I definitely support their choice, and we need more blue collar workers, but if this becomes a widespread trend there will be an oversupply of tradespeople and their wages will fall.
There's also another false promise being offered here that young people should be aware of:
> Kirby says blue-collar work is lucrative and allows him to "call the shots" in his life
But Kirby owns his own business and employs many people. It's not lucrative or boss-free for the majority of tradespeople.
An apprentice gets low pay in exchange for on-the-ground learning, and earning hours towards licensure. ...Paying ones dues, to eventually earn good income.
I hear that narrative a lot and I think it does a major disservice to the people interested in entering the field. Are there blue-collar workers making huge sums of money? Yes. Are most blue-collar workers making huge sums of money? No.
There is also the physical toll that gets glossed over. I know tradespeople who made a lot of money until they weren't physically capable of doing the work anymore. Some were able to focus on running the business and had trained up good people to do the actual work. Others were in a really bad place.
You mean a generation has decided they didn't want to be exploited straight into adulthood to take on massive amounts of debt just to receive a general education, that takes 4+ years in virtually all cases just to see any eventual return on investment?
Also, if Kirby is 32, wouldn't that make them a millennial? I'm a bit younger than them, and by all accounts so far I've been considered part of the millennial age range.
This whole article seems to be a compilation of anecdotes taken in a mostly casual format. Does this really tell us anything about Gen Z that hasn't already been in the pipeline over the last two to three generations?
I'm an Xennial with 20 years in tech, and I am seriously investigating switching to a trade. When I got in, the red hot areas in tech were all about building infrastructure technologies and software development was super close to the metal. Not so much anymore.
> software development was super close to the metal. Not so much anymore.
From your perspective, what feels lackluster about software development being further from the metal. I maybe also have a misunderstanding of what you mean by that. Are you saying that software is typically deployed a few abstraction layers deep away from the metal, or are you saying you get fewer opportunities to interact directly with the hardware you run your software on now? Perhaps both?
Not OP, but I have a similar amount of experience and kind of feel the same way.
You used to provision machines, setup the OS, think about networking, disk space, CPUs,
RAM, etc. That stuff was kind of fun.
Then you'd write code to build your service. Actual code where you had to think about the local environment and servers and how they interact.
A lot of software development these days feels more like configuration than anything. Nobody wants to actually develop software or run their own ecosystem. Instead it's just gluing shit together with Auth0, Vercel, DataDog, Atlas, SendGrid, AWS/GCP/Azure, etc.
I get that this theoretically allows you to focus on the code, but the reality is that you spend half your time managing dependencies and glue, dealing with forced upgrades, etc.
Based on the rates charged and the difficulty even finding an available plumber, I'm pretty sure an experienced plumber makes a better living than me.
Also, plumbers/electricians/etc. have been able to raise rates with inflation over the last couple of years, whereas I'm making the same salary I was getting back in 2021 (so effectively, my labor is worth less than it was 3 years ago w/ inflation).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] threadThere's also another false promise being offered here that young people should be aware of:
> Kirby says blue-collar work is lucrative and allows him to "call the shots" in his life
But Kirby owns his own business and employs many people. It's not lucrative or boss-free for the majority of tradespeople.
There is also the physical toll that gets glossed over. I know tradespeople who made a lot of money until they weren't physically capable of doing the work anymore. Some were able to focus on running the business and had trained up good people to do the actual work. Others were in a really bad place.
It is cyclical. It'll continue to happen over time, and it may not necessarily stabilize.
Also, if Kirby is 32, wouldn't that make them a millennial? I'm a bit younger than them, and by all accounts so far I've been considered part of the millennial age range.
This whole article seems to be a compilation of anecdotes taken in a mostly casual format. Does this really tell us anything about Gen Z that hasn't already been in the pipeline over the last two to three generations?
Yes, millennials are around 28-43 right now.
From your perspective, what feels lackluster about software development being further from the metal. I maybe also have a misunderstanding of what you mean by that. Are you saying that software is typically deployed a few abstraction layers deep away from the metal, or are you saying you get fewer opportunities to interact directly with the hardware you run your software on now? Perhaps both?
You used to provision machines, setup the OS, think about networking, disk space, CPUs, RAM, etc. That stuff was kind of fun.
Then you'd write code to build your service. Actual code where you had to think about the local environment and servers and how they interact.
A lot of software development these days feels more like configuration than anything. Nobody wants to actually develop software or run their own ecosystem. Instead it's just gluing shit together with Auth0, Vercel, DataDog, Atlas, SendGrid, AWS/GCP/Azure, etc.
I get that this theoretically allows you to focus on the code, but the reality is that you spend half your time managing dependencies and glue, dealing with forced upgrades, etc.
It's just not fun anymore.
Based on the rates charged and the difficulty even finding an available plumber, I'm pretty sure an experienced plumber makes a better living than me.
Also, plumbers/electricians/etc. have been able to raise rates with inflation over the last couple of years, whereas I'm making the same salary I was getting back in 2021 (so effectively, my labor is worth less than it was 3 years ago w/ inflation).