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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 yo

by 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
    In the long run it's detrimental. The longer you delay earnings, the less time you have for it to compound.
    - K0balt 1y ago
      If earnings are the main point of your life, that makes perfect sense.
      - strken 1y ago
        I bet that a substantial majority of people's long term goals involve money to some extent. Want to live in a van and surf all day? You do actually need money for that, particularly if you want to do it indefinitely.
        K0balt 1y ago
        Sure, resource potential is important. But putting all of your eggs in one basket can push you into a corner, especially in the sense of -feeling- cornered. Options, even if they exist primarily in theory, are a force multiplier. For example; If you have a “good” job, but it is trending toward a flat trajectory, and you have a set of skills that requires a complex set of circumstances to be employed, it may be too risky to move to a new location simply because the downside is so severe. It can be a 1:4 bet paying 10:1 odds, a bet you definitely should take, but if losing means your family doesn’t eat, you can’t take the risk. If you know you can find a way to get by even with day labor if things go badly until you can stabilize your situation, you can take those beneficial risks. It’s a matter of being prepared to roll with the inevitable punches, and being able to make decisions based on the knowledge of that readiness. Being less fragile, even antifragile.
sokoloff 1y ago
I think that the connectedness of cars (requiring dealer-level tools for some operations, even if available to independents at a cost that’s difficult to recoup) and the prevalence of pre-paid service bundles with new and CPO car sales is moving mechanic higher up the capital intensity (or employer/pool required) scale.
- K0balt 1y ago
  Yes, this is becoming more and more relevant. There are a lot of things that need fixed besides cars though.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  Every industry is feeling the same pressures. Even in "simple" trades the latent cost of running a licensed business is so high that you almost can't be in business yourself or with a couple people, you need to have a dozen guys running around doing gravy work (that nobody else can do, because no license, and that no other licensee will undercut any other on, because they're invested) under your license in order to stay above water in some markets.
  - Suppafly 1y ago
    There are a lot of things that work for one person or 10 people, but growing from 1-10 is the hard part. Even things like lawn care, as soon as you grow beyond what you can do, the first employee needs a duplicate of all of your truck, trailer, and other equipment, plus they aren't going to work as hard as you do and probably expect to be paid better than you pay yourself.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  I'm getting increasingly relevant personally as a double-whammy hacker and mechanic towards liberating people and the machines they fucking bought from daddy Chevrolet who doesn't want them to control their own machinery. It's still possible, even if for some you need to swap the entire engine controller, to take that control back. Ultimately all these damn modules have to eventually switch bare copper conductors to make all the stuff work in the car, and if we have to, we can swap ALL the silicon involved. I would love some actual right to repair legislation but our government is too occupied undermining people's civil rights and pissing off every other market on the face of the Earth. I will never ever pay a subscription fee for my fucking heated seats even if I have to bridge the 12V across a big toggle in the dashboard and wire the stupid thing myself. You gotta draw a line somewhere and that's mine. Fuck ALL the way off with subscription gating features in the machine I already bought.
amelius 1y ago
> carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer programmer, then also?
- K0balt 1y ago
  Sort of?, if you are sufficiently well rounded and can implement solutions from start to finish. It’s sort of Art adjacent, or entrepreneur adjacent. Still, I’d encourage strongly to learn carpentry, as in the rough construction level carpentry for anyone who is likely to focus on anything extremely cerebral. It is empowering to know you can build your own shelter, and construction carpentry tends to be a touching grass type of outdoor activity. Programming also is kinda iffy as a trade in the “I just got dropped off in the middle of BFE and I need to eat” kind of way. It sort of requires a bunch of fragile situational trimmings that are not really under individual control … so I’ve looked at software as a profession, really. It doesn’t quite pass the doctor test. Not everyone needs a programmer, but everyone needs shelter.
  - amelius 1y ago
    But programming can be done with less starting-capital than carpentry, realistically.
    - K0balt 1y ago
      True, but it still, generally, requires a whole lot of other societal components to be in place and functioning in order to generate most of its value. It tends to service the tyranny of needs in a very tangential way, or serves those needs only through the more direct agency of others. In that way it fails my test for a trade, in the same way that being a lawyer does. A trade should serve a universal human need with no intermediary. That’s what makes it especially resilient to chaos, and especially useful to the person with those skills. It gets close when you incorporate hardware as well. Now you can make tools with a software component, sort of a technical blacksmith, but you are still reliant on a fragile supply chain. Perhaps the technological handyman or tinker is as close as can be achieved inside this scope? Lots of grey areas with many skills.
i_love_retros 1y ago
So we'll all be living in wood huts because there are no architects and civil engineers and if break your leg the doctor will saw it off because no one studied biology and chemistry so pharmaceuticals don't exist... Sounds great! I love libertarianism!
- K0balt 1y ago
  What? I’m not advocating for forgoing education. On the contrary. I advocate for deeper, broader education and life experience. Not quite sure where you get that? OTOH we’d be better off living in well built wood huts than in the conditions that people with a high degree of specialized education but no practical education can provide. I have a great respect for knowledge, science, and learning in general… but the “incompetent intellectual“ stereotype, so effectively weaponized in the culture wars, exists for a reason. In the end, individuals and societies benefit from well educated people who have a well rounded education in not only the arts and sciences, but also in practical physical affairs of urgent application, AKA applied engineering or applied science.
  - henriquemaia 1y ago
    Probably they misread you while arguing with their own ghosts. Your idea is perfectly reasonable and sound. It allows the lived experience to shape youngsters minds.
    - K0balt 1y ago
      lol. Probably. I’ve never, ever done that on an Internet forum. Casting stones, and what not.
- psunavy03 1y ago
  Yeah! Hit that straw man! You could caricature libertarianism, or you could engage with understanding what it actually is, whether or not you choose to agree with it.
  - 1y ago
Balgair 1y ago
I grew up in a trade. My folks ran a small auto repair business, and as such, I'm more than competent in a lot of automotive related things and a barely competent in a lot of the trades (carpentry, electrical, tile, accounting, taxes, etc). Essentially, anything we needed to get done to make the business run, I did alongside my folks and family. I'm decidedly out of the trades as an adult. Mostly, this is because of my folk's parenting in general. I was not good, due to the stresses of said work and business. But I imagine that's true of most small business owners. But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body. I'm fully not kidding here when I say that my jeans were so dirty that they stood up on their own. Again, kid's jeans, and it wasn't every day, but at least twice a week. Heavy machinery like lathes will literally tear your arms off and beat you to death with them. I've grabbed 220V before and my Dad had to break the circuit with a broom handle, leaving quite the bruise on my arms, not to mention the near death of that kind of shock. Don't get me started on car exhaust and brake cleaners. Auto repair may not be very exemplary of the trades as a whole, but I choose to take showers after work now.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 1y ago
  Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of "go into trades" rhetoric is that most trades people either get into management as fast as they can, a small amount start their own business and a share of that small amount are very successful, or a large amount of people trade $$$ for future health problems (not just joints, many of the materials used in trades are awful and many never wear proper PPE). It's important to look at the trades without the veil of blue-collar romanticism; the trades can be lucrative but tradesmen will be very quick to give you the tradeoffs.
  - ashoeafoot 1y ago
    I actually wouldn't be suprised, running your own shop in a trade or in software bootstrap day to day mode has to be remarkable similar. Including consulting gigs to keep yourself afloat.
  - Balgair 1y ago
MisterBastahrd 1y ago
My nephew hates math. So he's not going to college right now. Instead he's going to vo-tech school. Where he takes math. Anyway, he seemed very interested in being a part of the FBLA and went to the various functions and conventions that the organization had. I encouraged him to keep in the back of his mind that one day he's not going to be young anymore, he's going to be tired of someone else's shit, every person in their mid 50s and over he knows who is in a trade has needed multiple surgeries just to function on a daily basis, and he's going to be frustrated that his boss is buying a motorcoach to drive to his vacation home while he's struggling to pay the note on his truck. Learn a trade. And then learn to run a business. So that you can run a business while working your trade.
Suppafly 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. I think one or the other is ok. My main thing is that you have to have some sort of plan. You can plan to be a software engineer or a hairdresser or whatever else, but you need to have some sort of plan. You can always update your plan, but you should at least have some vague idea of what it is. The 'failure to launch' folks that I know are all the ones that didn't have some sort of plan so they end up bouncing around from one low paying job to another without any sort of career progression. Even if they end up doing OKish as an office administrator or assistant retail manager, if/when they lose that job (often due to economic realities outside their control) they end up starting back over at the bottom.
- K0balt 1y ago
  What I’ve seen that drives my ideas on this are: I believe a professional skill is an important educational goal, and insofar as a person is capable and interested they will more likely thrive with a professional skill. But: professional skills tend to require a lot of dependencies and connections, can be heavily reputation based, and you can find yourself in a dead end of many kinds. Having a trade gives you an opt-out so you can always move laterally and reposition yourself, probably to get back into your profession or a related one. Also, it creates a way to take a “break” to avoid burnout. And being skilled in trades, you can easily “earn” tens of thousands of dollars a year as a homeowner by not having to pay a premium for life’s demands unless you want to. Just being able to credibly walk away is a huge advantage in negotiation. And even if you won’t, knowing that you could, really could, is a huge boost to well being. It all boils down to plotting a course based on options rather than only constraints. Empowerment. Thing is, most people won’t use that fallback, but it still provides a great advantage. With a fallback, you can take risks that can position you ahead of more timid strategies. Same as owning a little land with a simple cabin on it, outright. For a few thousand dollars or even less, the worst that can happen is that you might have to go “home” and recoup. You always have a place to be. Even if you rarely go there.
- lurking_swe 1y ago
  Unfortunately a lot of people just “sleep through life” as i like to say. They are physically awake, but they make decisions like they don’t have any agency. Almost like they are asleep. They think some higher power will magically drop a plan into their lap.

by K0balt 1y ago

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
  In the long run it's detrimental. The longer you delay earnings, the less time you have for it to compound.
  - K0balt 1y ago
    If earnings are the main point of your life, that makes perfect sense.
    - strken 1y ago
      I bet that a substantial majority of people's long term goals involve money to some extent. Want to live in a van and surf all day? You do actually need money for that, particularly if you want to do it indefinitely.
      - K0balt 1y ago
        Sure, resource potential is important. But putting all of your eggs in one basket can push you into a corner, especially in the sense of -feeling- cornered. Options, even if they exist primarily in theory, are a force multiplier. For example; If you have a “good” job, but it is trending toward a flat trajectory, and you have a set of skills that requires a complex set of circumstances to be employed, it may be too risky to move to a new location simply because the downside is so severe. It can be a 1:4 bet paying 10:1 odds, a bet you definitely should take, but if losing means your family doesn’t eat, you can’t take the risk. If you know you can find a way to get by even with day labor if things go badly until you can stabilize your situation, you can take those beneficial risks. It’s a matter of being prepared to roll with the inevitable punches, and being able to make decisions based on the knowledge of that readiness. Being less fragile, even antifragile.

sokoloff 1y ago

I think that the connectedness of cars (requiring dealer-level tools for some operations, even if available to independents at a cost that’s difficult to recoup) and the prevalence of pre-paid service bundles with new and CPO car sales is moving mechanic higher up the capital intensity (or employer/pool required) scale.

K0balt 1y ago
Yes, this is becoming more and more relevant. There are a lot of things that need fixed besides cars though.
potato3732842 1y ago
Every industry is feeling the same pressures. Even in "simple" trades the latent cost of running a licensed business is so high that you almost can't be in business yourself or with a couple people, you need to have a dozen guys running around doing gravy work (that nobody else can do, because no license, and that no other licensee will undercut any other on, because they're invested) under your license in order to stay above water in some markets.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  There are a lot of things that work for one person or 10 people, but growing from 1-10 is the hard part. Even things like lawn care, as soon as you grow beyond what you can do, the first employee needs a duplicate of all of your truck, trailer, and other equipment, plus they aren't going to work as hard as you do and probably expect to be paid better than you pay yourself.
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
I'm getting increasingly relevant personally as a double-whammy hacker and mechanic towards liberating people and the machines they fucking bought from daddy Chevrolet who doesn't want them to control their own machinery. It's still possible, even if for some you need to swap the entire engine controller, to take that control back. Ultimately all these damn modules have to eventually switch bare copper conductors to make all the stuff work in the car, and if we have to, we can swap ALL the silicon involved. I would love some actual right to repair legislation but our government is too occupied undermining people's civil rights and pissing off every other market on the face of the Earth. I will never ever pay a subscription fee for my fucking heated seats even if I have to bridge the 12V across a big toggle in the dashboard and wire the stupid thing myself. You gotta draw a line somewhere and that's mine. Fuck ALL the way off with subscription gating features in the machine I already bought.

amelius 1y ago

> carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer programmer, then also?

K0balt 1y ago
Sort of?, if you are sufficiently well rounded and can implement solutions from start to finish. It’s sort of Art adjacent, or entrepreneur adjacent. Still, I’d encourage strongly to learn carpentry, as in the rough construction level carpentry for anyone who is likely to focus on anything extremely cerebral. It is empowering to know you can build your own shelter, and construction carpentry tends to be a touching grass type of outdoor activity. Programming also is kinda iffy as a trade in the “I just got dropped off in the middle of BFE and I need to eat” kind of way. It sort of requires a bunch of fragile situational trimmings that are not really under individual control … so I’ve looked at software as a profession, really. It doesn’t quite pass the doctor test. Not everyone needs a programmer, but everyone needs shelter.
- amelius 1y ago
  But programming can be done with less starting-capital than carpentry, realistically.
  - K0balt 1y ago
    True, but it still, generally, requires a whole lot of other societal components to be in place and functioning in order to generate most of its value. It tends to service the tyranny of needs in a very tangential way, or serves those needs only through the more direct agency of others. In that way it fails my test for a trade, in the same way that being a lawyer does. A trade should serve a universal human need with no intermediary. That’s what makes it especially resilient to chaos, and especially useful to the person with those skills. It gets close when you incorporate hardware as well. Now you can make tools with a software component, sort of a technical blacksmith, but you are still reliant on a fragile supply chain. Perhaps the technological handyman or tinker is as close as can be achieved inside this scope? Lots of grey areas with many skills.

i_love_retros 1y ago

So we'll all be living in wood huts because there are no architects and civil engineers and if break your leg the doctor will saw it off because no one studied biology and chemistry so pharmaceuticals don't exist... Sounds great! I love libertarianism!

K0balt 1y ago
What? I’m not advocating for forgoing education. On the contrary. I advocate for deeper, broader education and life experience. Not quite sure where you get that? OTOH we’d be better off living in well built wood huts than in the conditions that people with a high degree of specialized education but no practical education can provide. I have a great respect for knowledge, science, and learning in general… but the “incompetent intellectual“ stereotype, so effectively weaponized in the culture wars, exists for a reason. In the end, individuals and societies benefit from well educated people who have a well rounded education in not only the arts and sciences, but also in practical physical affairs of urgent application, AKA applied engineering or applied science.
- henriquemaia 1y ago
  Probably they misread you while arguing with their own ghosts. Your idea is perfectly reasonable and sound. It allows the lived experience to shape youngsters minds.
  - K0balt 1y ago
    lol. Probably. I’ve never, ever done that on an Internet forum. Casting stones, and what not.
psunavy03 1y ago
Yeah! Hit that straw man! You could caricature libertarianism, or you could engage with understanding what it actually is, whether or not you choose to agree with it.
- 1y ago

Balgair 1y ago

I grew up in a trade. My folks ran a small auto repair business, and as such, I'm more than competent in a lot of automotive related things and a barely competent in a lot of the trades (carpentry, electrical, tile, accounting, taxes, etc). Essentially, anything we needed to get done to make the business run, I did alongside my folks and family. I'm decidedly out of the trades as an adult. Mostly, this is because of my folk's parenting in general. I was not good, due to the stresses of said work and business. But I imagine that's true of most small business owners. But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body. I'm fully not kidding here when I say that my jeans were so dirty that they stood up on their own. Again, kid's jeans, and it wasn't every day, but at least twice a week. Heavy machinery like lathes will literally tear your arms off and beat you to death with them. I've grabbed 220V before and my Dad had to break the circuit with a broom handle, leaving quite the bruise on my arms, not to mention the near death of that kind of shock. Don't get me started on car exhaust and brake cleaners. Auto repair may not be very exemplary of the trades as a whole, but I choose to take showers after work now.

beezlebroxxxxxx 1y ago
Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of "go into trades" rhetoric is that most trades people either get into management as fast as they can, a small amount start their own business and a share of that small amount are very successful, or a large amount of people trade $$$ for future health problems (not just joints, many of the materials used in trades are awful and many never wear proper PPE). It's important to look at the trades without the veil of blue-collar romanticism; the trades can be lucrative but tradesmen will be very quick to give you the tradeoffs.
- ashoeafoot 1y ago
  I actually wouldn't be suprised, running your own shop in a trade or in software bootstrap day to day mode has to be remarkable similar. Including consulting gigs to keep yourself afloat.
- Balgair 1y ago

MisterBastahrd 1y ago

My nephew hates math. So he's not going to college right now. Instead he's going to vo-tech school. Where he takes math. Anyway, he seemed very interested in being a part of the FBLA and went to the various functions and conventions that the organization had. I encouraged him to keep in the back of his mind that one day he's not going to be young anymore, he's going to be tired of someone else's shit, every person in their mid 50s and over he knows who is in a trade has needed multiple surgeries just to function on a daily basis, and he's going to be frustrated that his boss is buying a motorcoach to drive to his vacation home while he's struggling to pay the note on his truck. Learn a trade. And then learn to run a business. So that you can run a business while working your trade.

Suppafly 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. I think one or the other is ok. My main thing is that you have to have some sort of plan. You can plan to be a software engineer or a hairdresser or whatever else, but you need to have some sort of plan. You can always update your plan, but you should at least have some vague idea of what it is. The 'failure to launch' folks that I know are all the ones that didn't have some sort of plan so they end up bouncing around from one low paying job to another without any sort of career progression. Even if they end up doing OKish as an office administrator or assistant retail manager, if/when they lose that job (often due to economic realities outside their control) they end up starting back over at the bottom.

K0balt 1y ago
What I’ve seen that drives my ideas on this are: I believe a professional skill is an important educational goal, and insofar as a person is capable and interested they will more likely thrive with a professional skill. But: professional skills tend to require a lot of dependencies and connections, can be heavily reputation based, and you can find yourself in a dead end of many kinds. Having a trade gives you an opt-out so you can always move laterally and reposition yourself, probably to get back into your profession or a related one. Also, it creates a way to take a “break” to avoid burnout. And being skilled in trades, you can easily “earn” tens of thousands of dollars a year as a homeowner by not having to pay a premium for life’s demands unless you want to. Just being able to credibly walk away is a huge advantage in negotiation. And even if you won’t, knowing that you could, really could, is a huge boost to well being. It all boils down to plotting a course based on options rather than only constraints. Empowerment. Thing is, most people won’t use that fallback, but it still provides a great advantage. With a fallback, you can take risks that can position you ahead of more timid strategies. Same as owning a little land with a simple cabin on it, outright. For a few thousand dollars or even less, the worst that can happen is that you might have to go “home” and recoup. You always have a place to be. Even if you rarely go there.
lurking_swe 1y ago
Unfortunately a lot of people just “sleep through life” as i like to say. They are physically awake, but they make decisions like they don’t have any agency. Almost like they are asleep. They think some higher power will magically drop a plan into their lap.