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The article is basically a rah-rah piece for working in the trades (electrician, general laborer, etc.). It complains that the author’s fellow millennials went

• diob 5y ago
  Yeah, it's one of those where a few make it out into management, but the rest end up with broken bodies.
• beebmam 5y ago
  If labor is in short supply for blue collar jobs, shouldn't wages rise significantly? Doesn't make sense to me
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    It seems whenever I've had to hire someone to do electrical work, roofing work, water heater replacement, etc., the bill is fantastic. I watch them work, and it doesn't take that long or seem so difficult. Someone is making pots of money off of it. (I've watched the cable guy, the plumber, etc., at work. Next time I needed a similar job done, I did it myself. I even bought the same tools the cable guy was using. The guy replacing the water heater noted that it had a new pressure relief valve in it. I said yeah, it started leaking a month prior and I replaced it. He was shocked, and I said all it was was unscrewing the old one and putting it a new one with a bit of teflon tape. The whole job was $27, for the new valve from Amazon. I'm pretty good at sweating pipes, too!)
    • skinkestek 5y ago
      A friend of mine who has done well for himself in retail and later real estate said at one point that if he were to start over he'd consider plumbing: Getting a good plumber in his area was hard so those who were could both be picky and expensive. Of my other close friends friends those who did best so far did by doing well in sales (graduating to running their own), blue collar mechanic (team lead -> manager -> get some spre time, starts investing and building his own) and a number of people going the carpentry to real estate route. One of those who has done well has gone via college/university.
    • yen223 5y ago
      > I watch them work, and it doesn't take that long or seem so difficult. Someone is making pots of money off of it. One could say the same about software development work. Perhaps even rightfully so.
      • WalterBright 5y ago
        Not really. I've never had plumber training, and yet figured out how to do it by watching them. Writing software isn't learned that way. I've also never met an electrician who knew what inductive coupling was. They just followed the building code. They had no idea why. The roofers didn't know what galvanic corrosion was, either, and I had them pull all the nails out that were incompatible with the flashing material and redo it. (I talked to the contractor in advance about this, and he ignored me and use the wrong nails anyway.)
  • xyzzyz 5y ago
    That depends on how much the buyers can bear. If we had a serious shortage of cooks and waiters, we wouldn’t all have $50 dollar lunches to cover their wages, we’d rather collectively just eat out less often.
    • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      Or eat in cafeterias that used labor more efficiently like in some expensive European countries. I can bus my own table.
      • xyzzyz 5y ago
        Either way, this increased efficiency would mean fewer food service jobs.
  • smsm42 5y ago
    There's also elasticity of prices. There's a limit of how much people would pay for a job. I.e. if you have a washing machine repair technician, you can't charge as much as a new washing machine costs for repair, because then people would just go and buy a new one instead. There's some point for many jobs where it's better to not do the job or find some alternative way of achieving the same. Of course, if your roof is collapsing, you don't have a choice, but in many cases you do. So you would either not do it, or postpone it as long as you can - thus reducing the income of the job supplier.
  • asdff 5y ago
    Wages are high. Infrastructure costs more to build in this country than it ever has before because of labor shortages in the trades. There are literally only a handful of companies in the country who can do things like construct a light rail line, something that used to be routine a century ago.
    • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >There are literally only a handful of companies in the country who can do things like construct a light rail line, something that used to be routine a century ago. I'm guessing there are vested corporate interests and lobbying in keeping things like this (basically, the status quo), as it means those few companies get to charge the state however much they want, while paying their workers peanuts as there's nearly no competition for the workers to jump ship to. Ah, the "benefits" of consolidation. The funny thing is, in Europe we have bridges built by the Romans that still stand, and 30 year old bridges that need to be rebuilt because the contractor cut way too many corners to squeeze a buck here and there.
  • SyzygistSix 5y ago
    As well as better working conditions. Young people aren't stupid. They can see how older people have just become accustomed to an insufferable grind. Sure, you can not go full-blown consumerist and then you only have to endure 30 years of it rather than 40+. But to many, that is still a shit deal. How about a decent work-life balance? Young people look around and it is seldom to be seen in the US.
• ManuelKiessling 5y ago
  It seems to be a huge problem in Germany as well – I had several different trades working at my house over the past few month, and every single one lamented about how there is so much work to do and they can’t find the workers to handle it. I really wonder what the results will be in the coming 5-10 years in a country whose infrastructure has already begun to crumble at the seams.
  • luka-birsa 5y ago
    It will be the same as it's currently in post-covid bar and restaurant business. Nobody wanted to work the shitty 24/7 jobs after being out of the trade during the lockdowns so they had to increase salaries. Problem is not yet big enough and the hurdle of getting into construction is not so high that it's impossible to learn the trade in 6 months. On the other hand if that would mean that construction industry is not competitive, then well, I see a lot of Turkish and Chinese companies getting deals in EU.
    • tjansen 5y ago
      > not so high that it's impossible to learn the trade in 6 months. In Germany, with its apprenticeship system, it is. Typically it takes three years. In some trades you can work without the official license, but in many you are not allowed to. The whole apprenticeship system is so fundamental in Germany that I think it would be very difficult to get rid of it.
      • ManuelKiessling 5y ago
        And really, would we want that? I’m not saying that it’s a perfect system on every dimension, but it makes for insanely high quality work on average. And it’s easy to get used to it and take it as granted. Being married to a Hungarian wife and seeing the quality of work in the trades in Hungary first hand really made me appreciate the German system. As stupid as “am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen” is in general – for the trades it might actually make sense.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
• smnrchrds 5y ago
  Do trades even pay that well, or is it just selection bias making them seem like they do? According to BLS, median annual income for plumbers, electricians, and welders are respectively 56k, 57k, and 44k. Meanwhile, the median kindergarten and elementary school teacher—a famously non-lucrative career among those requiring university education—earns 60k according to the same resource. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-pipefitters-and-steamfitters.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers... https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric... https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/welders-cutters-solderers-and-brazers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/welders-cutters-solderers... https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kindergarten-and-elementary-school-teachers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde...
  • computerphage 5y ago
    Selection bias?
  • bennysomething 5y ago
    In my experience (I grew up spending a lot of time on building sites, family business was property development) the guys in the trades who set up businesses that employ other trade guys do really well. For example plumber / electrician guy had his own business, he was really wealthy. Big house, multiple cars etc. On the other hand, the guys who never set up on their own and just worked for wages ended up poor. I could give specific stories , but even 15 year old me could see the difference.
    • smnrchrds 5y ago
      If you need to employ N other tradespeople to earn a high income, that means that the ratio of high-income to low-income tradespeople is semi-fixed. If you need to have 9 employees to get 100k income, that means only 10% of the people entering the field will have a chance to earn 100k. In addition, unless N is 2 or 3, it cannot be the case everyone gets a chance at higher incomes in their life; that they will earn lower salaries the first few years but then start earning high salaries when they move up. So, what is N? Unless it is a low number and almost everyone earns high salaries after a couple of short years, we are doing the next generation a great disservice by encouraging them to get into careers where they destroy their bodies for the benefit of the boss, not themselves.
• wodenokoto 5y ago
  Author claims to be a "Professional lender and banker" in the sidebar. Why do you think he is in construction management? Anyway, the major problem is his whole setup: > When looking at our workforce figures, we need to keep that figure in mind. The population under 16 (not working) and population over 65 (more likely to be retired) are roughly equivalent right now, which means our workforce age should hew pretty close to our overall median age No, we wouldn't expect that. He then goes on to list median working age for select jobs, as if 16 year olds could be working as electricians. But he never mentions the mean working age, which is what his entire setup is about.
  • jdlshore 5y ago
    Yes, his premise seemed off to me, too, but I *didn’t think about it deeply. Regarding “construction management,” that may not be the right term. “Construction financing and oversight,” maybe. This is what he says in the article: > For the record, I’ve gone on to finance and supervise the funding and progress of large construction projects across the U.S. I can’t help but think that the article is a bit self-serving.
• the_only_law 5y ago
  I swear every instance of “you can make a lot of money in the trades” seems to selectively focus on workers in states with a heavy union culture, or people who run their own business, the latter of which I wouldn’t simply reduce to “working in the trades”. It may involve that or a history of that, but there’s entirely new and additional skill sets required. For my current state of residence, Florida, BLS lists the mean salary of the parent category “ Office and Administrative Support Occupations” as $39,300. Not great sure the averages for more specific categories under that parent run from anywhere from the low 30s to low 50s. I’ve picked this category specifically since it’s the lower tier of “white collar work”, i.e. stuff a relatively unskilled college grad my find themselves doing. Now some blue collar categories: “Construction and Extraction Occupations” - $42,930 “Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations” - $46,560 “Production Occupations” - $37,700 I don’t want to add noise by listing a ton of specific careers under these categories (and obviously the mean salary within categories can vary a lot). It does seem like the first two categories pay marginally better, but not by a lot. Various other white collar categories have better pay, even ones that people traditionally considered woefully underpaid, such as teaching professions and science ones. I understand there’s still a benefit for trade careers in that education doesn’t set you back nearly as much, but I also don’t want to equate white collar and educated. Plenty of sales people and software devs without a formal education. Just for kicks, I’ll look at some Glassdoor salary data for some trade related jobs near me, particularly the ones that people rave on and on about. Not a particularly good source, but there’s some ok self reported data. “Electrician” - range goes from $32k-$81k, with an average around $51k “Plumber” - $26k-$86k with an average $47k “Welder” (this one is interesting, because from what I hear you can make really good money, in specific niches under more dangerous circumstances) - $28k-$56k with an average close to $40k. Not going to say these are particularly worse than the wide net of “white collar” jobs, but they’re certainly a far cry from the “I know a guy who makes six figures as a tradesmen” anecdotes that get passed around oh so often in these types of discussions. Of course this is an extremely superficial look at some data I did at 2am. I’m sure, drilling down, you’ll find many blue collar and white collar careers that pay better than the overall category averages, and I am not a “go to college or risk your future” nor a “go into the trades, you can make a ton of money” type person. I just think both attitudes are memes and way overstated.
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• m0llusk 5y ago
  Worse than that is the mention of Housekeeping/Janitorial which in high demand areas pays around $40/hour and might even fill a schedule. At these typical rates that means something like $30k-$50k/year which is not enough to live well in areas with demand for these services and is also around that level where taxes begin to sharply increase and take a large part of any extra that is earned. So why aren't people choosing to be badly compensated for demeaning low status work? It is a bizarre mystery to be sure.
• bodge5000 5y ago
  I remember being told a lot when I was younger how good it was to get into trades, how well they pay and how easy it was to get into. I might be an edge case, but I tried getting into both trade jobs and dev and found the latter far easier (I didn't go to university, or even finish my A-levels). I'm no hotshot programmer either, I've done a few hobby projects but nothing that'd blow your mind. As for pay, its hard to say for sure but I'm doing alright for myself and my prospects are only looking better. I have friends who are in trades (all around the same age), some are paid more and some less than me so it doesnt appear to be that much different. Don't have any particular problem with trade jobs either, but they seem to be a bit overhyped and no more worthy of respect than anything else