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It takes literal years of daily practice for a welder to get good enough to do the high quality specialty materials pipe fitting welds that would make up so muc

It takes literal years of daily practice for a welder to get good enough to do the high quality specialty materials pipe fitting welds that would make up so much of nuclear plant construction. I am not exaggerating. A good welder/fitter team can work pretty much wherever they want, they are in incredibly high demand. There aren't more of them because not that many people have the baseline talent to be able to achieve the ability, regardless of how much practice they put in. Source: used to weld at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego.

jessaustin 6y ago
Could you expand on the "baseline talent"? This isn't the sort of hand-eye coordination that would be required to hit a major-league fastball, is it? (Somehow those employers are able to fulfill their skilled-labor needs.) How would an individual welder determine whether she has the talent that would make those years of practice worthwhile? If that is not possible, why don't interested organizations set up some testing programs?
- jjk166 6y ago
  Hand eye coordination isn't really the issue. When welding, you put an incredible amount of heat into the material. This causes it to move in real time. A welder needs to predict how it will move ant actively account for this so that the final piece winds up in the right condition. The tolerances depend on the application - for furniture who cares if it's out a bit, for a coolant line to a reactor you need it to be damn near perfect. Then there's heat penetration - adding heat to the material changes its material properties. Go too slow and steel becomes excessively weak, go too fast and you don't form a strong bond. Again, big differences between "probably won't break if you sit on it" and "this will kill a dozen people if it fails" Finally, there's just plain old margin for error. If you're welding together consumer products, it doesn't matter if you scrap one every now and then. However if you're trying to join together two multi-million dollar custom fabrications, you need someone who's going to walk up to this and get it on the first try every time. I'd compare it less to being a major league baseball player and more to being a professional musician - you can't determine that someone could never do it, but some people are certainly born with a knack for it and you can't simply churn out more on a whim.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    Thanks for the detailed and insightful answer! It seems that welding is what takes over when engineering can't go any further.

jessaustin 6y ago

Could you expand on the "baseline talent"? This isn't the sort of hand-eye coordination that would be required to hit a major-league fastball, is it? (Somehow those employers are able to fulfill their skilled-labor needs.) How would an individual welder determine whether she has the talent that would make those years of practice worthwhile? If that is not possible, why don't interested organizations set up some testing programs?

jjk166 6y ago
Hand eye coordination isn't really the issue. When welding, you put an incredible amount of heat into the material. This causes it to move in real time. A welder needs to predict how it will move ant actively account for this so that the final piece winds up in the right condition. The tolerances depend on the application - for furniture who cares if it's out a bit, for a coolant line to a reactor you need it to be damn near perfect. Then there's heat penetration - adding heat to the material changes its material properties. Go too slow and steel becomes excessively weak, go too fast and you don't form a strong bond. Again, big differences between "probably won't break if you sit on it" and "this will kill a dozen people if it fails" Finally, there's just plain old margin for error. If you're welding together consumer products, it doesn't matter if you scrap one every now and then. However if you're trying to join together two multi-million dollar custom fabrications, you need someone who's going to walk up to this and get it on the first try every time. I'd compare it less to being a major league baseball player and more to being a professional musician - you can't determine that someone could never do it, but some people are certainly born with a knack for it and you can't simply churn out more on a whim.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Thanks for the detailed and insightful answer! It seems that welding is what takes over when engineering can't go any further.