5 ms·

30 years of state run schools and colleges telling everyone you absolutely need a college degree and everyone who works in the trades is a loser has resulted in

30 years of state run schools and colleges telling everyone you absolutely need a college degree and everyone who works in the trades is a loser has resulted in a massive skilled tradesman deficit.

tpmx 5y ago
I think this is very common in many "western world" countries, not just the US. And at the moment the software field seems a lot more financially rewarding to smart, practical young people trying to figure out what field they should go into.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > I think this is very common in many "western world" countries, not just the US. I'd say it's the same process even in China these days. There was a big stir online few years ago where it came to light that Shenzhen polytech grads have significantly larger salaries, and employment than much more prestigious university graduates. On other side, I see more, and more Chinese companies becoming carbon copies of American corporates with engineering offices stuffed full of MBA's, and needing 10 SWOT analyses to fix a single line of code bug.
voidfunc 5y ago
You are not wrong about the messaging but lets not pretend trade work is green fields and roses, a lot of it absolutely fucks up peoples bodies.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Being poor absolutely fucks up being able to live, so I'd rather have a meaningful career if I had the choice versus being look at unfavorably compared to an automaton in other fields.
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    I hadn't considered this before reading your comments, but it makes sense that skilled trades will be somewhat automation proof, at least in the medium term.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      In part because skilled trades already are fairly mechanized. Backhoes, skid-loaders, nail guns, power tools, etc. (And in general, I think mechanization is under-appreciated as a productivity enhancer compared to automation... Who is more productive moving something like gravel around, someone driving a 5 ton capacity dump truck or someone overseeing 100 gravel-moving drones with a capacity of 5 kilograms each? Even if the drones are essentially autonomous, the dump truck driver will be more productive in moving the material around because he's driving a big machine and the drones will need someone to manage them especially when there are problems. Or even compare 5 ton autonomous mining trucks with a 500 ton dump truck... the 500 tonner is gonna win. Larger scale machines are still a pretty straightforward way to improve productivity.)
      - bandyaboot 5y ago
        Honest question. Why do your examples assume that the autonomous machine has to be smaller than the human operated version?
        Robotbeat 5y ago
        Well there’s an argument that there’s not a lot gained by going fully autonomous for huge machines. These huge trucks are like $5 million apiece not including sensors and hardware and software for automation, and so hiring a human to operate them (or even just babysit them) for $20-30/hour (typical dump or coal truck operator wage) seems like a pretty obvious idea. Which doesn’t mean people aren’t automating mining trucks… they are! But there aren’t huge cost savings in terms of labor. I guess I’m just saying that scaling up your smaller machine to be larger has the same kind of productivity enhancements as switching your smaller machine to autonomous. It is also something humans have been doing ever since the development of domestic beasts of burden.
- Fordec 5y ago
  Is there a building industry equivalent of build the machine that builds the houses? You can be a massively skilled electronic engineer, but you don't need to hand solder every board to have a great, skilled, outcome. I guess the answer is all the machinery we employ for larger buildings, but there's no real equivalent for the individual suburban home which still involves most of the manual labor.
  - wrycoder 5y ago
    Actually, the electrical engineers that I’ve worked with didn’t know how to solder. They had technicians to do that. OTOH, I, a physicist, used to be a certified NASA solderer. That was in the days before surface mount.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      All the EEs of my generation knew how to solder. Interestingly, no electrician I've used knew what inductive coupling was. :-(
      - wrycoder 5y ago
        Well, I’m about fifteen years older than you are. You must have worked with a different class of EEs. The one I knew weren’t hams and probably didn’t grow up building kits and stuff like we did. Inductive coupling is one of the most fascinating topics in EM. And, is all the power really flowing in the air between the wires? The electricians don’t know that, either.
    - analog31 5y ago
      I'm a physicist too. The electrical engineers at my workplace know how to solder. However, if someone needs a noise budget, they bring it to me. I'm the one who teaches the chemists to solder. ;-)
  - jacoblambda 5y ago
    Well there's the tools industry and robotics in general but the issue ultimately comes down to cost and speed. You can use heavy automation and tooling to reduce the tax on a person but that equipment is incredibly expensive and often times is slower than a person or a few people just doing the job by themselves or with more "manual" tools.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  There’s one channel on yt that I watch a lot. The fellow builds houses, and his ability to reach down and do useful work four inches below his toes amazes me.
- yojo 5y ago
  This. My dad is a contractor. I’ve been taking some time off SWE work to try to learn some of what he knows while he can still do it. It is just hard on my body, half the days I wake up with the wrong kind of pain. Hanging drywall, digging post holes, sanding, painting, laying tile, etc. So much of the work is an ergonomic nightmare. I think it’s not as bad in single family construction as commercial work, since the activity varies more over the day/week. But still, I can’t imagine my body not breaking if I did this for a career. OTOH electrical work seems mostly reasonable. If one of my kids wanted to get into a trade that’s where I’d steer them.
  - pc86 5y ago
    Not diminishing the degree to which it can hurt your body long term - it absolutely can. That being said, most people that do that kind of work as a career start it as a job when they're 16-18 years old, and are typically active (sports, etc.) for many many years before that. You're starting it at best in your mid-to-late twenties? And even if you played sports in HS and go to the gym regularly, your body just isn't used to it and it's past the point where it can quickly adapt and more importantly get used to the stimulus. You're likely much more prone to injury than someone fifteen years older than you whose been doing that work since they were 17 (I'm sure I am too, it would destroy and I am very active for a SWE).
    - stanski 5y ago
      Yes and no. I don't know of any exercise that would compare to sanding a wall, for example. It's not exactly an activity you would want to be doing for a long stretch of time. No matter how fit you are, construction work isn't like you're getting paid to go to the gym.
    - yojo 5y ago
      Fair. I’m late 30s, my dad is 74 and can work circles around me. He definitely started manual labor young. I did some of it in high school but have been behind a desk since college. I do consider myself very fit/active, but it’s not the strength or stamina that’s the limiting factor, it’s the holding weight at weird angles, or applying torque, or just reaching out over my center of mass for hours. Anecdotally it seems like the specialists have it worst. His friends who did flooring all have wrecked knees, and the drywall hangers have messed up shoulders. He seems to have made it out unscathed, though other generalists he knows have back problems.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Now we have electricians charging as much as software agencies. HVAC installation costs as much as a car in warmer regions. General handyman work outclasses all retail jobs, but you don't hear about people with two bachelors doing that type of work like you do at a Starbucks.
- jacoblambda 5y ago
  I think part of this is because skilled trades are often more physically taxing than "traditional" college degree desk jobs. I'm inclined towards the skilled trade side of things because I like getting my hands dirty but I understand why people wouldn't want to do a job that has you in a shop or working out in the heat, cold, or rain on a regular basis. Not to mention I imagine the injury and/or casualty rate is much higher for many trades compared to desk jobs. TLDR: We obviously need both and they are equally good fields but I completely understand the perceived higher valuation for the safer, less physically taxing albeit often more boring and sedimentary jobs.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    Retail jobs are often physically taxing also - shelf stacking for example.
  - glennpratt 5y ago
    I think society does a poor job communicating the actual lack of safety that comes from sedentary, physically repetitive jobs. I wouldn't qualify for workers compensation for my herniated disc because I don't know when it started or why. But it's probably from sitting in front of a computer. Asking coworkers over 35, they almost all have injuries from computer work. Maintaining weight and strength while a huge chunk of your day is sedentary is a big chore too.
    - jacoblambda 5y ago
      I completely agree. Of course as you say the damage from sedentary jobs is a lot less visible and much harder to pinpoint. I'd argue the public perceives sedentary jobs as much safer because of this even if they may not be in reality.
renewiltord 5y ago
Do you have data that links these two or are you speculating?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  They might be speculating, but it’s pretty reasonable. There’s been a massive uptick in college attendance and presumably a lot of those attendees would have been headed for the trades in the 60s before the “[almost] everyone should go to college” push.
wnevets 5y ago
Construction is an incredibly unstable source of income, its very feast or famine in nature. Software for example hasn't been since the dot com bubble burst
- epistasis 5y ago
  I think a good way to stabilize this industry, and overall help our current housing crunch and homelessness crisis, is to have a government builder. Somebody that builds countercyclically, buying land and collecting the same land rents that landlords do, but turning those land rents into more housing. We currently subsidize our food system with a massive amount of socialism, to the degree that Midwestern farming probably wouldn't be recognizable without the farm bill. However, our housing system is going to crap due to the instability of construction as a trade, which in turn is causing massive increases in housing prices. I think this is a place where we need to change our government policy to make it a better market. Instead of intervening only with massive subsidies for home loans as we currently do, we should also stabilize the demand side of construction to keep it healthy, by providing a continuous buyer of construction labor.
websites2023 5y ago
And yet college degree attainment hovers around 33% and those who do get one earn an average of $1m more over their life time than those who don’t. There’s something else going on here.
closeparen 5y ago
The just-so story I heard about the construction trades was that there was essentially no work for years after 2008. The master craftsmen retired or moved on, and as demand recovered there was hardly anyone left to train even those apprentices brave enough to enter an industry that just... sometimes doesn't have any work for a few years.
AngryData 5y ago
There aren't a lack of tradesmen, there is a lack of people willing to cut 20 years off their life for a marginal raise, especially in the US where that will barely cover their increased medical and tool costs. There is a lack of people willing to put themselves financially reliant on a boom-bust industry where workers are regularly fired or layed off on a moments notice. I know more tradesmen that are leaving the trades than joining, and they are usually the best among their group. Being a skilled framer often nets you nothing over being a barely competent framer. Despite all these claims of trades making huge money, most tradesmen are not. For ever plumber in NYC making $50 an hour, there is a dozen other contractors working for $12 an hour using their own tools and trucks fighting over the scraps of lower class business who can barely afford them.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "Being a skilled framer often nets you nothing over being a barely competent framer." Every indutry that doesnt reward skill qill eventually go to shit
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    Which is why Germany had the "Meisterzwang" for a long time in the trades - basically only certified masters of a trade could open up a shop. Unfortunately, EU laws forced Germany to drop that requirement for everything sans a couple of high-risk trade jobs (e.g. electricity, plumbing, meatpacking, roofing and hairdressers).
    - sgerenser 5y ago
      Hairdressing is high risk?
      - mschuster91 5y ago
        Yes, as hairdressers are dealing with sometimes extremely toxic or allergy-causing/-triggering chemicals on the skins of their customers. Hair color and bleach is nasty stuff.
eplanit 5y ago
This is just what Mike Rowe talks about, and something that he's personally working on: https://www.mikeroweworks.org/about/ https://www.mikeroweworks.org/about/. More power to him!

30 years of state run schools and colleges telling everyone you absolutely need a college degree and everyone who works in the trades is a loser has resulted in a massive skilled tradesman deficit.

tpmx 5y ago

I think this is very common in many "western world" countries, not just the US. And at the moment the software field seems a lot more financially rewarding to smart, practical young people trying to figure out what field they should go into.

baybal2 5y ago
> I think this is very common in many "western world" countries, not just the US. I'd say it's the same process even in China these days. There was a big stir online few years ago where it came to light that Shenzhen polytech grads have significantly larger salaries, and employment than much more prestigious university graduates. On other side, I see more, and more Chinese companies becoming carbon copies of American corporates with engineering offices stuffed full of MBA's, and needing 10 SWOT analyses to fix a single line of code bug.

voidfunc 5y ago

You are not wrong about the messaging but lets not pretend trade work is green fields and roses, a lot of it absolutely fucks up peoples bodies.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Being poor absolutely fucks up being able to live, so I'd rather have a meaningful career if I had the choice versus being look at unfavorably compared to an automaton in other fields.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  I hadn't considered this before reading your comments, but it makes sense that skilled trades will be somewhat automation proof, at least in the medium term.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    In part because skilled trades already are fairly mechanized. Backhoes, skid-loaders, nail guns, power tools, etc. (And in general, I think mechanization is under-appreciated as a productivity enhancer compared to automation... Who is more productive moving something like gravel around, someone driving a 5 ton capacity dump truck or someone overseeing 100 gravel-moving drones with a capacity of 5 kilograms each? Even if the drones are essentially autonomous, the dump truck driver will be more productive in moving the material around because he's driving a big machine and the drones will need someone to manage them especially when there are problems. Or even compare 5 ton autonomous mining trucks with a 500 ton dump truck... the 500 tonner is gonna win. Larger scale machines are still a pretty straightforward way to improve productivity.)
    - bandyaboot 5y ago
      Honest question. Why do your examples assume that the autonomous machine has to be smaller than the human operated version?
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        Well there’s an argument that there’s not a lot gained by going fully autonomous for huge machines. These huge trucks are like $5 million apiece not including sensors and hardware and software for automation, and so hiring a human to operate them (or even just babysit them) for $20-30/hour (typical dump or coal truck operator wage) seems like a pretty obvious idea. Which doesn’t mean people aren’t automating mining trucks… they are! But there aren’t huge cost savings in terms of labor. I guess I’m just saying that scaling up your smaller machine to be larger has the same kind of productivity enhancements as switching your smaller machine to autonomous. It is also something humans have been doing ever since the development of domestic beasts of burden.
Fordec 5y ago
Is there a building industry equivalent of build the machine that builds the houses? You can be a massively skilled electronic engineer, but you don't need to hand solder every board to have a great, skilled, outcome. I guess the answer is all the machinery we employ for larger buildings, but there's no real equivalent for the individual suburban home which still involves most of the manual labor.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  Actually, the electrical engineers that I’ve worked with didn’t know how to solder. They had technicians to do that. OTOH, I, a physicist, used to be a certified NASA solderer. That was in the days before surface mount.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    All the EEs of my generation knew how to solder. Interestingly, no electrician I've used knew what inductive coupling was. :-(
    - wrycoder 5y ago
      Well, I’m about fifteen years older than you are. You must have worked with a different class of EEs. The one I knew weren’t hams and probably didn’t grow up building kits and stuff like we did. Inductive coupling is one of the most fascinating topics in EM. And, is all the power really flowing in the air between the wires? The electricians don’t know that, either.
  - analog31 5y ago
    I'm a physicist too. The electrical engineers at my workplace know how to solder. However, if someone needs a noise budget, they bring it to me. I'm the one who teaches the chemists to solder. ;-)
- jacoblambda 5y ago
  Well there's the tools industry and robotics in general but the issue ultimately comes down to cost and speed. You can use heavy automation and tooling to reduce the tax on a person but that equipment is incredibly expensive and often times is slower than a person or a few people just doing the job by themselves or with more "manual" tools.
wrycoder 5y ago
There’s one channel on yt that I watch a lot. The fellow builds houses, and his ability to reach down and do useful work four inches below his toes amazes me.
yojo 5y ago
This. My dad is a contractor. I’ve been taking some time off SWE work to try to learn some of what he knows while he can still do it. It is just hard on my body, half the days I wake up with the wrong kind of pain. Hanging drywall, digging post holes, sanding, painting, laying tile, etc. So much of the work is an ergonomic nightmare. I think it’s not as bad in single family construction as commercial work, since the activity varies more over the day/week. But still, I can’t imagine my body not breaking if I did this for a career. OTOH electrical work seems mostly reasonable. If one of my kids wanted to get into a trade that’s where I’d steer them.
- pc86 5y ago
  Not diminishing the degree to which it can hurt your body long term - it absolutely can. That being said, most people that do that kind of work as a career start it as a job when they're 16-18 years old, and are typically active (sports, etc.) for many many years before that. You're starting it at best in your mid-to-late twenties? And even if you played sports in HS and go to the gym regularly, your body just isn't used to it and it's past the point where it can quickly adapt and more importantly get used to the stimulus. You're likely much more prone to injury than someone fifteen years older than you whose been doing that work since they were 17 (I'm sure I am too, it would destroy and I am very active for a SWE).
  - stanski 5y ago
    Yes and no. I don't know of any exercise that would compare to sanding a wall, for example. It's not exactly an activity you would want to be doing for a long stretch of time. No matter how fit you are, construction work isn't like you're getting paid to go to the gym.
  - yojo 5y ago
    Fair. I’m late 30s, my dad is 74 and can work circles around me. He definitely started manual labor young. I did some of it in high school but have been behind a desk since college. I do consider myself very fit/active, but it’s not the strength or stamina that’s the limiting factor, it’s the holding weight at weird angles, or applying torque, or just reaching out over my center of mass for hours. Anecdotally it seems like the specialists have it worst. His friends who did flooring all have wrecked knees, and the drywall hangers have messed up shoulders. He seems to have made it out unscathed, though other generalists he knows have back problems.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

Now we have electricians charging as much as software agencies. HVAC installation costs as much as a car in warmer regions. General handyman work outclasses all retail jobs, but you don't hear about people with two bachelors doing that type of work like you do at a Starbucks.

jacoblambda 5y ago
I think part of this is because skilled trades are often more physically taxing than "traditional" college degree desk jobs. I'm inclined towards the skilled trade side of things because I like getting my hands dirty but I understand why people wouldn't want to do a job that has you in a shop or working out in the heat, cold, or rain on a regular basis. Not to mention I imagine the injury and/or casualty rate is much higher for many trades compared to desk jobs. TLDR: We obviously need both and they are equally good fields but I completely understand the perceived higher valuation for the safer, less physically taxing albeit often more boring and sedimentary jobs.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Retail jobs are often physically taxing also - shelf stacking for example.
- glennpratt 5y ago
  I think society does a poor job communicating the actual lack of safety that comes from sedentary, physically repetitive jobs. I wouldn't qualify for workers compensation for my herniated disc because I don't know when it started or why. But it's probably from sitting in front of a computer. Asking coworkers over 35, they almost all have injuries from computer work. Maintaining weight and strength while a huge chunk of your day is sedentary is a big chore too.
  - jacoblambda 5y ago
    I completely agree. Of course as you say the damage from sedentary jobs is a lot less visible and much harder to pinpoint. I'd argue the public perceives sedentary jobs as much safer because of this even if they may not be in reality.

renewiltord 5y ago

Do you have data that links these two or are you speculating?

sokoloff 5y ago
They might be speculating, but it’s pretty reasonable. There’s been a massive uptick in college attendance and presumably a lot of those attendees would have been headed for the trades in the 60s before the “[almost] everyone should go to college” push.

wnevets 5y ago

Construction is an incredibly unstable source of income, its very feast or famine in nature. Software for example hasn't been since the dot com bubble burst

epistasis 5y ago
I think a good way to stabilize this industry, and overall help our current housing crunch and homelessness crisis, is to have a government builder. Somebody that builds countercyclically, buying land and collecting the same land rents that landlords do, but turning those land rents into more housing. We currently subsidize our food system with a massive amount of socialism, to the degree that Midwestern farming probably wouldn't be recognizable without the farm bill. However, our housing system is going to crap due to the instability of construction as a trade, which in turn is causing massive increases in housing prices. I think this is a place where we need to change our government policy to make it a better market. Instead of intervening only with massive subsidies for home loans as we currently do, we should also stabilize the demand side of construction to keep it healthy, by providing a continuous buyer of construction labor.

websites2023 5y ago

And yet college degree attainment hovers around 33% and those who do get one earn an average of $1m more over their life time than those who don’t. There’s something else going on here.

closeparen 5y ago

The just-so story I heard about the construction trades was that there was essentially no work for years after 2008. The master craftsmen retired or moved on, and as demand recovered there was hardly anyone left to train even those apprentices brave enough to enter an industry that just... sometimes doesn't have any work for a few years.

AngryData 5y ago

There aren't a lack of tradesmen, there is a lack of people willing to cut 20 years off their life for a marginal raise, especially in the US where that will barely cover their increased medical and tool costs. There is a lack of people willing to put themselves financially reliant on a boom-bust industry where workers are regularly fired or layed off on a moments notice. I know more tradesmen that are leaving the trades than joining, and they are usually the best among their group. Being a skilled framer often nets you nothing over being a barely competent framer. Despite all these claims of trades making huge money, most tradesmen are not. For ever plumber in NYC making $50 an hour, there is a dozen other contractors working for $12 an hour using their own tools and trucks fighting over the scraps of lower class business who can barely afford them.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"Being a skilled framer often nets you nothing over being a barely competent framer." Every indutry that doesnt reward skill qill eventually go to shit
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Which is why Germany had the "Meisterzwang" for a long time in the trades - basically only certified masters of a trade could open up a shop. Unfortunately, EU laws forced Germany to drop that requirement for everything sans a couple of high-risk trade jobs (e.g. electricity, plumbing, meatpacking, roofing and hairdressers).
  - sgerenser 5y ago
    Hairdressing is high risk?
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      Yes, as hairdressers are dealing with sometimes extremely toxic or allergy-causing/-triggering chemicals on the skins of their customers. Hair color and bleach is nasty stuff.

eplanit 5y ago

This is just what Mike Rowe talks about, and something that he's personally working on: https://www.mikeroweworks.org/about/ https://www.mikeroweworks.org/about/. More power to him!