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I’ve told this story before on here, but most of my social circle went to college. In general, most of those I’ve stayed in touch with are doing alright for the

I’ve told this story before on here, but most of my social circle went to college. In general, most of those I’ve stayed in touch with are doing alright for themselves. But we graduated college between 2007-2010, so it was a rough economy to be looking for a first job. One friend skipped college and joined the local electrician union. He did his 10 years to get his lifetime card, and started his own business a few years ago. Not only is he already making a ton of money, he has zero debt, and more importantly charges close to whatever he wants an hour because of how in demand he is. He jokes that he’s going to be the only electrician in the city in the next ten years because all the old guard is retiring, and way fewer millennials went into trades. College would have been a bad idea for him and he knew it.

moneil971 7y ago
Absolutely agree - these skyrocketing tuition fees should be causing a rise in trade schools and other (shorter, less expensive) paths to a career. Not everyone needs a 4-year or postgraduate degree to make a decent living.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I think it should also cause us to look into why tuition has gotten so expensive. I think society and a lot of individuals would benefit from more non-trade education. And it's not like, say, an ethics class needs to be expensive.
shados 7y ago
> and way fewer millennials went into trades. Ive been doing a lot of renovation on my condo lately...and found there's a couple distinct categories of people in trades. - Those who suck at their job - The scammers - Those who are so overbooked they have a 4-8 months waitlist and charge 3 times as much as the rest. Even the first 2 categories can be hard to come by, too. But for a good, let say, carpenter? I'll happily pay north of $200-300/hour. Because those who are cheap are usually just scamming/screwing me anyway and will cost more in the long run, so may as well get it right the first time.
- Wohlf 7y ago
  Honestly I think those categories apply to most jobs. Just look at all the posts on here about 10x and 100x developers. Some people are amazing at their jobs, some are scammers/incompetent/full of BS, most are in the middle.
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    The "most are in the middle" category does seem to be missing from a lot of trades, though. I can echo GP's comment about carpenters, flooring, masons, electricians, plumbers. Everyone is either absolutely amazing, honest, and truly cares about their craftsmanship, OR, they'll show up late and do shit work. I can't think of a single middle-of-the-road contractor I've ever hired to work on my property, and I've hired A LOT the last 5 years.
  - pmart123 7y ago
    Completely true. Just look at the research around active management. Most outperform before fees, but after fees slightly under-perform. This is the equivalent to most employees add value before salary and benefits, but probably add less value to a company than their total comp plus expenses.
  - shados 7y ago
    I think the bias in analyzing these is that when it comes to hiring, I'm more likely to deal with an individual carpenter than an individual programmer. With that said, I echo what another poster said. In the trades, it really feels like "the middle" is much, much rarer. Unlike, let say, programming, trades are usually an understood problem, where most of the challenge is in the execution (except for the design phase). That means after doing it for 15 years, people who are legit are actually REALLY good at it. As a software engineer, Im not sure I've ever done the same thing (or even similar things) twice within a year or even a decade at times...
- ipython 7y ago
  I will caution you, price does not in any way directly correlate to quality of work. I have hired people who undercharge (at least in relation to the quality of their work) for several reasons: because they don't know what the market will bear; they enjoy the work and don't care; they are just starting out and need referrals; they are a one-man-shop and still make more than they would as someone else's employee. In fact- I've found that often times, price inversely correlates with quality of work. Perhaps it may reverse again once you reach a certain inflection point where you're paying for a lot of 'white glove' service and someone who is willing to take abuse from very demanding clients.
bpyne 7y ago
If only more people had that self-awareness in high school. Unfortunately, the influence of parents and other social pressures often cause kids to make choices that aren't right for them.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  It’s also quite difficult to predict the job market for the next few decades.
supercanuck 7y ago
They said this 20 years ago, and then they opened up immigration or they will loosen up licensing or some other non-obvious outcome. You'll be amazed at what people will do to keep labor rates low.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  You can see this in the UK where hard line Brexiter politicians are now making noises about having quotas to import cheap tradesmen from Europe.
dfxm12 7y ago
That sounds like it's more a function of choosing a career that's in demand rather than choosing to go to college. Bonus if its something that's not a "bad idea" for you.
- sharkweek 7y ago
  No disrespect to my friend, but he was never the sharpest academic. He could have done the community college thing, but to what end. I don’t think he really considered college an option, but is doing amazing now.
throwayEngineer 7y ago
I know someone considering similar. 4.0 high school gpa. I'm urging him not to waste his abilities on technician work. I am not telling him to study Art History, but urging him to study Electrical Engineering instead of Electrician. An EE can be an Electrician, but the opposite isn't true. Those few short years of making money pale to the 6 figure income and abilities you gain as an engineer.
- fastball 7y ago
  You don't think an electrician in a big city with their own business is pulling down six figures?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Sure they can and do but the EE is going to be pulling six figures much sooner and have a more stable and less physically and mentally taxing career path than the electrician.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    That electrician with his own business could probably do better with a MBA though.
    - fencepost 7y ago
      But could he do enough better [than hiring business advisors] to make up for probably a 15+ year delay in starting the business (due to time spent in college and postgraduate work PLUS the debt incurred in schooling)? Edit: thanks autocorrect.
      - bluGill 7y ago
        Depends. There have been exceptions you can point to, but many small businesses fail because the owner doesn't spend enough time in the office. "Joe Electric" works when "Joe" and one assistant is the extent of the business, but "Joe" - if he is in a good location - will soon have more business than he can accept at which time it is temping to expand, and then the MBA skills are needed or Joe's poor handling of the office work ends up killing the company. If Joe was good at business he could keep 200 electricians busy with jobs that pay about as much as they would earn on their own, and no need for them to do all the book work in the office, and ultimately Joe makes more money.
nepeckman 7y ago
Counter anecdote: I had a friend who went to a mechanics trade school around that time. He is/was very talented: as a teen he built a working 6ft trebuchet and he was always tinkering with cars. He did 2 years of trade school, graduated in the height of the recession, and couldn't find a single mechanic job. No one was hiring, and he ended up working basic service industry jobs instead. While I agree trades are under appreciated as a career path, I don't think we should treat trade school as the antidote to job market woes and a broken education system.
tsss 7y ago
The common denominator for making a lot of money is not "the trades" but owning a business. Of course he's gonna make more if he doesn't have to relinquish the majority of his profits to a boss. A lot of people here and on reddit like to romanticize the trades while sitting in an air-conditioned office like it's some secret tip to instant wealth without the need to study for years. But the reality is grim for the majority of salaried tradesmen. It's a job that is very hard on your body and the heralded "fresh air" suddenly sounds a lot less nice when you have to do physical labor in intense heat or cold. Those who go above and beyond will always succeed no matter the field but for the average Joe a solid education is a much better bet and you are doing them a disservice by spreading these second-hand anecdotes.
- sharkweek 7y ago
  My point isn’t that everyone should quit college and join a trade union, my point is that it can be a viable option for a lot of people, ESPECIALLY in lieu of taking on a bunch of debt at a young age.
- briandear 7y ago
  Sitting at a desk for 40 years is also “hard” in your body. Also, a lot of people romanticize the value of “the college experience.” Is that experience worth $150k of debt? Is a degree in social work ever worth that much? Not at all; the data proves it. > for the average Joe a solid education is a much better bet and you are doing a disservice by spreading these second hand anecdotes Did you hear the one about the sociology graduate working at Starbucks with 100k in debt? How about the English graduate working at a call center with $80k in debt? How about the one about the one who worked her way through a marketing degree only to end up working as an assistant manager at a local Williams Sonoma making about $18 per hour. Let’s not spread anecdotes about how college is a better bet because for many many people, it’s not. I got a completely wasted degree in journalism, but now I work for a FAANG as a software engineer. The degree wasn’t even a consideration. So I have student debt for no good reason. And belittling the trades, claiming physical labor is hard: that’s just elitist. Most of the trades are more active than your office jobs, but that’s what “work” often is. People have gotten soft, lazy and fat. It isn’t like the trades require 12 hours a day at the bottom of a coal mine. A sedentary lifestyle is more of a risk than being a machinist.
SantalBlush 7y ago
These "I know a guy who makes a lot of money" stories do not paint a full picture of the trades in general. My family and friends worked in trades in 2008, and let me tell you, it was an absolute shit show. Many tradesmen had to travel across the country to find work, but most were just unemployed. They called it the "Man-cession" precisely because it affected blue collar workers the most. Many went to college on loans and state retraining programs to find better, more stable work. Now people (many of whom are in white collar jobs) act like it's a missed opportunity to forego the trades. I can't help but roll my eyes. Moreover, the key word here is "union." That is the common feature of most of these tradesman success stories. People need to embrace unions in many fields if they want better jobs. A union won't protect everyone during a 2009-like economy, but it significantly improves pay, job security, and working conditions otherwise.
- yardie 7y ago
  There were recessions in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. And the ones that got hit the hardest, first were always the trades. People have been treating these jobs and those workers like shit for decades. Everyone wants the same thing, great work at a low low price. We have this romantic notion that a pipe-fitter wants their kid to take over the family trade. The reality is that kid probably grew up through a few recessions, knows free/reduced school lunches a bit better than they would like, and the parents aren't necessarily pushing them to follow in the old man's foot steps.
mywittyname 7y ago
> way fewer millennials went into trades. It's not that we didn't want to, but that we never had the opportunity. The Great Recession destroyed basically every trade job out there. Nobody was going to hire a young buck when you could get really smart, experienced guy for the same price. So us millennials went to college instead. In 2009, people my age with no degree had an unemployment rate of like 20-25% while people with degrees had an unemployment rate of maybe 5-6%. A lot of my friends growing up that started in trades (myself include) ended up in the military and/or college because you still had to show up for work every day, just to sit around for a few hours to learn you weren't getting paid. Not that I'm complaining, my life certainty worked is better as a result. But I don't think people with office job realize how bad The Great Recession was for people at the bottom.
busterarm 7y ago
I knew this by the end of my first year of college (2003) and left. I didn't go into trades but I got jobs doing what I was good at. Now I work with people who mostly went to Cornell and MIT and I have zero student debt. I'm doing extremely well.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
The key ingredient in most of these trade success stories is not trade per se but working their asses off to build a scalable business. It is a blue collar startup story. I have a relative who worked construction after high school. Today he is "owns beautiful houses in exclusive neighborhoods around the globe" style wealthy. Yes he worked in the trades, but so did the hundreds of other guys he was working with when he first started out and I doubt any of them did nearly as well. His success wasn't due to him being in the trades, it was his ability to operate an efficient business that narrowly targeted a large business segment that had previously been under-served by generalist businesses, to consistently exceed customer expectations even under adversity, to build trusted business relationships, and to make all of this scale in practice. Which is a fair description of what a tech startup actually entails. Most trade career success stories have a strong element of entrepreneurial effort and ambition such that I wonder if we are misattributing whence that success is largely derived.
honkycat 7y ago
These opinions always pop up during these conversations. I agree spending a ton of money on a degree that isn't going to secure you a well-paying job is not a good idea if you do not want to be in debt for years and years. However, trades are not a silver bullet and there are many down sides. The pay starts out low, and a lot of the time STAYS low. Trades are notorious for stress injuries. Electrician is ACTUALLY a kind-of dangerous job. You can fry yourself by being careless. As are a lot of the trades. I would rather have my health, a valuable degree, and body fully working than not have student loan debt. You can pay off debt and make it go away if you are smart. You cannot heal your shot joints. SO MANY young people abuse their body thinking it's going to be young forever. It is not.
- war1025 7y ago
  "valuable degree" is the key part there. My dad worked in a factory the majority of his life. We were instructed early and often to go to college and not ruin your body doing manual labor.
pkaye 7y ago
I like the trades a lot. I used to spend a lot of time working on my own home over the weekends. Its not all easy as you get older though. I know of a plumber and a contractor who wore their back down after years of running their business. One had to quit and the other cut back a lot. Meanwhile I'm someone on dialysis and can still manage my desk job as a software engineer.

moneil971 7y ago

Absolutely agree - these skyrocketing tuition fees should be causing a rise in trade schools and other (shorter, less expensive) paths to a career. Not everyone needs a 4-year or postgraduate degree to make a decent living.

wpietri 7y ago
I think it should also cause us to look into why tuition has gotten so expensive. I think society and a lot of individuals would benefit from more non-trade education. And it's not like, say, an ethics class needs to be expensive.

shados 7y ago

> and way fewer millennials went into trades. Ive been doing a lot of renovation on my condo lately...and found there's a couple distinct categories of people in trades. - Those who suck at their job - The scammers - Those who are so overbooked they have a 4-8 months waitlist and charge 3 times as much as the rest. Even the first 2 categories can be hard to come by, too. But for a good, let say, carpenter? I'll happily pay north of $200-300/hour. Because those who are cheap are usually just scamming/screwing me anyway and will cost more in the long run, so may as well get it right the first time.

Wohlf 7y ago
Honestly I think those categories apply to most jobs. Just look at all the posts on here about 10x and 100x developers. Some people are amazing at their jobs, some are scammers/incompetent/full of BS, most are in the middle.
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  The "most are in the middle" category does seem to be missing from a lot of trades, though. I can echo GP's comment about carpenters, flooring, masons, electricians, plumbers. Everyone is either absolutely amazing, honest, and truly cares about their craftsmanship, OR, they'll show up late and do shit work. I can't think of a single middle-of-the-road contractor I've ever hired to work on my property, and I've hired A LOT the last 5 years.
- pmart123 7y ago
  Completely true. Just look at the research around active management. Most outperform before fees, but after fees slightly under-perform. This is the equivalent to most employees add value before salary and benefits, but probably add less value to a company than their total comp plus expenses.
- shados 7y ago
  I think the bias in analyzing these is that when it comes to hiring, I'm more likely to deal with an individual carpenter than an individual programmer. With that said, I echo what another poster said. In the trades, it really feels like "the middle" is much, much rarer. Unlike, let say, programming, trades are usually an understood problem, where most of the challenge is in the execution (except for the design phase). That means after doing it for 15 years, people who are legit are actually REALLY good at it. As a software engineer, Im not sure I've ever done the same thing (or even similar things) twice within a year or even a decade at times...
ipython 7y ago
I will caution you, price does not in any way directly correlate to quality of work. I have hired people who undercharge (at least in relation to the quality of their work) for several reasons: because they don't know what the market will bear; they enjoy the work and don't care; they are just starting out and need referrals; they are a one-man-shop and still make more than they would as someone else's employee. In fact- I've found that often times, price inversely correlates with quality of work. Perhaps it may reverse again once you reach a certain inflection point where you're paying for a lot of 'white glove' service and someone who is willing to take abuse from very demanding clients.

bpyne 7y ago

If only more people had that self-awareness in high school. Unfortunately, the influence of parents and other social pressures often cause kids to make choices that aren't right for them.

maxxxxx 7y ago
It’s also quite difficult to predict the job market for the next few decades.

supercanuck 7y ago

They said this 20 years ago, and then they opened up immigration or they will loosen up licensing or some other non-obvious outcome. You'll be amazed at what people will do to keep labor rates low.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
You can see this in the UK where hard line Brexiter politicians are now making noises about having quotas to import cheap tradesmen from Europe.

dfxm12 7y ago

That sounds like it's more a function of choosing a career that's in demand rather than choosing to go to college. Bonus if its something that's not a "bad idea" for you.

sharkweek 7y ago
No disrespect to my friend, but he was never the sharpest academic. He could have done the community college thing, but to what end. I don’t think he really considered college an option, but is doing amazing now.

throwayEngineer 7y ago

I know someone considering similar. 4.0 high school gpa. I'm urging him not to waste his abilities on technician work. I am not telling him to study Art History, but urging him to study Electrical Engineering instead of Electrician. An EE can be an Electrician, but the opposite isn't true. Those few short years of making money pale to the 6 figure income and abilities you gain as an engineer.

fastball 7y ago
You don't think an electrician in a big city with their own business is pulling down six figures?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Sure they can and do but the EE is going to be pulling six figures much sooner and have a more stable and less physically and mentally taxing career path than the electrician.
- bluGill 7y ago
  That electrician with his own business could probably do better with a MBA though.
  - fencepost 7y ago
    But could he do enough better [than hiring business advisors] to make up for probably a 15+ year delay in starting the business (due to time spent in college and postgraduate work PLUS the debt incurred in schooling)? Edit: thanks autocorrect.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Depends. There have been exceptions you can point to, but many small businesses fail because the owner doesn't spend enough time in the office. "Joe Electric" works when "Joe" and one assistant is the extent of the business, but "Joe" - if he is in a good location - will soon have more business than he can accept at which time it is temping to expand, and then the MBA skills are needed or Joe's poor handling of the office work ends up killing the company. If Joe was good at business he could keep 200 electricians busy with jobs that pay about as much as they would earn on their own, and no need for them to do all the book work in the office, and ultimately Joe makes more money.

nepeckman 7y ago

Counter anecdote: I had a friend who went to a mechanics trade school around that time. He is/was very talented: as a teen he built a working 6ft trebuchet and he was always tinkering with cars. He did 2 years of trade school, graduated in the height of the recession, and couldn't find a single mechanic job. No one was hiring, and he ended up working basic service industry jobs instead. While I agree trades are under appreciated as a career path, I don't think we should treat trade school as the antidote to job market woes and a broken education system.

tsss 7y ago

The common denominator for making a lot of money is not "the trades" but owning a business. Of course he's gonna make more if he doesn't have to relinquish the majority of his profits to a boss. A lot of people here and on reddit like to romanticize the trades while sitting in an air-conditioned office like it's some secret tip to instant wealth without the need to study for years. But the reality is grim for the majority of salaried tradesmen. It's a job that is very hard on your body and the heralded "fresh air" suddenly sounds a lot less nice when you have to do physical labor in intense heat or cold. Those who go above and beyond will always succeed no matter the field but for the average Joe a solid education is a much better bet and you are doing them a disservice by spreading these second-hand anecdotes.

sharkweek 7y ago
My point isn’t that everyone should quit college and join a trade union, my point is that it can be a viable option for a lot of people, ESPECIALLY in lieu of taking on a bunch of debt at a young age.
briandear 7y ago
Sitting at a desk for 40 years is also “hard” in your body. Also, a lot of people romanticize the value of “the college experience.” Is that experience worth $150k of debt? Is a degree in social work ever worth that much? Not at all; the data proves it. > for the average Joe a solid education is a much better bet and you are doing a disservice by spreading these second hand anecdotes Did you hear the one about the sociology graduate working at Starbucks with 100k in debt? How about the English graduate working at a call center with $80k in debt? How about the one about the one who worked her way through a marketing degree only to end up working as an assistant manager at a local Williams Sonoma making about $18 per hour. Let’s not spread anecdotes about how college is a better bet because for many many people, it’s not. I got a completely wasted degree in journalism, but now I work for a FAANG as a software engineer. The degree wasn’t even a consideration. So I have student debt for no good reason. And belittling the trades, claiming physical labor is hard: that’s just elitist. Most of the trades are more active than your office jobs, but that’s what “work” often is. People have gotten soft, lazy and fat. It isn’t like the trades require 12 hours a day at the bottom of a coal mine. A sedentary lifestyle is more of a risk than being a machinist.

SantalBlush 7y ago

These "I know a guy who makes a lot of money" stories do not paint a full picture of the trades in general. My family and friends worked in trades in 2008, and let me tell you, it was an absolute shit show. Many tradesmen had to travel across the country to find work, but most were just unemployed. They called it the "Man-cession" precisely because it affected blue collar workers the most. Many went to college on loans and state retraining programs to find better, more stable work. Now people (many of whom are in white collar jobs) act like it's a missed opportunity to forego the trades. I can't help but roll my eyes. Moreover, the key word here is "union." That is the common feature of most of these tradesman success stories. People need to embrace unions in many fields if they want better jobs. A union won't protect everyone during a 2009-like economy, but it significantly improves pay, job security, and working conditions otherwise.

yardie 7y ago
There were recessions in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. And the ones that got hit the hardest, first were always the trades. People have been treating these jobs and those workers like shit for decades. Everyone wants the same thing, great work at a low low price. We have this romantic notion that a pipe-fitter wants their kid to take over the family trade. The reality is that kid probably grew up through a few recessions, knows free/reduced school lunches a bit better than they would like, and the parents aren't necessarily pushing them to follow in the old man's foot steps.

mywittyname 7y ago

> way fewer millennials went into trades. It's not that we didn't want to, but that we never had the opportunity. The Great Recession destroyed basically every trade job out there. Nobody was going to hire a young buck when you could get really smart, experienced guy for the same price. So us millennials went to college instead. In 2009, people my age with no degree had an unemployment rate of like 20-25% while people with degrees had an unemployment rate of maybe 5-6%. A lot of my friends growing up that started in trades (myself include) ended up in the military and/or college because you still had to show up for work every day, just to sit around for a few hours to learn you weren't getting paid. Not that I'm complaining, my life certainty worked is better as a result. But I don't think people with office job realize how bad The Great Recession was for people at the bottom.

busterarm 7y ago

I knew this by the end of my first year of college (2003) and left. I didn't go into trades but I got jobs doing what I was good at. Now I work with people who mostly went to Cornell and MIT and I have zero student debt. I'm doing extremely well.

jandrewrogers 7y ago

The key ingredient in most of these trade success stories is not trade per se but working their asses off to build a scalable business. It is a blue collar startup story. I have a relative who worked construction after high school. Today he is "owns beautiful houses in exclusive neighborhoods around the globe" style wealthy. Yes he worked in the trades, but so did the hundreds of other guys he was working with when he first started out and I doubt any of them did nearly as well. His success wasn't due to him being in the trades, it was his ability to operate an efficient business that narrowly targeted a large business segment that had previously been under-served by generalist businesses, to consistently exceed customer expectations even under adversity, to build trusted business relationships, and to make all of this scale in practice. Which is a fair description of what a tech startup actually entails. Most trade career success stories have a strong element of entrepreneurial effort and ambition such that I wonder if we are misattributing whence that success is largely derived.

honkycat 7y ago

These opinions always pop up during these conversations. I agree spending a ton of money on a degree that isn't going to secure you a well-paying job is not a good idea if you do not want to be in debt for years and years. However, trades are not a silver bullet and there are many down sides. The pay starts out low, and a lot of the time STAYS low. Trades are notorious for stress injuries. Electrician is ACTUALLY a kind-of dangerous job. You can fry yourself by being careless. As are a lot of the trades. I would rather have my health, a valuable degree, and body fully working than not have student loan debt. You can pay off debt and make it go away if you are smart. You cannot heal your shot joints. SO MANY young people abuse their body thinking it's going to be young forever. It is not.

war1025 7y ago
"valuable degree" is the key part there. My dad worked in a factory the majority of his life. We were instructed early and often to go to college and not ruin your body doing manual labor.

pkaye 7y ago

I like the trades a lot. I used to spend a lot of time working on my own home over the weekends. Its not all easy as you get older though. I know of a plumber and a contractor who wore their back down after years of running their business. One had to quit and the other cut back a lot. Meanwhile I'm someone on dialysis and can still manage my desk job as a software engineer.