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High-school shop students attract skilled-trades job offers

256 points by lxm 1y ago

mikestew 1y ago
https://archive.ph/sWpS1 https://archive.ph/sWpS1
techpineapple 1y ago
Can’t really read the article so can’t confirm this. There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades, but doesn’t at least half the country live in a place / have parents that value the trades? I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools. Which means that maybe somewhat unintuitively, there are no separate paths — college for good students, trade school and military for I dunno, “non-academic/street smarts or whatever you wan to call it. — trade schools, the military and colleges are actually all competing for the same students. The second theory is tied to the first one, but for all the marketing on how great these jobs are, there are structural / practical problems with them. From how they pay, to lack of job security to the havoc they can wreak on your body.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  That's pretty much it in a nutshell --- I've always described the "Maker Movement" as "Geeks who missed shop class". Cut my teeth on texts such as: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square and have bought (and given away) more copies of: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-math https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-... and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-geometry https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-ge... than I'd care to count. Current project has me working through: the _Make: Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ books (and looking for a good book on conic sections which has optimized formulae to speed up/simplify what are currently a series of chained trigonometric functions...).
  - deleted 1y ago
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- mmooss 1y ago
  > There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades The conservative / GOP tactics are usually the same, and everyone else has, at conservative urging, disarmed themselves - they've abandoned postmodern understanding of communication, which the conservatives strategically embrace: They reframe issues: College is reframed - it was that knowledge was power, the key to life, citzenship, work, and sharpening your mind, your critical thinking, with the best thinkers and ideas in history was the most powerful tool. Now college is reframed as a training in employment skills for corporations. Life was about dreams and opportunity, fulfilling your potential and your dreams; now it's about making enough to survive. They refame America: It was the land of opportunity, where by working hard anyone had the opportunity to accomplish anything, not a class-based oppressive system like Europe and elsewhere; now you stay in your socioeconomic lane, take any job you can get, and (again) survive - what does a poor kid need college for? How you frame issues can determine the outcome of the discussion. 'Should we murder unborn babies?', 'Should we let undocumented criminals into the country?' - obviously, the answer is in how the question is framed (and often the framing is much more subtle than these easy examples). That doesn't mean there aren't merits to both sides but framing is a way to prevent discussion of the merits. They also demonize: Everything must include a criticism of 'liberals'. Almost as a display of bona fides, you'll see that commentary must always include an attack on liberals, even if it's a critique of something the GOP/conservatives is doing. Similarly they blame 'liberals' for every problem, no matter how absurd. They blame liberals for immigration, health care, lack of green energy, etc. etc. If you read the transcripts of the leaked Signal chats, you'll see their agreed-upon talking points included, without discussion, 'blame Biden'. Biden isn't even in office and will never run again, but that's a must. And why wouldn't they do these things? They work and nobody puts up any resistance; nobody even tries to understand their tactics or why they work and dominate the public debate. The Democrats play helpless - not a winning strategy and IMHO the reason they lose; who votes for helpless? And many liberals now embrace victimhood -- helplessness + persecution = a lack of personal responsibility for anything -- another winning strategy.
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- mindslight 1y ago
  > One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades I've got to wonder if a deeper dynamic is that you now have to be relatively "smart" to go into the trades because perhaps the teaching/curricula is lacking, making it so that more base general intelligence / self starting on abstract concepts is required to actually learn in the first place. Trade classes should be an opportunity for people who missed the verbal-communication-of-abstract-topics meta-intelligence to develop their intelligence focused around a narrower topic that they taking a liking to. But if the teacher is really uninspired, and the curriculum shies away from actually creating larger cool things or playing with different techniques, (or becomes about following the manual for procedures for poorly-documented poorly-written throwaway proprietary software) I can see it coming off as yet another "when are we going to need this" high school class.
  - techpineapple 1y ago
    I’ll bet it’s a scale issue though. Everyone knows a person (I’m one of them) who does bad in say math class but later gets a job with applied math, because doing math in a classroom is boring. But if you try to design a curriculum for say “math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class”. You’re mostly going to get people who just don’t have the whatever they need to be good enough at math to be an electrician.
    - mindslight 1y ago
      "math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class" seems like a reaction from within the model of the prevailing philosophy - more abstraction-first book learning. Whereas addressing a different learning style would be more like: here are the physical skills you need to be an electrician, here are more classes working your way up to build larger and larger things, and oh by the way now that you've developed the skills of building things while taking direction from someone telling you how to build it, let's try to teach you how to figure out how to build it yourself. And I'm just wondering if the safety-and-HR-uber-alles dynamic has stamped out a lot a of that physical-skills-first in favor of like, dry lessons trying to tell people all about wiring before they actually get to play with wires. Thus making it so the same people who succeed here are the traditionally "smart" ones that can take abstract knowledge and store it for later, before having something tangible to apply it to. (electrician might not be the best example for this because the differences between good/unsafe/unpowered wiring are still pretty abstract, but hopefully you can see the point regardless)
- kmeisthax 1y ago
  There's also a bit of this that's culture war fodder. A lot of middle-class conservatives send their kids to colleges, their kids reject their parents' conservatism, so the parents think the college has used some kind of magic liberalism ray[0] on their kids. The reality is, of course, that their kids weren't nearly as conservative as the parents thought. But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges. Trade schools come into play mainly as a totem to hold up against liberal colleges. They are being played up as a sort of bastion of conservative thought, mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system. There's a kernel of truth in all of this, in that there's some trades that shouldn't have been left out of the STEM paths that colleges like to push as an obvious moneymaker. The culture war is ultimately one of mottes and baileys, where you take some truth and ride it as one's political hobby-horse. Hell, just to explain why this happens I've already had to do the same thing. [0] In the same way that some people think tech companies can "hack our dopamine loops" or whatever
  - techpineapple 1y ago
    The thing that gets to me, and everyone is overly idealistic about a lot of things(learn to code!) but I really wish that that things were as simple as conservative culture warriors laid them out to be. It would be great if there was this “one neat trick!” To getting a 70k a year job right out of high school, optimized for people less academically inclined.
  - repeekad 1y ago
    For what it’s worth, my intro to psychology gen ed professor told us to spell “humyn” with a y to “remove woman being dependent on man” and let us skip the final if we recorded ourselves protesting the controversial state house bill at the time. On net I agree with what you’re saying, but know that the culture war isn’t total bs one sided, and my unremarkable school had plenty of bad examples like this. Evergreen university in 2017 barring white people from attending class for a day was particularly embarrassing.
    - whatshisface 1y ago
- TMWNN 1y ago
  > I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools. This has been the case for a long time. For almost the entirety of the post-1973 end of US military conscription, a high school diploma has been required to enlist. From a 2008 study <http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-in-the-us-military-the-demographics-of-enlisted-troops-and-officers http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...>: "Members of the all-volunteer [American] military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods." Also, "American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree ... Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service."
- nradov 1y ago
  It's true that bad schools make poor neighborhoods unproductive for military recruiters. They usually don't want recruits who dropped out of high school or have low ASVAB scores. But a lot of young people in those neighborhoods are also disqualified because of poor health (particularly including obesity, asthma, and various mental conditions), history of illegal drug use, and criminal records. These social issues are all highly correlated.
- intermerda 1y ago
  The same politicians who push trades on America and bash colleges won't send their kids to trade schools but send them to Ivy League Universities instead. I wonder why that is.
anonymousiam 1y ago
Non-paywalled version here: https://archive.is/mhFn0 https://archive.is/mhFn0
teuobk 1y ago
For what it's worth, /r/welding seems to think this claim is complete bunk: https://www.reddit.com/r/Welding/comments/1khd9aj/this_is_comical_lmao/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Welding/comments/1khd9aj/this_is_co...
- techpineapple 1y ago
  I’m curious what the distinction is. I assume that the article isn’t just a complete fabrication, but maybe they highlight the 20 best stories and everything else is meh. Kinda like saying you should go to code school because you can land a 175k/year entry level job at Google. Technically true.
  - eWeSaYYY 1y ago
    P-hacking is allowed and encouraged outside physical science where getting stats of medicine and building a bridge wrong have obvious side effect News media will whittle down their data set to get a result that only matters where cost of living is high, and there’s a tiny number of the workers overall. Leads the innumerates in rural Somewhereville, Flyover, USA, to be all confused they don’t make SF salaries in the middle of nowhere.
  - alistairSH 1y ago
    That’s my take. Yea, welding offshore/underwater pays very well. Food-grade welding a bit less. Both have fairly miserable working conditions, are hard on your body, have some amount of danger, typically require lots of OT to make the claimed income, and unless you’re union, with mediocre benefits. Great job for those who enjoy that type of work and/or want to hustle and save then move on. But any claim that it’s easy money or typicsl is just wrong.
- carabiner 1y ago
  If you read the threads in /r/construction that come up about this or adjacent topics ("trades are a guaranteed job, better than college") they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay. Personally, my friend is a carpenter and lives with his dad to save money. This is in Seattle so tons of construction and work to go around. He says he wishes he studied computer science in college (has an english degree).
StefanBatory 1y ago
How common it is to have shop classes in schools in USA? For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects. There are vocational schools, but they're known to be awful quality and you don't go there if you want to earn trade, but if you're an awful student. And if you aren't awful student, then you'll most likely end up as one - as your peers will most likely be :( There are also "technikum" which is a mix of these two, but it's not for trade per se, and statistically chances you'll pass your end of school exams are smaller.
- jspaetzel 1y ago
  I went to maybe slightly above average high school for my area and didn't have one. But there were programs where the school partnered with community colleges and students maintaining decent grades could attend classes elsewhere. And those had shop as well as other vocational programs. They probably sent us home with a pamphlet with information at the beginning of the year, but I don't remember.
- ZFleck 1y ago
  The answer is probably, unhelpfully, "it depends". I attended a fairly large high school, and we probably had a dozen shop class offerings. A much smaller school just a few miles away had no infrastructure to support any shop classes. It's probably even more nuanced than that, though. My parents both attended very small schools in small towns, and both offered shop classes. All four schools mentioned were / are located in the Midwest, though, and none in large cities. If I had to guess, I'd say probably the majority of schools in the US offer some form of shop class(es). But I don't believe any would necessarily be part of the standard curriculum. Generally, these classes are elective.
  - StefanBatory 1y ago
    I'll say something unrelated to my question before, but damn if I don't envy you for electives. I had zero elective classes up through my entire pre-uni education. At my uni, I had one or two elective classes - at fifth and sixth semester, and that's all. It is an aspect of American education I do like a lot. (here we choose our profile, which assigns us to extended classes - i.e, Maths/English/Physics, Maths/Biology/Chemistry, Polish/Geography/History and so on, but then we don't get to choose anything after.)
lif 1y ago
hmm... the U.S. economy might stand to benefit from adapting a school system more akin to the German model? Specifically, offering a track similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_school
- autobodie 1y ago
  Doesn't matter because U.S. ruling class doesn't agree.
  - tekla 1y ago
    There is literally nothing stopping you from going to trade school and skipping college. College is still a gate for higher paid trades because advanced manufacturing wants educated workers that can do math and/or programming g-code and/or know advanced metallurgy I know someone who went to welding school, and he was basically practice welding 40 hours a week after class because he was working on some very advanced welds that actually required some decent chunk of engineering knowledge
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      I mean, most trades do expect some sort of a college education now as well (minimum AA), and vocational programs are increasingly require attending a community college. Edit: can't reply below, but all of those vocations listed are offered at community colleges now and linked with an AS/AAS degree, as apprenticeships are often coordinated with CCs.
      - more_corn 1y ago
        Not plumbing, electrical, welding, construction, auto mechanic, hvac tech.
      - macintux 1y ago
        Just for future reference: when a comment thread is sufficiently nested the “reply” link is missing, but you can click/tap on the timestamp link. That’s a hardlink to the comment, whence you can reply.
DudeOpotomus 1y ago
In America 2025, there is no better path to a high income and quality of life than learning a trade, then learning how to manage other tradespeople and then owning a company for such a trade. In the trades, if you are slightly smarter than average, have a good work ethic and an inkling of entrepreneurial drive, you will be very successful.
- lurk2 1y ago
  Do you work in the trades?
  - DudeOpotomus 1y ago
    Yes, when I was young. Pre internet days. In the last 25 years, I've built 3 houses and remodeled half a dozen others. Worked very closely with these guys across the entire spectrum. From the unskilled, trying to cheat their way, to the 75 year old 50yr Journeyman who will never retire because he loves it. The trades were decimated by immigration and the race for cheaper labor, higher margins. What were once solid middle class jobs, were undercut by unskilled labor masquerading as skilled. Over time, the market raised the rate of the unskilled and lowered the rate of the skilled. Prices rose to meet the market but quality declined. Unskilled were charging the same rates as skilled. Today there are very few Journeyman tradesmen left. They were forced out. Which is why the market is crying for these skills and awarding them with high wages. Looking forward, the entire nation is lined up to build. Those who mange this growth and bring the skills, will become wealthy.
  - fires10 1y ago
    I have worked in the trades as an electrician and then became an estimator/Project Manager. Most are small businesses that are barely hanging on. It is often not a path to wealth. Many of the smaller businesses are being bought up by private equity now to drive up prices. The tradesmen are not getting wealthy and typically will not become wealthy. Licensing a business is different than the license a tradesman gets. Rules vary by state and are often require the approval of your would be competitors, regardless of demonstrated skill and time in the trade.
taurath 1y ago
A friend is dropping out of IT to pursue welding - but knows the money just isn’t there. She’s starting a 5:30am 10 hour shift at a manufacturer to be able to move onto welding and CNC. She’s autistic so can struggle sometimes but is also one of the smartest people I know and does physics puzzles for fun and builds shit all the time. Skilled trade jobs value paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me. Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck.
- dmckeon 1y ago
  > paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me. Yes, paying dues, both in the sense of putting in the time to learn the trade well, and very likely for a good paying career in the trade, paying union dues. People have been doing this since the rise of professional guilds in the middle ages. Today's kids can show aptitude, capability, and interest by doing well in shop class. An employer can take that interested teen or tween on at an entry level, add to their skill level, and make a profit on their labor. The worker can protect their labor value through a union, and probably should if only for the side benefits apart from negotiating contract labor rates. Should they just go to college instead? Sure, if they have that interest, and can get out without a student loan debt bigger than some mortgages.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Unions are not magic. I have a friend who did belong to the local sheetmetal workers union and she was... not positive. Moved into a non-union shop and was a lot happier.
    - Aurornis 1y ago
      Similar experience here. Family member went into a union job and discovered that it was great for the old guys at the top who had been there for 3 decades, but it was rather repressive for the new people starting at the bottom. Much easier to pivot into a different job where union seniority wasn’t the defining factor of your entire career.
    - 1y ago
nateburke 1y ago
The opportunity for trades-based small business creation in America would feel a lot more tangible... absent the carried interest tax loophole. Part of the small business trades success narrative is built upon trust, trust that in youth, doing good work will create a reputation within your community that will be remembered, and form the foundation for a brand (your name) that can attract the next generation of youth to be developed, trained, etc. If successful small businesses only exist to get acquired, so that both workers and customers suffer, that foundation of trust will struggle to persist.
- tmpz22 1y ago
  Is it not also reliant on an affluent customer base that can pay high prices for services? In poorer communities are trade jobs lucrative? Obviously in places like the Bay Area they are VERY lucrative, but is that a sustainable narrative to re-tool the economy around?
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Certain skills are always in a stable demand, and a relatively short supply. Plumbing, electricity, roofs. Some of this requires a license, all of this requires training and experience which only time and practice can give. Opportunities for that are also somehow limited. So, if you live in a poorer community and serve a poorer community, you likely make more than most in the poorer community, and likely gain respect if you do a good job.
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  are you suggesting that eliminating carried interest would deter private equity from bothering with small businesses, and make the remaining small businesses feel like a more reliable thing for workers and employers to engage in? because they won't get shuttered unceremoniously? if I'm understanding that correctly, I have to giggle, because there are plenty of ways for institutional money to have lower taxes than ordinary income tax rates. waaaay lower than the carried interest "loophole". also, to me, loopholes are unintended things that no one person in government or branch of government noticed. like a couple of private letter rulings from the IRS combined with an accounting tweak in a budget appropriations bill. carried interest isn't one of those to me when it was directly passed by congress explicitly and deliberately affirmed multiple times in subsequent legislation. but I could be misunderstanding your post entirely.
tonyhart7 1y ago
good for them
gigatexal 1y ago
I love this. This is what we need more of. My only concern is who will challenge their thinking? Who will teach them critical thinking skills? Who will give them a broader more holistic understanding of the world if not at a university? I fear we will get ( because we need them ) many thousands more skilled workers in the trades to build more again but they’ll also be too easily bamboozled by charlatans like Trump and vote in policies that will screw us all
- fallingknife 1y ago
  Those who want education on subjects they are not employed in or "a broader more holistic understanding of the world" (whatever that means) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to college. College is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 13 in K-12. It has no special properties.
  - intermerda 1y ago
    High School is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 8 in K-8. It has no special properties. Those who want education on subjects taught in high school (whatever their value is) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to high school. Between American states rolling back child labor laws, and the current federal administration's promising vision of factory and coal jobs for children and their future generations, there will be enough jobs that don't require useless high school diplomas. Eliminating income tax and increasing tariffs to gorillion percent is just part of the equation. Rolling back of high school education is critical to truly achieve the dream of the "good old days."
    - fallingknife 1y ago
      > High School is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 8 in K-8. It has no special properties. This is probably also true. High school standards have been lowered so much that everybody with a pulse can graduate so the degree is meaningless in terms of educational achievement. Basically just a filter now that says "I am at least one tiny step above a total retard or a complete 100% screw up." I worked jobs part time as young as 14. Child labor laws are mainly about keeping kids in school rather than protecting them from anything bad because with our society defined around credentials, failing to obtain them is bad for that child's future. But that's just a rule we made up. There's absolutely no reason that a 14 year old who has finished 8th grade and knows how to read and do basic math couldn't go off and apprentice to a trade and be successful. In 1910 only 10% of Americans had finished high school and we still had a perfectly well functioning society. And at that time only 2 % had college degrees and still we were in an era of rapid scientific progress and economic growth.
DragonStrength 1y ago
You need 200k/yr to be comfortable in Alabama. These headlines are for older generations who think that is too much money for a young person. Meanwhile, they’d never be able to afford the homes they now live in.
hbarka 1y ago
There was a time when high-school shop and home ec was normal.
deleted 1y ago
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kcb 1y ago
There's not much I dislike more than well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. Don't buy it. If at all possible get a degree, sit at a desk, and earn a living wage. This is your first priority.
- booleandilemma 1y ago
  Yep. My boss bitches about her work all the time. What does she complain about specifically? Having to respond to people on slack. Office workers don't know how easy they have it.
  - hamandcheese 1y ago
    Having done both. Sometimes physical work is easier. Sometimes.
- crystal_revenge 1y ago
  Seriously. Choosing the skilled trade path makes a lot of sense right now if the default option for you is unskilled work, but the job market isn't so tough that one should abandon the option to get paid much more in a much more comfortable field of work. Related is a certain actor, clearly following his passions, preaching the same nonsense: "give up on your dreams! go into skilled trade and wreck your body for okay pay!" Part of the "follow your dreams" advice that a lot of people seemed to miss is that "following your dreams" doesn't mean "major in that subject and try to not get Cs", it means obsess over that thing and work so hard at it you're always in the top 1% or higher for that craft. The reason you should chase your dreams is they're the only thing you can reasonably hope to obsess over enough for long enough to have a competitive advantage. While not all of them are "rich", everyone I know who sincerely followed their passion to the point that other people thought they were a bit crazy are all able to survive, often pretty well, doing something they love.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  I have also known young people working in the trades who were all about encouraging others to go into the trades and how much better it was. They all did objectively well for themselves. It is a different life choice that suits people differently. Neither path is necessarily the correct one for everybody, but the proportion of people going for degrees instead of other paths is too high.
Rantenki 1y ago
That 68k/yr wage only sounds good if you're still thinking in circa year 2000 dollars. Nobody is making the mortgage on a house on 68k/year, and they're not starting a happy family if they have to do 20+hrs/week overtime in order to turn 25/hr into 68k/year. I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental, so it's certainly not a great wage today.
- GenerWork 1y ago
  The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad. >I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental I made $10/hr my first job after college while living in a studio by myself in 2011 (and that was with student loan payments!), and I was barely able to get by, so how were you barely able to get by then on almost $70k a year? [0] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/ https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/
  - koolba 1y ago
    > The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad. The average rent nationally is $1860. In the Bay Area it’s $2650. That’s not to say it’s bad. But the numbers are meaningless without some localized pricing or cost adjustment.
- pcbro141 1y ago
  Find a spouse with a job.
- wavemode 1y ago
  $68K/yr is plenty of money for a single person. And that's just an entry level salary, offered to someone in high school - you would have the opportunity to make far more as you gain more experience. By the time you're looking to start a family and buy a house I don't see why that's not a very promising career.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I never went to college (high school dropout with a GED). My "formal" schooling was a 2-year, intensive EET (Technician) course, at a trade school. It had both good and bad traits. It was very structured and rigorous. When you graduated, you were ready to go directly into full-time work at almost any organization (the NSA and CIA used to recruit from our school). It stressed practicum, over theory, though, so you came out more as a "doer," than a "thinker." All of my theoretical stuff, I learned on my own, after getting my first job. I did OK with that, as I was fairly quickly promoted into engineering (and was introduced to "exempt" pay).
d_burfoot 1y ago
There is a classic capitalist ploy, documented in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, where business owners vastly over-advertise the abundance and remuneration offered by a certain area of work. Then many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field, so supply and demand pushes down wages, benefitting the owners.
- kcb 1y ago
  More people should go into the trades. Says the aristocrat with legacy admission kids making sure they can hire a plumber for their next remodel.
  - bcrosby95 1y ago
    If you've got ambitions to be a small business owner trades are a fair place to land. If you don't then avoid it like the plague.
- lxm 1y ago
  > many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field uproot from what, though? It's not like people disrupt their investment banking careers to become plumbers. The alternative (perhaps a pointless college degree with debt + barista job + realtor license) is worse.
- wnc3141 1y ago
  "learn to code..it's the future"
- lispisok 1y ago
  Just like the software industry!
inamberclad 1y ago
Welding isn't a job that you grow old in. It's physically taxing and exposes you to poisonous fumes and low levels of radiation from thoriated filaments. That's part of why kids are getting job offers, there needs to be a steady supply of meat.
- e40 1y ago
  On yt I see some people using masks with a separate air supply and filter. I guess this really needs to be more widespread.
kazinator 1y ago
In something like a century now of obsession with higher ed, America seems to have forgotten about the concept of trade schools. Now companies hitting on the idea of recruiting out of shop class makes the a WSJ headline in 2025. LOL!
Quenby 1y ago
I was raised to believe that going to college was the only right path. But later, a friend of mine dropped out and started training as a machinist—and somehow, he ended up living much more freely than most of us. He’s not what you'd call especially “smart,” but he has this intuitive sense for metal, welding, and machines. Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories—about the machine he fixed, or how he spotted a tiny issue just by the sound it made. That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk. Sometimes I wonder if being truly respectable isn’t about how much you earn, but whether you feel proud of what you do.
- jbverschoor 1y ago
  Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries? Pick the right tool for the job. If you’re wrong, or don’t know how to use your tools / understand the metals, you in for some trouble. Most programmers think too highly of themselves. Software projects have the exact same problems as construction jobs, with the main difference liability.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    > with the main difference liability I mostly agree but dimensionality is also a huge one. Being constrained to 3 dimensions and standard building materials really limits the problem space. It's why you can probably figure out how to build a structure where all the entrances lock but you definitely shouldn't roll your own crypto.
    - benhurmarcel 1y ago
      I find that physical work is different but not simpler than programming. Yes there are only 3 dimensions, but there are lots of layers of important "details" that you can't ignore, whereas digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot.
      - 1y ago
dhruv3006 1y ago
the world is changing.
K0balt 1y ago
To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to. A trade being any job you can do with your own tools and is universally useful to people. So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need. Ideally you could arrive in a new town with only this skill and your tools, and begin to eke out an existence. I favor trades that are also useful to oneself, so the building trades are good because everyone needs shelter-may as well build your own or at least understand what you are buying. Doctor also works as a trade, because the need is so basic and universal. A profession being anything else, basically, especially if it generally requires an employer (major capital investment) to be a useful activity. Interestingly, being a farmer falls into this category, since it requires land and equipment. Even if you own the land and equipment, you could lose it, and then your livelihood is out of your reach. So that’s a profession, by my narrow practical classification. I figured with a trade and a profession, young adults are much better prepared to roll with the punches in the inevitable chaos they will confront, and be empowered to walk away from situations that are untenable. The power to walk away is highly underrated. For myself, I have benefited greatly from my practical upbringing, and am a sophomore journeyman in many trades but my happy place is creating things. Electronics, a little mechanics, and software to breathe life into the soul of a new machine. Fortunately I have been hardcore unemployable by nature for decades, so I have developed the freedom to follow my own path, which is deeply gratifying. But without a strong trades type background this would not have really been possible.
- giantg2 1y ago
  Many of the trades you listed require licenses, apprenticeships, or trade schools. Usually high schools make you choose between a college prep track or vo-tech track, so you can't do both. Also, those the tools for those trades (if going beyond a handyman level) are a significant capital investment.
  - vermilingua 1y ago
    That’s only an obstacle if one believes education should be finished by 22-23 years old. Doing another few years of formal education isn’t a huge impediment and is probably pretty beneficial before even considering GP’s main point.
giantg2 1y ago
I wonder how long it will be until AI is making all the CAD/CNC models with just a check by humans. Same with the laser cutter they mentioned, water jet cutter, etc. It can't be that hard to have a model trained to take a technical drawing and generate the CAD model. I think if I lose my current job (on a PIP), that I should be a CAD designer (entry level around $75k). But then I'm concerned that I'll be out of a job in a couple years.
alwier 1y ago
I mentored two FIRST robotics teams. One was at a well-funded school with a big honors program. All of the students were smart and engaged and clever and ambitious. They designed an extremely clever, complicated robot that looked really cool on paper and was completely impractical to actually build and they did poorly overall, barely getting an extremely-stripped-down version of the design up and running, losing every match with usually no points scored. The other was at a poorly funded school with no honors classes. The students were just as intelligent and just as hard working, but instead of AP math and physics they were taking auto shop and wood shop. And they knew how to quickly design, build, and test simple, reliable solutions that got the job done. They fared much better in competition. Me personally, I did mechanical work for a decade before getting a CS degree and a desk job. And I'm really glad I did. Welding and machinery were a heck of a lot more fun than debugging distributed software systems, and I'm glad I spent my 20s doing the former instead of the latter.
1970-01-01 1y ago
The problem with skilled trades is they put you inside a very limited skill box. You're stuck monetizing that trade for decades, with very little business opportunities outside that box. Swings in the economy and your health will not neatly follow this model of one-and-done.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-high-school-juniors-with-70000-a-year-job-offers/ar-AA1EjI7E https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-high... Text-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1EjI7E https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1EjI7E

256 points by lxm 1y ago

https://archive.ph/sWpS1 https://archive.ph/sWpS1

Can’t really read the article so can’t confirm this. There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades, but doesn’t at least half the country live in a place / have parents that value the trades? I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools. Which means that maybe somewhat unintuitively, there are no separate paths — college for good students, trade school and military for I dunno, “non-academic/street smarts or whatever you wan to call it. — trade schools, the military and colleges are actually all competing for the same students. The second theory is tied to the first one, but for all the marketing on how great these jobs are, there are structural / practical problems with them. From how they pay, to lack of job security to the havoc they can wreak on your body.

WillAdams 1y ago
That's pretty much it in a nutshell --- I've always described the "Maker Movement" as "Geeks who missed shop class". Cut my teeth on texts such as: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square and have bought (and given away) more copies of: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-math https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-... and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-geometry https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-ge... than I'd care to count. Current project has me working through: the _Make: Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ books (and looking for a good book on conic sections which has optimized formulae to speed up/simplify what are currently a series of chained trigonometric functions...).
- deleted 1y ago
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mmooss 1y ago
> There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades The conservative / GOP tactics are usually the same, and everyone else has, at conservative urging, disarmed themselves - they've abandoned postmodern understanding of communication, which the conservatives strategically embrace: They reframe issues: College is reframed - it was that knowledge was power, the key to life, citzenship, work, and sharpening your mind, your critical thinking, with the best thinkers and ideas in history was the most powerful tool. Now college is reframed as a training in employment skills for corporations. Life was about dreams and opportunity, fulfilling your potential and your dreams; now it's about making enough to survive. They refame America: It was the land of opportunity, where by working hard anyone had the opportunity to accomplish anything, not a class-based oppressive system like Europe and elsewhere; now you stay in your socioeconomic lane, take any job you can get, and (again) survive - what does a poor kid need college for? How you frame issues can determine the outcome of the discussion. 'Should we murder unborn babies?', 'Should we let undocumented criminals into the country?' - obviously, the answer is in how the question is framed (and often the framing is much more subtle than these easy examples). That doesn't mean there aren't merits to both sides but framing is a way to prevent discussion of the merits. They also demonize: Everything must include a criticism of 'liberals'. Almost as a display of bona fides, you'll see that commentary must always include an attack on liberals, even if it's a critique of something the GOP/conservatives is doing. Similarly they blame 'liberals' for every problem, no matter how absurd. They blame liberals for immigration, health care, lack of green energy, etc. etc. If you read the transcripts of the leaked Signal chats, you'll see their agreed-upon talking points included, without discussion, 'blame Biden'. Biden isn't even in office and will never run again, but that's a must. And why wouldn't they do these things? They work and nobody puts up any resistance; nobody even tries to understand their tactics or why they work and dominate the public debate. The Democrats play helpless - not a winning strategy and IMHO the reason they lose; who votes for helpless? And many liberals now embrace victimhood -- helplessness + persecution = a lack of personal responsibility for anything -- another winning strategy.
- deleted 1y ago
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- 1y ago
mindslight 1y ago
> One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades I've got to wonder if a deeper dynamic is that you now have to be relatively "smart" to go into the trades because perhaps the teaching/curricula is lacking, making it so that more base general intelligence / self starting on abstract concepts is required to actually learn in the first place. Trade classes should be an opportunity for people who missed the verbal-communication-of-abstract-topics meta-intelligence to develop their intelligence focused around a narrower topic that they taking a liking to. But if the teacher is really uninspired, and the curriculum shies away from actually creating larger cool things or playing with different techniques, (or becomes about following the manual for procedures for poorly-documented poorly-written throwaway proprietary software) I can see it coming off as yet another "when are we going to need this" high school class.
- techpineapple 1y ago
  I’ll bet it’s a scale issue though. Everyone knows a person (I’m one of them) who does bad in say math class but later gets a job with applied math, because doing math in a classroom is boring. But if you try to design a curriculum for say “math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class”. You’re mostly going to get people who just don’t have the whatever they need to be good enough at math to be an electrician.
  - mindslight 1y ago
    "math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class" seems like a reaction from within the model of the prevailing philosophy - more abstraction-first book learning. Whereas addressing a different learning style would be more like: here are the physical skills you need to be an electrician, here are more classes working your way up to build larger and larger things, and oh by the way now that you've developed the skills of building things while taking direction from someone telling you how to build it, let's try to teach you how to figure out how to build it yourself. And I'm just wondering if the safety-and-HR-uber-alles dynamic has stamped out a lot a of that physical-skills-first in favor of like, dry lessons trying to tell people all about wiring before they actually get to play with wires. Thus making it so the same people who succeed here are the traditionally "smart" ones that can take abstract knowledge and store it for later, before having something tangible to apply it to. (electrician might not be the best example for this because the differences between good/unsafe/unpowered wiring are still pretty abstract, but hopefully you can see the point regardless)
kmeisthax 1y ago
There's also a bit of this that's culture war fodder. A lot of middle-class conservatives send their kids to colleges, their kids reject their parents' conservatism, so the parents think the college has used some kind of magic liberalism ray[0] on their kids. The reality is, of course, that their kids weren't nearly as conservative as the parents thought. But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges. Trade schools come into play mainly as a totem to hold up against liberal colleges. They are being played up as a sort of bastion of conservative thought, mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system. There's a kernel of truth in all of this, in that there's some trades that shouldn't have been left out of the STEM paths that colleges like to push as an obvious moneymaker. The culture war is ultimately one of mottes and baileys, where you take some truth and ride it as one's political hobby-horse. Hell, just to explain why this happens I've already had to do the same thing. [0] In the same way that some people think tech companies can "hack our dopamine loops" or whatever
- techpineapple 1y ago
  The thing that gets to me, and everyone is overly idealistic about a lot of things(learn to code!) but I really wish that that things were as simple as conservative culture warriors laid them out to be. It would be great if there was this “one neat trick!” To getting a 70k a year job right out of high school, optimized for people less academically inclined.
- repeekad 1y ago
  For what it’s worth, my intro to psychology gen ed professor told us to spell “humyn” with a y to “remove woman being dependent on man” and let us skip the final if we recorded ourselves protesting the controversial state house bill at the time. On net I agree with what you’re saying, but know that the culture war isn’t total bs one sided, and my unremarkable school had plenty of bad examples like this. Evergreen university in 2017 barring white people from attending class for a day was particularly embarrassing.
  - whatshisface 1y ago
TMWNN 1y ago
> I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools. This has been the case for a long time. For almost the entirety of the post-1973 end of US military conscription, a high school diploma has been required to enlist. From a 2008 study <http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-in-the-us-military-the-demographics-of-enlisted-troops-and-officers http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...>: "Members of the all-volunteer [American] military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods." Also, "American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree ... Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service."
nradov 1y ago
It's true that bad schools make poor neighborhoods unproductive for military recruiters. They usually don't want recruits who dropped out of high school or have low ASVAB scores. But a lot of young people in those neighborhoods are also disqualified because of poor health (particularly including obesity, asthma, and various mental conditions), history of illegal drug use, and criminal records. These social issues are all highly correlated.
intermerda 1y ago
The same politicians who push trades on America and bash colleges won't send their kids to trade schools but send them to Ivy League Universities instead. I wonder why that is.

anonymousiam 1y ago

Non-paywalled version here: https://archive.is/mhFn0 https://archive.is/mhFn0

teuobk 1y ago

For what it's worth, /r/welding seems to think this claim is complete bunk: https://www.reddit.com/r/Welding/comments/1khd9aj/this_is_comical_lmao/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Welding/comments/1khd9aj/this_is_co...

techpineapple 1y ago
I’m curious what the distinction is. I assume that the article isn’t just a complete fabrication, but maybe they highlight the 20 best stories and everything else is meh. Kinda like saying you should go to code school because you can land a 175k/year entry level job at Google. Technically true.
- eWeSaYYY 1y ago
  P-hacking is allowed and encouraged outside physical science where getting stats of medicine and building a bridge wrong have obvious side effect News media will whittle down their data set to get a result that only matters where cost of living is high, and there’s a tiny number of the workers overall. Leads the innumerates in rural Somewhereville, Flyover, USA, to be all confused they don’t make SF salaries in the middle of nowhere.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  That’s my take. Yea, welding offshore/underwater pays very well. Food-grade welding a bit less. Both have fairly miserable working conditions, are hard on your body, have some amount of danger, typically require lots of OT to make the claimed income, and unless you’re union, with mediocre benefits. Great job for those who enjoy that type of work and/or want to hustle and save then move on. But any claim that it’s easy money or typicsl is just wrong.
carabiner 1y ago
If you read the threads in /r/construction that come up about this or adjacent topics ("trades are a guaranteed job, better than college") they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay. Personally, my friend is a carpenter and lives with his dad to save money. This is in Seattle so tons of construction and work to go around. He says he wishes he studied computer science in college (has an english degree).

StefanBatory 1y ago

How common it is to have shop classes in schools in USA? For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects. There are vocational schools, but they're known to be awful quality and you don't go there if you want to earn trade, but if you're an awful student. And if you aren't awful student, then you'll most likely end up as one - as your peers will most likely be :( There are also "technikum" which is a mix of these two, but it's not for trade per se, and statistically chances you'll pass your end of school exams are smaller.

jspaetzel 1y ago
I went to maybe slightly above average high school for my area and didn't have one. But there were programs where the school partnered with community colleges and students maintaining decent grades could attend classes elsewhere. And those had shop as well as other vocational programs. They probably sent us home with a pamphlet with information at the beginning of the year, but I don't remember.
ZFleck 1y ago
The answer is probably, unhelpfully, "it depends". I attended a fairly large high school, and we probably had a dozen shop class offerings. A much smaller school just a few miles away had no infrastructure to support any shop classes. It's probably even more nuanced than that, though. My parents both attended very small schools in small towns, and both offered shop classes. All four schools mentioned were / are located in the Midwest, though, and none in large cities. If I had to guess, I'd say probably the majority of schools in the US offer some form of shop class(es). But I don't believe any would necessarily be part of the standard curriculum. Generally, these classes are elective.
- StefanBatory 1y ago
  I'll say something unrelated to my question before, but damn if I don't envy you for electives. I had zero elective classes up through my entire pre-uni education. At my uni, I had one or two elective classes - at fifth and sixth semester, and that's all. It is an aspect of American education I do like a lot. (here we choose our profile, which assigns us to extended classes - i.e, Maths/English/Physics, Maths/Biology/Chemistry, Polish/Geography/History and so on, but then we don't get to choose anything after.)

lif 1y ago

hmm... the U.S. economy might stand to benefit from adapting a school system more akin to the German model? Specifically, offering a track similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_school

autobodie 1y ago
Doesn't matter because U.S. ruling class doesn't agree.
- tekla 1y ago
  There is literally nothing stopping you from going to trade school and skipping college. College is still a gate for higher paid trades because advanced manufacturing wants educated workers that can do math and/or programming g-code and/or know advanced metallurgy I know someone who went to welding school, and he was basically practice welding 40 hours a week after class because he was working on some very advanced welds that actually required some decent chunk of engineering knowledge
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    I mean, most trades do expect some sort of a college education now as well (minimum AA), and vocational programs are increasingly require attending a community college. Edit: can't reply below, but all of those vocations listed are offered at community colleges now and linked with an AS/AAS degree, as apprenticeships are often coordinated with CCs.
    - more_corn 1y ago
      Not plumbing, electrical, welding, construction, auto mechanic, hvac tech.
    - macintux 1y ago
      Just for future reference: when a comment thread is sufficiently nested the “reply” link is missing, but you can click/tap on the timestamp link. That’s a hardlink to the comment, whence you can reply.

DudeOpotomus 1y ago

In America 2025, there is no better path to a high income and quality of life than learning a trade, then learning how to manage other tradespeople and then owning a company for such a trade. In the trades, if you are slightly smarter than average, have a good work ethic and an inkling of entrepreneurial drive, you will be very successful.

lurk2 1y ago
Do you work in the trades?
- DudeOpotomus 1y ago
  Yes, when I was young. Pre internet days. In the last 25 years, I've built 3 houses and remodeled half a dozen others. Worked very closely with these guys across the entire spectrum. From the unskilled, trying to cheat their way, to the 75 year old 50yr Journeyman who will never retire because he loves it. The trades were decimated by immigration and the race for cheaper labor, higher margins. What were once solid middle class jobs, were undercut by unskilled labor masquerading as skilled. Over time, the market raised the rate of the unskilled and lowered the rate of the skilled. Prices rose to meet the market but quality declined. Unskilled were charging the same rates as skilled. Today there are very few Journeyman tradesmen left. They were forced out. Which is why the market is crying for these skills and awarding them with high wages. Looking forward, the entire nation is lined up to build. Those who mange this growth and bring the skills, will become wealthy.
- fires10 1y ago
  I have worked in the trades as an electrician and then became an estimator/Project Manager. Most are small businesses that are barely hanging on. It is often not a path to wealth. Many of the smaller businesses are being bought up by private equity now to drive up prices. The tradesmen are not getting wealthy and typically will not become wealthy. Licensing a business is different than the license a tradesman gets. Rules vary by state and are often require the approval of your would be competitors, regardless of demonstrated skill and time in the trade.

taurath 1y ago

A friend is dropping out of IT to pursue welding - but knows the money just isn’t there. She’s starting a 5:30am 10 hour shift at a manufacturer to be able to move onto welding and CNC. She’s autistic so can struggle sometimes but is also one of the smartest people I know and does physics puzzles for fun and builds shit all the time. Skilled trade jobs value paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me. Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck.

dmckeon 1y ago
> paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me. Yes, paying dues, both in the sense of putting in the time to learn the trade well, and very likely for a good paying career in the trade, paying union dues. People have been doing this since the rise of professional guilds in the middle ages. Today's kids can show aptitude, capability, and interest by doing well in shop class. An employer can take that interested teen or tween on at an entry level, add to their skill level, and make a profit on their labor. The worker can protect their labor value through a union, and probably should if only for the side benefits apart from negotiating contract labor rates. Should they just go to college instead? Sure, if they have that interest, and can get out without a student loan debt bigger than some mortgages.
- ghaff 1y ago
  Unions are not magic. I have a friend who did belong to the local sheetmetal workers union and she was... not positive. Moved into a non-union shop and was a lot happier.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    Similar experience here. Family member went into a union job and discovered that it was great for the old guys at the top who had been there for 3 decades, but it was rather repressive for the new people starting at the bottom. Much easier to pivot into a different job where union seniority wasn’t the defining factor of your entire career.
  - 1y ago

nateburke 1y ago

The opportunity for trades-based small business creation in America would feel a lot more tangible... absent the carried interest tax loophole. Part of the small business trades success narrative is built upon trust, trust that in youth, doing good work will create a reputation within your community that will be remembered, and form the foundation for a brand (your name) that can attract the next generation of youth to be developed, trained, etc. If successful small businesses only exist to get acquired, so that both workers and customers suffer, that foundation of trust will struggle to persist.

tmpz22 1y ago
Is it not also reliant on an affluent customer base that can pay high prices for services? In poorer communities are trade jobs lucrative? Obviously in places like the Bay Area they are VERY lucrative, but is that a sustainable narrative to re-tool the economy around?
- nine_k 1y ago
  Certain skills are always in a stable demand, and a relatively short supply. Plumbing, electricity, roofs. Some of this requires a license, all of this requires training and experience which only time and practice can give. Opportunities for that are also somehow limited. So, if you live in a poorer community and serve a poorer community, you likely make more than most in the poorer community, and likely gain respect if you do a good job.
yieldcrv 1y ago
are you suggesting that eliminating carried interest would deter private equity from bothering with small businesses, and make the remaining small businesses feel like a more reliable thing for workers and employers to engage in? because they won't get shuttered unceremoniously? if I'm understanding that correctly, I have to giggle, because there are plenty of ways for institutional money to have lower taxes than ordinary income tax rates. waaaay lower than the carried interest "loophole". also, to me, loopholes are unintended things that no one person in government or branch of government noticed. like a couple of private letter rulings from the IRS combined with an accounting tweak in a budget appropriations bill. carried interest isn't one of those to me when it was directly passed by congress explicitly and deliberately affirmed multiple times in subsequent legislation. but I could be misunderstanding your post entirely.

tonyhart7 1y ago

good for them

gigatexal 1y ago

I love this. This is what we need more of. My only concern is who will challenge their thinking? Who will teach them critical thinking skills? Who will give them a broader more holistic understanding of the world if not at a university? I fear we will get ( because we need them ) many thousands more skilled workers in the trades to build more again but they’ll also be too easily bamboozled by charlatans like Trump and vote in policies that will screw us all

fallingknife 1y ago
Those who want education on subjects they are not employed in or "a broader more holistic understanding of the world" (whatever that means) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to college. College is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 13 in K-12. It has no special properties.
- intermerda 1y ago
  High School is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 8 in K-8. It has no special properties. Those who want education on subjects taught in high school (whatever their value is) will get it themselves. Those who don't want it won't get it even if you send them to high school. Between American states rolling back child labor laws, and the current federal administration's promising vision of factory and coal jobs for children and their future generations, there will be enough jobs that don't require useless high school diplomas. Eliminating income tax and increasing tariffs to gorillion percent is just part of the equation. Rolling back of high school education is critical to truly achieve the dream of the "good old days."
  - fallingknife 1y ago
    > High School is just 4 more years of school after you've already done 8 in K-8. It has no special properties. This is probably also true. High school standards have been lowered so much that everybody with a pulse can graduate so the degree is meaningless in terms of educational achievement. Basically just a filter now that says "I am at least one tiny step above a total retard or a complete 100% screw up." I worked jobs part time as young as 14. Child labor laws are mainly about keeping kids in school rather than protecting them from anything bad because with our society defined around credentials, failing to obtain them is bad for that child's future. But that's just a rule we made up. There's absolutely no reason that a 14 year old who has finished 8th grade and knows how to read and do basic math couldn't go off and apprentice to a trade and be successful. In 1910 only 10% of Americans had finished high school and we still had a perfectly well functioning society. And at that time only 2 % had college degrees and still we were in an era of rapid scientific progress and economic growth.

DragonStrength 1y ago

You need 200k/yr to be comfortable in Alabama. These headlines are for older generations who think that is too much money for a young person. Meanwhile, they’d never be able to afford the homes they now live in.

hbarka 1y ago

There was a time when high-school shop and home ec was normal.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

kcb 1y ago

There's not much I dislike more than well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. Don't buy it. If at all possible get a degree, sit at a desk, and earn a living wage. This is your first priority.

booleandilemma 1y ago
Yep. My boss bitches about her work all the time. What does she complain about specifically? Having to respond to people on slack. Office workers don't know how easy they have it.
- hamandcheese 1y ago
  Having done both. Sometimes physical work is easier. Sometimes.
crystal_revenge 1y ago
Seriously. Choosing the skilled trade path makes a lot of sense right now if the default option for you is unskilled work, but the job market isn't so tough that one should abandon the option to get paid much more in a much more comfortable field of work. Related is a certain actor, clearly following his passions, preaching the same nonsense: "give up on your dreams! go into skilled trade and wreck your body for okay pay!" Part of the "follow your dreams" advice that a lot of people seemed to miss is that "following your dreams" doesn't mean "major in that subject and try to not get Cs", it means obsess over that thing and work so hard at it you're always in the top 1% or higher for that craft. The reason you should chase your dreams is they're the only thing you can reasonably hope to obsess over enough for long enough to have a competitive advantage. While not all of them are "rich", everyone I know who sincerely followed their passion to the point that other people thought they were a bit crazy are all able to survive, often pretty well, doing something they love.
colechristensen 1y ago
I have also known young people working in the trades who were all about encouraging others to go into the trades and how much better it was. They all did objectively well for themselves. It is a different life choice that suits people differently. Neither path is necessarily the correct one for everybody, but the proportion of people going for degrees instead of other paths is too high.

Rantenki 1y ago

That 68k/yr wage only sounds good if you're still thinking in circa year 2000 dollars. Nobody is making the mortgage on a house on 68k/year, and they're not starting a happy family if they have to do 20+hrs/week overtime in order to turn 25/hr into 68k/year. I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental, so it's certainly not a great wage today.

GenerWork 1y ago
The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad. >I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental I made $10/hr my first job after college while living in a studio by myself in 2011 (and that was with student loan payments!), and I was barely able to get by, so how were you barely able to get by then on almost $70k a year? [0] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/ https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/
- koolba 1y ago
  > The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad. The average rent nationally is $1860. In the Bay Area it’s $2650. That’s not to say it’s bad. But the numbers are meaningless without some localized pricing or cost adjustment.
pcbro141 1y ago
Find a spouse with a job.
wavemode 1y ago
$68K/yr is plenty of money for a single person. And that's just an entry level salary, offered to someone in high school - you would have the opportunity to make far more as you gain more experience. By the time you're looking to start a family and buy a house I don't see why that's not a very promising career.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I never went to college (high school dropout with a GED). My "formal" schooling was a 2-year, intensive EET (Technician) course, at a trade school. It had both good and bad traits. It was very structured and rigorous. When you graduated, you were ready to go directly into full-time work at almost any organization (the NSA and CIA used to recruit from our school). It stressed practicum, over theory, though, so you came out more as a "doer," than a "thinker." All of my theoretical stuff, I learned on my own, after getting my first job. I did OK with that, as I was fairly quickly promoted into engineering (and was introduced to "exempt" pay).

d_burfoot 1y ago

There is a classic capitalist ploy, documented in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, where business owners vastly over-advertise the abundance and remuneration offered by a certain area of work. Then many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field, so supply and demand pushes down wages, benefitting the owners.

kcb 1y ago
More people should go into the trades. Says the aristocrat with legacy admission kids making sure they can hire a plumber for their next remodel.
- bcrosby95 1y ago
  If you've got ambitions to be a small business owner trades are a fair place to land. If you don't then avoid it like the plague.
lxm 1y ago
> many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field uproot from what, though? It's not like people disrupt their investment banking careers to become plumbers. The alternative (perhaps a pointless college degree with debt + barista job + realtor license) is worse.
wnc3141 1y ago
"learn to code..it's the future"
lispisok 1y ago
Just like the software industry!

inamberclad 1y ago

Welding isn't a job that you grow old in. It's physically taxing and exposes you to poisonous fumes and low levels of radiation from thoriated filaments. That's part of why kids are getting job offers, there needs to be a steady supply of meat.

e40 1y ago
On yt I see some people using masks with a separate air supply and filter. I guess this really needs to be more widespread.

kazinator 1y ago

In something like a century now of obsession with higher ed, America seems to have forgotten about the concept of trade schools. Now companies hitting on the idea of recruiting out of shop class makes the a WSJ headline in 2025. LOL!

Quenby 1y ago

I was raised to believe that going to college was the only right path. But later, a friend of mine dropped out and started training as a machinist—and somehow, he ended up living much more freely than most of us. He’s not what you'd call especially “smart,” but he has this intuitive sense for metal, welding, and machines. Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories—about the machine he fixed, or how he spotted a tiny issue just by the sound it made. That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk. Sometimes I wonder if being truly respectable isn’t about how much you earn, but whether you feel proud of what you do.

jbverschoor 1y ago
Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries? Pick the right tool for the job. If you’re wrong, or don’t know how to use your tools / understand the metals, you in for some trouble. Most programmers think too highly of themselves. Software projects have the exact same problems as construction jobs, with the main difference liability.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  > with the main difference liability I mostly agree but dimensionality is also a huge one. Being constrained to 3 dimensions and standard building materials really limits the problem space. It's why you can probably figure out how to build a structure where all the entrances lock but you definitely shouldn't roll your own crypto.
  - benhurmarcel 1y ago
    I find that physical work is different but not simpler than programming. Yes there are only 3 dimensions, but there are lots of layers of important "details" that you can't ignore, whereas digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot.
    - 1y ago

dhruv3006 1y ago

the world is changing.

K0balt 1y ago

To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to. A trade being any job you can do with your own tools and is universally useful to people. So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need. Ideally you could arrive in a new town with only this skill and your tools, and begin to eke out an existence. I favor trades that are also useful to oneself, so the building trades are good because everyone needs shelter-may as well build your own or at least understand what you are buying. Doctor also works as a trade, because the need is so basic and universal. A profession being anything else, basically, especially if it generally requires an employer (major capital investment) to be a useful activity. Interestingly, being a farmer falls into this category, since it requires land and equipment. Even if you own the land and equipment, you could lose it, and then your livelihood is out of your reach. So that’s a profession, by my narrow practical classification. I figured with a trade and a profession, young adults are much better prepared to roll with the punches in the inevitable chaos they will confront, and be empowered to walk away from situations that are untenable. The power to walk away is highly underrated. For myself, I have benefited greatly from my practical upbringing, and am a sophomore journeyman in many trades but my happy place is creating things. Electronics, a little mechanics, and software to breathe life into the soul of a new machine. Fortunately I have been hardcore unemployable by nature for decades, so I have developed the freedom to follow my own path, which is deeply gratifying. But without a strong trades type background this would not have really been possible.

giantg2 1y ago
Many of the trades you listed require licenses, apprenticeships, or trade schools. Usually high schools make you choose between a college prep track or vo-tech track, so you can't do both. Also, those the tools for those trades (if going beyond a handyman level) are a significant capital investment.
- vermilingua 1y ago
  That’s only an obstacle if one believes education should be finished by 22-23 years old. Doing another few years of formal education isn’t a huge impediment and is probably pretty beneficial before even considering GP’s main point.

giantg2 1y ago

I wonder how long it will be until AI is making all the CAD/CNC models with just a check by humans. Same with the laser cutter they mentioned, water jet cutter, etc. It can't be that hard to have a model trained to take a technical drawing and generate the CAD model. I think if I lose my current job (on a PIP), that I should be a CAD designer (entry level around $75k). But then I'm concerned that I'll be out of a job in a couple years.

alwier 1y ago

I mentored two FIRST robotics teams. One was at a well-funded school with a big honors program. All of the students were smart and engaged and clever and ambitious. They designed an extremely clever, complicated robot that looked really cool on paper and was completely impractical to actually build and they did poorly overall, barely getting an extremely-stripped-down version of the design up and running, losing every match with usually no points scored. The other was at a poorly funded school with no honors classes. The students were just as intelligent and just as hard working, but instead of AP math and physics they were taking auto shop and wood shop. And they knew how to quickly design, build, and test simple, reliable solutions that got the job done. They fared much better in competition. Me personally, I did mechanical work for a decade before getting a CS degree and a desk job. And I'm really glad I did. Welding and machinery were a heck of a lot more fun than debugging distributed software systems, and I'm glad I spent my 20s doing the former instead of the latter.

1970-01-01 1y ago

The problem with skilled trades is they put you inside a very limited skill box. You're stuck monetizing that trade for decades, with very little business opportunities outside that box. Swings in the economy and your health will not neatly follow this model of one-and-done.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-high-school-juniors-with-70000-a-year-job-offers/ar-AA1EjI7E https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-high... Text-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1EjI7E https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1EjI7E