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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

#741

Post by mapt »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #727
AlwaysRock wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if maybe modern bodies aren’t built for manual labor? I’d love to talk with any of the millions of voluntary and involuntary manual laborers from the past 200 years and learn about how they made it through their lifetimes working in fields and factories in stress positions under substandard conditions. To be honest, I guess we could just interact with and ask present day laborers across the globe cranking ou…

All the time at work I wonder if it's a novel modern expectation that aging not contain an accumulation of progressive injuries leading to everpresent chronic pain.

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

#742

Post by SoftTalker »

UncleMeat wrote: post #594
SoftTalker wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New home/residential wiring jobs are basically the entry point for electricians. It's about as mindless and simple as it gets. I'm not sure what the licensing requirements are but those are the sorts of jobs that an electrical contractor puts their new/junior people on.

That's where all the jobs have been in the last five years in his area. His teams are also doing commercial wiring as well, but new builds dominate the work. And they are supposed to complete jobs fast - even if the work is simple doing it fast is not easy. And so what? "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles" is a very different narrative than what i…

> "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles"

Everyone I know in the trades "put in their dues" with at least 10 years of working for someone else, doing the shit jobs, working outside in the rain, in the mud, in the heat, in crawlspaces, in attics, etc.

The smart, driven ones learn all they can, advance, build relationships and reputation, and start their own businesses. The lazy or dumb ones continue to do the crap jobs for their entire career.

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

#743

Post by mapt »

acdha wrote: post #587
dnissley wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they even know? Assuming they keep quiet about it

This part: > Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business. You can’t do a good business without leaving visible traces - permits, customers, suppliers, etc. all provide ways for information to leak. If his employer is exploitative, he has above average odds of correctly fearing retribution and depending on the area that could mean unemployment. It’s not exactly uncommon for companies to…

> depending on the area that could mean unemployment

This is the key reason why for most jobs, small town America is flyover country, an economically inefficient, exploitative, broken system. Without a large labor & employment market within easy commuting distance, your skills aren't portable if you get fired, and your boss can't readily find a replacement, so most employment relationships end up in a reluctant, often abusive state from one or the other.

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

#744

Post by jdkee »

UncleMeat wrote: post #33

"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…

That is why we have the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

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

#745

Post by Dalewyn »

rootusrootus wrote: post #605
anonreeeeplor wrote: post #348

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.”

> zero respect in society Is that really how you see it? I've never felt that way about the contractors coming to do work at my house. On the contrary, after I fork over a thousand bucks a day (minimum) for their expert work, I'm wondering if they're in fact a bit higher in the social hierarchy than I am. I feel a little self-conscious sometimes admitting that I move bits around on a screen for a living and have to h…

There is a very real fact of the matter that society can function without programmers, but society can't function without carpenters and other such craftsmen of the trades.

In fact, the vast majority of occupations today are ones society could do without as far as hard requirements are concerned. So long as there are the farmers and the trades, society will work just fine; everything additional is a luxury.

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

#746

Post by taneq »

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.

This is why I like automation (actual robots, not scripting and AutoHotKey stuff). You start out in the field doing sparky things (so you get some exercise, you get to travel, and you get first hand experience of a range of industrial stuff) and then if you do the job right, by the end you're sitting in an airconditioned office watching the machine run itself.

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

#747

Post by taneq »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #727
AlwaysRock wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if maybe modern bodies aren’t built for manual labor? I’d love to talk with any of the millions of voluntary and involuntary manual laborers from the past 200 years and learn about how they made it through their lifetimes working in fields and factories in stress positions under substandard conditions. To be honest, I guess we could just interact with and ask present day laborers across the globe cranking ou…

Human bodies aren't built for decades of high intensity repetitive manual labour. They're built for lounging around and running, and occasionally climbing trees and fighting things.

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

#748

Post by elabajaba »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #727
AlwaysRock wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if maybe modern bodies aren’t built for manual labor? I’d love to talk with any of the millions of voluntary and involuntary manual laborers from the past 200 years and learn about how they made it through their lifetimes working in fields and factories in stress positions under substandard conditions. To be honest, I guess we could just interact with and ask present day laborers across the globe cranking ou…

Modern mass production (iirc 1900s and later) where each person basically hyperspecializes in one job on an assembly line tends to cause repetitive strain injuries as people are doing the same handful of movements quickly thousands of times a shift. A good factory will shift people around to different parts of the assembly line to try and delay injuries as those will cause more efficiency loss than the hit you get from moving someone from one position on the line to another (sometimes it's even just as small as just having them be on the other side of the conveyor doing the same job).

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

#749

Post by wardedVibe »

joecot wrote: post #96
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…

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…

> Then we were told what we really need is nurses. So folks went to nursing school in droves. I'm not sure where we are with that, because it seems like hospitals still never have enough nurses but that those folks that went to nursing school also didn't manage to improve their situation much.

To be fair, we just had a pandemic, and we're still reeling from that. Lots of folks quit because of burn-out.

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

#750

Post by cagmz »

ryanSrich wrote: post #716
rybosworld wrote: post #503

"Youtube university" has most definitely had an effect. Particularly in regards to the lack of pay increase in the trades. My toilet is leaking? 10 years ago I'd call a plumber. Now I diagnose the problem and determine if it's within my skill level to learn the repair (it usually is). For me, this wouldn't be feasible without online how-to videos. A plumber/carpenter/electrician will charge me $50-$100/hr for work th…

Yeah same here. My dryer stopped working. Had someone come out and tell me the heating element and thermostat needed replacing. $275 for the part, $250 for the labor. That’s a $525 for a $650 dryer. Not worth it. I bought a complete heating element and thermostat kit on Amazon for $29. After a few YouTube videos and about an hour and a half, I had it fixed.

Did they charge to diagnose the issue?
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