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>Some of my kids seem like they enjoy academics, but others do not. I'll be pushing the latter toward trade school. Average IBEW (electrical union) pay is about
by lsc 7y ago
>Some of my kids seem like they enjoy academics, but others do not. I'll be pushing the latter toward trade school. Average IBEW (electrical union) pay is about $20/hr for an apprentice and $33 for a journeyman. $40,000 to $66,000 with ZERO DEBT right out the gate is nothing to ignore (and that pay can easily double -- especially in your younger years -- if you're willing to travel and put in those extra hours). It sure beats minimum wage at a crappy service job.
so, uh, I guess I'm the modern equivalent of those trades. I mean, I don't have a union, but I fix computers and make a whole lot of money doing it, without any education. It is a lot like a trade, 'cause essentially I'm infrastructure for industry. I mean, instead of maintaining electricity at a factory, I'm maintaining servers in a build farm, but it's still infrastructure.
On the individual level you have a point. I mean, as a sysadmin, I do make like 30% less than a SWE, but I still make a whole lot of money, and I started when I was 17.
On a societal level, though? when you don't have a degree, the amount you make is dramatically dependent on how productive the people around you are.
Because I live in silicon valley and manage infrastructure for (mostly highly educated) engineers who are incredibly productive, I make a lot of money. A huge amount for someone who isn't educated or born rich.
If I was in a rural area, I'd be fighting for a job at geeksquad. I mean, I'd handily win that fight, but if I'm maintaining infrastructure for people who aren't very productive, I'm going to make... not very much money.
My point here is that if the US continues this trend of not educating it's children and excluding foreign educated people? Jobs like mine, for uneducated maintainers of infrastructure follow the jobs for the more productive people. If those people start working from china? They're probably gonna go find locals to do my job.
What I'm saying is that it is very much in my interest to do what needs to be done (mostly, I think, pay taxes) to see to it that kids go to college, even if I don't have any children of my own.
- hajile 7y agoCollege doesn't make someone smart. College doesn't make someone choose to be productive. The decisions that lead to being smart and productive start early in childhood. Unfortunately, dollars spent on early education don't seem to have much of a correlation with success later in life.
- lsc 7y agoSo, I think about this a lot. I know a lot of really good sysadmins with no education; like of the people I consider really good sysadmins, close to half might not have degrees, and this is one of the reasons I equate my job to the trades. (I mean, along with the fact that our job is to create and maintain infrastructure so that other people can work) I know a fair number of software engineers with no formal education, though the proportion is a lot less than half. I know very few good electrical engineers who lack formal education. I don't know any good chemical engineers who don't have a formal education. My own experience (I've tried at school several times. I'm currently enrolled in the computer information systems "competency based" degree at nau.edu, but I've tried a bunch of others) is that school is actually way more difficult than industry. You can't just be brilliant twice a month, as is my experience of industry; you have to show up and perform at 90% every day which seems impossibly brutal to me. I mean, this is probably a quirk of my own personality; I'm actually really good at coming in and dealing with disasters every now and again, but my consistency is... really pretty bad. I mean, I personally think that a love of and respect for learning is fundamentally more important than education; but I also think that education isn't nothing. There are a lot of people who do a lot better with some formal education, and there are a whole lot of jobs, that as far as I can tell, are almost impossible to do well without a good formal education. I personally don't think I'd let a self-taught doctor hack on me if I had any other choice at all. My personal opinion is that if there are any young people with the capacity to be good at those things that require an education who are prevented from doing those things because of money, our society has made a huge mistake, one that will cost us much money in the long term, just 'cause having those people perform at peak value is hugely valuable to society. Further, I think that the unwillingness, as a society, to pay for the education of young people evinces a lack of valuation of learning that might be an even bigger problem.
- barry-cotter 7y agoYou co-authored a reasonably successful book teaching people how to use a complicated piece of software. You may not have any formal schooling past high school but you’re wildly unrepresentative of the “uneducated”.
- lsc 7y agoI think That was actually an example of the benefits one can gain by being around people who are smarter and better educated than you are. That book would not have been intelligible without my smarter and better educated co author. I mean, I do think I am rather a lot smarter than average, but everything is relative, and I believe I have accomplished so much more because I seek out situations where I am surrounded by people I think are better than I am on those scales.