. In the past, when you started a trade, you could apprentice with a small, locally-owned and operated company. If you worked at it long and hard, you'd have a good chance at being able to buy th…

I would offer a bit of a different take. When you get some scale, you can start to offer real benefit packages. You have a real career path. In many of these subscale ops there is just owner and workers, in stasis.

And fundamentally in a market where the talent is tight, you HAVE to treat your people well to keep the lights on.

I truly believe there is a giant untapped value creation potential for tradesfolk. What I see is the gap is basic "management" of the business. It is really hard for "doers" to become managers and leaders. And of course, these industries are not known for leveraging technology. (I mean, if your HVAC guy used a scheduling app he'd automatically be in the top 5%!)

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

#834

Post by giantg2 »

nverno wrote: post #738
paxys wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may feel better at the time but repetitive motions in most physical jobs will eventually catch up with your body. In an office job you can exercise on your own terms and without long term chronic pain.

I don't know, when I used to work on farms, the old guys were a lot healthier than most of the people I see in tech nowadays. Although, most of that work isn't unhealthily repetitive, like jack-hammering or something, so perhaps not a great example. But, use-it-or-lose-it is a real thing.

I'd believe it. The Amish are very healthy.

https://time.com/5159857/amish-people-stay-healthy-in-old-ag...

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

#835

Post by giantg2 »

watwut wrote: post #782
nverno wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, when I used to work on farms, the old guys were a lot healthier than most of the people I see in tech nowadays. Although, most of that work isn't unhealthily repetitive, like jack-hammering or something, so perhaps not a great example. But, use-it-or-lose-it is a real thing.

Are you sure they were "more healthy" rather then "good muscle and I don't know whether they had health issues"?

There have been studies about Amish. Granted they have some other lifestyle factors involved, but it seems like this is as close as you can get.

https://time.com/5159857/amish-people-stay-healthy-in-old-ag...

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

#836

Post by meetingthrower »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #494
meetingthrower wrote: post #360

Man, I'm in PE buying these companies and if you want to get rich in America be competent in skilled trades. If you have a little bit of management skill it is very doable. I've been offering 40 year old high school grads $30M in cash for their companies (and they would get that much again as we are doing rollups and they maintain significant equity.) What is amazing is that these guys just do this again and again. Y…

How much more are these high school grads earning than you? Is it not sufficient to incentivize you to do what they do, or do you not possess the “little bit of management skill” it would take? Or is it something else? I suspect the volatility is much higher for possessing the skill to be able to “cash out” $30M+ regularly, compared to going to a nice undergrad school, getting a job at a prestigious big company, then…

Laziness on my part. I'm old and comfortable, and it takes real work for 10 years to get there. And of course it requires technical knowledge learned over those ten years!

But if I had worked as hard as I did earlier in my career at a trade business (remember - much lower risk than a startup as the market is very well known and demand omnipresent), I would be much richer now.

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

#837

Post by ClumsyPilot »

sdiacom wrote: post #439
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> managing the people who will sell their health and body as tradesmen. A minor racket. A racket? He just became a 'wealth creator'! How dare you compare a visionary entrepreneur to a pimp!

I am once again unable to tell whether this is genuine or sarcastic capitalist bootlicking. This website has destroyed my brain.

only true capitalist bootlicking is allowed here.

If you don't like the current breed of disaster capitalism, and the fact that most of your productive output belongs to someone else, you have failed in life and must be a jealous socialist.

If you are successfull and wealthy, you are even worse - Champaign socialist.

If you are actually Schumpeterian, tou are still gonna be called a socialist because they are economically illiterate.

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

#838

Post by meetingthrower »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #685
meetingthrower wrote: post #360

Man, I'm in PE buying these companies and if you want to get rich in America be competent in skilled trades. If you have a little bit of management skill it is very doable. I've been offering 40 year old high school grads $30M in cash for their companies (and they would get that much again as we are doing rollups and they maintain significant equity.) What is amazing is that these guys just do this again and again. Y…

What does this mean? So the tradespeople are all the ones with the Lambos. I’m not even sure what you’re taking about but whatever is must be a tiny minority of tradespeople. By this logic, we should tell people to skip the trades and study hard for Ivies and get jobs in investment banking because these are the people that own Islands.

I think if you looked at the data of who the $10M+ people actually are, you would see they are actually the owners of these "real" businesses.

Of course we are talking selection bias with the businesses I'm talking about (just like startups here on Y combinator!) But I would argue the overall risk is lower, and the expected value is higher if you applied the same rigor to the business.

There is no yCombinator or Harvard b school for trades. And that is what sets the ones that I see apart - they have leaders who naturally figured out how to lead, set up processes, do marketing, manage talent, etc. This is a huge gap for most high school path tradesmen as they've never "seen what good looks like," so most get stuck pretty early.

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

#840

Post by moonchrome »

RC_ITR wrote: post #418
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.

Highly doubtful, you don't just switch careers because comp suddenly rises, social status is very much associated with these decisions, maybe anecdotal but physical labor also has a stigma around it, people working in the field might not be the kind of people you want to be working with, etc.

Entire game dev industry is built in finding passionate young people, underpaying them and putting them through the grinder till they burn out. And there's no shortage of applicants.

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