Guess what!
There's a whole generation of old men about to pass away, most of them tradesmen. And in my experience, crotchety and unwilling to teach.Because this generation generally has less interest in trades, likely from being viewed down upon (see above), there is going to be a severe shortage of people working in the trades.
This will possibly mean two things:
Companies are going to scramble desperately to get new apprentices, so -good news- more jobs. But, expect a startling lack of quality in the years to come.There's a startling lack of quality a lot of the time now, it's gonna get hella bad when the trades-boomers go.
Skill shortage probably comes the same way as bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. We are probably in the slowly running out of tradesmen phase of the craftocalypse.
Things are built to spec. Everybody wants that 4500sf house but most people don't know what quality looks like. When I was house shopping, the new construction homes homes already made me very disappointed and leary. I eventually bought an older home with a Stablok panel and felt better about that. 😂 Swapped the panel out after close, I'm not nuts.
I'm 42 now and I left the trades a year ago after getting the life beat out of me for most of my life. It's not that no one wants to do the work, it's that no one wants to pay for a good tradesperson. When I left my last job they were only hiring techs for $16-$20 and hour. That was with HVAC certification. It's laughable.
Matter of fact, the company I worked for withheld raises from one of their teams for 3 years and they pikachu faced when they all left. Literally the best tech team in the company too. (This team had over 100 years of total experience in the trades. Plumbing, electrical, you name it. They've done it.)
Not to mention like 99% of the companies require you to own your own tools and will not replace/repair anything that breaks while working for their company. Got a nice new impact and it broke doing a job? That $200 is coming out of your pocket. Always.
Fucking, also, all the jobs that require being on call. Got a family? Fuck you, go fix shit at 2am and then make sure you show up to work on time at 6am with no sleep. Work 10-12 hours, go home, get called the next night too.
Whew, my poor cousin worked for CN Rail a while ago. Absolute worst, most inconvenient on-call hours you could imagine.
On-call jobs can go to hell.
As someone who spent the last 5 years in trades, and is now going to retraining: nobody is willing to pay enough for you to destroy your body by the time you're 50.
Tried getting into tiling/flooring, could feel it absolutely destroying my knees. Got out of that pretty quick. Totally not worth it.
AND, another instance of my hoping to be taken on as an Apprentice, only for the guy to be a complete prick and take me for a ride. What a waste of my time and energy and physical well being
Countries ought to vary your retirement age based on the work you do. It's absolutely wild that I will retire at 67 (heck you Australia for raising it) after working mostly in an office, but a tradie also only qualifies for the pension at the same age, despite doing back breaking labour their whole life.
No one looks down upon them. They're just crappy jobs that take a toll on your body and health over time.
- A former tradesman
They try to make it so appealing though, "Oh if you get your Red Seal, you can work anywhere I Canada."
Great, I can be underpaid in ANY province I want.
Southpark’s latest special covers this.
Nobody knows how to do shit anymore!
I don't understand why people pick on tradesman as if they're somehow lesser than them.
There's lots of skill and knowledge that goes along with doing any trade.
Also, while it's back breaking work, and you often work overtime, construction workers make bank.
This is an aged and outdated take that devalues the contributions of a very important job.
All jobs are skilled labor.
Everyone shits on blue collar workers until their furnace stops working, their pipes leak, their car breaks, their roof leaks, their foundation cracks, the wiring in their house gives out... Shit, it's almost like their work is integral to their jaded-ass day to day lives
I don't. I talk them up to my kids who are under 5 and considering both blue collar and science/academic jobs. I don't really care what they do anyway, as long as they're happy and making the world a better place. Manual labor helps me clear my head a lot.
Also, while it's back breaking work
This is why. It's not so much "these people are dumb" as it is "you don't want to have to do backbreaking labor the rest of your life".
They get to create useful things unlike a lot of white collar jobs
That's not fair. Do you have any idea how hard I work to put adverts into your products without making them crash? God, think next time!
Hey, c'mon those programmers making minecraft mods during their work hours are contributing to society
Maybe some people decided to play Gregtech and got inspired to get a chemistry degree, who knows
The irony is now that the situation is totally inverted.
My STEM degree has got me making a barely livable wage while the GEDs who went straight into a trade are making twice what I make.
And the cruel reality is there is not a good way to determine which way this market will go unless you're one of the 0.01%. And if you were it would make this a mute point.
What STEM path is barely getting by? Programmers and engineers are highly sought after employees rn.
I'm a Medical Laboratory Scientist (bachelor's degree, nationally certified, and current on my certificate maintenance continuing education requirements) and it has taken 16 years for me to crack 100k/year. I started at 38k. There are not enough MLS out there to staff all the labs in the US. Labs are scrambling to figure out how to continue providing patient care in the face of crippling staffing shortages and yet pay is still shit.
Well I my skill set is in programming, however to date since my graduation, I've only managed to get into an adjacent job which was IT.
I'm gonna try and bring my skillset up ther by focusing on network administration, since for me it would appear that my programming skill isn't really worth that much.
IMO the hard truth is that the niche skills sell, not degrees.
I would not say "right now". This is the worst that the industry has ever been since maybe the dot com bubble.
There are lay offs everyday, and wages are being openly suppressed. Someone with x yoe should expect 10% lower than 2 years ago.
I think you mean a moo point
A μ point.
🐄🐮
Construction workers can make bank, mom!
Figuratively and literally!
That construction worker has made more money at his entry level job than you have in the last twenty years mom!
~$24/hr x 2080 = $49,920 x 20 = $998,400. + 36/hr x 520 OT = 18,720 x 20 = 374,400. = $1,372,800 + benefits in 20 years.
Mom = -$200,000 first 4 years in reality -300,000 with interest for college. $9/hr full time job for 2 years outside of your industry. $17/hr first 3 years in your industry. $20/hr next 5 years. $25/hr next 5 years. $23/hr due to salary cuts last 1 year.
-300,000 + 37,440 + 106,080 + 208,000 + 260,000 + 47,840 = $359,360 for mom in 20 years with the good benefits only coming after she gets salaried.
Congrats, this is what the gender pay gap has been about since it was created. Men destroy themselves and off themselves in droves for it.
I mean.. At least as a construction worker my retirement plan is three-fold. The trick is to survive long enough and well enough to enjoy retirement.
The three are 401k, annuity, and the unheard of pension.
Granted, I'm also on my fourth pulled back muscle for the year. I really need to stretch more.
Don't let your job be your only workout. Stretch daily, and then do low weight/high rep strength training in the gym a few times a week, to be stronger than you need to be for your job. You'll stop pulling muscles so easily. I'm 43 and I don't have even half the pain that most of the 30 year olds around here complain about.
That's the thought that crossed my mind. As far as pay, it is being a good stable career option - the very physical trades tend to encounter a lot more injuries and physical consequences. I respect the heck out of the trades and I work with a lot of them on different things for work - but if you look at some of the older/close to retirement folks - physical ailments and shorter life expectancy is a real concern.
Think of the "silent generation" and "baby boomers" you know that are getting up there in years. Everyone I have known that reached their 90s had fairly "cushy" desk jobs. The ones I knew who did skilled labor and trades work lived to their late 70s/early 80s.
I think, at least in the US, that we are going to REALLY feel the decrease in trades like plumbers, electricians, etc. You can teach some trades much quicker when there is a need - but with licensing and such - its going to take time to turn that ship back on course.
The construction dude who dropped out of high-school at 16, never went to college, and makes $90,000 a year at age 25 is doing just fine lol
Until he becomes the construction dude who falls apart like lego every morning at the age of 45
🎼Everything is--hrk!!--awesome...🎵
The sad thing is these jobs do pay so well but are so gruelling that naturally a person wants greater relief from said job...so they spend their lofty earnings like a pirate who just got their share from a merchant vessel raid.
New shiny trucks. Big house. Pricey furniture...
Then the toll catches up when they can't pull tons of overtime anymore, and all that "wealth" was in depreciating assets when the kids would've been better off spending more quality time with construction dad anyway.
Are people actually still talking trash about tradesmen? Come on, what year is it supposed to be?
Year is irrelevant, as long as class exists (working, owning, and
middledeluded worker, aka "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"), so will classism.I didn't know people were talking trash about them. When I was a kid my parents warned me to do skooll gud so that I could get a cushy office job instead of a low paying back breaking job, not that those professions are shameful or anything like that.
But I think there’s still that implication that those jobs are for less intelligent people and that they’re less desirable.
my parents used that one: "do you want to dig ditches when you get older ?" it took a lot of work for me to lose that attitude towards manual and mechanized labor.
Me: Yes, excavators are fun. (Note: I am not in construction though.)
Those graves aren't digging by themselves.
Like the guy with steady pay, job security, benefits, and a strong union?
Shit I better stop studying
Labour adheres to supply/demand. Now that boomers are retiring who primarily made up most of the blue-collar workers, there's a derth of them and its only going to get worse.
So homeboy with the hardhat is gonna be making 6 figures easily out of 2 year apprenticeship while your fancy university degrees will be competing with all the other Asian students raised with this mentality.
We were all under the assumption automation was going to replace manual labour first, turns out its actually the code monkeys and adminstrators who are biting the bullet.
A 2-year paid apprenticeship no less.
As an ex-programmer that is now in the trades I can say my mental health is way better and my back hurts less these days since I'm not sitting in an expensive "ergonomic" chair all day. There are a lot of high paying trades that are far from back breaking work. Personally I got in to finish carpentry building science labs specifically.
There's also the added benefit that I like playing with computers again, when it was my day job I wanted nothing to do with them after work.
Finish carpentry building science labs...as an architect who has recently taken an interest in building science, that sounds interesting. The jump from programmer is interesting, too. Like, did you have prior experience in carpentry, or did you go in blind?
I grew up with my dad always doing work in and around the house himself and now as an adult doing the same with my house, so I wasn't completely going in blind. My last programming job was in the office furniture industry and that gave me a leg up having knowledge about casework, tabletops, etc. My brother in law was also a finish carpenter (now a job superintendent, but we work in fairly different areas/companies) and I had helped him with side work over the years.
As an ex-programmer that is now in the trades
It's very possible that movie had an influence on my career decisions lol
I'm trying make the opposite switch haha
Godspeed
The union employee who probably makes more than you and dad combined? Sure, I don't want to end up like him or the garbage man that I know for a fact makes more than both of you combined. Great job employment shaming mom.
phone marketing would be more apt job to scare kids with. It brings nothing of value to society and its awful for the worker and those being bothered. Or just skip pointing fingers at any job and just tell the kid they will end up being exploited if they are left with no options.
While construction workers should absolutely be respected, you definitely don't want to end up as a construction worker in India. Construction workers earn like 300-400 rupees (3.61 - 4.81 USD) per day of work in the part of India that I live in (which is a very industrious part btw). These people overwhelmingly belong to the lower castes. They don't have their own home, and live on site in temporarily constructed structures made from metal panels.
These people suffered the most when the COVID lockdowns happened. Their places of employment fired them. They thus lost their temporary home. These people, along with their kids tried to move back to the villages that they migrated to the cities from. However, for quite some time, they weren't allowed to return back. Thus, thousands of people were immediately made homeless, having to sleep on the streets. Of course, they were harassed by the police a lot. Finally, when special trains were organized for them, there were instances where the police sprayed water into these trains on these people "to clean them". Watch this documentary by Vice news if you want to learn more about them.
I think the most important thing when it comes to a job, over pay, is mental health. If you're doing a job you hate that pays you higher than doing a job you love, is it really worth spending so much of your limited time on this Earth doing something you hate? Unless what you want to do with your life will literally risk you and your family's starvation, just do it. It's not worth the stress. I know, I'm stuck in a horrible job trying desperately to get out.
The flipside now is doing what you love now requires multiple 10's of thousands of $ of debt to get even a CHANCE of getting into said field, and theres no guarantee that even if you get in you'll love it as a job instead of just a hobby, so you arent guaranteed better mental health by career switching
That's the thing I struggle with: There's lots of tasks that I wouldn't mind, or might outright enjoy, to accomplish in exchange for monetary return...
...oh, but it's the same routine that occupies that un-movable, sometimes randomized deathgrip on that huge time-block in your life? Day in and day out? Until you lose your mind and quit?
Even "playing games for a living" would suck under those circumstances!
Tell me your mom is totally insulated from reality and a huge cunt without saying it explicitly.
My boss once told me he would never ask me to do something that he wouldn't do himself. This 'mom' is espousing the opposite idea, that certain jobs are beneath her. I'm pretty sure these people have no clue how to do anything other than be some low level manager or bureaucrat and will vanish from existence like the morning mist, come the apocalypse.
All judgement until you hear a dripping in the night and have to pay that person a quarter of your "smart peoples" wages
Which 3/4 of goes to the company they work for and the actual worker gets paid shit.
A construction worker here receives twice my hourly wage.
til I don't make smare peoples wages.
If anyone is interested - commercial HVAC service pays extremely well depending on where you live. I rarely have to work overtime (although I do like to) and it's not backbreaking (it's a lot more mental/problem solving). It's union work. Not to say it can't be stressful, but it's the best job I've had and I've worked in a bunch of industries. I'm college educated as well, but don't need any degree for this work. Wish I would've joined this industry a long time ago.
Idk, tradesmen in the UK earn shitloads of money. Pretty good job if you like the lifestyle of it.
I have hella respect for any tradie and the hard work they do. I actively encourage my kids to think of trade school as a viable career path. I work in IT and I hate it most days. I wish some days I had gone into HVAC, electrical, or plumbing, but at this point I'm kind of stuck since I have three kids I need to support.
Im curious why you dont think IT is like a trade? I write code all day and petty much feel like a glorified construction worker for computer programs. IT has been blue collar for a while now. Heck my local trade school for teenagers 15 years ago had various IT role classes.
TBF "IT" covers everything from Helpdesk to devs so I really think it just comes down to what you're doing within the field. I wouldn't mind coding all day, but doing helpdesk for any prolonged period of time is usually not fun
So did you get good grades? You didn't mention that
