- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
You must log in or register to comment.
Why is learning a trade only considered a last resort? Even on lemmy, I got downvoted to shit when I commented that people should focus less on degrees and more on industry certification, to have some actual value they can sell to potential employers. An electrician certification proves that you can do something. A bachelor’s degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.
Relying on just degrees that virtually everybody else has is stupid. Anon has nothing that stands out from the soup of zero-experience job seekers.
Why is learning a trade only considered a last resort?
Because a lot of trades are pretty bad for your health. They require getting in potentially unsafe environments, dealing with substances or byproducts that can lead to cancers or other occupational diseases. They also require a lot more physical work. So of course people would prefer a cushy office job to trawling through crawlspaces lined with asbestos to plug in a light. Not to mention that a lot of trade jobs are not that great paid when starting out, the good pay comes with years of experience and until you get there you have to suffer through all the above. Sure some office jobs don’t pay well starting out either but you just sit on your ass in a air conditioned office instead of nailing 2x4s in the hot sun for 8 hours.
People always ask this question but they never consider that there are actual valid considerations that make trade jobs unattractive compared to other jobs.
Edit: Oh also a lot of well paid trade people run their own companies which is an additional stress and a lot of people don’t want to deal with that. My father is in trades and he ran his own company and I watched him age 20 years in the span of 5 due to all the stress and physical work he was doing. Running a company, even a small one is no easy job.
The pay part of that equation is dependent on where you are, and what trade you’re talking about.
Where I am, trades generally get paid more than any office job you’re going to get with just a random bachelors degree. And if you join one of the trade unions, especially one of the higher skilled industrial ones (so like electricians, pipefitters, millwrights, etc, as opposed to general labour or residential construction), your pay will be much higher than entry level office positions, and will likely stay higher than anyone who doesn’t get themselves into an upper management type position.
electricians, pipefitters, millwrights
Electricians, pipefitters, and millwrights have really hazardous jobs. That’s why they get paid so well, directly and indirectly (because it takes a lot of training to do those jobs safely).
I’m not trying to discourage anyone from taking these jobs, but they’re not risk free.
Define “really hazardous”.
What are the rates of workplace injury for trades compared to the rates of people getting long term health effects caused by sedentary work conditions?
Per 100k full time employees, 1.6, 3.1, and 1.8/year versus 0.8/year for electricians, pipefitters, and millwrights, respectively, vs office workers.
So based on those statistics, I will say that those trades are definitely not “really dangerous”. Tortilla manufacturering is twice as dangerous at 6.2, and hospital workers were up above 10. Going from 0.8 to 1.6 is like going from laying on your couch to walking down the sidewalk.
… you’re looking at those backwards, those are all lower rates lol.
Falls are the largest issue with trades and cause the most injuries, and all of the trades you listed are the ones that use heights the least.
None of the ones you listed Even come close to the top 10
A construction flagger is at far higher risk of injury, and that has almost no training as well, the risk is a very small portion of the pay.
When I started in construction 20 years ago minimum wage was $10, but most trades start at $15, this is for a laborer, apprentices got $18
After 4 years I was 33.50 an hour and still had room to move up. My direct supervisor was making $50, but he had a cash bonus to pay for his truck, instead of them giving him one.
Now minimum wage is $15 and most trades start at $21 and hour.
legally the company is supposed to pay apprentices 60% of the lowest paid journeyman, but they can hire people specifically to lower this -.- fourth years get 90%, it goes up each year. It forces a raise after finishing each schooling section.
Trade jobs frequently require buying a lot of the equipment and protective gear. Most of the high pay examples include a lot of overtime, and may be limited when work isn’t available. A lot of trades don’t have a regular 40 hour work week, if the weather is bad for a week they may not make any money.
It really depends and is a lot more complex of a comparison. Trades are important and I think they should have more stability and require less personal cost, although most of that would be addressed if we had single payer healthcare and UBI.
If you’re buying your own equipment and gear, find a better company. A company is supposed to pay for any and all safety gear, and all equipment should be owned by the company.
The only thing a tradesperson should have to bring to a job is their tools.
Sitting on your arse all day, everyday is equally bad for your health. I’d probably argue even worse, you can’t get PPE to help protect you from sedentary working conditions.
The effects of sitting on your arse can be mitigated with 30 to 40 minutes of daily vigorous exercise. There are a bunch of studies showing this. It’s not remotely the same thing.
Standing desks to transition from aitting to standing and exercising on breaks is the PPE for office work.
It’d be lovely if the US had more requirements for providing better tools for office workers. I’ve never had a job be willing to fund anything outside of pointing me at a used desk with a 15 year old computer.
Yep… Certain trades are worse for your bones and joints, but not much is going to be worse for your systemic health than sitting for half the day.
As someone who’s worked in construction and now works in orthopedics and rehabilitation, I think the biggest issue with a lot of people in trades like residential construction is that they don’t really learn how to prioritize their physical health until a lot of the damage is already done. Once you’re a bit older you kinda learn that even if carrying that 80lb bag of cement by yourself is faster, it’s still better to take the time to grab a dolly or another person. Most of the issues would be solved if we had better regulations.
Yeah you can. Adequate breaks for eyes, standing desks, under desk elliptical/treadmill, etc… not that most employers will supply or allow it, but it can be overcome.
It’s not even close. When I went from 50:50 lab/office to 10:90 lab/office I gained like 12 kg and outgrew all of my pants in a year. Granted a bit of that was stress with my asshole bosses but I believe that just working on my feet a couple of hours versus being sedentary made a massive difference.
Reread my post. You can do things at a desk, in an office, or at home…
Nah, I got the meaning of your post. Standing at the desk, even with a treadmill, is not the same as natural movement. Taking breaks from a physically passive activity is not tge same as being constantly physically active.
You probably weren’t burning significantly more calories. What happened is you likely started eating or drinking more calories at your desk where before you were too busy. It’s like a thirty minute jog to work off an oreo, it’s unlikely you were actually burning that many more calories. But then most people still think exercise and metabolism have a lot of control over your weight when it’s almost exclusively how much you’re eating and drinking. Nobody is breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
It’s definitely no where close to worse.
Depends on which trade and location you’re comparing with. Things vary wildly in the trades.
Name one that is better for your health than (checks notes) … sitting down.
Locksmithing and similar type trades. Not construction trades. You’re on your feet, but you aren’t necessarily breaking your body lifting and such.
Why is learning a trade only considered a last resort?
Because it’s not even an option for most people.
Agree, I am 3 years into a bachelor’s degree and like 9 months ago I realised I haven’t really developed any meaningful skills. I have no idea what job I even could have anymore. I chose to pursue BBA because at the time it seemed like an easy way to get a decent office job, and at the beginning all the teachers assured that i’d find my specialty during the studies. Turns out, I do not want to see money, count money or think about money, I just want a job where I create something, do something. So after i’m done with this shit, I think I’ll try to just get a source of income and work on a game or maybe just go to a trade school later
That’s a big sandwich.
Uhh, yea
Fuck, I meant that’s an expensive sandwich.
I went to electrical school right out of high school and was an electrician for 10 years. Learned a ton of practical skills, can fix just about any household or mechanical issues, and bought my first house 5 years in. Best decision my parents ever encouraged me to do. Would recommend and also not sure why it gets so much flak
An electrician certification proves that you can do something. A bachelor’s degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.
Why is it that you think that an electrician certification is less about checkboxes than a 4-year university degree? Or that the checkboxes are somehow more difficult to game? Most trade schools themselves are a joke, so you have to play the meta game of getting the cert and networking your way to a job. You know, same as your university degree.
The fact is, most trades pay shit, and their big advantage is that you get to start earlier in life, and that you have more opportunities to get overtime pay. That can be a good option for your 20’s, especially during a jobs boom (most trades are infamously boom and bust cycles), but by your 30’s you will get passed up by most of your degree holding peers (and you’ll totally get left in the dust in your 40’s and 50’s).
It’s not good advice to young people. Electricians, plumbers, welders, etc. don’t get paid very much on average, and the ones who break out from that low pay are either highly specialized or climb the small business/management ladder (at which point they benefit from concepts taught in school as well).
Where are you that plumbers don’t get paid well? At least where I live, plumbing is the default “I want to make a lot of money and don’t know what to do with my life” recommendation. Most trades people I know, on average, make more money than most office people I know, on average. Office jobs may have a higher ceiling but that doesn’t necessarily mean most people are making more. Cut out the top and bottom extremes in pay and trades are definitely the better route to decent pay cheques, at least where I live.
Where are you that plumbers don’t get paid well?
I’m in the U.S. Here’s an interactive, searchable table of U.S. stats for all job codes Note that you can dig around the site by state, as well.
It shows the mean, median, 10th percentile, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and 90th percentile wage, plus the number in each job, by both hour and by year.
For 47-2152, “Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters,” we have 465k people making an average of $72k. The 10th/25th/50th/75th/90th percentiles are $44k/$50k/$63k/$85k/$108k. Those numbers are exactly what I’m talking about: a high floor and a very flat trajectory, where the 75th percentile doesn’t even double the 25th percentile.
Compare to something like Human Resources Specialist, one of the more unremarkable college-educated office jobs. They’re averaging $82k, with $47k/$59k/$76k/$99k/$129k on those percentiles. And they have a clear pathway towards Human Resources manager, where the average is $164k and the spread is $88k/$111k/$149k/$199k/$268k.
Note also that the U.S. employs almost twice as many HR specialists (912,000) as plumbers (465,000) in our job market. And HR Managers are over 200,000 people.
Start digging into different jobs and you can see a lot of the same trends. Non-college educated white collar jobs (secretaries, assistants) don’t pay well, and jobs requiring a bit of a certification but not full blown bachelor’s degrees (paralegal) are comparable to plumber incomes.
But my general point is clear: the trades have a high floor, very flat trajectories, and a low ceiling. They deal with higher unemployment rates and the jobs are harder on the bodies. The college educated pathways have a huge up front cost (tuition and late entry into the workforce), and take up to a decade to actually catch up. But most of us work 30-50 year careers, so a 10-year break even point is actually pretty good.
And if you want to work with your hands, the educated blue collar job fields can be super lucrative: field engineers, outdoor researchers, even things like surgeons.
Here too. Our friend’s kid went into plumbing, he gets steady well paid work with a company plus under the table jobs at least one per weekend. He’s raking it in & happy about it. It is a demanding and often stinky job but very lucrative.
An electrician certification doesn’t mean a whole lot either. Both are just paper. Degrees with work experience and trades with apprentership time hold a little more value, but its still hit and miss.
Where are you that a trade doesn’t require 4 years of schooling and on the job training?
Most places won’t even let you do the schooling without being indentured and working for a minimum amount either.
They know you need both.
I’m in the US and I never got any formal education in my trade (HVAC-R). Most of the techs here didn’t. The few techs we’ve hired who did go to trade school came out of it with practically no knowledge which couldn’t easily be taught on the job in a couple months. It seems like, for HVAC at least, the tradeschool programs teach enough that maybe you could manage some light residential work, but they barely touch on refrigeration, let alone the heavy commercial and industrial refrigeration we often do. When evaluating candidates, a tradeschool cert means less than a year of experience in some sort of maintenance position.
The same seems to be true of many other trades. At least in my state no certs are required or even beneficial to become a licensed plumber or electrician. Those liscenses are all based solely on years of experience. Technically you can become a master electrician solely with an electrical engineering degree and 0 years of experience but if you have that degree then you probably have better jobs available to you.
The same seems to be true of many other trades. At least in my state no certs are required or even beneficial to become a licensed plumber or electrician.
No certs necessary for locksmithing either.
Honestly as someone who spent ages getting into Tech and Linux. If I could do it again, Trades school would be my route. Constant work, no AI bullshit and you can run your own business very easily since your in high demand
I ducked into grad school thinking it’d help.
Then it was a single skill I picked up on my undergraduate that landed me a job. From there I just pick up experience where I can and take on responsibilities of higher jobs and then apply to those jobs elsewhere.
It took me 2 years to start making more than 80% of my graduate professors and 7 to make more than all of them.
This sounds like one of those things where for 299.99 you too can discover this one skill. Then you sell a 2 week bootcamp where you teach people that skill and it turns out the skill is just applying to lots of jobs.
The tool is organizing boot camps.
Just in time for the EV revolution. How about drones? I hear they’re all the rage.
We have come to the point where me must accept that it is normal for people to spend their early 20s smoking weed and masturbating
I got my degree in 2014 at 22, and it still took scores of applications to get even a handful of interviews and one job offer for $17 an hour. I can only imagine what young people deal with today. I know it’s only worsened in the last half decade or so.
Why are people talking like being a mechanic is bum work, or like there’s a huge overhead cost in being a mechanic, or that you have to go to trade school to be a mechanic, or like mechanic work is going away?
None of these is true.
Mechanics will always have work, usually with overtime, and usually pay is very decent.
No degree required. Certs optional.
Tools are very affordable when you’re not buying them all at once.
Lots of room to change specializations.
ICE mechanics are still going to be hugely in demand because the Internal Combustion Engine isn’t going anywhere, even if they stop putting them in some/ most automobiles. But there are dozens of other mechanical disciplines, and as long as you know how to (when to) then a wrench, you can always get a job.
A bearing is a bearing, whether it’s on a crank shaft, an electric motor, a tail pulley, or a garage door.
Trade work is admirable work. Never downplay fields that allow overtime. My best salary years are in an industry that allows unlimited OT.
Mechanic pay is ass these days. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless it’s like specialized and unionized.
How much do you think mechanics get paid today?
They make a good living, but they are paid flat rate, and there is no guarantee that there will be steady income. If there’s a lul, the mechanic might make $0 in a given week. Also, if for some reason a job takes longer than the billable hours for that job, they are essentially working for free. Of the trades, it’s the shittiest one to make good money in imo.
so many bozos on the internet they know what these fields are like, and it shows they know nothing.
folks who post how wonderful it is have survivorship bias. your average mechanic/plumber/electrician isn’t making bank, they are making average to below average wage. and the income is not steady, it’s sporadic. you might make 100k one year and 60 the next, or spend 2 years with minimal income because construction market or similar is slowing down.
do you know any mechanics?
every mechanic I have met hates their life, unless they work for like a really high end place. and those jobs are far and few.
i had family in auto work, electricians, and line workers. they all basically said ‘go to college working in the trades is fucking shit.’
working in an office is a lot easier on your body and doesn’t leave you with medical problems. my electrician uncle lost one leg in his 50s and then other in his 60s. the mechanics i knew all worked for their dads and were townies we never left where they grew up, etc.
they made decent money, sure, but i would never ever want to trade live with them. i’m in my 40s and healthier than I was in my 20s. money isn’t everything.
I… uh… i am a mechanic. I just don’t work in a car shop that pays only billable hours. Why would you do that to yourself?
That would be like getting a minimum wage serving job and hoping the tips will be reliable. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I never struggle for hours, I have great benefits, non- union, no certs, degrees, or specialization required. I make enough to pay all my bills, invest in retirement, and still have money left over for life afterward. I work with a gang of guys all doing the same. We work in a field where we can go pretty much anywhere and get another job paying about the same.
I’m not sure why the mechanics you have met can’t find these jobs, but they have all misinformed you.
i work in IT. it’s so easy, just get a six figure job like me.
it’s not that the vast majority of positions in the field… are part time contract work that pay shit… and jobs like mine are difficult and rare to find and typically only go to those with tons of experience or elite degrees, like myself. it’s not that 22 year olds even struggle to get those shit jobs that get their foot in the door.
or that it took me over a decade of experience and working to get to this wage level… no it’s not that.
i also don’t understand why 22 year olds don’t have 500K in assets and just buy houses instead of renting and living with roommates, it’s so easy!
Wow, you have it hard in IT i guess. Maybe you should have looked into being a mechanic.
You don’t need a degree to get jobs as a mechanic, so no formal education necessary. You don’t have to worry about jobs being hard to find because basically everything that moves has bearings that need to be changed. You don’t need to worry about contract work because there are substantial amounts of mechanic jobs that pay hourly and offer tons of overtime.
I’m not sure why it’s so offensive to you that plenty of people don’t have the experience you heard about from “every mechanic you met.”
the average mechanic wage is 50K a year. average IT job wage is 100K a year.
that’s not a livable wage unless you live in bumfucksville parts of the USA, and the mechanics that live there are not making 50K, they are making like 30K.
but please tell me how everyone should go be a mechanic and they’ll make 150K a year? i guess?
just because you got lucky or did well, doesn’t not mean every other person will have the same luck or skill in their career.
you certainly are not educated. you’ve made that very clear but your insistence ignorance that being a mechanic is ‘so easy’.
Wow, for someone so educated, you sure make a lot of odd assumptions.
Perhaps I am more educated than you assume, even if a formal education is not required for my job.
Also, I’m gonna make an assumption now about your education, based on things you’ve said here… someone as condescendingly smart as yourself and using averages to discuss things like this has certainly taken at least some statistics classes and understands what a “standard deviation” is… and how that might be affected by extremely low paying jobs in one sector, even if those are not the most prominent paying jobs or abundant positions in that sector.
I think the standard deviation of pay for mechanics is much wider than you think, and possibly skewed by other factors than just simple geography.
I’m not saying that all mechanics make IT wages, but i am saying that I didn’t have to spend 10 years in school and $150k in debt to compete for a position that I earn 6 figures in. My job is not competitive for positions, they’re pretty abundant. Base pay for this position in my area (not a big city) is substantially higher than the national “average.” No formal education required.
But I must ask, why u so mad bro? Sounds like you’re living the dream life, no need to have an aneurism about other people’s money
Basically nobody has 150K in debt form an undergrad degree. They have like 30-40K of debt, which is easy for them to back back over 10 years with when the starting salary is 50-60K and in 10 years they will most likely double that salary.
but keep telling me how everyone should be a mechanic and college is stupid. Please. because anyone who went to college is a dumb loser or something, or i dunno, maybe you are talking about your own poor choices when you were younger? I definitely have met very dumb folks who have 150K in debt from college, who were very mad about it, who also terrible employees and people in general.
A mechanic making over 100K exists, yes, but they are rare, and would be in highly specialized areas and likely late in their careers. There are bicycle mechanics who make over 100K a year, but for every 1 of them, there are about 1000s of them making 30K a year with the top end wage being about 45K after decades of experience. Should I tell folks to go be a bike mechanic because it’s a good career path because like .01% of professional race mechanics make good money? Becuase yeah, they have about a 1/10000 change of that career path, and a 99999/10000 change of working 40 hours a week in some crappy bike shop making 20 bucks an hour for the rest of their life.
Oh my life is the dream life. I get mad other very dumb people tell me that I’m the richest bastard in the world, or that i’m a poor piece of shit. of which there a lot of on lemmy. Instead the boring fact that I’m in the 85th percentile of income and the 90th percentile of asset wealth. I even was a landlord for a few years, which you know, makes me capitalist hyper scum.
But i prefer facts, statistics and reality, to emotional reasoning, which makes folks very mad. but they tend to respond to that stuff wtih ‘u mad bro? lolz i so smart u dumb because anecdote anecdote anecdote’.
While college sure aint the answer to everything, spending your days jerking off and watching TV sure aint the answer either.
Pretty sure wanking doesn’t take him all day. Jerking off is not the problem.
1: is your name a reference to the stormlight archives
2: the person self describes their life as jerking and TV watching, don’t think OP is being unfair
1: no, what’s that?
2: yeah but still. I mean, don’t put us all in the same bucket, I jerk off too. OK maybe not 7 times per day. But even then there’s time to do stuff. Watching TV is the real issue there.
Why does he not say what his bachelor’s degree is in? It seems highly relevant
What’s wrong with being a mechanic?
Probably just that he’s already spent 4 years getting a bachelor’s degree and only now finds out it’s insufficient to land a job and now he has to do more school and cross his fingers that improves his job-seeking situation. (It should, but so should a bachelor’s degree.)
Honestly, “what’s wrong with a master’s degree” is almost as good a question, except that it would likely require going into more debt than trade school would.
just having a job these days is you being ahead.
To be fair I was like that when I was 23 a long ass time ago, too…
The only 23 year olds who didn’t go through this phase… were the people who had family connections to get them a 100K job after graduation.
rest of us took 6-9 months to find work, often while doing part time stuff to pad or resumes. if you don’t have connections getting a job is difficult and takes a lot of work.
we also had degrees from frickin’ Harvard. but we had no connections and no idea how the real world worked. I got my first real job 8 months after graduating, after working full time all summer and part time the entire fall. and i was living away from home, off my savings that entire time.
The only 23 year olds who didn’t go through this phase… were the people who had family connections to get them a 100K job after graduation.
Idk about that. I knew plenty of people who got entry level jobs at Schlumberger or Dell or corporate equivalent, earning $70k+ walking in the door.
If you had top grades and interviewed well, it’s possible. But we’re talking college grads and maybe one in five or one in ten, depending on your school. It wasn’t the “normal” experience. But it wasn’t pure nepo shit either.
rest of us took 6-9 months to find work, often while doing part time stuff to pad or resumes. if you don’t have connections getting a job is difficult and takes a lot of work.
Spent six months volunteering at a literacy center, which gave me some glowing references and a genuinely good feeling about getting up in the morning in the intermediate time.
Also spent a bunch of time at the gym, which was great once I got back into the dating scene.
I graduated into Bush’s recession, so I went to get a PhD in education. They pay you a small wage to do research, guaranteed for 5 years in my program. Graduated that into a healthy economy that… old professors weren’t willing to retire from. Finally give up after several second place rejections and take a simple adjunct professor job just in time for the pandemic, cutting my classes to a third.
But hey, at least I didn’t get that job at NCES; Trump 2.0 royally fucked all those education PhD federal jobs.
Don’t look down on trade schools. The trades are a great way to make good money and not likely to be replaced by AI… If I was that age today, I would be very strongly looking at that type of work. Or something in the medical field.
USA is a shithole. If op lived in a developed country they would still have healthcare, vacation time, childcare, public transportation, and a better minimum wage.
I live in Canada, have all of those things, does not change job prospects whatsoever.
And in the US, you wouldn’t have any of those things if you don’t have a job.
And on top of that, a job doesn’t guarantee any of those things either.
This is not the topic
They’re not wrong though.
USA being a shithole is always the topic.