Why is learning a trade only considered a last resort?

Because a lot of trades are pretty bad for your health. They require getting in potentially unsafe environments, dealing with substances or byproducts that can lead to cancers or other occupational diseases. They also require a lot more physical work. So of course people would prefer a cushy office job to trawling through crawlspaces lined with asbestos to plug in a light. Not to mention that a lot of trade jobs are not that great paid when starting out, the good pay comes with years of experience and until you get there you have to suffer through all the above. Sure some office jobs don't pay well starting out either but you just sit on your ass in a air conditioned office instead of nailing 2x4s in the hot sun for 8 hours.

People always ask this question but they never consider that there are actual valid considerations that make trade jobs unattractive compared to other jobs.

Edit: Oh also a lot of well paid trade people run their own companies which is an additional stress and a lot of people don't want to deal with that. My father is in trades and he ran his own company and I watched him age 20 years in the span of 5 due to all the stress and physical work he was doing. Running a company, even a small one is no easy job.

An electrician certification doesn't mean a whole lot either. Both are just paper. Degrees with work experience and trades with apprentership time hold a little more value, but its still hit and miss.

I went to electrical school right out of high school and was an electrician for 10 years. Learned a ton of practical skills, can fix just about any household or mechanical issues, and bought my first house 5 years in. Best decision my parents ever encouraged me to do. Would recommend and also not sure why it gets so much flak

An electrician certification proves that you can do something. A bachelor's degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.

Why is it that you think that an electrician certification is less about checkboxes than a 4-year university degree? Or that the checkboxes are somehow more difficult to game? Most trade schools themselves are a joke, so you have to play the meta game of getting the cert and networking your way to a job. You know, same as your university degree.

The fact is, most trades pay shit, and their big advantage is that you get to start earlier in life, and that you have more opportunities to get overtime pay. That can be a good option for your 20's, especially during a jobs boom (most trades are infamously boom and bust cycles), but by your 30's you will get passed up by most of your degree holding peers (and you'll totally get left in the dust in your 40's and 50's).

It's not good advice to young people. Electricians, plumbers, welders, etc. don't get paid very much on average, and the ones who break out from that low pay are either highly specialized or climb the small business/management ladder (at which point they benefit from concepts taught in school as well).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a skilled trade.

That said historical opinion on the quality of jobs they offered has lead to lower enrolment. Combined with an aging population has people aging out of the workforce creating demand in the “labour market”.

When the underlying reason to pursue any career is capitalisms incentive structure and you can see those wheels grinding it gives the jump on the bandwagon vibe of suggesting a trade the ick.

From personal experience there are two sides of the trades.

Do well entrepreneurs who earn a good living offering services and exploiting labour as any good capitalist does.

Commodified labour who is paid a “fair wage” for their skills but are generally not benefitting from the systemic demand of their skills beyond that.

It’s fair that the hand we’re dealt gives us a choice between a useless degree and a diploma that offers a job

It’s also fair that game is bullshit lol

Nobody I knew that went to trade school was ever able to get a job doing that trade. Granted, we all graduated during the 2008 crash, and were in a very economically depressed rural area.

A bachelor's degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.

That really depends on the program. A general studies BA from a correspondence school might not indicate much, but a BS in the focus of a highly specialized university does.

Why is learning a trade only considered a last resort?

Because it's not even an option for most people.

https://hcs.la/...

Agree, I am 3 years into a bachelor's degree and like 9 months ago I realised I haven't really developed any meaningful skills. I have no idea what job I even could have anymore. I chose to pursue BBA because at the time it seemed like an easy way to get a decent office job, and at the beginning all the teachers assured that i'd find my specialty during the studies. Turns out, I do not want to see money, count money or think about money, I just want a job where I create something, do something. So after i'm done with this shit, I think I'll try to just get a source of income and work on a game or maybe just go to a trade school later

Additionally these days anyone can cheat and get through college knowing damn near nothing. I think trade schools (i think) usually still require in person testing of the hands on skills.

It's actually quite difficult to get into a well paying trade, all the apprenticeship programs run on nepotism and then you usually still need to go into business for yourself to actually make a living, and they're all absolutely saturated since they started pushing trades on millennials and z twenty years ago. Trades are the same gamble as conventional college anymore. There just aren't any available jobs.

the need for EV automotive mechanics will only grow, id probably do that if I was in the OPs shoes

I don’t envy anyone trying to break into the games industry right now - you graduated at exactly the time all the investment left, layoffs hit, and jobs dried up.

It’s hard enough trying to find positions right now if you have years of experience, let alone as a fresh grad with none.

Could be worse. Could be living in China with even more capitalism.

Yeah.... The early 00s seems to be the last time when just getting any practical degree seemed to be a decent investment. After the 08 recession things seemed to only really bounce back for people with specified graduate degrees.

At this point I would say that it's better to wait to go to school until you know what you want to do, and only if that job requires a specific degree. Anything else just seems to be gambling with loans.

Coming out of grad school in 2024, I had to submit ~300 applications to get 4 interviews and 2 offers for engineering roles. From what I hear, it's gotten even worse since then- companies are posting fake positions to look busy even in the middle of hiring freezes and ai bullshit has infected the recruiting process too.

Edit: reading this back, I feel like it reads as if I'm trying to one-up your job search struggle, which was not my intent. I was just confirming that it has continued to get worse

was it ever not normal for people from middle class and upper middle class families to do that?

I only did 1 of those and managed to get a house by my late 20s a few years ago.

While volatile is a good way to describe the day to day. It's been trending worse for many years now.

gets a degree in public health to help humanity

Trump completely ousts public health and replaces it with dodgy supplements

the problem with folks and their degrees is they fall into sunk cost fallacy. you have to get a job in your field or you have wasted your entire education. oh and if you can't do that, you have to get another degree in another field to get another job that field.

no, you don't. what you need to do is learn to market your skills to appeal to a broad range of employers, many of whom are looking for skills more than degrees. you may also have to be willing to move, or take on other compromises to find work.

but many folks can't do that because of a sense of pride, arrogance, or stubbornness. they'd rather work shitty low wage jobs 'in their field' and be forever fucked, than like, try something different. and they view those of us who chose that path as 'traitors' or something. it's totally absurd and is entire a problem of not being willing to give up 'the dream' and all the emotional expectation tied to it.

i'm glad i quit my PhD and tried something different with my life. higher education has distorted itself into a bureaucratic ponzi scheme run by petty people.

i won't even get into the stupidity of 'useful' vs 'useless' degree nonsense that so many mostly use as a way to punch other people who had different courses of study than they did, despite the fact generally higher education kind of teaches most students the same skillsets, but then again, the students are go out of their way to avoid learning those skills and part of how they justify that is by claiming such skills are worthless,

such a stupidly vicious circle of stupidity and laziness. that influences and idiots also exploit by defaming higher education as a whole based on loud cohort of people who choose to be helpless and blame their uni for not getting them a job they thought they deserved.

You're assuming this exists tho....

https://www.tuftsdaily.com/...

I’m laughing to think what happens when the market is saturated with PhDs.

Will everyone need to be a professor to be competitive?

My group of buddies always say that if gaming hadn’t become so wildly popular a revolution started by young men would have happened already.

The US is really good at placating the masses with media. Stay distracted, stay oppressed.

4chan and reddit were instrumental in the election of Trump (45). CMV.

Reddit's boner for Ron Paul in 2008 was a proof-of-concept for leveraging social media to astroturf. CMV.

Just as soon as the porn stops being so abundant and interesting to occupy all of OOP's free time

Yeah because this guy is totally trying to be a useful member of society with his lounging around all day watching TV.

My advice would be to find any entry level position at a company that does tuition reimbursement. Call centers often do this so they can hire from within to avoid paying market rates.

I got my career start as a customer service rep and ended up a senior IT engineer, and got my IT degree in the process, of which they covered 2/3. That's why I didn't mind being paid 50% market average.

My second piece of advice is to get your basics at a community college. Substantially lower costs, smaller class sizes, and the exact same classes as a university. Just make sure the desired university accepts the credits, but there's often agreements between universities and near by CCs. If you get your associates, some universities have scholarships for that.

Although if you're interested in IT, certs are a better use of money. A degree shows knowledge of theory, but many certs show technical knowledge.

College is not only about a degree it's part of our social culture and you're making your child miss out on that due to fear.

Honestly? You don't need a degree for any of those admin jobs in mid-sized cities either. At least in the US, give or take.

do you know any mechanics?

every mechanic I have met hates their life, unless they work for like a really high end place. and those jobs are far and few.

i had family in auto work, electricians, and line workers. they all basically said 'go to college working in the trades is fucking shit.'

working in an office is a lot easier on your body and doesn't leave you with medical problems. my electrician uncle lost one leg in his 50s and then other in his 60s. the mechanics i knew all worked for their dads and were townies we never left where they grew up, etc.

they made decent money, sure, but i would never ever want to trade live with them. i'm in my 40s and healthier than I was in my 20s. money isn't everything.

shop rate around me $180/hr now. the mechanics better be making at least a quarter of that. my company only charges half that rate for custom machine building

Trade work is admirable work. Never downplay fields that allow overtime. My best salary years are in an industry that allows unlimited OT.

HAAANK DONT ABBREVIATE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE HAAANK

Mechanic pay is ass these days. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless it's like specialized and unionized.

Pretty sure wanking doesn't take him all day. Jerking off is not the problem.

If I wanted good advice I'd go see a shrink, not a green text forum. Nerd. /s

I'd also recommend driving a school bus. $35/hour and subsidized health insurance. You only have the little bastiges for 15 minutes at a time and you don't have to teach them shit. You don't need a bachelor's degree (or even a high school degree) and god DAMN do my coworkers show the results of that.

$260 a day is quite decent

The deprivation of basic human needs and the concomitant necessity of serving capital... These are foundations of capitalism.

If your search for being used (ie. "employed") is chaotic and fearful, that's a benefit for those who might want to use (i.e "employ") you.

It's a feature, not a bug.

Its the effects of the long lasting ageism. We have been indoctrinated to infantilize those that are the most in need of protection - and now when they become legally of age - full competency is expected.

That is what market socialism would be. A Nordic model, but with decentralised planning and ownership in the hands of the workers, rather than the CEOs.

“Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: so far so good... so far so good.“

Anon was 23 in 2022.

So they're like, 60 now?

You just gotta accept a job that's way worse than what you got your PhD for.

\s but not really \s

This is why there's a homelessness epidemic

No alternative than to keep looking for a job. At least evictions take months to years to complete. They're lucky that they have parents to live with currently.

OTOH, a paid off house is all you need for basic subsistence. If you only have to pay property taxes, insurance, and maintenance, getting a couple of roommates would cover that plus something left over for food and other essentials each month. Not a glamorous existence, but it will keep you off the street.

Remember, every home is a potential revenue stream for its owner.

Yeah I'm sure it causes lots of worry and stress. What's your point?

you will inherent your parents money when they die. most likely.

and if you can't afford the property, you sell it, and live off that money with which you can downsize or rent.

or you can rent out the spare bedrooms

That was my thought reading this. 'I have bills but I choose not to work because the jobs are beneath me' People used to see the schooling as a way to skip entry level work. But now as a society, all it means is that you put money in before time. Its just not that special any more.

20+ years ago I put myself through college in an IT field, went to work in an industrial plant right next to the guys from my highschool, that dropped out to work. They had 3+ years work experience over me, I had to start at the bottom. In the time since then, I have worked in a dozen places, for a variety of wages to support my family. Where I am now is no mistake or act of luck. It takes hard work.

my brother is unemployed for 5 years now. but it's entirely because he's a cunt who won't take a lower paycheck or work for a company he thinks is 'below' him. he has more or less fucked himself because he thinks he should be only be hired for top level positions. the industry he is in also shrank a lot and he refuses to change industries.

Prison guards make $55/hr, and I still wouldn't give up my $21/hr job to work in a Vitamin D-deprived hellhole full of "customers" who hate you for merely existing.

Triple the pay, and maybe I'd consider it. Prison sucks.

I did this to become a programmer. No CS degree, learned to program by working on a personal project (music composition software), formed an LLC and sold the app as shareware back in the day when there was such a thing and people would pay $29.95 (!) for it. Still didn't make nearly enough to live on, got a real job with a resume that listed my own company as my first employment. Wasn't even dishonest about it, listed my role as "sole proprietor". Maybe the people reviewing my resume didn't know what a proprietor was.

TBF this was the '90s when Internet startups were hiring anything with a pulse.

Would rather live in a giant vase than contribute to prison industrial complex.

You can always start a business. It only takes a little bit of money to setup an LLC or something.

Whether or not that business makes money... Probably best not to talk about that.

it is easy.

just have wealthy family willing to give you start up capital, and who will give you money when you crash and burn your business.

anything is easy when you use other people's money to do it. including living life. hence why streaming and influencing is such an appealing lifestyle for so many folks.

If you really want to know how I can help with some of it. I started a business last year. I am a skilled laborer by training but my business isn't in the same field. The main steps are:

1. Go to your Secretary of State website
2. Start your LLC (maybe something else but LLC covers most things for most people)
3. Get your ein from the IRS website
4. Use whatever monies you (proprietor) have to buy equipment, advertising, whatever. Save your receipts.
5. When you file your (personal) taxes deduct everything you spent money on that is common and appropriate for your business.
6. Get all the money you spent back. Now you have the things you bought plus they money you spent on it.
7. Try to profit the second year and hopefully not have to use your (personal) money anymore.
8. Once you get to the point your revenues exceed your costs try not to embezzle from yourself (LLC.) the tax code favors businesses to the point that stealing isn't really necessary.

That's a general idea of how it goes. It cost me $75 I think and took a week for the SoS to approve my filing. I did all of the paperwork on my phone and it took less than an hour total. How to make money from a business is another topic but if you got a good idea or marketable skill don't let the official/legal part put you off.

Probably just that he's already spent 4 years getting a bachelor's degree and only now finds out it's insufficient to land a job and now he has to do more school and cross his fingers that improves his job-seeking situation. (It should, but so should a bachelor's degree.)

Honestly, "what's wrong with a master's degree" is almost as good a question, except that it would likely require going into more debt than trade school would.

It is more than likely a relatively shitty hard job.

Most shops have a shop time per hour, which lets say it's 60, you would probably make like 20 an hour. But your hours are not time worked, they are what the body that sets the job time. So say you have to replace a water pump, and the job time is 10 hours. If you can do it faster you still make ten hours, but if it's slower you still only make 10 hours.

There are pros and cons to every job of course, but generally speaking they get paid by the job, which can be profitable: if you're quick, know what you need to do, and have what you need to do it. OR the exact opposite, figuring out what is wrong, doing a job, and you have to redo it because the parts that you got from the manufacturer are faulty, you still only get paid for one job. Or if that aforementioned water pump actually takes you 20 hours, it would hurt your bottom line.

My highschool autoshop teacher worked at a dealership with the only real exception I've heard about automotive, which is electrical. His shop time and pay was 100 an hour, but he hated that job.

Mines a hole in the dirt

I wish I had been born with enough people to play democracy.

Mine is my other kidney.

Mine is as a mime in a mine.

It's not.

what's relevant is his work history and how he is applying for jobs. i hire for my company. lots of people have shitty worthless resumes and letters because they literally don't know how the apply to jobs. and then a chunk of those with recent applications, dont' reply or interview terribly.

but they are 22/23, they don't know this shit and they have to learn it.

we dont' give a fuck what your degree is in, but we expect a demonstration of professional competence and the ability to tell us how your skills would apply to the job. and most people can't do this... they apply with boilerplate language that shows us they didn't read the job description or they resume highligths irrelevant things. copy pasting the same application to every job is the best way to ensure no employee ever looks at it.

and we dont' even get a ton of applications, we're a small company with no clout, we maybe get 30 applications per position, not like 300 or 3000. but typically 90% are trash and we might try to contact/interview 3 people for 1 offer.

we've honestly hired people from shitty no name schools over people with more relevant degrees and from fancy schools... because their application was relevant and in the interview they showed competence and maturity and the ability to process new information. a lot of folks freak out and freeze up and can't answer basic questions, like how their degree/work history is relevant to what we are looking for in an employee, so they don't get hired.

i got hired on the spot basically because during my interview I asked them questions about their security postures and practices, and like their upgrade timelines... which all showed I knew what the fuck I was talking about and had experience doing IT operations. they told me later that out of various other people and previous employees, not a one of them had shown that level of curious and engagement with the job and often they ended up being shitty employees.

You'd really like to think so.

But a 4.0 GPA will get you a job basically anywhere, because managers assume you're a quick study. Sub-3.0 means they think you're lazy or hard headed. When you're skating near 2.0, you can have a degree in Rocket Science and recruiters will just assume you sucked at it.

Worked at a tech company that was hiring anyone with a 3.5+ from Data Scientists to English Lit majors. Then they just throw everyone into New Hire Training and gave them a coding crash course. The English Lit kids didn't do any worse than the STEM crowd on the tech side. And they were way better at collaboration, documentation, and delivery.

The only 23 year olds who didn't go through this phase... were the people who had family connections to get them a 100K job after graduation.

rest of us took 6-9 months to find work, often while doing part time stuff to pad or resumes. if you don't have connections getting a job is difficult and takes a lot of work.

we also had degrees from frickin' Harvard. but we had no connections and no idea how the real world worked. I got my first real job 8 months after graduating, after working full time all summer and part time the entire fall. and i was living away from home, off my savings that entire time.

First job out of college was a tiny Medical IT company with maybe a dozen employees. Started at $15/hr while they billed me at $80. Spent seven years polishing my resume (should have been out the door at 3, but I was naive and they did up my pay to $35/hr before I'd finally left).

All that is to say, your starting salary isn't forever. Five and ten years of experience counts for a lot.

But staying in the service sector is a dead end. The most dogshit small time IT job is better than carting boxes around, if you want to work in IT. The grungiest nursing job is better than flipping burgers if you want to work in medicine.

Put years on a resume and keep looking for new opportunities. But don't get stuck in the quagmire of retail, unless you actually want to try and climb that career path into management or supply chain or whatever.

And absolutely, stay the fuck out of masters programs. That's for people who have a job lined up, not people looking for work.

I keep telling myself I need to get off the computer and get into the garage and do some real shit. I just really enjoy computing in general though, especially learning Linux. The other issue is that "real shit" allllll costs money. Its free for me to learn Linux all day. It costs thousands to to an engine swap. Even building some wood shelves...hundreds of doars in wood and screws. Plus its hard on the body...idk man. I'm glad I'm old so I dont have to think much about future shit. If I were graduating now I'd be ultra depressed.

easiest way to get a job is to have daddy hire you at his company or call a friend to get you job at theirs.

and then lecture and look down on folks who are struggled to get jobs because they don't have a daddy like that.

otherwise you're gonna struggle and struggle until you get a lucky break. the average job search is 3-6 months, which mean often it's longer than that. a lot of places will take 1-2 months to hire you from start to finish. my first job took 3 months to hire me from first interview, which was in late oct, and I didn't start until Feb. and of course once I was hired in December, I got multiple interviews and 2 more offers... because that's how life works. after months of nothing.

I think that's called being an influencer.

Porn film quality assurance

/j

The world will always need electricians (and if society collapses you'll have the knowledge to not die when salvaging parts from the clankers that countries sent in after they ran out of human meat for the grinder)

Me too, thanks.

EVs actually tend to use fewer ECU modules than IC vehicles - even Hybrids are driving a trend towards mechanical and electrical simplicity.

The IC manufacturers are fighting repairability tooth and nail, but the only ones who can afford their new shit are the last people who would embrace being locked-in to dealer repairs.

All that, and the dealerships/service-centers will always require mechanics, as the manufacturers themselves will always prefer to be able to fix and re-sell used cars.

Why not?

Maybe don't specialize in internal combustion engines, but... EVs still need repairs even if their predicted lifespan is significantly shorter. Won't need head gasket replacements, but brakes are still brakes, struts are still struts. I suspect if you specialize in high voltage systems, you'll still have a good career ahead of you as a mechanic.

Yeah mechcanic is a dead job. You want to be an EE or CS degree, cars are rolling spyware with a billion chips now.

However, body work will always exist!!

AiEvDroneCoin is the next big thing.

This sounds like one of those things where for 299.99 you too can discover this one skill. Then you sell a 2 week bootcamp where you teach people that skill and it turns out the skill is just applying to lots of jobs.

I live in Canada, have all of those things, does not change job prospects whatsoever.

This is not the topic

Fun fact Obama made a site that would let you see the average graduate salary compared to the degrees cost. The soulless animals in the GOP shut it down.

He's got a real case of the Mondays doesn't he ?

That's just misdirected. The people who teach and educate, at least from what I've seen (and mind you, I'm from Europe from a country that doesn't have a for-profit university system in place), are quite often just passionate about their topic. Them being part of the same messed up system as you doesn't mean they're the ones to blame.

"just travel the world bro!" wow incredible advice, please write a book