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California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
- kleene_op 1y agoThat's good for CS and CE related work. Too many people went there not because they liked programming or engineering but because they wanted to get rich fast. Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.
- verisimi 1y agoGetting rich fast, and doing what you love in your spare time, rather than pretending you love your work, which no one does, sounds perfectly coherent to me.
- frizlab 1y agoI love my work personally.
- OutOfHere 1y agoNo, because they are not the people who love to do it in their spare time. They never do it in their spare time, because they don't love the activity that much.
- twalichiewicz 1y agoI've always found design to be deeply fulfilling work, not something I need to pretend to love.
- pjjpo 1y agoDo people actually get rich fast without loving their work, at least to a reasonable degree? Motivation is the most important requirement for productivity, not smarts (unnecessary for engineering where the main job is to understand tools to the fullest) nor even experience (though the ones that stay in the industry for a while generally also have more motivation). I've seen plenty of folks get managed out that fall in the unmotivated, unproductive pattern as they probably should be. Retiring early to pursue something different is a great goal, but I think that means liking your work enough to get there. And some luck maybe that someone shared the importance of investment which is often the missing piece.
- beej71 1y agoAnd as an educator, I also look forward to more classes where people genuinely want to learn the material and aren't just in it for the money.
- kubb 1y agoCan they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- mschild 1y agoWhat does the alternative look like though? Sure tech companies pay engineers well, but there's plenty of other jobs requiring a college degree that don't reach that salary level.
- kubb 1y agoI didn’t say that there was an alternative. Just that 100k doesn’t make them rich.
- globular-toast 1y agoApple, Tesla et al tell you you're not rich, but you can be if you want to be. Learned helplessness.
- hellisothers 1y ago… but not in most cities in CA is the OP’s point, actually not even is most large cities on either coast. Which isn’t to say it’s not possible, you could definitely live well elsewhere on that salary but there is an obsession with coastal cities.
- madaxe_again 1y agoOutside of the Bay Area, sure - California is a pretty big place, and trades are in demand all over.
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- globular-toast 1y ago"AI" might be the given reason but I feel like this is an expected correction regardless. Ideally people would gravitate towards jobs that match their interests and talents. But our education systems, governments and economies have been pushing more people into thought work even if that's not where their talents lie. This has actually made a lot of the trades very lucrative for the few that remained. Of course, that won't last either, though. The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
- CalRobert 1y agoBut shortages of necessities are used to ensure that peer competition remains stiff enough to keep us outbidding each other for housing, etc necessitating optimizing for income, necessitating working more hours, for all but a lucky few.
- colesantiago 1y agoCouple this and investing (and having no college debt) and they would be laughing. Then they can just live off the interest and in 5-10 years think of buying a house instead of renting. House prices needs to come down and crash though and more housing needs to be built.
- nelox 1y agoA dozen students
- lifestyleguru 1y agoA full dozen of them
- cadamsdotcom 1y ago> The cobots have already begun production performing high-volume and repetitive welds, but the technology still lags behind humans in artistic quality and problem-solving ability. AI reduces the repetitive work humans have to do, freeing up our minds for creative problem solving - and creative problem solving is also amplified by having an AI to dialogue with.
- siva7 1y agoBlue collar is the only bastion safe from AI. As we office workers lose our jobs we need to retrain
- bestouff 1y agoWait for AI-powered robots in the field.
- torium 1y agoSpoken like someone who's never been inside an assembly line.
- tails4e 1y agoIt depends on the blue collar job, but electrician, plumber, roofer, all seem pretty safe from automation for a while at least.
- nkrisc 1y agoI don’t think robots will be replacing a toilet or retrofitting PEX in an old home anytime soon. Though it might be nice for the drywall guys to have robots make the cuts instead of the plumbers.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoLongshoremen in the USA have had to fight tooth and nail to avoid the automation that the other world ports of adopted, much to the detriment of port capacity.
- bsder 1y agoHere's what look like some real numbers: https://ibew11.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Residential-wage-rates.pdf https://ibew11.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Residential-wa... Those rates are nothing to sneeze at, but the work is often hard work out in the beating sun (not everybody is installing data centers in air conditioning). And the work takes a toll on your body. Those are certainly not numbers that would make people genuinely qualified for software jobs think once let alone twice.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> the work takes a toll on your body It doesn’t need to. Not for welding.
- kbar13 1y agoyour eyes tho i guess staring at a screen for 90% of your day is probably also bad for the eyes
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bsder 1y ago> Not for welding What? Where? All the welding jobs I have ever known were terrible for your body. Between the exposure to high UV, all the bits of toxic crap that you are breathing/ingesting, and the noise from heavy machinery, it's quite bad. And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal. My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father. My grandfather died from a weird cancer from all the crap he was exposed to. My father quit working at the mill precisely because it was doing so much damage just by wear and tear. They both made a point to make sure that my job would be based around my brain and not my body. Electricians, by contrast, at least don't have anywhere near the same level of exposure to toxic crap.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
- Fraterkes 1y agoI’m not from California, and I’m not a teen, but this hasn’t been my experience
- runsWphotons 1y agoThe jobs probably aren't disappearing because of AI but because of previous over-hiring and a slowing economy. It seems like a cover story to push people into accepting underemployment.
- F7F7F7 1y agoCTE/Vocational education leading to underemployment is some straight up Boomer propaganda. A 18 year old who goes from graduation to the electrical union will make $60k in year one. Sure, not the total comp package that those in tech covet but have you looked at median income?
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoDo apprentices really earn that much before they become journeymen? I thought there was some sort of process in place where you got some in the job training at the expense of getting paid less, at least in construction.
- geremiiah 1y agoKids who used to study electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering or go into finance and accounting, decided all to major in computer science instead, because if you are going to be an office drone, why not be an office drone in the field that everyone is getting 6-figure starting salaries in? Surely the overabundance of graduates in CS played into the current situation.
- vasco 1y agoWhen computers get much better at doing stuff I'd think more people would want to work with computers, this to me seems obvious. There will be even more computers and more people needed to deploy them and operate them. And by the time that is automated, most other jobs that require physical jobs will have robots doing them anyway, so it really is hard for me to understand that as computers get better people predict less people will work with them. Better tool = more of that tool. Paperclip would also say that over a long period of time all of our energy and available space would go to more and more compute. It's hard to think anything else is safer than computer.
- solatic 1y agoWelding is supposed to be future-proof? At $90+/hour for unionized labor? Don't make me laugh. Look at the work Boston Dynamics has already done with neural networks and tell me that we're not going to see robots doing perfect welds in any space a human could reach, 24/7 around the clock without any need for rest breaks. https://youtu.be/HYwekersccY?si=p5BZaGOUQJsqd1f_ https://youtu.be/HYwekersccY?si=p5BZaGOUQJsqd1f_ What's the case for optimism here?
- frainfreeze 1y agoArc time is 10-20% of welders workday.
- 627467 1y agoIsnt this healthy? Decades of single-minded idea that the only progress is college degree formula "because stats shows college degrees is indicator of whatever progress metric" has led to massive personal debt and unsuitable - both personal and societal - careers. Isnt it healthy that people/society dont think there's a singles formula for success?
- tennisflyi 1y agoWould love a source on the $80.50. BLS has welding wages much lower. Also, all the “easy” jobs will be automated. Tough/uncomfortable to the humans