Only someone doing dangerous and rare types of welding, such as underwater welding, will make a ton of money. The trade-off is that it is extremely dangerous, and life expectancy is well below average.
Or incredibly arduous and you need to train for years while your actual working life is 10 years or so. I know metalworkers who can't pick up their tools any more because of the damage their bodies have sustained from their work.
What country are you talking about? Also, citation needed. Underwater welding requires a very specific skill set; I can imagine the sort of people who go in to it will be daredevils but it would probably be illegal to put them in situations where the risk was bad enough to say "well below average". Plus, they are probably quite important; companies wouldn't want to risk them.
Not just bad situations like getting killed on the job, but "Hazard Pay" in the case of underwater welding, prolonged exposure to being under pressure has shown to cause heart problems.
I know several underwater welders, and several more folks in training programs to become one. They are not daredevils. They tend to be very methodical, very careful professionals who are above average at evaluating risk. Daredevils are not tolerated, because daredevils either screw up (lots of money lost), get killed (lots of paperwork) or get someone else killed (bad).
Not an apples to apples comparison, but my uncle got paid 250k/year USD to drive a big rig in Iraq for the US military. He knows Arabic and can "fit in", though. You can get paid a lot more for taking on a lot more risk, even if you don't have particularly unique or exceptional skills.
I've seen a few people I've grown up with try doing skilled trades.
First, they seem to ignore that there is still education needed. And most people who claimed they were going skilled trades ended up doing low skilled manual labor.
And second, they overvalue their education. I've had people claim their skills were good enough to call them an engineer. (But if you give them a real world engineering question, they don't make an attempt)
Third, I've seen fantastic technicians, able to solder a board-mount LED by hand saved us literally thousands of dollars. There is value here, but this person was physically talented from decades of experience.
For a couple of semesters I roomed with a guy taking an electrical engineering technician course at a college while I was taking an electrical engineering degree at a university.
We were both surprised at how similar many of our courses were. The big difference was that the standards for pass/fail were lower at his, and that he didn't have any of the 300 or 400 level courses where all the interesting stuff was IMO. And I didn't have any of the hands on courses that was the interesting stuff in his opinion. He had an advanced soldering course. I had an "optional" 3 hour tutorial in it -- it was optional in the sense that you didn't have to attend, but you'd fail your labs if you couldn't solder...
And that's where you have this divide of people who have an EE degree but can't assemble their own designs to save their lives, and those with just a technical background who may struggle to design and understand their own circuits, but who can build them to expert level standards.
There are plenty in the middle who can do both - and more than a few of them with such knowledge have never take a college or university course in their life.
You see the same thing with software engineering sometimes - the CompSci graduate who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag even if given a github of fizzbuzz, versus the person who never went to college yet makes 6-figs in SV hacking on code (yet doesn't have the "book understanding" of data structures or algorithms).
...and tons of people in between those who can combine both.
Slap 'em together with similar people in the trades - well, you'll find yourself a myriad of people at all levels and understanding of "mechatronics" and/or robotics and such.
It is quite likely that your roommate could learn what you learned - and you could (or have) learned what he knew. It ultimately all depends on having the motivation and desire to pursue it.
Where you might have the advantage is that you could probably pick up his skills from online resources and simple practice projects or whatnot. He would probably struggle to do the same, without actually going into debt and attending some kind of university course(s). Some of it can be approximated with self-study and some online MOOC training, but not all of it, unfortunately - and he wouldn't have the "piece of paper" at the end.
solder a board-mount LED by hand ... physically talented from decades of experience
These days most people use ovens and solder paste with laser cut stencils, which make this stuff mostly about the tedium of ordering, identifying and placing components on the board with tweezers. The solder self-corrects. There is thus little physical skill required in SMT style soldering, at least at moderate component sizes.
Source: I trained my company from scratch to the point where we can turn over new prototype quantity boards in 2-3 days (including design, fab, receipt, assembly). Nobody has decades of experience.
I just don't get it. Education is everything! How is the United States placing such a low priority on it!? It is really only a matter of time until we are blown out of the water by Asian countries, who seem to understand its importance.
I do hire people every once in a while and I want them to be reliable, smart and educated in this specific order of priority.
Education is important, but I'm sure my plumber who charges a thousand bucks cash for half a day work earns more than most college graduates in this country.
There's an image problem with college in the US, largely the fault of some of the students/student organizations. Like that protest that took over a whole unrelated building, barring an innocent professor from accessing his research, and resulted in the professor being fired for trying to get it back. I hope we can return to respectable academia at one point. Where universities put furthering the body of human knowledge before bending over for their 'customers' who are more concerned with using the place as a playground to push their political views. I wouldn't be surprised if some medical university research program was on the verge of curing cancer but let their program be delayed because the students wanted to do a walk-in over something or other.
Wish the downvoters would give some explanation. I left my college with a vague sense of shame over the frivolous protests the student body participated in and the admin/professors allowed to disrupt class/activities/common-use areas. I'd have paid more togo somewhere protests had to be done off-campus or in a designated zone. At least in theory you're supposed to be there to learn.
Education is important but it doesn't have to be formal degree-oriented offered through what is effectively a cartel.
Education can and does come in a variety of ways. Expecting it to look exactly the same and work exactly the same for basically everyone doesn't make sense.
I'd love to see more of an emphasis around lifelong learning instead of demanding 18yo make lifetime decisions with near-zero life experience.
Exactly correct. But valuing education is now as politicized as hurricane forecasts.
This is because education level is a major factor in voting patterns. So conservative pundits have made open war on it, to the nations serious detriment. They could instead work to lower the price of education but that is absolutely not the agenda for the same reasons.
It's not entirely unprecedented, universities have been called communist incubators for decades. What is new is the shift in portrayal from communist to being a bad investment (but with no intention of fixing that). Also new is the willingness to cast off the nations future for political gain which previous conservatives apparently were not willing to do.
There are similar patterns for climate change, guns and renewable energy.
> So conservative pundits have made open war on it, to the nations serious detriment. They could instead work to lower the price of education but that is absolutely not the agenda for the same reasons.
What? Conservatives have been advocates of school choice (shown to reduce the price of education) for decades. Conservatives have not made open war on education at all. Conservative pundits themselves tend to be some of the most educated people. I mean, I'm pretty conservative, and graduated out of a top-ranked, intensive engineering school.
The salaries of welders does seem a bit over-hyped. That said, there are people out there working in the trades making decent money. I have a couple of friends that went to school to be electrical lineman and both are making close to 6 figures now with minimal student loans. I think it just requires a little bit of research and perhaps the help of a decent high school career counselor.
If you start off as an electrician, you don't have to remain an electrician forever. You can move up to managing other electricians. You can become a general contractor and manage multiple trades. You can become a real estate developer and manage your own custom or spec builds.
Welding, electric, plumbing, roofing - that's just the skill you start with, but entrepreneurship in these fields is alive and well, and the sky's the limit for ambitious people.
I think a high wage also requires the same things it does in other professions - flexibility and willingness to chase opportunities.
If you're a welder in a small mid-west town with no obvious industry, your prospects are going to suck. If you're willing to go to the oil patch for a few years, you could do really well.
Skilled trade demand varies across the United States. Welding is not a major trade in the western North Carolina. You can jump right on over to the eastern portion of Virginia and find a large number of welding opportunities. The temp agency I work for as opportunities from 13 to 21 and beyond for 5XXX and CuNi in South Carolina, Norfolk, Knoxville, Tampa, and Columbus. Several of these go so far as to offer per diem.. When I got hired I was in initial OSHA training with a guy from VT Halter in Mississippi who came up here on per diem and was being paid 29 + per diem. The skilled trades have a good amount of opportunity if you're available and able to reside where industry is located.
This guy was fired twice for missing work. So that's just a bad sign off the rip. I think welding is being pushed too hard. Every one needs to do their research and see what trades are in demand where they reside.
In fairness, where I live in flyover country, people are pretty realistic about how much money you can get as a welder. Or carpenter. Or plumber. Or what have you. They are relatively good jobs, for around here. But everyone knows you're not gonna make six figures being a welder. Not even close. (Maybe if you're working on a pipeline, that's underwater, but even that's temporary.)
There is nothing wrong with vocational education. But the reality is that, on average, how well you do with college education largely depends on what degree you pursued and same is true with vocational education as well. If there is a lot of demand for your vocation, salaries will be higher regardless of whether it requires college degrees or not.
This article seems to imply 'welding' is a single level skill after you have jumped through X number of academic hoops. this is like saying 'IT' is basically one skill set that can be learnt. There are welders earning vast amounts flying all over the world working on mission critical projects with huge economic and safety dependencies at the top, large numbers of highly talented entrepreneurial artisan welders (who often have many other skills) and people trying to learn a skill at the bottom. The article is like saying someone going to junior college to learn python is discouraged because they aren't immediately thought of as a senior engineer once they get a few qualifications.
I mean, the people putting forth the narrative that you can make good money as a welder don't draw any of the distinctions you outline in their anecdotes either.
The article also goes into the percentiles of wages for the profession as a whole. The 90th percentile makes $60K. It says there's a high floor of wages for the profession, but also a low ceiling, which seems fair
So if you are looking at software development with the same eye, you're going to see high floor, high ceiling, and come to a different conclusion about the profession as a whole.
>So if you are looking at software development with the same eye, you're going to see high floor, high ceiling, and come to a different conclusion about the profession as a whole
The line between software and IT is blurry. Depending on where you draw the line the floor for software can be pretty low.
> The article is like saying someone going to junior college to learn python is discouraged because they aren't immediately thought of as a senior engineer once they get a few qualifications.
"Welders at the 90th percentile of income for the profession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, earn $63,000 a year before taxes. Those are, statistically, the top earners, and they are usually expert welders with decades of experience."
This just seems wrong? Welding varies a ton by state. The Bureau of Labor statistics also says that welders in Alaska earn an average of $65k a year. They aren't all expert welders, it just varies heavily by location.
It says “usually”. That allows for exceptions like Alaska. (I just looked at the stats, and it looks like there is data on 510 welders in Alaska out of 389,190 total, so it’s a tiny exception.)
Except that the article has mischaracterized the BLS data. The data is actually for "Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers" which is not the same as "Welders". [1]
My Dad worked as a pipe fitter (welder) for a union in the '80s. Pay was $25/hr and there were some benefits, primarily a pension, but also some health insurance and other things. He worked overtime and double time Sundays at various jobs. Phrases like "6-10s" or "7-12s" were common in our household. His best year he (officially) earned $35,000 which was like 1987. But he also made a lot of extra cash on the side, so I really don't know how much he made that year or any other year in total and neither does anyone else. There were always broken dump trucks, plow blades, bulldozer blades, and tons of other items sitting in our yard that he would repair.
The article itself is bs. It feels more like a hit piece against the trades. How would someone who can't motivate himself to even finish his Associate's degree be any better off going to a 4 year college? Isn't this story anectdotal? There are plenty of welders making decent money, probably six figures and beyond, but they have to hustle to do it. As much as I want to think my Dad was a great guy, I know he wasn't that great at plotting a career path for himself. We did "ok" but were definitely lower middle class. We never went on a truly decent vacation, everything was very budget. But we had fun. I saw a side of life more raw, more real, than what most people experience. I have done better myself and for my own family, but I have a lot of respect for blue collar guys and just for "regular folk." I think there's too many socialist city people with big ideas in this country and their meddling just needs to end.
Not necessarily. I worked at a company where if you missed two days of work without calling in to let them know, you were fired. You could stretch that to about 5 days if you always called in.
I'm not making a judgement as to whether those are reasonable terms, only pointing out that such jobs exist, and could be similar where this individual worked there.
I think you may have missed something in the article. It does not state that the five years of work had been continuous or at the same location. It mentions multiple places they worked and that they were fired from multiple positions.
A career with similar average salary would be teaching. Four year tuition is an average of 25k in state and 41k out of state.[0]
Welding school is typically 5k to 15k [1] and takes two years or less. Despite how things played out for the particular case covered by this author, there is a good argument for welding. It may not make you rich. However, if you don't like the traditional college route, then welding and similar trades offer comparatively good pay/training trade-off.
Paying for welding school is just one way you can go. Apprenticeships will pay for you to go while paying you. Also there's non union options where the company teaches you while paying you. If you think about it, with the proper guidance and motivation it's not impossible to do both, learn the trade and take a night class or online course with your community college a term at the same time. It's really unfortunate how the trades were looked down upon in the past. I remember in high school it wasn't even an option since all the adults would kind of hide that option from students since it wasn't what "smart" people did.
One of the other nice things about welding - while it may not make you rich - is that you can do it to some degree almost your entire life. It's the same with a lot of trade skills.
I'm a software engineer - that is what I know, and what I do. But I'm already above the "age ceiling" that we all know exists - but somehow (maybe due to the fact that I keep my skills current?) I have stayed employed and haven't been subjected (to my knowledge) to not being hired because of my age. I'm also not in SV or any other "high earning" area, and I like small "mom-n-pop" vs large established companies (with all the politics and other junk) - so I've never earned 6 figs - nor will I likely ever. But what I do earn pays my bills and keeps a roof over my head, and allows for entertainment for me and my family.
For now.
But someday that won't be there. Then what? Well - I intend to work until I die - that is, code forever. I know there are plenty of software engineers out there much older than I am who are still employed. So maybe it isn't as bleak as I think. But I do know this: When I am not employed, I can't just "go around the neighborhood" or "advertise on craigslist" or "hang out a shingle" that says "Got a broken fence? I can weld it for ya! Call me @ xxx..."
Which is something tradespeople can almost always do. In their "retirement years" they can become handypersons, do side-jobs welding or carpentry, or maybe simple auto repairs (or even more complex ones if they have the tools and strength left). Plumbing and electrical isn't out of the question either. They may not make bank, but they likely won't starve, either.
For myself? I'm not sure what I could do. One thing I do know I can do - just not well enough to be employed at it - is weld. I can also use a hammer, saw, plane, whatever - I do have some wood and metal shop skills. I also work on my own automobiles. Whether I could convince someone else to let me fix their issues - well, that's just some marketing and hopefully doing it right for them (just hand me that grinder and paint - I'm no tig stacked-dimes artist).
So there's that to be said about the trades - that it is something that can be done to keep some form of food on the table, even if it's just helping out neighbors for a few dollars. Nobody wants to hire an aging software engineer to code up a simple website or something like that any longer it seems. Those older SWEs typically find their gigs maintaining aging and creaking software in a language nobody uses any longer (and fortunately for me, I do have skills in Perl, VB3 thru 6, classic ASP, some COBOL - and it seems PHP may be headed that way too).
When I was in grad school I made extra money on the side making/maintaining websites and apps for small businesses in the area. I generally charged between $35 and $50 an hour. This was in California, so I image the hourly rate would be lower in a low COL area.
For me I have a retirement plan that is maxed out. I plan to keep busy in retirement, but I'll be working for myself. I plan to buy a better welder and some days I'll make a model of some weird thing that catches my interest. Other days I'll stay inside and write some code. At nights I'll practice piano, if I'm lucky I'll advance to the point where I sound okay.
I think you've got your head on straight, although it's probably best to think of the old-programmer problem as a kind of half life. Every year, some percentage of the remaining ones drop out, often through no fault of their own.
The main thing is to panic now instead of panic later. Ease into a Plan B before it's a dire necessity.
I have worked in a few startups and there are lots of old software guys. The biggest reason why there tend to be fewer of them is because most old software engineers used to be young software engineers, which meant they had access to obscene amounts of capital via their incomes, and thus exited from 'wage earner' to 'full-time investor'. The only old software engineers tend to be those that didn't use their capital wisely (or didn't care to) or that went through divorce or other financial trauma.
> When I am not employed, I can't just "go around the neighborhood" or "advertise on craigslist" or "hang out a shingle" that says "Got a broken fence? I can weld it for ya! Call me @ xxx..."
Also... I have no idea why you think you can't do this. Before I went to college for computer science, I did exactly this, and made quite a bit of money. But, I think this goes to what I said above... some people are aggressive with their skills and money and you tend to not find them at work.
Seems like the biggest problem facing this guy was English class and math class — not learning to weld.
No particular reason we should be teaching welding at a college as opposed to an actual trade school. Tradesmen should not be held up by a need to analyze “The Purple Letter” or “Sir Gatsby & The Green Knight”.
The unspoken claim here is that if he'd gone to college and pursued a liberal arts degree that he'd be better off now. The evidence in the article however says the opposite. He'd have even more debt and even lower prospects after failing to complete that degree.
I don't think that's the claim at all; Rather that there is a common but unrealistic, if not downright dishonest, narrative about opportunity and working class jobs and it is doing a disservice to people. It's also plausibly a tool for people in other economic sectors to pretend any problems these people have are "their own fault".
I think that thesis is pretty defensible. Clearly a liberal arts, or for that matter professional, degree isn't for everyone. On the other hand, pretending that some sort of idealized working class living exists in the US today for anyone who just wants it enough and will work hard is disingenuous at best. There has been a lot of cynically dishonest political rhetoric around these topics in recent decades.
The claim is very much not that he should have gotten a different degree, but that there is no decent path to upward mobility for this seemingly decent person (or at least welding is not that path).
Some have been arguing that skilled trades are the answer to those who are facing a lack of opportunity, this looks in depth at how one person's attempt to join the skilled trades went (poorly) and also looks at statistics for welders generally and shows that it's a mixed bag.
Maybe I missed that part of the article where it was a direct comparison of welding to a liberal arts degree outside of the politician comparing philosophy to welding. Philosophers make more money than biochemists, FYI. What are your sources about the opposite occurring? If one goes to an instate school s/he can do fairly well with a liberal arts degree.
It's clear he doesn't do well in traditional liberal arts subjects. The question here isn't really liberal arts vs welding. It's that the narrative for a long time had been that college for everyone is a solution. For those students who will do well there, it is a solution. But it's not a good idea for everyone.
While it's true welders aren't rich, the question is actually how to provide education resources to allow everyone to see succeed to their ability, without making your parents' wealth the biggest factor. I think it's clear that vocational education is a part of this, and that college for all is not.
This is a glorified anecdote by a smug Atlantic writer yutz; dripping with condescension "There is no doubt that Orry would benefit from high-quality face-to-face instruction from a caring and conscientious English professor.." It's also a red-herring. Nobody believes an average welder makes $150k a year. In fact, we know what they make: a lower middle class salary (admittedly linked in the column):
The guys who actually do well, and who do make $150k a year were not enrolled in some shitty associates degree program (this article should really be on the failure of the US higher education scam); they're highly skilled former Navy machinists.
And of course, the reason working class jobs like welder don't make more is simple: we keep importing new low skilled laborers, driving the price of low-skilled labor down. Mercantilism and labor laws could fix this. Instead we get dimwits from the Atlantic suggesting welders go to English class.
I object to the labeling of Associates Degree programs as 'shitty'. In my experience, AS programs are just far more practicality oriented than academic BSs.
You want to learn how the math behind Dijkstra's algorithm works, get a BS. You want to learn how to build a network, get an AS.
You might be right regarding computer associates: but getting a degree in something like welding is just increasing the number of firey hoops someone has to jump through to do a job he can be trained on the job for, or in a union apprenticeship program.
I myself learned welding on the job: at a muffler company, and again later in a government lab. The answer to social problems is not always "more school."
This is in fact quite common in the welding world. Several other comments mention companies that hire anyone and train them to weld. I've also read articles from the oil field companies that they do the same. So does the military, if you pass the aptitude test at least. That said, my community college will teach you to run a CNC laser welding machine, a CNC plasma table, a robotic arm MIG, etc. Getting into all of that off the street is rare.
The trade skills degrees have their place, but the 'shitty' descriptor really applies to AS degrees in academic theory-- an AS in CS from University of Phoenix or Full Sail or whatever will cost way more than a BS from a proper university and the credits only selectively transfer to other AS-level programs.
It's such a waste of money it should just be considered fraud.
That AS probably doesn’t cover anything complex like BGP, right? You can teach yourself how to “build a network” with a couple of books and a few hundred in equipment off of ebay.
Yeah, sure, or you could spend the same few hundred on classes instructed by someone who works or worked at that job and receive a piece of paper saying you did so.
I could say the same about a BS couldn't I? How was it put in Good Will Hunting? “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
My experimental concept for post-secondary schooling goes as follows:
Spend four years at junior college(s) taking useful sounding classes. German, welding, programming, calculus, jazz band, EMT, with no intention of getting an associates degree (which is of little value in any case).
Cheap, and you might actually learn something. In the modern era, I'm not so sure that following the obvious path is the right idea anymore.
In general, no. Professional welders who do well economically typically have a few things in common that have nothing to do with their origin or education:
* They work very hard (60+ hours a week or more), usually on an hourly wage and make overtime pay/holiday pay/hazard pay
* They work either for themselves or in a small shop rather than for a large business or manufacturer. Large businesses typically cap salaries for their workers at a number high enough to attract the skills they need, but low enough to protect profits for the shareholders.
* The welders have the needed certifications or specialty skill set to meet the demand in a particular niche of the market
* They live near or are able to commute or move to an area with significant demand for their particular specialty.
The most obvious example at the moment are the welders in the oil patch (Bakken shale) in North Dakota. Many of the welders working there are working nearly 24/7, making a lot of money because oil production requires pipeline welders and the oil companies are paying lots of labor overtime to avoid any interruptions in production.
For the most part, the only qualification needed is the welding certificate for the type of welding they'll be doing. The employers don't care that you didn't finish high school or that you are an ex-con, as long as you have the paper (you passed the welding tests) and can read basic instructions you're paid a decent hourly wage.
Since there's such demand, you can work as much as you want, and since you're hourly you get overtime and holiday pay.
Another example is nuclear welders... TIG welders who are certified for welding stainless, monel, or other piping types used in nuclear reactors do fairly well. They have to have certifications in the welding types used (TIG or specialized stick, mostly) and they have to pass the basic security checks needed to work on a reactor site. Reactors need maintenance, and they aren't going away soon, so there's a demand.
The myth of welders being rich is something pushed by the various politicians who benefit from being able to say that student loan debt isn't a problem. It's true that a welder CAN make a ton of cash, but those examples aren't the entire workforce and there's always a price to pay. An underwater welder can make over $1 million in take home pay over a 5 year career that usually ends due to chronic injuries from high pressure environments that last a lifetime.
You're arguing with people who have never been on a real job site. Here, they think job site means monster.com or indeed.com.
I spent about a week at a natural gas power plant in Oregon being built to work on some telecom. Welders there ranged from 80k-120k that I knew. To be fair, I don't know of any welder above water that could make 150k. I only know the 150 range to be for deep sea oil guys. But that's just my experience. Either way, it's not like you get out of the gate being that class of welder. It's getting cert'd in difference environments, tolerances and types of welding, along with experience that get you to that level. And I don't know a single career blue-collar that thinks otherwise. Unless they're really stupid and anything above 30k a year is unbelievable to them.
"You mean you have to develop extra skills that separate you from the herd to get paid more? No! Really?" Same goes for programming too if we're all being honest.
> I only know the 150 range to be for deep sea oil guys.
I've read about these "saturation divers". Guys that go down inside a diving bell for weeks at a time and breath a mix of helium. Only highly skilled divers can do this (ie, lots of experience), and if I remember correctly, have to stop by age 40(ish). So there's this narrow window of time where they can make that kind of money. But these guys could make $175-$200k.
Obviously this is a tiny, tiny fraction of welders for only a portion of there career. I just found it really fascinating how the whole process works. Living down there for days or weeks at a time.
Yeah, I grew up in a very rural area with a major natural gas pipeline running through it. I know a lot of folks who work on pipelines. Welders who have all of the certifications/etc needed for that job do quite well. ~$100k is pretty standard for someone who meets the qualifications, and that's in an area with a dirt cheap cost of living.
It takes a lot of work experience and education to meet those qualifications, though. You're welding specialized alloys and need to make absolutely airtight welds in weird orientations and tight spaces. Mistakes get expensive fast. These folks aren't just out of tech school. They're mid-late career professionals who are _really damned good_ at what they do.
Saturation divers (i.e. "deep sea oil guys") and even some salvage divers can all make significantly more, but that's an additional, hard-to-find skillset tacked on top of the welding certifications and it's often contract work instead of full-time. It's also a lot more physically demanding and damned dangerous. The $150-200k/year welders exist, but an awful lot are ex-Navy folks with a decade or so of experience working in very extreme environments.
I was also told that you got excellent pay working on welding for chemical plant. But all welds are checked, and one serious mistake meant you lost your job at that level permanently (no one would hire you anywhere for that job). Anecdotal of course...
Well, that's the one downside to becoming the "best" in a field. There's fewer and fewer at your caliber. Thus, your name technically has more meaning. That goes outside blue collar too.
That's the funny part when you mention specialized alloys. There's a whole bunch of people out there, even though they don't have a college degree, who have an amazingly keen sense and in-depth knowledge of these specialized alloys and how to manipulate them in the real world. These are the folks that get the high range salaries, for very good reason. Now, it may be unfair that I say no college degree. They do take classes and other courses. But that's where we try to make a difference between trade/vocational school and college.
While I do see the value in theoretical and academic knowledge. I really do. There's zero fucking reason to assume it's grander than practical/vocational knowledge. One of the few jokes I like out of the Big Bang Theory (fucking hate that show but my ex loved it), the group was driving out somewhere for some reason, but the car breaks down. Whoever the main guy was says "Who knows anything about internal combustion engines?". All of them start saying they know plenty, yada yada. "Who knows how to fix one?" Silence.
Both sides need each other, academic and vocational. Neither side can advance without the other. But I'll gladly be the one to rag on academics if they act superior to the tradesmen until that stupidity ends.
"Nobody believes an average welder makes $150k a year."
The main point of the article is that politicians from a particular party say that they do. It then goes into a lot of examination as to why that's not true.
I love how liberal press screams "blue-collar workers can't get jobs", but if you try to hire plumber or electrician for a day job you will be lucky to schedule someone in the next few weeks and then will pay $1000 for a 6-hour visit.
The usual problem is that there are big swathes of the population living in regions without a healthy/diverse/growing economy. (Eg areas that are or once were monocultures of one particular sector, and/or are/were based on natural resource extraction. So basically fossil jobs and auto making are the prime examples.)
The needed retraining, relocation, and/or regional revitalization is completely non-existent in the Trump era, and it wasn't really effective/serious during the Obama administration either.
So, nothing to do with how much a plumber makes in a big city.
Skilled trades are still a good idea in the UK. I estimated that experienced self employed electricians could probably pull in $80-120k per year excluding office costs at 80% utilisation.
It's not huge money, but once you start factoring in that tax is much better for the self employed, costs of living, commute time etc it does look like a good deal. Even if you discount the estimate by 1/3 it still compares very favourably to most white collar careers.
I work at a company that does heavy manufacturing. They're begging for welders. They only accept something like 30% of applicants, I hear drugs is a big problem with applicants. They thing is that you don't even need to know how to weld, they'll train you. They put you through their training program and eventually you'll be welding for them. And the type of welding they do isn't small scale thing but really heavy duty thick sheets of steel. And here's the kicker, their pay is terrible. Which is why they're constantly begging for more people to train.They totally know that they're basically the guys that train all the welders in the area. People come in to learn the ropes then about 2 years later or so they get a job down the street making a lot more. I'm not a business guy but I guess it works for the company because they've been going for a very long time and still growing. I guess it's cheaper for them to constantly be training than it is to retain their welders.
I think the business case for it depends on training time, training costs, the odds of a person being useful after training, and how expensive it is to get someone already trained.
Training a batch of people for six months who will mostly be useful after completion and are mostly likely to complete training might be a good proposition. If training time is four years, 50% of entrants complete training, and 50% of those trained are useful... the case might be weaker.
How would the trained guy be cheap talent? Now he's trained and on the market as a trained worker. Are you going to ask him to pay you back for training if he quits?
in a proper master/apprentice system quitting early is like aborting your training, that is, you don't get a certificate for incomplete training. for a short training like welding, i don't know, but if it comes with a certificate i suppose you could withhold it if they leave early.
in IT this is a real problem. it takes about half a year to make someone productive. it takes another half year or so before i start getting a return on my investment. if they leave then, i am barely breaking even. if they leave earlier, i am making a loss. a friend of mine tried this business and couldn't make it work financially.
> training people is a very good way to get cheap talent
It's also exactly how the master-apprentice system works. It's a good system, is fair, and works. It's also vastly superior than the system where you pay to be trained by someone who is not a working master and end up learning substandard or obsolete methods.
Many industries are competitive, there is a limited pool of people to hire. If you pay a little more you get lower turnover, and you end up with more experienced and more skilled employees than your competition.
I used to work for a managed service provider and their NOC was the same way. They would cycle through newbie guys constantly since they had a pretty low cap on NOC tech pay. I was a design engineer so I was out of their direct loop, but close enough to observe.
A lot of the local network engineers in the Austin area owe their start to working on that NOC desk- they were fairly large so they kept 30ish people fairly busy. Once they reached a certain level of competency they either moved to supervisory positions or got poached...
They test for drugs because being under the influence of drugs (including alcohol) is a safety hazard. I suppose if tests were developed that could differentiate between "I'm intoxicated" and "I smoked on my day off", the situation could change.
Although I'm arguably pro legalisation I have problems with this. It assumes drugs = MJ, and from observation I'd say alcohol is a more dangerous drug in the way it disinhibits more risky behaviour than MJ - but there should never, ever be use of any drugs, legal or illegal, that can affect someone when they do potentially dangerous work. I think we can all agree on that.
My bigger problem with legalisation is my experience of the utter fucking stupidity that suddenly manifests when drugs are present. Responsible use just does not seem part of many people's nature. I include legal drugs like alcohol in that.
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Bit of info, more FYI than actually relevant to the point here, but interesting: a mate of mine works in the office of a largish UK company.
He mentioned that there is drug testing for him and others in the office, at which point I predictably blew my top, assuming it's fucking intrusive American working practices come with American companies trying to spread fucking witless American drug policies over the world (and that is real problem IMO).
Hold on, said my mate, and pointed out that the company has a sizeable workforce that goes out to fix heavy, moving infrastructure under risky conditions. Drug testing is necessary under those conditions, agreed? And if they test them, the company can hardly make an exemption for the office staff, right?
Why would it be unfair? This is a simple cost-benefit risk management. Of course testing people has some cost (harder to find employees, privacy concerns, bad PR, the actual cost of the testing and management of testing), of course if someone fucks up that has an even bigger cost usually, so preventing fuckup while high seems to have a big positive cost-benefit. Okay, then simply get a threshold and look at the risk involved for each individual role/position and test those that are above.
I'm asking for the moral calculation that lead you to say it's unfair to make the lives harder for only those who are above a threshold for certain risks.
And also how the law works, what's the legal test to determine fairness?
There are obviously issues with having drugged workers in dangerous environments.
There are other professions which have problems with substance abuse but which take an approach that is more focused on rehabilitation. I have heard of this occurring for dentists and medical doctors but I haven’t heard of drug testing all practitioners and can’t imagine the uproar such a proposal would cause.
Restaurants and construction were for years the only places ex cons could find work. If those go away from overzealous screening where will those folks find work?
Maybe they can lay off the cocaine for a few days then? If I were a restaurant owner I wouldn't bat an eyelash at a positive MJ result though. I definitely don't want coke/meth heads though.
Parent said ex-cons. If they're 'laying the cocaine for a few days' they're still ex-cons, and no more employable.
> I definitely don't want coke/meth heads though.
Why do you think that is worse than MJ? I know a guy who uses meth and he's reliable and can hold down a job. Have you any reason to hold that view other than from anti-drug propaganda? (not intended as snark)
Many physical labor jobs require applicants to take a drug test and breathalyzer on their first day of work. For some reason, a fair number of workers do not realize this and end up failing one of the tests and get fired on the first day.
EB? I've heard they'll take just about anyone with a pulse. I've also heard they're horrible to work for, and have known several people that have quit.
The person in the anecdote was second to last in their high school class and got fired for missing too much work. No one thinks such a person should be sleeping in the gutter, but let's not beat ourselves up over the fact that they're not making 6 figures here.
They could well come to the same conclusion if they followed a similar person learning "coding"..
Cherry-picked example. Although I do think the Conservative opinion of skilled trades is not really rooted in reality. Most of the better-off tradesmen are sole proprietors.
Is it really a "conservative opinion"? I've heard positive stories about the trades from people across the political spectrum.
And of course, the trades aren't a panacea. Demand ebbs and flows and sometimes work can be hard to come by. But I see nothing wrong with suggesting it as an option to a college degree (and the debt that goes along with it). Even if the salary isn't that high, it still beats being unemployed with $20K in student debt.
There is a ton of need for skilled blue collar jobs and there are plenty of well paying ones available. More than jobs for ethnic studies majors. This is not opinion this is fact.
That was my takeaway as well, based more on the twice-fired history than the high school performance.
Some people just don't apply themselves. Some just have bad luck. Some have a combination of the two. It's unfair to Orry Carriere (the individual in question) for us who aren't better-versed in his personal history to assume which of the above cases (or perhaps others unmentioned) he falls into.
But regardless, the article seems to have cherry-picked Mr. Carriere. Alternatively, how would someone who graduated in the middle of his class (or near the top) and never was fired from their job have done as a welder?
I'm quite open to the argument that the "wealthy welder" is truly a myth.... but this article was not the most compelling, objective way to make the argument.
There are two major reasons why I am really, really not a fan of this stance here.
The first is that we're equating high school performance to life performance. High school in America is a joke for a variety of reasons (lack of funding, gentrification etc) and I don't think highschool performance represents how well a person does at all given how many different circumstances can affect that at a young age.
Second, 'missing too much work' in America can mean things such as 'taking time off because you're sick' or 'having to deal with familial emergencies', all of which many jobs do not at all allow any leeway in.
The person in the article made multiple efforts and worked hard to try and get a better job/life for his family. The fact that you immediately isolate out the things he's had to deal with make me wonder if you've experienced poverty or had to deal with shitty jobs in the past.
I don't think the author did enough research here. I think the article misrepresented and undercut the value of trade schools. For instance, it is perfectly possible to become a welder without attending college. In fact, the standard method is to simply start an apprenticeship and work up from their much like a plumber or electrician.
Also, it completely disregards the fact that most experienced tradesmen eventually go into business for themselves as independent contractors. However, since an independent contractor files as a business owner and not a welder (or electrician or what-have you) they would no longer contribute to the statistics for their actual trade.
Overall I would give this article and its author a 5/10 in terms of quality... not really worth reading imho.
Another frequently overlooked problem with the 'trade school' mantra is that women need jobs too - and I'm willing to wager that the prejudice women are going to face in a welding shop is going to be a lot higher the frequently cited problem of women in engineering.
Never mind if they try to hang out their shingle as a plumber or electrician. It'd be an interesting study to compare the number of calls that Charlie vs Charlene would get in that field, but I think we all know the answer.
>Another frequently overlooked problem with the 'trade school' mantra is that women need jobs too - and I'm willing to wager that the prejudice women are going to face in a welding shop is going to be a lot higher the frequently cited problem of women in engineering.
I suspect there is some truth to that however, I regularly see women with 'welder' listed on their dating profiles (mostly tinder, although I've seen 2 on Facebook dating app, within 15 miles of me, since it rolled out making matches in Indy yesterday) and personally I only know one male that welds for a living.
I see plenty of female automotive techs/mechanics around too. I think out of my last dozen oil changes there has been at least 1 woman in the bays working and as many as at least 3 and my last brake job was a woman (she called me out to do the 'well we could machine your rotors butttt...).
I'm sure there's a lot of sexual harassment and general unpleasantness still there in a random shop but I feel like there are a lot more 20-40ish women in these sorts of jobs than there were even a decade ago. Indianapolis could be somewhat of an outlier though as we have a huge FFA presence here and in surrounding towns as well as a few trade schools that just do automotive, welding and electrician training.
What I've never seen though is any women doing HVAC or plumbing. One would think women would be more inclined towards plumbing given they are generally smaller and can fit in those tight spaces better, instead in my experience I've generally seen plumbers that are built like me, like a refrigerator, grumbling and groaning while they try and snake their way under a sink or behind a toilet.
My aunt owned and managed a welding shop for over 50 years. She'd disagree with most of what you wrote. The opportunity is there for people that want to work hard and learn. There is in fact a fairly good tradition supporting women in the trades, (in the US at least) especially during and after WWII. See "Rosie the Riveter" for example, which is where my aunt got her start.
This harkens to some of the points some other commenters have made in this thread. Earning $7/hour in 1970 for a welding job is equivalent of $95k/year in 2019 money.
Similarly, getting a start and sticking it out is just as difficult for women today as it was in the pre-war era. The post war period has been ingrained as the normal baseline in our collective imaginations, though it is anything but normal.
I am willing to wager that Rosie the Riveter isn't the norm for the US and if she or your aunt was trying to make it as a welder, they both will not find the supportive environment that existed post-war
After the men came home from the war, the first thing most of them wanted to see, is for Rosie the Riveter to be sent packing back to the kitchen, so that they could get their jobs back.
There are indeed women working trades, but not many of them. In Canada, for instance, they are 4.5% of the skilled trades workforce. [1]
How is it a problem that women, for the most part, are not welders? Is it a problem that men are not nannies, for the most part? I think we all know what would happen if Bruno vs Betty got if each tried to hang out their shingle as a babysitter. Do you also fret about the prejudice that men face trying to find jobs in roles that are traditionally female?
I can't help but consider the wider background of this story.
Across the country, high schools have been cutting shop classes. Administrators push 4-year college as the only viable option. Anything else is increasingly viewed as irresponsible advice.
At the same time, 4-year college costs have been skyrocketing. Students are taking on levels of debt that the previous generation would have thought obscene.
Meanwhile, the breadth of degrees that can reasonably be expected to service the debt of a 4-year college stint, let alone earn a living afterwards, appears to be shrinking.
Just because some degrees are currently in high demand doesn't mean that will be the case in 1, 2, or 5 years. Tech recessions can be brutal given how leveraged the booms are.
At the center of all of this is automation in numerous forms. The changes we've seen so far will only accelerate. There's little evidence to suggest that today's economies will be up to the challenge of providing economically viable pathways for young people starting out.
The myth of higher education as the pathway to a middle class lifestyle has all the hallmarks of an idea that will die a slow, agonizing death. We're utterly unprepared for what comes next.
My local community college's welding program includes classes on robotic MIG welding, automated sub-arc welding and CNC laser welding. These things are progressing in the places where people need to learn it, but it does slowly sort it into fewer and fewer people.
> Administrators push 4-year college as the only viable option. Anything else is increasingly viewed as irresponsible advice.
At the same time, 4-year college costs have been skyrocketing.
Something tells me these things are related...
My old man taught wood shop in a high school. Year after year, there was less and less demand/attendance. To stay securely employed, as he was getting closer to retirement he pivoted over to teaching drafting and then CAD which had tons of interest and were supported by administration. By the time he retired the wood and metal shop classes were gone for good. Pretty sad and worrying to think that since then an entire generation has gone through that school with no opportunity to learn how to actually make a physical good with their hands. We have YouTube now if we want to learn, and it’s a great resource, but it’s hard not to think something has been lost.
> Pretty sad and worrying to think that since then an entire generation has gone through that school with no opportunity to learn how to actually make a physical good with their hands.
Welcome to globalism? 98% of the physical goods you buy are made in the developing world, there's not much point in acquiring these skills here.
A crappy assemble-at-home Target organizer costs like $20 and probably cost a fraction of that to manufacture, but a fancy artisanal lacquered organizer made by the hobbyists across town can be sold for several times the cost of supplies and labor.
But a lot of folks feel the squeeze so they buy the crappy Target one instead.
If artisanal, hand-crafted, built-to-spec, lacquered organizers became a big enough business, there will be, before the year is out, a school in Vietnam that will train thousands of people how to build them, by hand, to-spec, artisanally for <$1/hour.
This reminds me of my neighbor who had recently retired and began a side business making furniture in his garage. He was just looking to make a little beer money, but his business grew quickly just through word of mouth and he was complaining to me that now it was more of a job than he had before he retired. He was thinking about shutting the whole thing down.
I wonder to what extent insurance issues have driven the death of shop classes. I have no current knowledge, but it wouldn't surprise me if modern day chemistry class has veered away from actually touching dangerous items.
I'm old enough ( graduated HS 1987 ) to have had woodworking in middle school. Still have the shitty pine box I made in class. I now enjoy woodworking as a hobby, not a profession. Currently building a dresser for the bedroom. Will take me probably a year. Real wood furniture built by real craftsmen is expensive, because labor aint cheap. Most people don't want to spend / can't afford to spend anymore.
I was hearing this back around 2004-2005 that welders could make $150k if they take this remote oil pipeline jobs and "all your expenses are paid for while you're out in the field".
I heard a lot of people talk about taking these jobs but they never seemed to exist.
"If you want to feel old after 42 years, keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears"
My dad did blue collar labor his whole life and his body hurt. He would take something like 6 ibuprofen every morning with breakfast. To do that kind of work requires you putting your family above yourself, which is a noble thing. I think what people miss in the old "you could support a family doing this" was that it was very much you actively harming yourself so that your family could be better off.
It's the same thing with coal miners. They get all sorts of terrible health consequences from the work, but it is a noble sacrifice to them.
My dad was adamant that we were going to college and living a more comfortable life than he did. So here I am, a software engineer with plenty of worries in the world, but at least a job that won't leave me broken and in pain after I do it for twenty years.
I didn't read this article word for word, but it seemed to have a bit of an agenda to it. The number one determining factor of how far you will make it if you're working class is how driven you are. If you are lazy, you'll struggle your whole life. There isn't any family safety net to keep you ignorant of that.
It's important to give people access to opportunity, but it's up to the individual to be self-motivated enough to take it. Education isn't some magical panacea.
On a meta-level, maybe part of being educated, is being educated about the various possibilities and opportunities you might have if you pursued certain career paths. Its fuzzy whether you can get to that stage without a well rounded formal education.
> at least a job that won't leave me broken and in pain after I do it for twenty years.
There are no guarantees. There's ample opportunity in this field for atrophy or strain to take its toll. Take care of yourself, pay attention to the complaints and do something about them.
Don't know why you were downvoted. A sedentary lifestyle is a health risk, and all engineers should 100% learn ergonomics (balance your body, don't force it to keep position)
I expect there are jobs that are "medium duty" that are actually health-enhancing. Somewhere between back-breaking labor and sedentary engineer.
Maybe being a mail carrier and walking most of the day.
No joke. A construction career of 12 years was enough for me. Even with automation/labor saving tools its backbreaking. Three aspirin the morning and another three in the afternoon. Your alarm goes off before dawn and it starts to seem like groundhog day
I think it depends just how grueling the physical work is.
My dad is 71 years old (I'm 28) and has been doing autobody repair work for 55 years (still working to this day). He has mild arthritis, but he's in remarkably good shape.
On the other hand, I'm starting to develop a gut after 7 years of full-time programming. I genuinely believe that if I were to keep up my current lifestyle, I'd be in for a bad time by the time I hit 50.
Ideally, I should be doing more physical exercise, but the difference is that it's a choice that I have to make whereas it's not a choice for my dad, and it's hard for me to find motivation to go to the gym.
So, in terms of health, I suspect that:
Desk job + gym > Physical labor job > Desk job with no physical activity
The difference is the work is actually hurting your dad (arthritis) and your choice of sedation is doing it to you. The past few offices I’ve worked in all had gyms. Healthy food options are a must for office jobs.
I’m saying this as a office worker who’s lost 15 pounds by diet change small walks. Looking to add some days at the gym soon.
Autobody work probably doesn't cause the same repetitive stress injuries that working on an assembly line does.
I have an uncle who is a plumber of a similar age and is in pretty great shape for his age. My understanding is that most of his aches and pains are related to a car accident he was in when he was young and reckless.
> I genuinely believe that if I were to keep up my current lifestyle, I'd be in for a bad time by the time I hit 50.
That's mostly diet. With a better diet and 20 minutes of working out a day, you could make yourself healthy. Hell, run just a mile a day, and do pushups, pullups, and planks every other day. It's amazing how short workouts done consistently can actually keep you fit.
I don't have any trouble at all keeping my weight under control, but in order to stay strong and flexible I still need to work at it constantly.
To that end, I have a weight bench, barbell and dumbbells in my lounge room, and a pull up bar hung between two door ways in the hall.
I find 'working out' tedious, incredibly boring. But I'll walk by the pull up bar and do 10 pull ups multiple times a day, or grab a couple dumbbells and do a few sets here and there.
> The number one determining factor of how far you will make it if you're working class is how driven you are.
In my experience it's much more about how you manage the money you make, i.e.:
1. live below your means
2. invest the difference - put your money to work for you
For example, in the last week there was a bank that accidentally deposited $120,000 in the account of a couple. The couple immediately went on a spending spree, buying all kinds of very expensive items. By the time the police got involved, the money was gone.
Not to mention people are encouraged to do zero planning for the student debts and get pressured by family to buy new cars.
There’s so much of wealth that comes down to lifestyle and educating people on personal finance which would go way farther than just telling people to get a $100k degree and ‘study hard (for rote testing)’. Here in Canada where I live the debt levels are still insane and didn’t decline like the US did, even without the healthcare bills excuse.
Politicians love blaming external factors and rich people/big corporations for all our upward mobility issues, which obviously play a roles but it’s hardly the full story, I’m curious how far we could improve things through culture and how we teach our kids to spend money. This was a personal finance culture that was far more popular in the west in the recent past eras which we people constantly romanticize about and point to different single things to explain it all away (ie unions).
My girlfriend is amazing with money and saves everything, both her parents do the same, which is the opposite of me in my early 20s before I read into it and my parents growing up too. I’m convinced parenting combined with culture (she’s Han Chinese and they tend to be thrifty similar Scottish people and Jugaad in India[1], among others) has a significant impact on these trajectories.
I've inherited not spending money from my (not Scottish) parents. It's taken an effort to spend money in social situations, so I'm not seen as miserly.
Yea probably true. Didn't really expect my post to get the attention it has. Probably could have worded it better.
My parents were careful with money, but not necessarily frugal. I think part of it was the fact that my mom (and probably my dad at least at one point) had a pension to look forward to. I've thought before a lot on how that probably changes the calculus quite a bit.
I seem to have picked up some pathological fear of not having enough, so I probably live excessively below my means.
Growing up, I didn't even know that normal people could invest money in the stock market. Even now, I have friends that look at me sort of funny when I mention having a significant amount of money in the market. Usually they ask why I don't do something useful to it like buy a nicer house, car, etc.
Really driven working class people get out of the working class (basically by definition), don't they?
They either start their own company/contracting, become highly specialized professionals, or get a degree and take some boring white collar job that pays better.
Managing finances is just a gimmick when you have zero disposable income. That's basically 24/7/365 crisis management.
Sure, if you manage to get some savings/credit-score together it's very important what you spend it on. (Eg classes/moving or finally doing that trip to Vegas you always dreamed about.) But if you can't increase your income significantly, then investing or spending it makes no difference. (Because investing it is just continuing the saving, for whatever purpose, let's say to have a rainy day fund, or medical emergency fund, amd spending it just decreases the years you spent saving up, but your overall lifetime income will not change much, thus your range of possibilities won't either.)
I've been a software contractor for the last ~18 months. I do it because it affords me the ability to spend my time exactly how I want to, mostly reading and researching. But I also have reduced my contracting time as much as possible and this year my income will have been ~30k.
I've gotten to the end of my rope, and it's stressful and weighs on me 24/7, especially with my fear of an upcoming recession.
I decided to find a job again and in just a month I've been able to get multiple offers lined up for 5x my current income.
On the one hand, I use my position to its fullest--and I've spent the better part of a year learning things I never would have learned in a University or employment setting.
On the other hand, I recognize that this is an incredibly privileged position, one which I don't feel very deserving of. I understand the market forces, yes, but I can't help but feel a tinge of guilt knowing that I can be somewhat irresponsible financially just to pull myself out within two months of a new paycheck.
Most of the metal fabricators I know are incredibly unfit.
I've worked in metal fabrication on and off for over 20 years, and my observation is that's a cultural thing combined with long running fatigue from working too many hours standing up. That and metal fabricators aren't known for their diet being particularly great.
I'm fairly active, both mentally and physically, never really drank much, and never smoked cigarettes. I could kick most of the guys I work with in the head, whereas most of them wouldn't be able to lift a foot above their hips. People usually guess my age between 6 and 10 years below my actual age.
Metal fabrication doesn't have to be hard on the body.
I entirely agree with you that the number one determining factor of how far you'll get in life--and by that I mean how well you'll do setting and achieving your own goals--is how driven you are.
And highly driven people tend not to hang around the workshop floor for very long, so the workshop floor tends to suffer a driven-person-drain by attrition as the highly driven people drive off to greener pastures.
>To earn an associate’s degree, Orry would need to pass 12 separate welding courses, plus basic courses in math and English, as well as more conceptual courses in welding metallurgy.
>His first year at CVCC went well, mostly. It wasn’t completely smooth—he failed his required English course, which was offered only online. But in his welding classes, he earned nothing but A’s and B’s. After that first year ended, he ran into some bureaucratic trouble with his financial aid, he told me, and he took both the summer and the fall of 2017 off from school. For a while, I wondered whether he might just be finished with college. But then he started up again as a full-time student in January 2018.
Why would anyone pay to go to college for welding? Unless it is some specialized area (Underwater welding), you can join the Iron Worker's 4 year apprenticeship program.
4 years of work/classes once a month. Start at 60% scale (16-18$ depending on state) in year one. 10% pump in pay each year so by the end of your program when you have your journeyman's card you get (26-32$) depending on the state.
You have to pay like a $400 sign up fee to get in the union (way cheaper than college) and continue to pay your union dues, however that gets you the benefit of getting on a list to be called when contractors need to man a job.
A lot of times it just takes one job with a contractor where you do well, and they will call you direct anytime they need a job.
There are lots of Iron Workers in my area at least who only work 9 months out of the year and make $100,000 + by working shutdowns (emergency repair jobs) through the union hall.
You can get all your welding certificates without going to college which is what any job requires. Experience and certs proving your welds are up to par.
Also FTA
> It was hard work, loud and dirty and repetitive, but it paid $13.90 an hour, more than Snappy Lube. After a year and a half, Orry was fired for missing too many days of work, but he soon managed to land a job at another steel-wire factory. Then he got fired from that job as well.
> It was by that point the spring of 2016, and Orry was 24, separated, and unemployed. He was raising two children with his ex-wife, Katie, and he was living with a new girlfriend named Crystal. Orry had been working hard for five years, and yet he was broke, with nothing saved.
It doesn't explain why he was fired other than 'missed too many days' - and doesn't say any reason for the 2nd. This sounds to me like it's more about the personal work ethic of Orry and budgeting skills vs being a welder you will be poor.
Anecdotal I know, but a friend of mine right out of high school got into the trades with the above mentioned path. By 24 (2 years into his journeyman work), he had a modest two bedroom house, wife, two kids and had no issues with money or bankruptcy. He also only worked shutdowns where he may work 28 days in a row, 12 hours a day, and then have an entire month off until the next job. This life isn't for everyone but hey for some it works some it doesn't.
Looking at these official stats, median for plumbers is $54K per year, which is not such a bad money for a job that requires no school, just on-job training. Little bit less for carpenters, floor installers and masonry and construction workers, etc. But we need to take into account that none of them requires any special education, it's on-job training only, so you start your life with no debts which gives you a big head start and a lot of freedom. Unlike welders they also, with a bit of entrepreneurship, can expect one day to run their own businesses and earn more. Also, these days very important thing to think of, AI and robots will not replace plumbers or tile layers anytime soon. People working in maintenance will probably be the last to be replaced, if ever.
There are other opportunity costs of trades, such as increased risk of morbidity and mortality due to all the driving/type of work/materials worked with, and working away from home. If one can land a well paying desk job, then currently it still has a greater value proposition, and who wants to be real and tell their child that they probably won't make it into the ranks of a well paying desk job?
> who wants to be real and tell their child that they probably won't make it into the ranks of a well paying desk job?
Likely the successful tradesmen who has instilled a sense of worth in "dirty jobs" and working final product.
Anecdotally, I have some college educated friends that describe the majority of their desk jobs as tedious, repetitive, and duplicative data entry; A plumber or welder's job certainly has comparatively longer term viability.
My first career was welding. MIG welding to be specific. I learned shortly after MIG welding machines were first being produced back in the mid-1970s.
I made good money doing it, but the work was hit or miss and it wasn't really the welding I was getting paid for, it was knowing how to cut up vans and modify them for severely handicapped people and I'd learned how to do that by building "custom cars" with my father who was a "bodyman" by trade and went on to become a "custom car builder".
By the time I quit customizing vans for the handicapped the State of California required you be a "certified welder" to do the work I did on the vans and cars they purchased for people who were in wheelchairs so you had to pay to go to a "welding school" to get a certification.
But none of those welders I met who did that actually knew how to weld. How to lay down a bead that penetrated the steel. They all did what those I learned from called "bird shit" welds. A cold weld that laid on top of the metal and didn't penetrate all the way through, and were thus prone to fail. And none of them started those jobs for much more than $5-$7 an hour.
That's when I decided to learn how to code. It was only a few years after that when the Internet started taking off, so I learned HTML and Perl by buying books written by the likes of Steven Brenner, "Selena Sol", Lincoln Stein and Randal Schwartz and there were no college level classes that taught it. I got invited to teach some after hour classes at SMS because they didn't have any at the time.
Now, more than 20 years later companies want to hire someone with a CS degree, and really they often don't know any more about it than those guys who took those welding classes did about laying down a bead that stuck.
But in both cases those who sold the classes lobbied their State Reps to make them mandatory and raked in the cash afterwards.
One of my first job’s after hishschool was Aluminum TIG and MIG welding. I learned to weld throughout highschool and was hired because of the reputation my school had for teaching welding.
Unfortunately, I think most of the trade skills are no longer taught at that school.
My welding career was only for a couple years, but during that time I focused on improving my TIG skillsets and was able to move into the number two postion at a high end shop that manufactured Aluminum wakeboard and fishing towers (Samson Sports).
The welding quality was superb, and every inch was looked over for visual and structual perfection. Needless to say, the pay still wasn’t that great.
I'd argue that people who read 4 or 5 books on programming don't know much about anything either when they first start out.
In fact, I'd argue that a graduate knows much more than most people think. The problem is that it's usually general knowledge that doesn't apply to some specific framework that 90% of developers use. It's all abstracted away to learning X framework.
Sure, and that's pretty much what this guy was saying. How much does theory help you properly weld? Same way learning when to use bubblesort vs. quicksort helps me figure out why my css is working in firefox but not ie11.
Knowing how to judge the complexity of an algorithm (which is what learning about different sorts helped teach me) is useful to me in developing software on a regular basis. That includes javascript sometimes.
The metallurgy of welding is complex. When performing a bespoke weld, you have to know what type of filler metal to use (it frequently is not identical to the pieces being welded...), heat pre-treatment, heat post-treatment, and range of available current for the job. All of those factors vary with the job. While the reference texts can help you, you have to at least know enough to figure out where to look. Then you need to have enough practice to to recognize when things go wrong, and how to correct it.
Much as in the current programming industry, the problem is people coming out with an education on paper, yet not actually knowing either the theory or practice the of welding.
> I'd argue that people who read 4 or 5 books on programming don't know much about anything either when they first start out.
I would say that's a function of a lot of complex items, including their prior educational experience, general intelligence, and just how closely they read the book. There exist many books I've "read" once and mostly forgotten, and precious few I've read a half-dozen or more times and know intimately.
If the former, I agree with you. If the latter, not so much.
> In fact, I'd argue that a graduate knows much more than most people think.
In my experience there are two kinds of graduates, those who spent years memorizing material to get a piece of paper, and those who learned how to learn and applied it to get their piece of paper.
When folks talk about shit graduates they have the former in mind, when folks extol the virtues of a university education they are thinking of the latter.
Unfortunately universities spit out both and it's very hard to distinguish on-the-fly.
HN regularly has posts where people justify cheating their way through college. I can't help but think these are the ones who do poorly at their jobs, and then the "years memorizing material to get a piece of paper" gets blamed.
Or people generally don't distinguish between good graduates and bad ones. In most discussion, the distinction boils down to "college graduates suck and don't know anything" to paraphrase.
While granted there's obviously people who don't take college seriously, many do. And unfortunately, I'm one of those people that worked very hard to get through college and didn't attend hardly any social functions. Same as high school. I would spend weekends from 8am to 6pm reading textbooks and doing assignments.
However, I often feel that doing this was somewhat of a detriment to both my ability to socialize and my ability to really solve problems organically.
The plight of the typical grad isn't just that they have overly general knowledge for any one task, but that they have just emerged from a system that filtered their thoughts for possibly several decades into completing assignments and taking tests for a grade.
And once you get into industry you have to unlearn that because the clear objective goals and grades disappear, and you are left with an array of subtle values and more pernicuous consequences to any action. And that stuff is absolutely vital to being good at intellectual jobs - it's mostly crushed out by the system, fostering the "narrow STEMlord" mindset that is constantly surprised by things blowing up when they followed the book exactly.
This was a real problem at my last employer, new grads couldn’t really tell the difference between coursework and actual work. And if it wasn’t up to standard thought they could plead with “the professor” (their boss) for a better “grade”.
I was never this person and still struggled when I initially got into industry and still do.
Part of it is because most businesses are run by people that have no knowledge of the timescale of their projects and therefore try to squeeze as much work as possible in ridiculous time frames and society trains you to stop "whining" and get it done.
The lack of empathy in industry is enormous due to profit motive. And because of the ambiguous nature of software, it's always difficult to know exactly what needs to be done. And because most people want to please their bosses, the incentive to estimate low and push yourself to get a project done is very real.
> once you get into industry you have to unlearn that because the clear objective goals and grades disappear, and you are left with an array of subtle values and more pernicuous consequences to any action
Which is one reason I continue to think that a broad education, including humanities and social sciences, is valuable even for folks looking to work in STEM fields. It's in those academic disciplines that you learn to work with subtle nuances, and how to originate and defend an opinion or point of view.
Why? Here's the repo, clone it, set up the dev env, maybe connect to VPN to reach some test instances, here's the issue tracker, here's a ticket, explore it, see if it's reproducible, if yes, get to the root cause, solve it, get it reviewed, goto 10.
Naturally, this should lead to a lot of questions, but which part is not a clear step with clear goals? Plus in industry the employer has vested interest to make you efficient, because it pays you. It'll check up on you daily. (Or initially/constantly you will do pair programming, get mentoring, sprint retros, etc.)
And if you are stuck you can ask questions and there are usually domain experts right next to you.
No one knows a lot when they first start out. However, there's a lot of value in learning new skills by doing. It's the main skill programmers need to succeed in their jobs. No one becomes a great programmer by taking a new college class for each new API.
I think the "learning to learn" thing is a myth propagated by people raking in tons of money. I'm sure it happens, but I personally did not meet a single person who "learned to learn" while in college beyond some very basic studying techniques that could be picked up from watching a couple of Youtube videos.
Hm, at least college exams required some serious effort. And learning that comes handy when you are faced with big challenges at work. (Eg to design, understand, debug a big complex system.) What they don't teach is team/project work.
Though if there were more emphasis on hard math/CS/programming/ITsec problem solving, that'd probably translate well to industry setting.
You realize $7 an hour is $95,000 a year in 2019 cash? If i were offered that for hangover quality work burning rods at a good union job i would not think twice. id be able to afford the median home price in 1970 which was $23,000. These numbers seem to support the idea of the wealthy welder. Its entirely possible fossilized republicans are thinking in 1970 dollars.
Fast forward to 2019. auto mechanics START at just shy of 22,000 a year and thats assuming you keep track of your time and work for a shop that doesnt engage in the rampant practice of wage theft. master mechanic? depends, maybe $28 an hour in 2019? but nowhere near the $46 an hour a twice convicted tombstone welder made back when the Love Boat sailed.
The problem is not trade, or college, its the seemingly endless wealth gap between people who do work, and people who just seem to collect mansions and yachts.
The last sentence really hits the nail on the head. Just to add to that, during the 2008 recession I saw my portfolio swing pretty wildly going negative one day and positive another but the amount was more than I made that day or maybe even that week. It was then it dawned on me, American capitalism rewards ownership, not labor nor time devoted to a task. Those changes in my net worth would have happened regardless of if I worked or took the day off. Time and labor can get you to ownership but that's not guaranteed nor probable in some fields. I don't want our country to discourage property ownership and accumulation of wealth but the paths leading to that from working hard seems increasingly fewer and narrower.
This comment shouldn’t have been downvoted because it’s completely accurate, and provably so: tax rates for earnings on capital are by and large less than earnings on labor. Warren Buffett has complained for years that he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary. The system we have rewards trust fund babies, and punishes hard working people.
Hell, raising kids and taking care of disabled/elderly people is an investment in the economy too. Those folks and their caretakers are consumers just as much as you and me.
Why does there need to be a privileged reward to invest? Everyone and their dog knows if you keep your money stuffed in your mattress it’ll lose value over time from inflation, and who doesn’t want to have a nest egg to retire on? Nobody needs an additional incentive to invest their capital beyond the bare bones basics of personal finance.
I get that Piketty's work isn't without controversy or criticism. Summers and others have criticized it, but their critiques haven't seemed very strong.
One article [1] (which discusses Piketty's shortcomings) claims the biggest reaction to Piketty is silence:
"But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the field—even to this day."
...
"The economics elite, it seems, answered by stonewalling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so it would not have the impact on economics research agendas that it merits."
Anyway, it's not clear to me that Piketty's fundamental thesis is wrong. Happy to follow a link or two, thank you.
Even if it wasn’t wrong in the past, it can certainly be wrong going forward. With all the governments printing money to cause asset prices to inflate, of course ROI of capital will be > ROI of labor, since price increases for labor will always lag price increases of capital.
> price increases for labor will always lag price increases of capital
Let's also keep in mind that that is a policy choice, because it's necessary to dislodge workers off their sticky wages and some sort of mumbo jumbo about the Phillips curve.
Piketty looked at like ~200 years of econ data (wages, asset values, rents) and allowed for inflation and even depreciation.
His thesis is actually that r > g, wherein r = ROI of capital and g = the rate of economic growth (gdp).
This has to be true, because rich people exist and we can measure that they get richer and richer faster than others. You can gauge faith in the likelihood that it will continue to work that way given that funds like Y Combinator exist and are successful, and because activities like buying and maintaining rental properties "works" in terms of creating personal wealth faster than the rate of economic growth.
The research has shown multiple other ways to reach the current results without r>g (housing stock is one method, if I recall) and authors have shown r>g leads to results we do not see.
Thus it’s not true to claim existence of rich people implies r>g. If it were that simple people before Piketty would have reached that conclusion earlier.
The papers linked in this thread show the flaws.
It’s also the case the rich don’t get richer, if you mean a rich person gets richer. For any dataset where you can track rich individuals over time, pick a level you call rich, track everyone meeting that definition, and you find they get poorer, reverting to mean. That is why most millionaires are first gen. It’s why the Forbes 400 is mostly first gen; the rich that were top 400 lose wealth. It’s why St. Louis Fed has papers showing the majority of the top quintile or the top 1% are not there 10 years later, or from generation to generation.
Sure some rich keep wealth. But for any level called rich, if you track all those in it, that group mostly falls out.
>If it were that simple people before Piketty would have reached that conclusion earlier.
Perhaps you've heard the expression, "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer"
What Piketty did was put extensive data and a pretty rigorous methodology to work to explain why. I've not read a critique that undermines his main conclusions in a meaningful way.
It's no secret that if you already have a pile of money or capital assets you can put those to work for you which will also generate income and you will come out ahead and faster than someone without the same pile of money.
> We find evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data.
> I conclude that Piketty’s data for the wealth share of the top 10 percent for the period 1870 to 1970 are unreliable.
The values he reported are manufactured from the observations for the top 1 percent inflated by a constant 36 percentage points. Piketty’s data for the top 1 percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810–1910) are also unreliable.
> A key observation in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) is that the share of aggregate income accruing to capital in the US has been rising steadily in recent decades. The growing disparity between the income going to wage earners and capital owners has led to calls for government intervention. But for such interventions to be effective, it is important to ask who the capital owners are.
> Recent research has shown that the long-run rise in the net capital income share is mainly due to the housing sector (e.g. Rognlie 2015, Torrini 2016 – see Figure 1). This phenomenon is not specific to the US but has been evident in almost every advanced economy. This suggests that it is not entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that are taking an increasing share of the economy, but land owners.
> The results from at least four studies were compared for three measures of income change: change in median incomes, share of growth captured by the top 10 percent, and the changing income share of the top 1 percent. In all cases, Piketty and Saez (2003) were the outlier, showing the most increased inequality. And in all three measures of income change , Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) found much less growth in income inequality than Piketty and Saez (2003).
The counter-argument is that Piketty's models and data are at least as credible as the standard models and data used in policy econ.
For example Magness & Murphy prefer the UK's Office of National Statistics to Piketty's figures - because it's supposed to generate gold-standard objective economic data.
In reality the ONS produces the UK's unemployment figures by considering anyone who works one hour a week as employed. Similarly anyone who labels themselves self-employed for tax purposes is considered "employed" even if they do no work at all.
It says this clearly on the ONS site.
It's quite strange to accuse Piketty of cherry-picking and distortion when these egregious - even comically obvious - distortions pass for official economic "fact" at the national level.
I don't really understand what was special about Picketty, though, so I can understand the silence. It's been recognized for a very long time, amongst certain economists, that capitalism rewards capitalists - that is, those who own things. Mainstream economics is mainstream because it ignores these economists. It doesn't matter how you come to this conclusion, no economics department is going to give it the time of day - and those that do can expect to become targeted by politicians, as hotbeds of 'left wing academic bias'. Which is a very good way to shrink your department.
So amongst those that are not professionally immune to this kind of argument, Picketty get's a, 'well, duh'. Amongst the rest (mainstream economists) it gets a resounding silence. It isn't really relevant to the field, because the field is constituted by a kind of professional avoidance of politically charged topics.
> American capitalism rewards ownership, not labor nor time devoted to a task.
It's in the name, after all. One performs labor to (ideally) incrementally increase ownership. The concept thrives in the public mind as go-pay-off-a-house but (ideally) would also stick as go-buy-some-equities too.
One performs labor to enrich the bourgeoisie. The only way anyone was able to “work hard” to increase any kind of ownership was through supportive government after WWII. It’s no coincidence that the middle class is shrinking and wealth is being accumulated in fewer and fewer hands.
Indeed, capitalism rewards those who own the means of production at the expense of the people who labor to support it. A lot has been written about this.
Inflation was rampant in the 70s though. He says mid-70s. $7/hr in 1970 would be $95K today, but $7/hr in 1975 would be like $68K. And that seems comparably the high end of pay given in the article.
You realize that he said the machines were first made in the mid-70s?
If he stopped welding around the time that the Internet was taking off, that would mean that it was $5-7/hour in the early to mid 90s NOT 1970. The "now 20 years later" later in the comment backs this up.
$5-7/hour in the 1990 is $20-30k in 2019 money, which is about what your example mechanic is making.
You're right. 1990-92 is "about the time I quit" building vans for quadriplegics to drive and that's what I was referring to in regards to the $5-$7 per hour those companies I sub-contracted from were paying. And that was at most and it was not a "living" wage in Los Angeles back then.
"when the internet started taking off" was the late 90s. Not the mid 70s when he started.
Even if he meant $5-7 (average $6) in 1975, the $95k doesn't work. bls.gov inflation calculator gives $12,000 a year in January 1975 (2000 hrs at $6/hr) as $59k for August 2019.
How can you go to school for welding and still suck at basic MIG techniques? Is it all theory with no practical?
I learned MIG basics in an afternoon. So far none of my welds have cracked. I'd expect much better welding from people coming out of school than what I can do.
Yes. All of them are in active use and subjected to hundreds or thousands of pounds of force.
Considering my lack of experience I suspect over time I'll find at least one weak joint. That said it's really not hard to tell if you get penetration, especially if you grind them.
Well, not just welding: we're considered engineering tradespeople - that's what it says on my trade certificate.
Earned over $100k last financial year, doing 50+ hour weeks, so plenty of over time, we certainly work for it.
If you're in the right workshop, or doing the right site work, we're getting paid reasonably well. If you can buy a house away from the major centres, maybe one that needs a bit of a refresh, and don't need a brand new car every few years, we can live quite comfortably.
In WA to get a license to weld you have to pass a 4G or 5G test. You can't really pass those without a penetrating weld as the lack of penetration will be very obvious when they slice and fold the cupon. I could see that people who can pass the test would not know how to weld in many positions or on many automotive type materials/parts, but they should at least know how to get a penetrating weld.
I used to watch a lot of https://www.youtube.com/user/weldingtipsandtricks for fun and the impression I got from this guy was that welding school and certification tests are hard and require verification of exactly the kind of good welds you describe.
TLDR: OMG Orry the welder isn't making billions of dollars like mark zukerberg. REPUKLICKIN myth blue collar jobs can pay well==BUSTED. We must continue Big Ed welfare and support more and more people getting their ph.d in Paleoinuit intersectional feminist theory!
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadThey do seem to make a lot of money.
During IRAQ II I saw a local add (Uk) offering £40K tax free for a basic car mechanic going out to Iraq to presumably work for the Military or PMC
That's against 52K on glassdoor for being a military officer. But I am pretty sure that 52K is taxable itself so the actual different is smaller.
First, they seem to ignore that there is still education needed. And most people who claimed they were going skilled trades ended up doing low skilled manual labor.
And second, they overvalue their education. I've had people claim their skills were good enough to call them an engineer. (But if you give them a real world engineering question, they don't make an attempt)
Third, I've seen fantastic technicians, able to solder a board-mount LED by hand saved us literally thousands of dollars. There is value here, but this person was physically talented from decades of experience.
We were both surprised at how similar many of our courses were. The big difference was that the standards for pass/fail were lower at his, and that he didn't have any of the 300 or 400 level courses where all the interesting stuff was IMO. And I didn't have any of the hands on courses that was the interesting stuff in his opinion. He had an advanced soldering course. I had an "optional" 3 hour tutorial in it -- it was optional in the sense that you didn't have to attend, but you'd fail your labs if you couldn't solder...
There are plenty in the middle who can do both - and more than a few of them with such knowledge have never take a college or university course in their life.
You see the same thing with software engineering sometimes - the CompSci graduate who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag even if given a github of fizzbuzz, versus the person who never went to college yet makes 6-figs in SV hacking on code (yet doesn't have the "book understanding" of data structures or algorithms).
...and tons of people in between those who can combine both.
Slap 'em together with similar people in the trades - well, you'll find yourself a myriad of people at all levels and understanding of "mechatronics" and/or robotics and such.
It is quite likely that your roommate could learn what you learned - and you could (or have) learned what he knew. It ultimately all depends on having the motivation and desire to pursue it.
Where you might have the advantage is that you could probably pick up his skills from online resources and simple practice projects or whatnot. He would probably struggle to do the same, without actually going into debt and attending some kind of university course(s). Some of it can be approximated with self-study and some online MOOC training, but not all of it, unfortunately - and he wouldn't have the "piece of paper" at the end.
These days most people use ovens and solder paste with laser cut stencils, which make this stuff mostly about the tedium of ordering, identifying and placing components on the board with tweezers. The solder self-corrects. There is thus little physical skill required in SMT style soldering, at least at moderate component sizes.
Source: I trained my company from scratch to the point where we can turn over new prototype quantity boards in 2-3 days (including design, fab, receipt, assembly). Nobody has decades of experience.
I do hire people every once in a while and I want them to be reliable, smart and educated in this specific order of priority.
Education is important, but I'm sure my plumber who charges a thousand bucks cash for half a day work earns more than most college graduates in this country.
Education can and does come in a variety of ways. Expecting it to look exactly the same and work exactly the same for basically everyone doesn't make sense.
I'd love to see more of an emphasis around lifelong learning instead of demanding 18yo make lifetime decisions with near-zero life experience.
This is because education level is a major factor in voting patterns. So conservative pundits have made open war on it, to the nations serious detriment. They could instead work to lower the price of education but that is absolutely not the agenda for the same reasons.
It's not entirely unprecedented, universities have been called communist incubators for decades. What is new is the shift in portrayal from communist to being a bad investment (but with no intention of fixing that). Also new is the willingness to cast off the nations future for political gain which previous conservatives apparently were not willing to do.
There are similar patterns for climate change, guns and renewable energy.
What? Conservatives have been advocates of school choice (shown to reduce the price of education) for decades. Conservatives have not made open war on education at all. Conservative pundits themselves tend to be some of the most educated people. I mean, I'm pretty conservative, and graduated out of a top-ranked, intensive engineering school.
Average salary of electrical lineman: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/lineman-sal...
If you're a welder in a small mid-west town with no obvious industry, your prospects are going to suck. If you're willing to go to the oil patch for a few years, you could do really well.
You can join the IBEW as an apprentice, get work experience, an education, and get paid...no student loans required.
I'm not sure how your friend did it, but they should have done more research...
This guy was fired twice for missing work. So that's just a bad sign off the rip. I think welding is being pushed too hard. Every one needs to do their research and see what trades are in demand where they reside.
12 -18
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/26693cff-8967-4b2c-a62...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/e30dd4d1-fe81-4f71-825...
20 - 23
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/2541dfe5-4f21-41fa-aef...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/59ec0ea9-e975-4ff8-931...
Unlisted, but based on reading 20+. Mostly 5XXX, CuNi, etc.
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/cf1967b7-0e04-4a5f-9ff...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/b3482924-7abe-44bd-b76...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/29c1474d-a58c-4299-aba...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/d5ff023f-c22e-4ad9-95d...
I mean, the people putting forth the narrative that you can make good money as a welder don't draw any of the distinctions you outline in their anecdotes either.
So if you are looking at software development with the same eye, you're going to see high floor, high ceiling, and come to a different conclusion about the profession as a whole.
The line between software and IT is blurry. Depending on where you draw the line the floor for software can be pretty low.
"Welders at the 90th percentile of income for the profession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, earn $63,000 a year before taxes. Those are, statistically, the top earners, and they are usually expert welders with decades of experience."
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/welders-cutters-solderers...
The article itself is bs. It feels more like a hit piece against the trades. How would someone who can't motivate himself to even finish his Associate's degree be any better off going to a 4 year college? Isn't this story anectdotal? There are plenty of welders making decent money, probably six figures and beyond, but they have to hustle to do it. As much as I want to think my Dad was a great guy, I know he wasn't that great at plotting a career path for himself. We did "ok" but were definitely lower middle class. We never went on a truly decent vacation, everything was very budget. But we had fun. I saw a side of life more raw, more real, than what most people experience. I have done better myself and for my own family, but I have a lot of respect for blue collar guys and just for "regular folk." I think there's too many socialist city people with big ideas in this country and their meddling just needs to end.
Orry had been working hard for five years...
Isn't there some contradiction in these two statements?
I'm not making a judgement as to whether those are reasonable terms, only pointing out that such jobs exist, and could be similar where this individual worked there.
Welding school is typically 5k to 15k [1] and takes two years or less. Despite how things played out for the particular case covered by this author, there is a good argument for welding. It may not make you rich. However, if you don't like the traditional college route, then welding and similar trades offer comparatively good pay/training trade-off.
* https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/average-cost-of-c...
* https://education.costhelper.com/welding-school.html
I'm a software engineer - that is what I know, and what I do. But I'm already above the "age ceiling" that we all know exists - but somehow (maybe due to the fact that I keep my skills current?) I have stayed employed and haven't been subjected (to my knowledge) to not being hired because of my age. I'm also not in SV or any other "high earning" area, and I like small "mom-n-pop" vs large established companies (with all the politics and other junk) - so I've never earned 6 figs - nor will I likely ever. But what I do earn pays my bills and keeps a roof over my head, and allows for entertainment for me and my family.
For now.
But someday that won't be there. Then what? Well - I intend to work until I die - that is, code forever. I know there are plenty of software engineers out there much older than I am who are still employed. So maybe it isn't as bleak as I think. But I do know this: When I am not employed, I can't just "go around the neighborhood" or "advertise on craigslist" or "hang out a shingle" that says "Got a broken fence? I can weld it for ya! Call me @ xxx..."
Which is something tradespeople can almost always do. In their "retirement years" they can become handypersons, do side-jobs welding or carpentry, or maybe simple auto repairs (or even more complex ones if they have the tools and strength left). Plumbing and electrical isn't out of the question either. They may not make bank, but they likely won't starve, either.
For myself? I'm not sure what I could do. One thing I do know I can do - just not well enough to be employed at it - is weld. I can also use a hammer, saw, plane, whatever - I do have some wood and metal shop skills. I also work on my own automobiles. Whether I could convince someone else to let me fix their issues - well, that's just some marketing and hopefully doing it right for them (just hand me that grinder and paint - I'm no tig stacked-dimes artist).
So there's that to be said about the trades - that it is something that can be done to keep some form of food on the table, even if it's just helping out neighbors for a few dollars. Nobody wants to hire an aging software engineer to code up a simple website or something like that any longer it seems. Those older SWEs typically find their gigs maintaining aging and creaking software in a language nobody uses any longer (and fortunately for me, I do have skills in Perl, VB3 thru 6, classic ASP, some COBOL - and it seems PHP may be headed that way too).
And I'm with ya, "grinder and paint makes me the welder I ain't"
Today software puts food on the table.
The main thing is to panic now instead of panic later. Ease into a Plan B before it's a dire necessity.
> When I am not employed, I can't just "go around the neighborhood" or "advertise on craigslist" or "hang out a shingle" that says "Got a broken fence? I can weld it for ya! Call me @ xxx..."
Also... I have no idea why you think you can't do this. Before I went to college for computer science, I did exactly this, and made quite a bit of money. But, I think this goes to what I said above... some people are aggressive with their skills and money and you tend to not find them at work.
No particular reason we should be teaching welding at a college as opposed to an actual trade school. Tradesmen should not be held up by a need to analyze “The Purple Letter” or “Sir Gatsby & The Green Knight”.
I think that thesis is pretty defensible. Clearly a liberal arts, or for that matter professional, degree isn't for everyone. On the other hand, pretending that some sort of idealized working class living exists in the US today for anyone who just wants it enough and will work hard is disingenuous at best. There has been a lot of cynically dishonest political rhetoric around these topics in recent decades.
Some have been arguing that skilled trades are the answer to those who are facing a lack of opportunity, this looks in depth at how one person's attempt to join the skilled trades went (poorly) and also looks at statistics for welders generally and shows that it's a mixed bag.
While it's true welders aren't rich, the question is actually how to provide education resources to allow everyone to see succeed to their ability, without making your parents' wealth the biggest factor. I think it's clear that vocational education is a part of this, and that college for all is not.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/welders-cutters-solderers...
The guys who actually do well, and who do make $150k a year were not enrolled in some shitty associates degree program (this article should really be on the failure of the US higher education scam); they're highly skilled former Navy machinists.
And of course, the reason working class jobs like welder don't make more is simple: we keep importing new low skilled laborers, driving the price of low-skilled labor down. Mercantilism and labor laws could fix this. Instead we get dimwits from the Atlantic suggesting welders go to English class.
You want to learn how the math behind Dijkstra's algorithm works, get a BS. You want to learn how to build a network, get an AS.
I myself learned welding on the job: at a muffler company, and again later in a government lab. The answer to social problems is not always "more school."
It's such a waste of money it should just be considered fraud.
I could say the same about a BS couldn't I? How was it put in Good Will Hunting? “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
Spend four years at junior college(s) taking useful sounding classes. German, welding, programming, calculus, jazz band, EMT, with no intention of getting an associates degree (which is of little value in any case).
Cheap, and you might actually learn something. In the modern era, I'm not so sure that following the obvious path is the right idea anymore.
In general, no. Professional welders who do well economically typically have a few things in common that have nothing to do with their origin or education:
* They work very hard (60+ hours a week or more), usually on an hourly wage and make overtime pay/holiday pay/hazard pay
* They work either for themselves or in a small shop rather than for a large business or manufacturer. Large businesses typically cap salaries for their workers at a number high enough to attract the skills they need, but low enough to protect profits for the shareholders.
* The welders have the needed certifications or specialty skill set to meet the demand in a particular niche of the market
* They live near or are able to commute or move to an area with significant demand for their particular specialty.
The most obvious example at the moment are the welders in the oil patch (Bakken shale) in North Dakota. Many of the welders working there are working nearly 24/7, making a lot of money because oil production requires pipeline welders and the oil companies are paying lots of labor overtime to avoid any interruptions in production.
For the most part, the only qualification needed is the welding certificate for the type of welding they'll be doing. The employers don't care that you didn't finish high school or that you are an ex-con, as long as you have the paper (you passed the welding tests) and can read basic instructions you're paid a decent hourly wage.
Since there's such demand, you can work as much as you want, and since you're hourly you get overtime and holiday pay.
Another example is nuclear welders... TIG welders who are certified for welding stainless, monel, or other piping types used in nuclear reactors do fairly well. They have to have certifications in the welding types used (TIG or specialized stick, mostly) and they have to pass the basic security checks needed to work on a reactor site. Reactors need maintenance, and they aren't going away soon, so there's a demand.
The myth of welders being rich is something pushed by the various politicians who benefit from being able to say that student loan debt isn't a problem. It's true that a welder CAN make a ton of cash, but those examples aren't the entire workforce and there's always a price to pay. An underwater welder can make over $1 million in take home pay over a 5 year career that usually ends due to chronic injuries from high pressure environments that last a lifetime.
I spent about a week at a natural gas power plant in Oregon being built to work on some telecom. Welders there ranged from 80k-120k that I knew. To be fair, I don't know of any welder above water that could make 150k. I only know the 150 range to be for deep sea oil guys. But that's just my experience. Either way, it's not like you get out of the gate being that class of welder. It's getting cert'd in difference environments, tolerances and types of welding, along with experience that get you to that level. And I don't know a single career blue-collar that thinks otherwise. Unless they're really stupid and anything above 30k a year is unbelievable to them.
"You mean you have to develop extra skills that separate you from the herd to get paid more? No! Really?" Same goes for programming too if we're all being honest.
I've read about these "saturation divers". Guys that go down inside a diving bell for weeks at a time and breath a mix of helium. Only highly skilled divers can do this (ie, lots of experience), and if I remember correctly, have to stop by age 40(ish). So there's this narrow window of time where they can make that kind of money. But these guys could make $175-$200k.
Obviously this is a tiny, tiny fraction of welders for only a portion of there career. I just found it really fascinating how the whole process works. Living down there for days or weeks at a time.
It takes a lot of work experience and education to meet those qualifications, though. You're welding specialized alloys and need to make absolutely airtight welds in weird orientations and tight spaces. Mistakes get expensive fast. These folks aren't just out of tech school. They're mid-late career professionals who are _really damned good_ at what they do.
Saturation divers (i.e. "deep sea oil guys") and even some salvage divers can all make significantly more, but that's an additional, hard-to-find skillset tacked on top of the welding certifications and it's often contract work instead of full-time. It's also a lot more physically demanding and damned dangerous. The $150-200k/year welders exist, but an awful lot are ex-Navy folks with a decade or so of experience working in very extreme environments.
While I do see the value in theoretical and academic knowledge. I really do. There's zero fucking reason to assume it's grander than practical/vocational knowledge. One of the few jokes I like out of the Big Bang Theory (fucking hate that show but my ex loved it), the group was driving out somewhere for some reason, but the car breaks down. Whoever the main guy was says "Who knows anything about internal combustion engines?". All of them start saying they know plenty, yada yada. "Who knows how to fix one?" Silence.
Both sides need each other, academic and vocational. Neither side can advance without the other. But I'll gladly be the one to rag on academics if they act superior to the tradesmen until that stupidity ends.
I think the ongoing repetition of the claim, and the fact that it seems to work for those repeating it, would suggest otherwise?
The main point of the article is that politicians from a particular party say that they do. It then goes into a lot of examination as to why that's not true.
The usual problem is that there are big swathes of the population living in regions without a healthy/diverse/growing economy. (Eg areas that are or once were monocultures of one particular sector, and/or are/were based on natural resource extraction. So basically fossil jobs and auto making are the prime examples.)
The needed retraining, relocation, and/or regional revitalization is completely non-existent in the Trump era, and it wasn't really effective/serious during the Obama administration either.
So, nothing to do with how much a plumber makes in a big city.
It's not huge money, but once you start factoring in that tax is much better for the self employed, costs of living, commute time etc it does look like a good deal. Even if you discount the estimate by 1/3 it still compares very favourably to most white collar careers.
a) Be willing to do it in conditions nobody else wants to.
b) own a business and employ other people who do it.
Training a batch of people for six months who will mostly be useful after completion and are mostly likely to complete training might be a good proposition. If training time is four years, 50% of entrants complete training, and 50% of those trained are useful... the case might be weaker.
Invest x months of training at y cost.
Then the person leaves right after training for a higher-paying job.
That dis-incentivizes training.
Those help a lot.
in IT this is a real problem. it takes about half a year to make someone productive. it takes another half year or so before i start getting a return on my investment. if they leave then, i am barely breaking even. if they leave earlier, i am making a loss. a friend of mine tried this business and couldn't make it work financially.
It's also exactly how the master-apprentice system works. It's a good system, is fair, and works. It's also vastly superior than the system where you pay to be trained by someone who is not a working master and end up learning substandard or obsolete methods.
A lot of the local network engineers in the Austin area owe their start to working on that NOC desk- they were fairly large so they kept 30ish people fairly busy. Once they reached a certain level of competency they either moved to supervisory positions or got poached...
Possible legalisation of drugs and stuff around that is a matter of interest for me, so if you can elaborate on that I'd appreciate it.
Even if drugs were legalized, this would still happen.
They test for drugs because being under the influence of drugs (including alcohol) is a safety hazard. I suppose if tests were developed that could differentiate between "I'm intoxicated" and "I smoked on my day off", the situation could change.
My bigger problem with legalisation is my experience of the utter fucking stupidity that suddenly manifests when drugs are present. Responsible use just does not seem part of many people's nature. I include legal drugs like alcohol in that.
---
Bit of info, more FYI than actually relevant to the point here, but interesting: a mate of mine works in the office of a largish UK company.
He mentioned that there is drug testing for him and others in the office, at which point I predictably blew my top, assuming it's fucking intrusive American working practices come with American companies trying to spread fucking witless American drug policies over the world (and that is real problem IMO).
Hold on, said my mate, and pointed out that the company has a sizeable workforce that goes out to fix heavy, moving infrastructure under risky conditions. Drug testing is necessary under those conditions, agreed? And if they test them, the company can hardly make an exemption for the office staff, right?
Couldn't agree more.
But fairness comes in under the law, it's formalised as discrimination. That is something companies are rightly keen to avoid.
And also how the law works, what's the legal test to determine fairness?
If you're going to say something potentially very useful, at least back it up.
There are other professions which have problems with substance abuse but which take an approach that is more focused on rehabilitation. I have heard of this occurring for dentists and medical doctors but I haven’t heard of drug testing all practitioners and can’t imagine the uproar such a proposal would cause.
> I definitely don't want coke/meth heads though.
Why do you think that is worse than MJ? I know a guy who uses meth and he's reliable and can hold down a job. Have you any reason to hold that view other than from anti-drug propaganda? (not intended as snark)
Cherry-picked example. Although I do think the Conservative opinion of skilled trades is not really rooted in reality. Most of the better-off tradesmen are sole proprietors.
And of course, the trades aren't a panacea. Demand ebbs and flows and sometimes work can be hard to come by. But I see nothing wrong with suggesting it as an option to a college degree (and the debt that goes along with it). Even if the salary isn't that high, it still beats being unemployed with $20K in student debt.
That's like saying the better off developers are senior software architects or consultants.
If you want to optimize your trade career for money owning your own business is simply where that path leads.
Some people just don't apply themselves. Some just have bad luck. Some have a combination of the two. It's unfair to Orry Carriere (the individual in question) for us who aren't better-versed in his personal history to assume which of the above cases (or perhaps others unmentioned) he falls into.
But regardless, the article seems to have cherry-picked Mr. Carriere. Alternatively, how would someone who graduated in the middle of his class (or near the top) and never was fired from their job have done as a welder?
I'm quite open to the argument that the "wealthy welder" is truly a myth.... but this article was not the most compelling, objective way to make the argument.
The first is that we're equating high school performance to life performance. High school in America is a joke for a variety of reasons (lack of funding, gentrification etc) and I don't think highschool performance represents how well a person does at all given how many different circumstances can affect that at a young age.
Second, 'missing too much work' in America can mean things such as 'taking time off because you're sick' or 'having to deal with familial emergencies', all of which many jobs do not at all allow any leeway in.
The person in the article made multiple efforts and worked hard to try and get a better job/life for his family. The fact that you immediately isolate out the things he's had to deal with make me wonder if you've experienced poverty or had to deal with shitty jobs in the past.
Also, it completely disregards the fact that most experienced tradesmen eventually go into business for themselves as independent contractors. However, since an independent contractor files as a business owner and not a welder (or electrician or what-have you) they would no longer contribute to the statistics for their actual trade.
Overall I would give this article and its author a 5/10 in terms of quality... not really worth reading imho.
Never mind if they try to hang out their shingle as a plumber or electrician. It'd be an interesting study to compare the number of calls that Charlie vs Charlene would get in that field, but I think we all know the answer.
I suspect there is some truth to that however, I regularly see women with 'welder' listed on their dating profiles (mostly tinder, although I've seen 2 on Facebook dating app, within 15 miles of me, since it rolled out making matches in Indy yesterday) and personally I only know one male that welds for a living.
I see plenty of female automotive techs/mechanics around too. I think out of my last dozen oil changes there has been at least 1 woman in the bays working and as many as at least 3 and my last brake job was a woman (she called me out to do the 'well we could machine your rotors butttt...).
I'm sure there's a lot of sexual harassment and general unpleasantness still there in a random shop but I feel like there are a lot more 20-40ish women in these sorts of jobs than there were even a decade ago. Indianapolis could be somewhat of an outlier though as we have a huge FFA presence here and in surrounding towns as well as a few trade schools that just do automotive, welding and electrician training.
What I've never seen though is any women doing HVAC or plumbing. One would think women would be more inclined towards plumbing given they are generally smaller and can fit in those tight spaces better, instead in my experience I've generally seen plumbers that are built like me, like a refrigerator, grumbling and groaning while they try and snake their way under a sink or behind a toilet.
Similarly, getting a start and sticking it out is just as difficult for women today as it was in the pre-war era. The post war period has been ingrained as the normal baseline in our collective imaginations, though it is anything but normal.
I am willing to wager that Rosie the Riveter isn't the norm for the US and if she or your aunt was trying to make it as a welder, they both will not find the supportive environment that existed post-war
There are indeed women working trades, but not many of them. In Canada, for instance, they are 4.5% of the skilled trades workforce. [1]
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3823621/women-skilled-trades-manu...
Across the country, high schools have been cutting shop classes. Administrators push 4-year college as the only viable option. Anything else is increasingly viewed as irresponsible advice.
At the same time, 4-year college costs have been skyrocketing. Students are taking on levels of debt that the previous generation would have thought obscene.
Meanwhile, the breadth of degrees that can reasonably be expected to service the debt of a 4-year college stint, let alone earn a living afterwards, appears to be shrinking.
Just because some degrees are currently in high demand doesn't mean that will be the case in 1, 2, or 5 years. Tech recessions can be brutal given how leveraged the booms are.
At the center of all of this is automation in numerous forms. The changes we've seen so far will only accelerate. There's little evidence to suggest that today's economies will be up to the challenge of providing economically viable pathways for young people starting out.
The myth of higher education as the pathway to a middle class lifestyle has all the hallmarks of an idea that will die a slow, agonizing death. We're utterly unprepared for what comes next.
Something tells me these things are related...
My old man taught wood shop in a high school. Year after year, there was less and less demand/attendance. To stay securely employed, as he was getting closer to retirement he pivoted over to teaching drafting and then CAD which had tons of interest and were supported by administration. By the time he retired the wood and metal shop classes were gone for good. Pretty sad and worrying to think that since then an entire generation has gone through that school with no opportunity to learn how to actually make a physical good with their hands. We have YouTube now if we want to learn, and it’s a great resource, but it’s hard not to think something has been lost.
Welcome to globalism? 98% of the physical goods you buy are made in the developing world, there's not much point in acquiring these skills here.
But a lot of folks feel the squeeze so they buy the crappy Target one instead.
I went to the sonoma county fair a few months ago, the student exhibits had a section with welding. There was a lot of pretty good looking work there.
I heard a lot of people talk about taking these jobs but they never seemed to exist.
"If you want to feel old after 42 years, keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears"
My dad did blue collar labor his whole life and his body hurt. He would take something like 6 ibuprofen every morning with breakfast. To do that kind of work requires you putting your family above yourself, which is a noble thing. I think what people miss in the old "you could support a family doing this" was that it was very much you actively harming yourself so that your family could be better off.
It's the same thing with coal miners. They get all sorts of terrible health consequences from the work, but it is a noble sacrifice to them.
My dad was adamant that we were going to college and living a more comfortable life than he did. So here I am, a software engineer with plenty of worries in the world, but at least a job that won't leave me broken and in pain after I do it for twenty years.
I didn't read this article word for word, but it seemed to have a bit of an agenda to it. The number one determining factor of how far you will make it if you're working class is how driven you are. If you are lazy, you'll struggle your whole life. There isn't any family safety net to keep you ignorant of that.
It's important to give people access to opportunity, but it's up to the individual to be self-motivated enough to take it. Education isn't some magical panacea.
There are no guarantees. There's ample opportunity in this field for atrophy or strain to take its toll. Take care of yourself, pay attention to the complaints and do something about them.
I expect there are jobs that are "medium duty" that are actually health-enhancing. Somewhere between back-breaking labor and sedentary engineer.
Maybe being a mail carrier and walking most of the day.
- Wake up early -- not too many chances for late-night drinking then feeling bad about it.
- Walk a long way, whatever the weather. The post office supplied excellent waterproofs (this is Denmark).
- Walk up so many stairs. Many apartment buildings have the letter boxes in each apartment's door.
- Occasionally run away from a dog.
My dad is 71 years old (I'm 28) and has been doing autobody repair work for 55 years (still working to this day). He has mild arthritis, but he's in remarkably good shape.
On the other hand, I'm starting to develop a gut after 7 years of full-time programming. I genuinely believe that if I were to keep up my current lifestyle, I'd be in for a bad time by the time I hit 50.
Ideally, I should be doing more physical exercise, but the difference is that it's a choice that I have to make whereas it's not a choice for my dad, and it's hard for me to find motivation to go to the gym.
So, in terms of health, I suspect that:
Desk job + gym > Physical labor job > Desk job with no physical activity
I’m saying this as a office worker who’s lost 15 pounds by diet change small walks. Looking to add some days at the gym soon.
I have an uncle who is a plumber of a similar age and is in pretty great shape for his age. My understanding is that most of his aches and pains are related to a car accident he was in when he was young and reckless.
That's mostly diet. With a better diet and 20 minutes of working out a day, you could make yourself healthy. Hell, run just a mile a day, and do pushups, pullups, and planks every other day. It's amazing how short workouts done consistently can actually keep you fit.
I don't have any trouble at all keeping my weight under control, but in order to stay strong and flexible I still need to work at it constantly.
To that end, I have a weight bench, barbell and dumbbells in my lounge room, and a pull up bar hung between two door ways in the hall.
I find 'working out' tedious, incredibly boring. But I'll walk by the pull up bar and do 10 pull ups multiple times a day, or grab a couple dumbbells and do a few sets here and there.
> I work in metal fabrication and my I'm lathe.
The linked picture always makes me giggle, a guy carrying drywall, captioned:
"Your back hurts from sitting at your desk? Let me put these sheets down and get you a Midol."
https://img.fireden.net/v/image/1534/88/1534880458592.png
In my experience it's much more about how you manage the money you make, i.e.:
1. live below your means
2. invest the difference - put your money to work for you
For example, in the last week there was a bank that accidentally deposited $120,000 in the account of a couple. The couple immediately went on a spending spree, buying all kinds of very expensive items. By the time the police got involved, the money was gone.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2019/09/08/bank-acc...
Criminality aside, the "gee I have some extra money, let's go shopping!" is how one remains poor for life.
Not to mention people are encouraged to do zero planning for the student debts and get pressured by family to buy new cars.
There’s so much of wealth that comes down to lifestyle and educating people on personal finance which would go way farther than just telling people to get a $100k degree and ‘study hard (for rote testing)’. Here in Canada where I live the debt levels are still insane and didn’t decline like the US did, even without the healthcare bills excuse.
Politicians love blaming external factors and rich people/big corporations for all our upward mobility issues, which obviously play a roles but it’s hardly the full story, I’m curious how far we could improve things through culture and how we teach our kids to spend money. This was a personal finance culture that was far more popular in the west in the recent past eras which we people constantly romanticize about and point to different single things to explain it all away (ie unions).
My girlfriend is amazing with money and saves everything, both her parents do the same, which is the opposite of me in my early 20s before I read into it and my parents growing up too. I’m convinced parenting combined with culture (she’s Han Chinese and they tend to be thrifty similar Scottish people and Jugaad in India[1], among others) has a significant impact on these trajectories.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad
I've inherited not spending money from my (not Scottish) parents. It's taken an effort to spend money in social situations, so I'm not seen as miserly.
If you're highly driven to achieve the goal of spending-consuming, that's unlikely to get you anywhere particularly interesting.
My parents were careful with money, but not necessarily frugal. I think part of it was the fact that my mom (and probably my dad at least at one point) had a pension to look forward to. I've thought before a lot on how that probably changes the calculus quite a bit.
I seem to have picked up some pathological fear of not having enough, so I probably live excessively below my means.
Growing up, I didn't even know that normal people could invest money in the stock market. Even now, I have friends that look at me sort of funny when I mention having a significant amount of money in the market. Usually they ask why I don't do something useful to it like buy a nicer house, car, etc.
They either start their own company/contracting, become highly specialized professionals, or get a degree and take some boring white collar job that pays better.
Managing finances is just a gimmick when you have zero disposable income. That's basically 24/7/365 crisis management.
Sure, if you manage to get some savings/credit-score together it's very important what you spend it on. (Eg classes/moving or finally doing that trip to Vegas you always dreamed about.) But if you can't increase your income significantly, then investing or spending it makes no difference. (Because investing it is just continuing the saving, for whatever purpose, let's say to have a rainy day fund, or medical emergency fund, amd spending it just decreases the years you spent saving up, but your overall lifetime income will not change much, thus your range of possibilities won't either.)
I've been a software contractor for the last ~18 months. I do it because it affords me the ability to spend my time exactly how I want to, mostly reading and researching. But I also have reduced my contracting time as much as possible and this year my income will have been ~30k.
I've gotten to the end of my rope, and it's stressful and weighs on me 24/7, especially with my fear of an upcoming recession.
I decided to find a job again and in just a month I've been able to get multiple offers lined up for 5x my current income.
On the one hand, I use my position to its fullest--and I've spent the better part of a year learning things I never would have learned in a University or employment setting.
On the other hand, I recognize that this is an incredibly privileged position, one which I don't feel very deserving of. I understand the market forces, yes, but I can't help but feel a tinge of guilt knowing that I can be somewhat irresponsible financially just to pull myself out within two months of a new paycheck.
I've worked in metal fabrication on and off for over 20 years, and my observation is that's a cultural thing combined with long running fatigue from working too many hours standing up. That and metal fabricators aren't known for their diet being particularly great.
I'm fairly active, both mentally and physically, never really drank much, and never smoked cigarettes. I could kick most of the guys I work with in the head, whereas most of them wouldn't be able to lift a foot above their hips. People usually guess my age between 6 and 10 years below my actual age.
Metal fabrication doesn't have to be hard on the body.
I entirely agree with you that the number one determining factor of how far you'll get in life--and by that I mean how well you'll do setting and achieving your own goals--is how driven you are.
And highly driven people tend not to hang around the workshop floor for very long, so the workshop floor tends to suffer a driven-person-drain by attrition as the highly driven people drive off to greener pastures.
>His first year at CVCC went well, mostly. It wasn’t completely smooth—he failed his required English course, which was offered only online. But in his welding classes, he earned nothing but A’s and B’s. After that first year ended, he ran into some bureaucratic trouble with his financial aid, he told me, and he took both the summer and the fall of 2017 off from school. For a while, I wondered whether he might just be finished with college. But then he started up again as a full-time student in January 2018.
Why would anyone pay to go to college for welding? Unless it is some specialized area (Underwater welding), you can join the Iron Worker's 4 year apprenticeship program.
4 years of work/classes once a month. Start at 60% scale (16-18$ depending on state) in year one. 10% pump in pay each year so by the end of your program when you have your journeyman's card you get (26-32$) depending on the state.
You have to pay like a $400 sign up fee to get in the union (way cheaper than college) and continue to pay your union dues, however that gets you the benefit of getting on a list to be called when contractors need to man a job.
A lot of times it just takes one job with a contractor where you do well, and they will call you direct anytime they need a job.
There are lots of Iron Workers in my area at least who only work 9 months out of the year and make $100,000 + by working shutdowns (emergency repair jobs) through the union hall.
You can get all your welding certificates without going to college which is what any job requires. Experience and certs proving your welds are up to par.
Also FTA
> It was hard work, loud and dirty and repetitive, but it paid $13.90 an hour, more than Snappy Lube. After a year and a half, Orry was fired for missing too many days of work, but he soon managed to land a job at another steel-wire factory. Then he got fired from that job as well.
> It was by that point the spring of 2016, and Orry was 24, separated, and unemployed. He was raising two children with his ex-wife, Katie, and he was living with a new girlfriend named Crystal. Orry had been working hard for five years, and yet he was broke, with nothing saved.
It doesn't explain why he was fired other than 'missed too many days' - and doesn't say any reason for the 2nd. This sounds to me like it's more about the personal work ethic of Orry and budgeting skills vs being a welder you will be poor.
Anecdotal I know, but a friend of mine right out of high school got into the trades with the above mentioned path. By 24 (2 years into his journeyman work), he had a modest two bedroom house, wife, two kids and had no issues with money or bankruptcy. He also only worked shutdowns where he may work 28 days in a row, 12 hours a day, and then have an entire month off until the next job. This life isn't for everyone but hey for some it works some it doesn't.
Not only is it not bad, it's higher than the median salary of many college graduates, even of highly accredited known public schools.
Likely the successful tradesmen who has instilled a sense of worth in "dirty jobs" and working final product.
Anecdotally, I have some college educated friends that describe the majority of their desk jobs as tedious, repetitive, and duplicative data entry; A plumber or welder's job certainly has comparatively longer term viability.
I made good money doing it, but the work was hit or miss and it wasn't really the welding I was getting paid for, it was knowing how to cut up vans and modify them for severely handicapped people and I'd learned how to do that by building "custom cars" with my father who was a "bodyman" by trade and went on to become a "custom car builder".
By the time I quit customizing vans for the handicapped the State of California required you be a "certified welder" to do the work I did on the vans and cars they purchased for people who were in wheelchairs so you had to pay to go to a "welding school" to get a certification.
But none of those welders I met who did that actually knew how to weld. How to lay down a bead that penetrated the steel. They all did what those I learned from called "bird shit" welds. A cold weld that laid on top of the metal and didn't penetrate all the way through, and were thus prone to fail. And none of them started those jobs for much more than $5-$7 an hour.
That's when I decided to learn how to code. It was only a few years after that when the Internet started taking off, so I learned HTML and Perl by buying books written by the likes of Steven Brenner, "Selena Sol", Lincoln Stein and Randal Schwartz and there were no college level classes that taught it. I got invited to teach some after hour classes at SMS because they didn't have any at the time.
Now, more than 20 years later companies want to hire someone with a CS degree, and really they often don't know any more about it than those guys who took those welding classes did about laying down a bead that stuck.
But in both cases those who sold the classes lobbied their State Reps to make them mandatory and raked in the cash afterwards.
One of my first job’s after hishschool was Aluminum TIG and MIG welding. I learned to weld throughout highschool and was hired because of the reputation my school had for teaching welding.
Unfortunately, I think most of the trade skills are no longer taught at that school.
My welding career was only for a couple years, but during that time I focused on improving my TIG skillsets and was able to move into the number two postion at a high end shop that manufactured Aluminum wakeboard and fishing towers (Samson Sports).
The welding quality was superb, and every inch was looked over for visual and structual perfection. Needless to say, the pay still wasn’t that great.
In fact, I'd argue that a graduate knows much more than most people think. The problem is that it's usually general knowledge that doesn't apply to some specific framework that 90% of developers use. It's all abstracted away to learning X framework.
A ton.
The metallurgy of welding is complex. When performing a bespoke weld, you have to know what type of filler metal to use (it frequently is not identical to the pieces being welded...), heat pre-treatment, heat post-treatment, and range of available current for the job. All of those factors vary with the job. While the reference texts can help you, you have to at least know enough to figure out where to look. Then you need to have enough practice to to recognize when things go wrong, and how to correct it.
Much as in the current programming industry, the problem is people coming out with an education on paper, yet not actually knowing either the theory or practice the of welding.
I would say that's a function of a lot of complex items, including their prior educational experience, general intelligence, and just how closely they read the book. There exist many books I've "read" once and mostly forgotten, and precious few I've read a half-dozen or more times and know intimately.
If the former, I agree with you. If the latter, not so much.
> In fact, I'd argue that a graduate knows much more than most people think.
In my experience there are two kinds of graduates, those who spent years memorizing material to get a piece of paper, and those who learned how to learn and applied it to get their piece of paper.
When folks talk about shit graduates they have the former in mind, when folks extol the virtues of a university education they are thinking of the latter.
Unfortunately universities spit out both and it's very hard to distinguish on-the-fly.
While granted there's obviously people who don't take college seriously, many do. And unfortunately, I'm one of those people that worked very hard to get through college and didn't attend hardly any social functions. Same as high school. I would spend weekends from 8am to 6pm reading textbooks and doing assignments.
However, I often feel that doing this was somewhat of a detriment to both my ability to socialize and my ability to really solve problems organically.
And once you get into industry you have to unlearn that because the clear objective goals and grades disappear, and you are left with an array of subtle values and more pernicuous consequences to any action. And that stuff is absolutely vital to being good at intellectual jobs - it's mostly crushed out by the system, fostering the "narrow STEMlord" mindset that is constantly surprised by things blowing up when they followed the book exactly.
Part of it is because most businesses are run by people that have no knowledge of the timescale of their projects and therefore try to squeeze as much work as possible in ridiculous time frames and society trains you to stop "whining" and get it done.
The lack of empathy in industry is enormous due to profit motive. And because of the ambiguous nature of software, it's always difficult to know exactly what needs to be done. And because most people want to please their bosses, the incentive to estimate low and push yourself to get a project done is very real.
Which is one reason I continue to think that a broad education, including humanities and social sciences, is valuable even for folks looking to work in STEM fields. It's in those academic disciplines that you learn to work with subtle nuances, and how to originate and defend an opinion or point of view.
Why? Here's the repo, clone it, set up the dev env, maybe connect to VPN to reach some test instances, here's the issue tracker, here's a ticket, explore it, see if it's reproducible, if yes, get to the root cause, solve it, get it reviewed, goto 10.
Naturally, this should lead to a lot of questions, but which part is not a clear step with clear goals? Plus in industry the employer has vested interest to make you efficient, because it pays you. It'll check up on you daily. (Or initially/constantly you will do pair programming, get mentoring, sprint retros, etc.)
And if you are stuck you can ask questions and there are usually domain experts right next to you.
Though if there were more emphasis on hard math/CS/programming/ITsec problem solving, that'd probably translate well to industry setting.
Fast forward to 2019. auto mechanics START at just shy of 22,000 a year and thats assuming you keep track of your time and work for a shop that doesnt engage in the rampant practice of wage theft. master mechanic? depends, maybe $28 an hour in 2019? but nowhere near the $46 an hour a twice convicted tombstone welder made back when the Love Boat sailed.
The problem is not trade, or college, its the seemingly endless wealth gap between people who do work, and people who just seem to collect mansions and yachts.
Hell, raising kids and taking care of disabled/elderly people is an investment in the economy too. Those folks and their caretakers are consumers just as much as you and me.
Why does there need to be a privileged reward to invest? Everyone and their dog knows if you keep your money stuffed in your mattress it’ll lose value over time from inflation, and who doesn’t want to have a nest egg to retire on? Nobody needs an additional incentive to invest their capital beyond the bare bones basics of personal finance.
TLDR: RoI (capital) > RoI (labor), with the expected consequences.
I get that Piketty's work isn't without controversy or criticism. Summers and others have criticized it, but their critiques haven't seemed very strong.
One article [1] (which discusses Piketty's shortcomings) claims the biggest reaction to Piketty is silence:
... Anyway, it's not clear to me that Piketty's fundamental thesis is wrong. Happy to follow a link or two, thank you.[1] http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-...
edited for a typo
Let's also keep in mind that that is a policy choice, because it's necessary to dislodge workers off their sticky wages and some sort of mumbo jumbo about the Phillips curve.
His thesis is actually that r > g, wherein r = ROI of capital and g = the rate of economic growth (gdp).
This has to be true, because rich people exist and we can measure that they get richer and richer faster than others. You can gauge faith in the likelihood that it will continue to work that way given that funds like Y Combinator exist and are successful, and because activities like buying and maintaining rental properties "works" in terms of creating personal wealth faster than the rate of economic growth.
Thus it’s not true to claim existence of rich people implies r>g. If it were that simple people before Piketty would have reached that conclusion earlier.
The papers linked in this thread show the flaws.
It’s also the case the rich don’t get richer, if you mean a rich person gets richer. For any dataset where you can track rich individuals over time, pick a level you call rich, track everyone meeting that definition, and you find they get poorer, reverting to mean. That is why most millionaires are first gen. It’s why the Forbes 400 is mostly first gen; the rich that were top 400 lose wealth. It’s why St. Louis Fed has papers showing the majority of the top quintile or the top 1% are not there 10 years later, or from generation to generation.
Sure some rich keep wealth. But for any level called rich, if you track all those in it, that group mostly falls out.
Perhaps you've heard the expression, "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer"
What Piketty did was put extensive data and a pretty rigorous methodology to work to explain why. I've not read a critique that undermines his main conclusions in a meaningful way.
It's no secret that if you already have a pile of money or capital assets you can put those to work for you which will also generate income and you will come out ahead and faster than someone without the same pile of money.
Cf https://boingboing.net/2016/08/23/bill-gates-net-worth-hits-...
> We find evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-histo...
> I conclude that Piketty’s data for the wealth share of the top 10 percent for the period 1870 to 1970 are unreliable. The values he reported are manufactured from the observations for the top 1 percent inflated by a constant 36 percentage points. Piketty’s data for the top 1 percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810–1910) are also unreliable.
http://voxeu.org/article/piketty-s-housing-capital-results-n...
> A key observation in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) is that the share of aggregate income accruing to capital in the US has been rising steadily in recent decades. The growing disparity between the income going to wage earners and capital owners has led to calls for government intervention. But for such interventions to be effective, it is important to ask who the capital owners are.
> Recent research has shown that the long-run rise in the net capital income share is mainly due to the housing sector (e.g. Rognlie 2015, Torrini 2016 – see Figure 1). This phenomenon is not specific to the US but has been evident in almost every advanced economy. This suggests that it is not entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that are taking an increasing share of the economy, but land owners.
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99455/...
> The results from at least four studies were compared for three measures of income change: change in median incomes, share of growth captured by the top 10 percent, and the changing income share of the top 1 percent. In all cases, Piketty and Saez (2003) were the outlier, showing the most increased inequality. And in all three measures of income change , Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) found much less growth in income inequality than Piketty and Saez (2003).
For example Magness & Murphy prefer the UK's Office of National Statistics to Piketty's figures - because it's supposed to generate gold-standard objective economic data.
In reality the ONS produces the UK's unemployment figures by considering anyone who works one hour a week as employed. Similarly anyone who labels themselves self-employed for tax purposes is considered "employed" even if they do no work at all.
It says this clearly on the ONS site.
It's quite strange to accuse Piketty of cherry-picking and distortion when these egregious - even comically obvious - distortions pass for official economic "fact" at the national level.
So amongst those that are not professionally immune to this kind of argument, Picketty get's a, 'well, duh'. Amongst the rest (mainstream economists) it gets a resounding silence. It isn't really relevant to the field, because the field is constituted by a kind of professional avoidance of politically charged topics.
It's in the name, after all. One performs labor to (ideally) incrementally increase ownership. The concept thrives in the public mind as go-pay-off-a-house but (ideally) would also stick as go-buy-some-equities too.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=14000&year1=19...
If he stopped welding around the time that the Internet was taking off, that would mean that it was $5-7/hour in the early to mid 90s NOT 1970. The "now 20 years later" later in the comment backs this up.
$5-7/hour in the 1990 is $20-30k in 2019 money, which is about what your example mechanic is making.
Even if he meant $5-7 (average $6) in 1975, the $95k doesn't work. bls.gov inflation calculator gives $12,000 a year in January 1975 (2000 hrs at $6/hr) as $59k for August 2019.
$12,000 salary in January 1998 is $19,000 today.
You skipped a couple of steps. The full process goes like this:
1. Hire someone to produce something. Pay then $X.
2. Sell the the thing they produced back to them for $Y where Y>X.
3. Pocket $(Y-X)
4. Use some of the proceeds to pay lobbyists to pressure legislators to pass laws that make it illegal for anyone else to enter your market
5. Buy yacht
That's assuming you get 40 hours a week of work.
I learned MIG basics in an afternoon. So far none of my welds have cracked. I'd expect much better welding from people coming out of school than what I can do.
Considering my lack of experience I suspect over time I'll find at least one weak joint. That said it's really not hard to tell if you get penetration, especially if you grind them.
Well, not just welding: we're considered engineering tradespeople - that's what it says on my trade certificate.
Earned over $100k last financial year, doing 50+ hour weeks, so plenty of over time, we certainly work for it.
If you're in the right workshop, or doing the right site work, we're getting paid reasonably well. If you can buy a house away from the major centres, maybe one that needs a bit of a refresh, and don't need a brand new car every few years, we can live quite comfortably.