This thread has a lot of people saying things like "don't get a degree" or "get a trade cert" or "work in a different field to get experience" which I feel completely side-steps many issues and the realities that many people face. It's just a fundamentally broken system. The value of degrees fluctuates so much because of a political climate that has the stability of a pane of glass being violently thrown off of a building and a job market that prioritizes either posting ghost jobs to overwork employees to death or outsourcing its candidate search to whoever can guess the most buzzwords in an application.
Hard disagree. Tax breaks don't get that low. Nobody making 100k is setting up shell companies and passing on generational wealth. That's food security, a decent vehicle, and enough buying power to get a mortgage on a really cheap house.
It's not nothing, but you're not doing great. You have the buying power of two people making 30k 20 years ago.
My father was able, as a tradesman 35 years ago to buy a house outright, have two cars, new clothes and a vactaion every year.
My 3 bedroom apt was $800 a month in a nice area in the early 2000's
bitching that you can't have shell corporations or afford first class plane tickets is very different than not being able to afford food, fuel, or housing.
people who make 100K+ typically come from generational wealth. overwhelmingly. they had educated parents, overwhelmingly, etc.
you're just mad you can't afford a house, cool. i can't afford one either, but I'm not mad about it. i own a condo instead.
i could also easily afford two kids in my condo. but i'm single because every idiot around me thinks you need 5000sq ft home to have two kids, and there is no point in having kdis unless you can take them 1st class to france every summer. but none of that is being poor or struggling, it's being a delusional idiot who has absurd expecations that only the 1% can really afford.
the vast majority of people who work in tech came from wealthy households, yes.
they don't believe that, of course. they all think they are poor because their folks only rented a house every two weeks on the beach, and didn't own a beach front home.
every rich asshole thinks they aren't rich, because someone else is richer than them. but if you're parent sincome and your income are over 100K, you're doing better than 90% of other people in the USA. just because you can't see that doesn't make it true.
where i live people make 300-500K a year and are convinced they are poor and struggling and have it worse than migrant farm workers. because at least those migrant farm workers have a house back in mexico. i have heard this bullshit multiple times in the past few years.
im broke and im gaming on a borderline e-waste pc (which i bought for cheap used) and a steam deck from pre-price hike and buying games off humble bundle and deep discounts on steam
i also have a ps4 pro (which i bought used for next to nothing) from before i moved to this tiny apartment and could do couch gaming
it's possible but you gotta not buy the latest and most expensive games. idk why anyone would do that in the first place tho, theres so many games to play that are just as good and are way cheaper
but they fund the development of those games tho so i dont mind i guess š¤·
Gaming systems are made for the top 10% now. They are fully rejecting regular consumers and focusing entirely on the high end market.
Basically they want to cater the economy to the top 10% and neglect the bottom 90%. This is one reason why everything is so damn expensive. Budget options aren't a thing anymore.
If you look into it at all, America is a really embarrassing place.
I mean, we just started an unprovoked war by bombing a school full of little girls.
If someone has done that to America, there'd already be memorials about it and several random brown countries bombed back to the stone age, but since we did it, it's actually totally cool.
Uhh, yes. Unironically. Revolutions happen when a sufficient number of people can't afford to game & jack off any more, so their only source of entertainment is to LARP overthrowing the government, which they do so realistically that it actually happens. Open a history book smh.
We canāt even get gamers to stop pre-ordering games from even just the shitty companies. They literally canāt simply go play any of the thousands of other amazing games because theyāre too busy letting themselves get rat-fucked by companies like EA and Ubisoft who actively hate their customers.
Why do you think ghislane was power-moderating reddit until 2019 and eglin was [redacted] {user has unfortunately died in a vehicle collision and subsequent lithium fire}
2: yeah but still. I mean, don't put us all in the same bucket, I jerk off too. OK maybe not 7 times per day. But even then there's time to do stuff. Watching TV is the real issue there.
I wasnāt actually in competition with them at least, as they were all post-docs I know. The masters never did anything for my career in software that starting a year earlier wouldnāt have done better, except that the state paid for my ales.
Why are people talking like being a mechanic is bum work, or like there's a huge overhead cost in being a mechanic, or that you have to go to trade school to be a mechanic, or like mechanic work is going away?
None of these is true.
Mechanics will always have work, usually with overtime, and usually pay is very decent.
No degree required. Certs optional.
Tools are very affordable when you're not buying them all at once.
Lots of room to change specializations.
ICE mechanics are still going to be hugely in demand because the Internal Combustion Engine isn't going anywhere, even if they stop putting them in some/ most automobiles. But there are dozens of other mechanical disciplines, and as long as you know how to (when to) then a wrench, you can always get a job.
A bearing is a bearing, whether it's on a crank shaft, an electric motor, a tail pulley, or a garage door.
every mechanic I have met hates their life, unless they work for like a really high end place. and those jobs are far and few.
i had family in auto work, electricians, and line workers. they all basically said 'go to college working in the trades is fucking shit.'
working in an office is a lot easier on your body and doesn't leave you with medical problems. my electrician uncle lost one leg in his 50s and then other in his 60s. the mechanics i knew all worked for their dads and were townies we never left where they grew up, etc.
they made decent money, sure, but i would never ever want to trade live with them. i'm in my 40s and healthier than I was in my 20s. money isn't everything.
I... uh... i am a mechanic. I just don't work in a car shop that pays only billable hours. Why would you do that to yourself?
That would be like getting a minimum wage serving job and hoping the tips will be reliable. Ā ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
I never struggle for hours, I have great benefits, non- union, no certs, degrees, or specialization required. I make enough to pay all my bills, invest in retirement, and still have money left over for life afterward. I work with a gang of guys all doing the same. We work in a field where we can go pretty much anywhere and get another job paying about the same.
I'm not sure why the mechanics you have met can't find these jobs, but they have all misinformed you.
i work in IT. it's so easy, just get a six figure job like me.
it's not that the vast majority of positions in the field... are part time contract work that pay shit... and jobs like mine are difficult and rare to find and typically only go to those with tons of experience or elite degrees, like myself. it's not that 22 year olds even struggle to get those shit jobs that get their foot in the door.
or that it took me over a decade of experience and working to get to this wage level... no it's not that.
i also don't understand why 22 year olds don't have 500K in assets and just buy houses instead of renting and living with roommates, it's so easy!
Wow, you have it hard in IT i guess. Maybe you should have looked into being a mechanic.
You don't need a degree to get jobs as a mechanic, so no formal education necessary. You don't have to worry about jobs being hard to find because basically everything that moves has bearings that need to be changed. You don't need to worry about contract work because there are substantial amounts of mechanic jobs that pay hourly and offer tons of overtime.
I'm not sure why it's so offensive to you that plenty of people don't have the experience you heard about from "every mechanic you met."
the average mechanic wage is 50K a year. average IT job wage is 100K a year.
that's not a livable wage unless you live in bumfucksville parts of the USA, and the mechanics that live there are not making 50K, they are making like 30K.
but please tell me how everyone should go be a mechanic and they'll make 150K a year? i guess?
just because you got lucky or did well, doesn't not mean every other person will have the same luck or skill in their career.
you certainly are not educated. you've made that very clear but your insistence ignorance that being a mechanic is 'so easy'.
Wow, for someone so educated, you sure make a lot of odd assumptions.
Perhaps I am more educated than you assume, even if a formal education is not required for my job.
Also, I'm gonna make an assumption now about your education, based on things you've said here... someone as condescendingly smart as yourself and using averages to discuss things like this has certainly taken at least some statistics classes and understands what a "standard deviation" is... and how that might be affected by extremely low paying jobs in one sector, even if those are not the most prominent paying jobs or abundant positions in that sector.
I think the standard deviation of pay for mechanics is much wider than you think, and possibly skewed by other factors than just simple geography.
I'm not saying that all mechanics make IT wages, but i am saying that I didn't have to spend 10 years in school and $150k in debt to compete for a position that I earn 6 figures in. My job is not competitive for positions, they're pretty abundant. Base pay for this position in my area (not a big city) is substantially higher than the national "average." No formal education required.
But I must ask, why u so mad bro? Sounds like you're living the dream life, no need to have an aneurism about other people's money
Basically nobody has 150K in debt form an undergrad degree. They have like 30-40K of debt, which is easy for them to back back over 10 years with when the starting salary is 50-60K and in 10 years they will most likely double that salary.
but keep telling me how everyone should be a mechanic and college is stupid. Please. because anyone who went to college is a dumb loser or something, or i dunno, maybe you are talking about your own poor choices when you were younger? I definitely have met very dumb folks who have 150K in debt from college, who were very mad about it, who also terrible employees and people in general.
A mechanic making over 100K exists, yes, but they are rare, and would be in highly specialized areas and likely late in their careers. There are bicycle mechanics who make over 100K a year, but for every 1 of them, there are about 1000s of them making 30K a year with the top end wage being about 45K after decades of experience. Should I tell folks to go be a bike mechanic because it's a good career path because like .01% of professional race mechanics make good money? Becuase yeah, they have about a 1/10000 change of that career path, and a 99999/10000 change of working 40 hours a week in some crappy bike shop making 20 bucks an hour for the rest of their life.
Oh my life is the dream life. I get mad other very dumb people tell me that I'm the richest bastard in the world, or that i'm a poor piece of shit. of which there a lot of on lemmy. Instead the boring fact that I'm in the 85th percentile of income and the 90th percentile of asset wealth. I even was a landlord for a few years, which you know, makes me capitalist hyper scum.
But i prefer facts, statistics and reality, to emotional reasoning, which makes folks very mad. but they tend to respond to that stuff wtih 'u mad bro? lolz i so smart u dumb because anecdote anecdote anecdote'.
Iād rather have the ability to pickup an extra shift when times are tough. I have my friends that are on a strict 40 hour week and when the check doesnāt cut it they are fucked. OT has allowed me a lot of luxuries I otherwise would have had to scrimp and save for.
Meanwhile most people are fucked if their car breaks down. I just pick up an extra shift and the problem goes away.
Thats exactly the point, if you are on a 40h week and that doesnt cut it, something is very wrong. If you say to work extra as a bonus, well maybe. But if you need it to make ends meet it's completely fucked imo.
It can be both, can't it?
People should be paid a living wage. If you do more work than is the defined norm you should be paid increasingly more sums of money.
The intent of overtime laws was to encourage companies to hire someone else instead of making someone work 80 hours a week.
A business saying that they'll pay you more if you work more at your discretion doesn't bother me. Even with a perfectly good wage and benefits you're going to have cases where people want a touch more more money. I had a coworker who did contracting jobs to pay for a new deck. He didn't have to, but it kept his budget from getting weird.
I worked 3300 hours a few years back. I was not prepared for what the overtime would do to my taxes. Still brought home more than I ever had before (or since). Also was not prepared what the overtime would do to my personal life or my mind.
shop rate around me $180/hr now. the mechanics better be making at least a quarter of that. my company only charges half that rate for custom machine building
They make a good living, but they are paid flat rate, and there is no guarantee that there will be steady income. If there's a lul, the mechanic might make $0 in a given week. Also, if for some reason a job takes longer than the billable hours for that job, they are essentially working for free. Of the trades, it's the shittiest one to make good money in imo.
so many bozos on the internet they know what these fields are like, and it shows they know nothing.
folks who post how wonderful it is have survivorship bias. your average mechanic/plumber/electrician isn't making bank, they are making average to below average wage. and the income is not steady, it's sporadic. you might make 100k one year and 60 the next, or spend 2 years with minimal income because construction market or similar is slowing down.
Honestly, if you're in this situation, and you have any interest at all in education, or just think it wouldn't drive you mad, look into substitute teaching. In my area the only requirement to be a substitute is to have any bachelor's degree and to be able to pass a very rigorous background check. (Think fingerprinting.) I'm currently exploring a mid-career transition to K12 teaching, and I'm planning on doing a bunch of substitute teaching in the coming school year. Substitutes make about $260/day in my district. Not amazing money, but it still comes to a solid $30/hr or so. And there's enough demand at least where I'm at that they often have postings go unfilled.
And hell, just getting out of the house and regularly interacting with people will do wonders for your mental health. I wouldn't recommend substitute teaching as a permanent career. But for someone in transition or trying to get started, it's a great option. It's a very useful way of getting past the trap of "I need experience to get the job, but I need the job to get experience." At least in my area, if you've got a bachelor's and a clean criminal record, you can become a substitute.
I'd also recommend driving a school bus. $35/hour and subsidized health insurance. You only have the little bastiges for 15 minutes at a time and you don't have to teach them shit. You don't need a bachelor's degree (or even a high school degree) and god DAMN do my coworkers show the results of that.
In my area, the average monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment is $1500/month, or $18,000 per year. If you maxed out substitute teaching, teaching every day you could? That would bring in about $45k/year. And the job comes with no health insurance, retirement, or other benefits. On days you don't work, you don't get paid. Full time teaching positions do have benefits and pay better, but those require more extensive licensing.
You could earn a subsistence living substituting where I'm located, especially if you got roommates. But it's not a long-term viable career if you want to have any hope of home ownership, retirement, etc. A great option for those in transition, but not a career.
It's a maximum $45k/year job that offers no health insurance, retirement, or paid leave. Sure it's $260 per day, but that is only for the school days that you work. Considering the number of days in the school year, and the reality that you won't be able to find a position every day? If you max it out and sub as much as you can, you're talking about $45k/year with zero benefits.
Not a bad gig if you're on your parent's or spouse's health insurance. But if you try and work that your whole career, you can forget about ever being a home owner or retiring. Starter homes here go for $400k.
Great option for those in transition. But there's a reason I call it decent, but hardly amazing.
Looking into it, substitute teachers in my area make from 40-50k on average, so really not far off. Considering many jobs in my area already don't provide health insurance, it's really not the worst option for people specifically in my area. I'm sure this is by far the exception of course, just thought it was interesting.
The only 23 year olds who didn't go through this phase... were the people who had family connections to get them a 100K job after graduation.
rest of us took 6-9 months to find work, often while doing part time stuff to pad or resumes. if you don't have connections getting a job is difficult and takes a lot of work.
we also had degrees from frickin' Harvard. but we had no connections and no idea how the real world worked. I got my first real job 8 months after graduating, after working full time all summer and part time the entire fall. and i was living away from home, off my savings that entire time.
The only 23 year olds who didnāt go through this phaseā¦ were the people who had family connections to get them a 100K job after graduation.
Idk about that. I knew plenty of people who got entry level jobs at Schlumberger or Dell or corporate equivalent, earning $70k+ walking in the door.
If you had top grades and interviewed well, it's possible. But we're talking college grads and maybe one in five or one in ten, depending on your school. It wasn't the "normal" experience. But it wasn't pure nepo shit either.
rest of us took 6-9 months to find work, often while doing part time stuff to pad or resumes. if you donāt have connections getting a job is difficult and takes a lot of work.
Spent six months volunteering at a literacy center, which gave me some glowing references and a genuinely good feeling about getting up in the morning in the intermediate time.
Also spent a bunch of time at the gym, which was great once I got back into the dating scene.
First job out of college was a tiny Medical IT company with maybe a dozen employees. Started at $15/hr while they billed me at $80. Spent seven years polishing my resume (should have been out the door at 3, but I was naive and they did up my pay to $35/hr before I'd finally left).
All that is to say, your starting salary isn't forever. Five and ten years of experience counts for a lot.
But staying in the service sector is a dead end. The most dogshit small time IT job is better than carting boxes around, if you want to work in IT. The grungiest nursing job is better than flipping burgers if you want to work in medicine.
Put years on a resume and keep looking for new opportunities. But don't get stuck in the quagmire of retail, unless you actually want to try and climb that career path into management or supply chain or whatever.
And absolutely, stay the fuck out of masters programs. That's for people who have a job lined up, not people looking for work.
I feel like I'm alone with this one, but if you have options, swallow your pride and take them. It's a paycheck, and can always lead to something better. I took a paycheck job at a retail store and I'm on the management team. Is it something to brag about? God no, it sucks. But my bills are paid and I can advance.
That was my thought reading this.
'I have bills but I choose not to work because the jobs are beneath me'
People used to see the schooling as a way to skip entry level work. But now as a society, all it means is that you put money in before time. Its just not that special any more.
20+ years ago I put myself through college in an IT field, went to work in an industrial plant right next to the guys from my highschool, that dropped out to work. They had 3+ years work experience over me, I had to start at the bottom. In the time since then, I have worked in a dozen places, for a variety of wages to support my family. Where I am now is no mistake or act of luck. It takes hard work.
my brother is unemployed for 5 years now. but it's entirely because he's a cunt who won't take a lower paycheck or work for a company he thinks is 'below' him. he has more or less fucked himself because he thinks he should be only be hired for top level positions. the industry he is in also shrank a lot and he refuses to change industries.
If you can't get a job in your field with a graduate degree, why does anyone think that if you get a master's, suddenly the jobs will appear?
Usually, you need a lot of less skilled workers, and as you go up in skill, the demand for the numbers of workers goes down. So getting something more advanced/specialized may actually shrink your pool of options.
Plus, people with entry jobs with graduate degrees are more likely to shift jobs because someone is offering a higher skill position with more pay, so entry jobs should become available more frequently. In contrast, highly specialised jobs requiring the masters degree and whatnot will have some quadragenarian holding it as a salaried/tenured employee.
that was me in the 80s, so nothing really changes without a ton of actual luck. and yes i tried mechanic school, and welding school. got nowhere with either one. do have the skills to make and fix my own stuff though, which i wouldn't trade for a desk job
easiest way to get a job is to have daddy hire you at his company or call a friend to get you job at theirs.
and then lecture and look down on folks who are struggled to get jobs because they don't have a daddy like that.
otherwise you're gonna struggle and struggle until you get a lucky break. the average job search is 3-6 months, which mean often it's longer than that. a lot of places will take 1-2 months to hire you from start to finish. my first job took 3 months to hire me from first interview, which was in late oct, and I didn't start until Feb. and of course once I was hired in December, I got multiple interviews and 2 more offers... because that's how life works. after months of nothing.
what's relevant is his work history and how he is applying for jobs. i hire for my company. lots of people have shitty worthless resumes and letters because they literally don't know how the apply to jobs. and then a chunk of those with recent applications, dont' reply or interview terribly.
but they are 22/23, they don't know this shit and they have to learn it.
we dont' give a fuck what your degree is in, but we expect a demonstration of professional competence and the ability to tell us how your skills would apply to the job. and most people can't do this... they apply with boilerplate language that shows us they didn't read the job description or they resume highligths irrelevant things. copy pasting the same application to every job is the best way to ensure no employee ever looks at it.
and we dont' even get a ton of applications, we're a small company with no clout, we maybe get 30 applications per position, not like 300 or 3000. but typically 90% are trash and we might try to contact/interview 3 people for 1 offer.
we've honestly hired people from shitty no name schools over people with more relevant degrees and from fancy schools... because their application was relevant and in the interview they showed competence and maturity and the ability to process new information. a lot of folks freak out and freeze up and can't answer basic questions, like how their degree/work history is relevant to what we are looking for in an employee, so they don't get hired.
i got hired on the spot basically because during my interview I asked them questions about their security postures and practices, and like their upgrade timelines... which all showed I knew what the fuck I was talking about and had experience doing IT operations. they told me later that out of various other people and previous employees, not a one of them had shown that level of curious and engagement with the job and often they ended up being shitty employees.
a lot of applicants have no idea what your job involves skillwise. company names dont always give a hint, and unless youre a huge conglomerate youre media footprint is miniscule at best.
Truth. This is sadly something you learn after landing your first job, not before.
My eye opening moment was seeing the technical guy at the interview light up when I said I'm open to learning their domain knowledge. I didn't have a degree, but I made up for it by showing interest in the field by doing my own projects, as a hobby. I was the only guy in the department without a degree for a long time.
First job hunt took a while, second and third was basically on the spot, first application sent.
But a 4.0 GPA will get you a job basically anywhere, because managers assume you're a quick study. Sub-3.0 means they think you're lazy or hard headed. When you're skating near 2.0, you can have a degree in Rocket Science and recruiters will just assume you sucked at it.
Worked at a tech company that was hiring anyone with a 3.5+ from Data Scientists to English Lit majors. Then they just throw everyone into New Hire Training and gave them a coding crash course. The English Lit kids didn't do any worse than the STEM crowd on the tech side. And they were way better at collaboration, documentation, and delivery.
You can always get a job as a prison guard. Sidebar, you get a job that's below you and then start a business on paper that's doing something relevant to your degree field and you hire yourself. Then you put that shit on your resume, wham bam thank you mam, one year later and some interview preparation you got your pick of the litter.
Prison guards make $55/hr, and I still wouldn't give up my $21/hr job to work in a Vitamin D-deprived hellhole full of "customers" who hate you for merely existing.
Triple the pay, and maybe I'd consider it. Prison sucks.
I did this to become a programmer. No CS degree, learned to program by working on a personal project (music composition software), formed an LLC and sold the app as shareware back in the day when there was such a thing and people would pay $29.95 (!) for it. Still didn't make nearly enough to live on, got a real job with a resume that listed my own company as my first employment. Wasn't even dishonest about it, listed my role as "sole proprietor". Maybe the people reviewing my resume didn't know what a proprietor was.
TBF this was the '90s when Internet startups were hiring anything with a pulse.
Good shit, Although it seems you legitimately did something which is better. As always, can't get a job? Hire yourself. Gotta work the system sometimes instead of just giving up. Also yeah soul proprietor doesn't sound as fancy shmancy as CEO. They legit may not have been aware or understood you had the gumption to do something for yourself.
I would add in the modern context for people here to open a static website, have some social media account attached to the business with some content and that will really help with the legitimacy.
The world will always need electricians (and if society collapses you'll have the knowledge to not die when salvaging parts from the clankers that countries sent in after they ran out of human meat for the grinder)
Maybe don't specialize in internal combustion engines, but... EVs still need repairs even if their predicted lifespan is significantly shorter. Won't need head gasket replacements, but brakes are still brakes, struts are still struts. I suspect if you specialize in high voltage systems, you'll still have a good career ahead of you as a mechanic.
The issue is the customers are morons, the bosses are morons, the dealerships are morons, working under warranty pays bloody half the usual hours, and no matter what happens to a car after it leaves the shop, you will be blamed.
I don't know a single goddamn mechanic that enjoys their job and doesn't work for a really reputable shop. Chances are you will work in a shithole.
I graduated with an IT degree during a major IT downturn and felt the exact same way. Worked restaurant gigs applied for hundreds of jobs and started thinking about moving abroad to find work.
I ended up getting a low level shit paying job as tech support at a tiny company and worked my way up.
You didnāt mention your degree but I advise just starting somewhere with some opportunity to move up.
Network, network network! After my first job I have always gotten jobs by knowing someone who can get me in. Especially now with the bullshit hiring processes you need to know someone on the inside more than ever.
Have sex with dogs on camera to supplement your income. Do it with humans if you don't care about the paycheck, you ethicscel, you. Fuck a goat and get a new grandma, it's in the fine print. Eat bull testicles, lose the lottery until you win. Obviously. These are basic money making strategies of our lord, Jesus Christovich. That boy fucked all the dogs on camera. That's how I know this works.
Fun fact Obama made a site that would let you see the average graduate salary compared to the degrees cost. The soulless animals in the GOP shut it down.
That's just misdirected. The people who teach and educate, at least from what I've seen (and mind you, I'm from Europe from a country that doesn't have a for-profit university system in place), are quite often just passionate about their topic. Them being part of the same messed up system as you doesn't mean they're the ones to blame.
Anon is a loser and it shows. Instead of doing something with free rent and free time he "jerks off and watches tv". He doesn't even have any responsibilities so what stopping them from picking up and going there the job market is? You can get a low paying good job anywhere around the world just by the virtue of being a westerner. Sure you won't be buying super cars but you'll grow, experience life, do something rather than whine on racist boards like a little bitch.
yes instead whine how you have no opportunities with one the most privileged passport in the world. Skill issue, no one can help you at this point if you can't take advantage of all advantages you are given.
Why is learning a trade only considered a last resort? Even on lemmy, I got downvoted to shit when I commented that people should focus less on degrees and more on industry certification, to have some actual value they can sell to potential employers. An electrician certification proves that you can do something. A bachelor's degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.
Relying on just degrees that virtually everybody else has is stupid. Anon has nothing that stands out from the soup of zero-experience job seekers.
It's actually quite difficult to get into a well paying trade, all the apprenticeship programs run on nepotism and then you usually still need to go into business for yourself to actually make a living, and they're all absolutely saturated since they started pushing trades on millennials and z twenty years ago. Trades are the same gamble as conventional college anymore. There just aren't any available jobs.
Why is learning a trade only considered a last resort?
Because a lot of trades are pretty bad for your health. They require getting in potentially unsafe environments, dealing with substances or byproducts that can lead to cancers or other occupational diseases. They also require a lot more physical work. So of course people would prefer a cushy office job to trawling through crawlspaces lined with asbestos to plug in a light. Not to mention that a lot of trade jobs are not that great paid when starting out, the good pay comes with years of experience and until you get there you have to suffer through all the above. Sure some office jobs don't pay well starting out either but you just sit on your ass in a air conditioned office instead of nailing 2x4s in the hot sun for 8 hours.
People always ask this question but they never consider that there are actual valid considerations that make trade jobs unattractive compared to other jobs.
Edit: Oh also a lot of well paid trade people run their own companies which is an additional stress and a lot of people don't want to deal with that. My father is in trades and he ran his own company and I watched him age 20 years in the span of 5 due to all the stress and physical work he was doing. Running a company, even a small one is no easy job.
The pay part of that equation is dependent on where you are, and what trade you're talking about.
Where I am, trades generally get paid more than any office job you're going to get with just a random bachelors degree. And if you join one of the trade unions, especially one of the higher skilled industrial ones (so like electricians, pipefitters, millwrights, etc, as opposed to general labour or residential construction), your pay will be much higher than entry level office positions, and will likely stay higher than anyone who doesn't get themselves into an upper management type position.
Electricians, pipefitters, and millwrights have really hazardous jobs. Thatās why they get paid so well, directly and indirectly (because it takes a lot of training to do those jobs safely).
Iām not trying to discourage anyone from taking these jobs, but theyāre not risk free.
What are the rates of workplace injury for trades compared to the rates of people getting long term health effects caused by sedentary work conditions?
So based on those statistics, I will say that those trades are definitely not "really dangerous". Tortilla manufacturering is twice as dangerous at 6.2, and hospital workers were up above 10. Going from 0.8 to 1.6 is like going from laying on your couch to walking down the sidewalk.
When I started in construction 20 years ago minimum wage was $10, but most trades start at $15, this is for a laborer, apprentices got $18
After 4 years I was 33.50 an hour and still had room to move up. My direct supervisor was making $50, but he had a cash bonus to pay for his truck, instead of them giving him one.
Now minimum wage is $15 and most trades start at $21 and hour.
legally the company is supposed to pay apprentices 60% of the lowest paid journeyman, but they can hire people specifically to lower this -.- fourth years get 90%, it goes up each year. It forces a raise after finishing each schooling section.
Trade jobs frequently require buying a lot of the equipment and protective gear. Most of the high pay examples include a lot of overtime, and may be limited when work isn't available. A lot of trades don't have a regular 40 hour work week, if the weather is bad for a week they may not make any money.
It really depends and is a lot more complex of a comparison. Trades are important and I think they should have more stability and require less personal cost, although most of that would be addressed if we had single payer healthcare and UBI.
If youāre buying your own equipment and gear, find a better company. A company is supposed to pay for any and all safety gear, and all equipment should be owned by the company.
The only thing a tradesperson should have to bring to a job is their tools.
Sitting on your arse all day, everyday is equally bad for your health. I'd probably argue even worse, you can't get PPE to help protect you from sedentary working conditions.
you can't get PPE to help protect you from sedentary working conditions
Wrist braces, chairs that encourage you to sit upright, risers for your monitor, a standing desk, etc...
You can also choose to be active in your time off, or during breaks or while waiting for something to load. If you work a physically demanding trade, no amount of elective sedentary behavior in your free time will compensate for the damage and strain you're putting your body through at work.
Also, this is all without mentioning the fact that some people have disabilities that prevent them from doing many trades.
Yeah you can. Adequate breaks for eyes, standing desks, under desk elliptical/treadmill, etc... not that most employers will supply or allow it, but it can be overcome.
It's not even close. When I went from 50:50 lab/office to 10:90 lab/office I gained like 12 kg and outgrew all of my pants in a year. Granted a bit of that was stress with my asshole bosses but I believe that just working on my feet a couple of hours versus being sedentary made a massive difference.
Nah, I got the meaning of your post. Standing at the desk, even with a treadmill, is not the same as natural movement. Taking breaks from a physically passive activity is not tge same as being constantly physically active.
You probably weren't burning significantly more calories. What happened is you likely started eating or drinking more calories at your desk where before you were too busy. It's like a thirty minute jog to work off an oreo, it's unlikely you were actually burning that many more calories. But then most people still think exercise and metabolism have a lot of control over your weight when it's almost exclusively how much you're eating and drinking. Nobody is breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
Yep..... Certain trades are worse for your bones and joints, but not much is going to be worse for your systemic health than sitting for half the day.
As someone who's worked in construction and now works in orthopedics and rehabilitation, I think the biggest issue with a lot of people in trades like residential construction is that they don't really learn how to prioritize their physical health until a lot of the damage is already done. Once you're a bit older you kinda learn that even if carrying that 80lb bag of cement by yourself is faster, it's still better to take the time to grab a dolly or another person. Most of the issues would be solved if we had better regulations.
The effects of sitting on your arse can be mitigated with 30 to 40 minutes of daily vigorous exercise. There are a bunch of studies showing this. It's not remotely the same thing.
It'd be lovely if the US had more requirements for providing better tools for office workers. I've never had a job be willing to fund anything outside of pointing me at a used desk with a 15 year old computer.
I'm not saying that everyone who doesn't get an office job should immediately become a tradie. When you have nothing else to offer, just having some industry certificates is an advantage. Even if the certificate is unrelated to the job. My first job was assembly machine operator in a factory. My boss straight up told me that he hired me because of my Cisco and ECDL certs that I got in high school (for free because Europe).
If you don't get the office job you wanted, you've still opened up some options. Tradie life isn't glamorous, but it pays better than complaining on an internet forum.
And if you do get a job and it doesn't work out, you'll still have something to fall back on.
An electrician certification doesn't mean a whole lot either. Both are just paper. Degrees with work experience and trades with apprentership time hold a little more value, but its still hit and miss.
I'm in the US and I never got any formal education in my trade (HVAC-R). Most of the techs here didn't. The few techs we've hired who did go to trade school came out of it with practically no knowledge which couldn't easily be taught on the job in a couple months. It seems like, for HVAC at least, the tradeschool programs teach enough that maybe you could manage some light residential work, but they barely touch on refrigeration, let alone the heavy commercial and industrial refrigeration we often do. When evaluating candidates, a tradeschool cert means less than a year of experience in some sort of maintenance position.
The same seems to be true of many other trades. At least in my state no certs are required or even beneficial to become a licensed plumber or electrician. Those liscenses are all based solely on years of experience. Technically you can become a master electrician solely with an electrical engineering degree and 0 years of experience but if you have that degree then you probably have better jobs available to you.
The same seems to be true of many other trades. At least in my state no certs are required or even beneficial to become a licensed plumber or electrician.
Australia. And yes, you have to do on the job training, but that doesn't mean anything. The quality of the work experience is highly variable, so you could spend all of it learning, or all of it buying coffee and sweeping floors.
Not every electrician is going to be working on panels, some just wire plugs instead, people specialize and are payed differently depending on the tasks. Very rarely do you find someone who does the entire trade regulary. Theyāre not going to be as good or fast as the ones that specialize, so itās a delicate balance.
Just like every graphic artist may not be being Mona Lisaās, they could be doing mangas or just heads or something.
Not all doctors are cancer specialists, some are just family doctors, thatās literally how every job and training works everywhere.
Do you think that everything you learn with a degree is used while working? Because theyāre taught useless shit too.
My point is that by the time you have the paper, in either case, there is zero reliable proof that you can do either job. Real world work experience (successfully ran a sparky business, or successfully held a job for a few years) counts far more than the paper does.
If you canāt handle the trade, a companyās not going to keep you on, and the next company will look at your apprenticeship record and see your lack of training. From there youāve flunked out.
The system protects itself. So yes if you have a ticket, you can atleast do something in that trade. A degree, IS just a piece of paper. A trade certificate shows you are competent and able to complete tasks. And be able to stick something through to completion (4 years). So yes, that āpaperā holds a lot of information. The person while training also builds up a portfolio that they can use to show to future clients or employers of the work they did. A degree doesnāt allow any of this, or provide any information about the person. Other than they could āaffordā to sit in a class for a few years.
To finish an apprenticeship you need to hold that job for four years dudeā¦ while working on the jobs that entire timeā¦. theyāve met your arbitrary distinction lol.
Your point is, you apparently donāt know how an apprenticeship works.
I agree with you overall - the paper is important and it holds a lot of weight.
There's also a lot of hiring in smaller companies that overlooks certificates. On the job experience is weighted pretty heavily as well in the trades. If you can't handle it, you'll get fired eventually, but companies are happy to employ mediocre trade workers without certs.
You are assuming that the company cares about training, and not just a source of cheap labour. Apprentices are paid barely above minimum wage in Aus, and there are kickbacks to the companies to encourage employing them.
If it worked as you described (which is how it should work), I would absolutely agree with you, but the system in Aus happily churns out some absolute duds. Just like the uni system.
Also, for what its worth, many uni degrees include a year of paid internship, but there are similar issues that allow duds to sail through there as well.
Depends on where you are in the world. Here you have to have a portfolio and working experience among other qualifications before you can take the assessment. You're not an electrician until you're on the register after all that.
I went to electrical school right out of high school and was an electrician for 10 years. Learned a ton of practical skills, can fix just about any household or mechanical issues, and bought my first house 5 years in. Best decision my parents ever encouraged me to do. Would recommend and also not sure why it gets so much flak
It's mostly just that in a lot of places you either need the right last name or be close with someone with the right last name to get an apprenticeship.
What did you end up doing afterwards? I'm interested in becoming an electrician out of interest, for the practical skills, and the fact it seems there would be work wherever I find myself in the future. I just don't want it to be my final stop necessarily. I'm curious what kind of things the trade can lead too.
I actually switched into IT. My commute to work was pretty bad and my brother and friend had a work from home job, so they put in a good word for me, and here I am. Honestly I got pretty lucky with this one as I don't have any schooling for it, but I do pretty well in interviews so I was able to land the job. That was 5 years ago.
I was able to bullshit my way through the interview saying electrical had a lot of transferable skills like troubleshooting problems, working with work computers, plus I do a lot of PC work on my own time as a hobby (which is true) etc etc.
Got my red seal (Canada) so if I ever want to go back into the trade, I can really easily and would be starting again at journeyman wage.
I think electrician will be one of those jobs that will always be in demand, but you might have to go where the work is. I'm from BC and spent my first year working out in Alberta doing a camp job. After that though, 9 years pretty steady at home until I left it on my own terms
An electrician certification proves that you can do something. A bachelor's degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.
Why is it that you think that an electrician certification is less about checkboxes than a 4-year university degree? Or that the checkboxes are somehow more difficult to game? Most trade schools themselves are a joke, so you have to play the meta game of getting the cert and networking your way to a job. You know, same as your university degree.
The fact is, most trades pay shit, and their big advantage is that you get to start earlier in life, and that you have more opportunities to get overtime pay. That can be a good option for your 20's, especially during a jobs boom (most trades are infamously boom and bust cycles), but by your 30's you will get passed up by most of your degree holding peers (and you'll totally get left in the dust in your 40's and 50's).
It's not good advice to young people. Electricians, plumbers, welders, etc. don't get paid very much on average, and the ones who break out from that low pay are either highly specialized or climb the small business/management ladder (at which point they benefit from concepts taught in school as well).
Where are you that plumbers donāt get paid well? At least where I live, plumbing is the default āI want to make a lot of money and donāt know what to do with my lifeā recommendation. Most trades people I know, on average, make more money than most office people I know, on average. Office jobs may have a higher ceiling but that doesnāt necessarily mean most people are making more. Cut out the top and bottom extremes in pay and trades are definitely the better route to decent pay cheques, at least where I live.
It shows the mean, median, 10th percentile, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and 90th percentile wage, plus the number in each job, by both hour and by year.
For 47-2152, "Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters," we have 465k people making an average of $72k. The 10th/25th/50th/75th/90th percentiles are $44k/$50k/$63k/$85k/$108k. Those numbers are exactly what I'm talking about: a high floor and a very flat trajectory, where the 75th percentile doesn't even double the 25th percentile.
Compare to something like Human Resources Specialist, one of the more unremarkable college-educated office jobs. They're averaging $82k, with $47k/$59k/$76k/$99k/$129k on those percentiles. And they have a clear pathway towards Human Resources manager, where the average is $164k and the spread is $88k/$111k/$149k/$199k/$268k.
Note also that the U.S. employs almost twice as many HR specialists (912,000) as plumbers (465,000) in our job market. And HR Managers are over 200,000 people.
Start digging into different jobs and you can see a lot of the same trends. Non-college educated white collar jobs (secretaries, assistants) don't pay well, and jobs requiring a bit of a certification but not full blown bachelor's degrees (paralegal) are comparable to plumber incomes.
But my general point is clear: the trades have a high floor, very flat trajectories, and a low ceiling. They deal with higher unemployment rates and the jobs are harder on the bodies. The college educated pathways have a huge up front cost (tuition and late entry into the workforce), and take up to a decade to actually catch up. But most of us work 30-50 year careers, so a 10-year break even point is actually pretty good.
And if you want to work with your hands, the educated blue collar job fields can be super lucrative: field engineers, outdoor researchers, even things like surgeons.
Here too. Our friend's kid went into plumbing, he gets steady well paid work with a company plus under the table jobs at least one per weekend. He's raking it in & happy about it. It is a demanding and often stinky job but very lucrative.
Thereās nothing inherently wrong with a skilled trade.
That said historical opinion on the quality of jobs they offered has lead to lower enrolment. Combined with an aging population has people aging out of the workforce creating demand in the ālabour marketā.
When the underlying reason to pursue any career is capitalisms incentive structure and you can see those wheels grinding it gives the jump on the bandwagon vibe of suggesting a trade the ick.
From personal experience there are two sides of the trades.
Do well entrepreneurs who earn a good living offering services and exploiting labour as any good capitalist does.
Commodified labour who is paid a āfair wageā for their skills but are generally not benefitting from the systemic demand of their skills beyond that.
Itās fair that the hand weāre dealt gives us a choice between a useless degree and a diploma that offers a job
Nobody I knew that went to trade school was ever able to get a job doing that trade. Granted, we all graduated during the 2008 crash, and were in a very economically depressed rural area.
A bachelor's degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.
That really depends on the program. A general studies BA from a correspondence school might not indicate much, but a BS in the focus of a highly specialized university does.
Agree, I am 3 years into a bachelor's degree and like 9 months ago I realised I haven't really developed any meaningful skills. I have no idea what job I even could have anymore. I chose to pursue BBA because at the time it seemed like an easy way to get a decent office job, and at the beginning all the teachers assured that i'd find my specialty during the studies. Turns out, I do not want to see money, count money or think about money, I just want a job where I create something, do something. So after i'm done with this shit, I think I'll try to just get a source of income and work on a game or maybe just go to a trade school later
Additionally these days anyone can cheat and get through college knowing damn near nothing. I think trade schools (i think) usually still require in person testing of the hands on skills.
I donāt envy anyone trying to break into the games industry right now - you graduated at exactly the time all the investment left, layoffs hit, and jobs dried up.
Itās hard enough trying to find positions right now if you have years of experience, let alone as a fresh grad with none.
Me in game dev school right now š„²
Fortunately I have previous experience and while I'm studying for design I've already been a programmer for a number of years. I'll make it but yeah... Applying for jobs won't get me anywhere I'm gonna have to know a guy who knows a guy
Aināt that the truth. Iāve worked in games for about 15 years and almost every job Iāve had has been because I knew someone at that company already.
Not saying regular applications without a referral never work, but the odds against you are astronomical.
Fortunately, the indie scene is still booming. If you went into games because you love it, you still have a fair shot at making something you want and finding an audience.
I got my degree in 2014 at 22, and it still took scores of applications to get even a handful of interviews and one job offer for $17 an hour. I can only imagine what young people deal with today. I know it's only worsened in the last half decade or so.
Yeah.... The early 00s seems to be the last time when just getting any practical degree seemed to be a decent investment. After the 08 recession things seemed to only really bounce back for people with specified graduate degrees.
At this point I would say that it's better to wait to go to school until you know what you want to do, and only if that job requires a specific degree. Anything else just seems to be gambling with loans.
I encouraged my sister to not go to school (against what everyone else in my family told her). Now she's in several thousand dollars worth of debt and has no degree. She wanted to do nursing, but she actually does not enjoy caring for super needy people. It took a couple months of wiping butts in the old folks home for her to flunk out.
She didn't take out a loan, but they take what tax refunds she would get each year.
Unfortunately there are a lot of different types of nurses with varying degrees of education and ability to discharge care. Some of the stuff that nursing assistants and even some LPN have to do is pretty grueling. I think a lot of nursing schools that act almost as certification mills kinda mislead a lot of students on what they're going to be doing.
But overall nursing is a great job if you have the right education, a lot of RN and especially APRN can basically find a job anywhere in the country virtually overnight and make pretty good pay.
If she is still interested in nursing, I would suggest a more traditional education route instead of an LPN school. As an RN or APRN you can pick and choose where you work and with what patient population.
Coming out of grad school in 2024, I had to submit ~300 applications to get 4 interviews and 2 offers for engineering roles. From what I hear, it's gotten even worse since then- companies are posting fake positions to look busy even in the middle of hiring freezes and ai bullshit has infected the recruiting process too.
Edit: reading this back, I feel like it reads as if I'm trying to one-up your job search struggle, which was not my intent. I was just confirming that it has continued to get worse
I graduated into Bush's recession, so I went to get a PhD in education. They pay you a small wage to do research, guaranteed for 5 years in my program. Graduated that into a healthy economy that... old professors weren't willing to retire from. Finally give up after several second place rejections and take a simple adjunct professor job just in time for the pandemic, cutting my classes to a third.
But hey, at least I didn't get that job at NCES; Trump 2.0 royally fucked all those education PhD federal jobs.
the problem with folks and their degrees is they fall into sunk cost fallacy. you have to get a job in your field or you have wasted your entire education. oh and if you can't do that, you have to get another degree in another field to get another job that field.
no, you don't. what you need to do is learn to market your skills to appeal to a broad range of employers, many of whom are looking for skills more than degrees. you may also have to be willing to move, or take on other compromises to find work.
but many folks can't do that because of a sense of pride, arrogance, or stubbornness. they'd rather work shitty low wage jobs 'in their field' and be forever fucked, than like, try something different. and they view those of us who chose that path as 'traitors' or something. it's totally absurd and is entire a problem of not being willing to give up 'the dream' and all the emotional expectation tied to it.
i'm glad i quit my PhD and tried something different with my life. higher education has distorted itself into a bureaucratic ponzi scheme run by petty people.
i won't even get into the stupidity of 'useful' vs 'useless' degree nonsense that so many mostly use as a way to punch other people who had different courses of study than they did, despite the fact generally higher education kind of teaches most students the same skillsets, but then again, the students are go out of their way to avoid learning those skills and part of how they justify that is by claiming such skills are worthless,
such a stupidly vicious circle of stupidity and laziness. that influences and idiots also exploit by defaming higher education as a whole based on loud cohort of people who choose to be helpless and blame their uni for not getting them a job they thought they deserved.
That's a fairly broad take that didn't really apply to me. I wanted to impact education policy in the US because I noticed how decrepit it was. I was denied that opportunity but managed to get some top tier data analytic skills through the process that I could capitalize on if I was willing to work in the private sector (such as health insurance or financial industry predictive models). There is still massive demand for those skills.
But I don't do that, not because of sunk cost but because I don't want to contribute to systems I find immoral. I took a job in a Psychology department, which isn't my field, since it lets me teach while taking care of my children.
You are right, though, the research field has some serious issues that need to be resolved. There has been some push for open source materials that people can contribute to, but given the current state of affairs globally, it's not something people can really deal with right now.
That said, a PhD in any research profession is a passion project. You don't do it for money, but for intellectual curiosity or some other reason. Towards that end, they should be stubborn -- they're already rejecting the idea that education is a means towards profit.
Unfortunately, that also means most PhDs are already wealthy going into it (especially those who can actually afford to finish) which means, at least in education and politics, those perspectives dominate the field. It's a real problem when they don't understand how 99% of the rest of us live.
Out of curiosity, which field did you need to leave? Each has their own problems.
This is me but I'm in my 40s with over 25 years experience in my field. My ex left me hi and dry when she left me and I can't find a job despite my applying anywhere and everywhere that might pay more than minimum wage. I've still got my own place, but the shame I feel having to ask my parents for money is unbearable at times.
I'm currently trying to start my own business, but I still need money to pay bills in the interim. Capitalism is a fucking cancer on society.
Don't look down on trade schools. The trades are a great way to make good money and not likely to be replaced by AI... If I was that age today, I would be very strongly looking at that type of work. Or something in the medical field.
I think there has been a clear pivot towards trade schools in recent years. I recently toured my old high school as part of my 20 year reunion. It is far more focused on the trades now. Back when I was going they got rid of all the shop classes. Now they're back and they have a big focus.
I feel so sad for the younger people. At least companies seem to be hiring again, people are getting cold calls. I told my son not to go to college, he'll just become a debt slave.
My advice would be to find any entry level position at a company that does tuition reimbursement. Call centers often do this so they can hire from within to avoid paying market rates.
I got my career start as a customer service rep and ended up a senior IT engineer, and got my IT degree in the process, of which they covered 2/3. That's why I didn't mind being paid 50% market average.
My second piece of advice is to get your basics at a community college. Substantially lower costs, smaller class sizes, and the exact same classes as a university. Just make sure the desired university accepts the credits, but there's often agreements between universities and near by CCs. If you get your associates, some universities have scholarships for that.
Although if you're interested in IT, certs are a better use of money. A degree shows knowledge of theory, but many certs show technical knowledge.
If you got the degree you can land a basic government job that isn't in a major city. Process permits for 20 an hour in a small town easily. And the smaller more rural towns don't usually require a degree and will consider someone who will just live in town.
And from there you can work you way up way better than any corporate environment.
I don't just mean the admin jobs though. There's some field jobs, especially in water (drinking and waste, which I followed) and food (inspecting restaurants I avoided.) Health departments, for example, are in need of staff across the country, especially after the 2023 culling of covid funding. Public service is retiring fast.
Agreed, I think I sorta group those types of jobs as admin in my head which is inaccurate. Like working in a health department seems administrative, but clearly thereās field work there.
Public service can be hard to break into as well. It often takes months to years to land a local government job.
Definitely can be, though I walked into a rural health department who had paper applications. They didn't use online applications as a screening method. Got the job that month. They were also a weird teamsters union department, and probably wouldn't have hired me if I weren't white. So the mileage definitely varies.
(And yeah I processed paperwork 80% of my time there.)
āHeard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: so far so good... so far so good.ā
Its the effects of the long lasting ageism. We have been indoctrinated to infantilize those that are the most in need of protection - and now when they become legally of age - full competency is expected.
That is what market socialism would be. A Nordic model, but with decentralised planning and ownership in the hands of the workers, rather than the CEOs.
If mechanically inclined, consider FAA Airframe and Powerplant mechanic. You'll never want for work the wages are great and there's contracting opportunities all over the world. Really the worst best part is that the defense and "war" sector of aircraft work does pay the best.
Itās terrifying though. Donāt these people worry what will happen when their parents die? Even if the house is paid off, you still have a lot of monthly expenses.
OTOH, a paid off house is all you need for basic subsistence. If you only have to pay property taxes, insurance, and maintenance, getting a couple of roommates would cover that plus something left over for food and other essentials each month. Not a glamorous existence, but it will keep you off the street.
Remember, every home is a potential revenue stream for its owner.
No alternative than to keep looking for a job. At least evictions take months to years to complete. They're lucky that they have parents to live with currently.
Or the parents are in terrible debt too, or they need to go to a nursing home so you sell the assets they have to cover the costs until they're exhausted. For many there's nothing to inherit.
Yet folks on my Lemmy post said its the best time ever to start a business and everyone can do it. I do not understand how. Even though I have hard work ethic and a ton of ideas. I do not get how it works.
If you really want to know how I can help with some of it. I started a business last year. I am a skilled laborer by training but my business isn't in the same field. The main steps are:
Go to your Secretary of State website
Start your LLC (maybe something else but LLC covers most things for most people)
Get your ein from the IRS website
Use whatever monies you (proprietor) have to buy equipment, advertising, whatever. Save your receipts.
When you file your (personal) taxes deduct everything you spent money on that is common and appropriate for your business.
Get all the money you spent back. Now you have the things you bought plus they money you spent on it.
Try to profit the second year and hopefully not have to use your (personal) money anymore.
Once you get to the point your revenues exceed your costs try not to embezzle from yourself (LLC.) the tax code favors businesses to the point that stealing isn't really necessary.
That's a general idea of how it goes. It cost me $75 I think and took a week for the SoS to approve my filing. I did all of the paperwork on my phone and it took less than an hour total. How to make money from a business is another topic but if you got a good idea or marketable skill don't let the official/legal part put you off.
I have been home brewing for a few years and looked it up out of curiosity. Fucking hell the taxes and regulations are oppressive if I wanted to try selling anything. Then there is distilling that I would probably not even be given permission to do and the vast majority of the cost of your end product is gone to alcohol tax and VAT.
Also all the ingredients I use? Illegal if I wanted to sell any product made with foraged berries. So I couldn't even sell jam.
I was thinking more of a side business than full time. Possibly a semi retirement option if I pay off the mortgage in several decades.
just have wealthy family willing to give you start up capital, and who will give you money when you crash and burn your business.
anything is easy when you use other people's money to do it. including living life. hence why streaming and influencing is such an appealing lifestyle for so many folks.
Have to say, this is an extremely self-defeating attitude.
Yes, you'll have trouble if you want to start a business that requires millions in startup capital or highly specific skills or hard-to-obtain licenses. But immigrants come to this country, often not even knowing the language, and they manage to start up businesses without any family help or advantages.
The key is they focus on businesses with minimal startup costs, or ones where you can start small and reinvest the profits into growing the business. You don't try to open a car factory. You start mowing your neighbor's lawns, possibly even using their mower. Use the money from that that to buy more equipment. Iterate. Pretty soon you're operating a whole lawn care business.
You can search for lists of business types that require little start up capital or licensing. Research those, find something that appeals to you, and give it a go. If it fails, try something else. If everything fails despite your best efforts, at least you can sleep at night knowing you tried your best.
It is more than likely a relatively shitty hard job.
Most shops have a shop time per hour, which lets say it's 60, you would probably make like 20 an hour. But your hours are not time worked, they are what the body that sets the job time. So say you have to replace a water pump, and the job time is 10 hours. If you can do it faster you still make ten hours, but if it's slower you still only make 10 hours.
There are pros and cons to every job of course, but generally speaking they get paid by the job, which can be profitable: if you're quick, know what you need to do, and have what you need to do it.
OR the exact opposite, figuring out what is wrong,
doing a job, and you have to redo it because the parts that you got from the manufacturer are faulty, you still only get paid for one job. Or if that aforementioned water pump actually takes you 20 hours, it would hurt your bottom line.
My highschool autoshop teacher worked at a dealership with the only real exception I've heard about automotive, which is electrical. His shop time and pay was 100 an hour, but he hated that job.
That's dealer mechanics, dealer mechanics don't fix cars, they replace parts, often whole systems at once*, and the manufacturer tells them how long it must take to replace a part and for some marques even which part must be at fault for whatever symptoms. Seriously, factory repair manuals are INFURIATING to read sometimes as a shade-tree mechanic working on my own cars.
Independent dealers and outright third party shops that don't specialize in any particular marque, will often charge you by the actual time taken, and the mechanic will get paid for time spent working. They'll also be better at diagnosing the actual issue because they play by their own experience not a set of rules and might help you save money by replacing only what needs to be replaced.
* Good luck getting your auto transmission transmission solenoids replaced at the dealer. What do you mean 500ā¬ for a set of solenoids? No, if it shifts wrong, the transmission is broken, it's 21915ā¬! And you'll be paying twice as much per hour compared to the actual automatic transmission specialists who will replace the parts that need replacing and might not even drop the transmission. Also what do you mean transmission fluid change? It's lifetime fluid, it'll never go bad!
(variations of this transmission are used in like 20 different marques, GM's 8 speed is also a variation of it, etc, I just used Audi because I could easily check their dealer pricing on a random model's part code for the ZF 8HP and yes, a set of solenoids does cost under a grand even for such a modern transmission, with genuine ZF parts. I don't know what the car manufacturers try to tell people on the 8HP, but for the 6HP most marques said the fluid is lifetime. ZF says it's 5 years or 80 000 km between fluid + filter changes for 6HP. I wonder who knows these transmissions better)
Oh and for the price check to get a transmission part code, I used a model that's depreciated enough that they now cost about 10k.
Probably just that he's already spent 4 years getting a bachelor's degree and only now finds out it's insufficient to land a job and now he has to do more school and cross his fingers that improves his job-seeking situation. (It should, but so should a bachelor's degree.)
Honestly, "what's wrong with a master's degree" is almost as good a question, except that it would likely require going into more debt than trade school would.
Mechanics also have the cost problem. A good mechanic will have to put an amount of money into tools that is comparable to the cost of a university degree. A career mechanic will spend tens of thousands on their tools.
They accumulate over time as you work on different cars (and thus earn money) though, university degree is an upfront cost.
Yes if you want to start a VW dealer, you need like 100k USD worth of VW special tools alone in the US if I remember correctly from some Eric The Car Guy video from 10-15 years ago. If you want to just start an honest shop for honest people, you can probably get started for under 10k in tools and equipment, particularly if you have tools at home from fixing your own cars.
Or you can get a job as a mechanic and your employer should be paying for the tools you use.
Personally, Iām pretty sure society is going to collapse (or at least begin to) within our lifetimes. Having strong knowledge of a practical skill will be priceless. Trade school is the way to go.
Honestly as someone who spent ages getting into Tech and Linux. If I could do it again, Trades school would be my route. Constant work, no AI bullshit and you can run your own business very easily since your in high demand
I keep telling myself I need to get off the computer and get into the garage and do some real shit. I just really enjoy computing in general though, especially learning Linux. The other issue is that "real shit" allllll costs money. Its free for me to learn Linux all day. It costs thousands to to an engine swap. Even building some wood shelves...hundreds of doars in wood and screws. Plus its hard on the body...idk man. I'm glad I'm old so I dont have to think much about future shit. If I were graduating now I'd be ultra depressed.
EVs actually tend to use fewer ECU modules than IC vehicles - even Hybrids are driving a trend towards mechanical and electrical simplicity.
The IC manufacturers are fighting repairability tooth and nail, but the only ones who can afford their new shit are the last people who would embrace being locked-in to dealer repairs.
All that, and the dealerships/service-centers will always require mechanics, as the manufacturers themselves will always prefer to be able to fix and re-sell used cars.
Then it was a single skill I picked up on my undergraduate that landed me a job. From there I just pick up experience where I can and take on responsibilities of higher jobs and then apply to those jobs elsewhere.
It took me 2 years to start making more than 80% of my graduate professors and 7 to make more than all of them.
This sounds like one of those things where for 299.99 you too can discover this one skill. Then you sell a 2 week bootcamp where you teach people that skill and it turns out the skill is just applying to lots of jobs.
USA is a shithole. If op lived in a developed country they would still have healthcare, vacation time, childcare, public transportation, and a better minimum wage.
Classic quarter-life crisis. It'll get easier eventually. The problems will remain, but you'll learn to live with it and to navigate the waters. If you're lucky, you'll even find your way.
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This thread has a lot of people saying things like "don't get a degree" or "get a trade cert" or "work in a different field to get experience" which I feel completely side-steps many issues and the realities that many people face. It's just a fundamentally broken system. The value of degrees fluctuates so much because of a political climate that has the stability of a pane of glass being violently thrown off of a building and a job market that prioritizes either posting ghost jobs to overwork employees to death or outsourcing its candidate search to whoever can guess the most buzzwords in an application.
While volatile is a good way to describe the day to day. It's been trending worse for many years now.
worse for whom?
if you are making 100K or more, you're doing great.
Hard disagree. Tax breaks don't get that low. Nobody making 100k is setting up shell companies and passing on generational wealth. That's food security, a decent vehicle, and enough buying power to get a mortgage on a really cheap house.
It's not nothing, but you're not doing great. You have the buying power of two people making 30k 20 years ago.
My father was able, as a tradesman 35 years ago to buy a house outright, have two cars, new clothes and a vactaion every year.
My 3 bedroom apt was $800 a month in a nice area in the early 2000's
disgaree all you want. the facts are the facts.
bitching that you can't have shell corporations or afford first class plane tickets is very different than not being able to afford food, fuel, or housing.
people who make 100K+ typically come from generational wealth. overwhelmingly. they had educated parents, overwhelmingly, etc.
you're just mad you can't afford a house, cool. i can't afford one either, but I'm not mad about it. i own a condo instead.
i could also easily afford two kids in my condo. but i'm single because every idiot around me thinks you need 5000sq ft home to have two kids, and there is no point in having kdis unless you can take them 1st class to france every summer. but none of that is being poor or struggling, it's being a delusional idiot who has absurd expecations that only the 1% can really afford.
You gave no facts. The facts you manufactured is wrong AF.
Every developer out there who's worked withint 3 hours of a large city is generational wealth?
Get outa here.
the vast majority of people who work in tech came from wealthy households, yes.
they don't believe that, of course. they all think they are poor because their folks only rented a house every two weeks on the beach, and didn't own a beach front home.
every rich asshole thinks they aren't rich, because someone else is richer than them. but if you're parent sincome and your income are over 100K, you're doing better than 90% of other people in the USA. just because you can't see that doesn't make it true.
where i live people make 300-500K a year and are convinced they are poor and struggling and have it worse than migrant farm workers. because at least those migrant farm workers have a house back in mexico. i have heard this bullshit multiple times in the past few years.
You're not even arguing in good faith, welcome to blocked
gets a degree in public health to help humanity
Trump completely ousts public health and replaces it with dodgy supplements
This is how revolutions start. Some smooth talker is going to come along and motivate all these people to do something wonderful or terrible.
My group of buddies always say that if gaming hadnāt become so wildly popular a revolution started by young men would have happened already.
The US is really good at placating the masses with media. Stay distracted, stay oppressed.
Bread and circuses. A concept thousands of years old.
Yeah but the rich forgot to keep paying for the bread and circuses.
Don't worry, gaming is quickly becoming unaffordable to anyone without a serious income stream.
im broke and im gaming on a borderline e-waste pc (which i bought for cheap used) and a steam deck from pre-price hike and buying games off humble bundle and deep discounts on steam
i also have a ps4 pro (which i bought used for next to nothing) from before i moved to this tiny apartment and could do couch gaming
it's possible but you gotta not buy the latest and most expensive games. idk why anyone would do that in the first place tho, theres so many games to play that are just as good and are way cheaper
but they fund the development of those games tho so i dont mind i guess š¤·
Gaming systems are made for the top 10% now. They are fully rejecting regular consumers and focusing entirely on the high end market.
Basically they want to cater the economy to the top 10% and neglect the bottom 90%. This is one reason why everything is so damn expensive. Budget options aren't a thing anymore.
Hahaha ! "We would start a revolution but we're too busy gaming on the couch". What a bunch of losers indeed.
If you look into it at all, America is a really embarrassing place.
I mean, we just started an unprovoked war by bombing a school full of little girls.
If someone has done that to America, there'd already be memorials about it and several random brown countries bombed back to the stone age, but since we did it, it's actually totally cool.
It always has been. Thatās why alternate history is taught.
Uhh, yes. Unironically. Revolutions happen when a sufficient number of people can't afford to game & jack off any more, so their only source of entertainment is to LARP overthrowing the government, which they do so realistically that it actually happens. Open a history book smh.
We canāt even get gamers to stop pre-ordering games from even just the shitty companies. They literally canāt simply go play any of the thousands of other amazing games because theyāre too busy letting themselves get rat-fucked by companies like EA and Ubisoft who actively hate their customers.
4chan and reddit were instrumental in the election of Trump (45). CMV.
Reddit's boner for Ron Paul in 2008 was a proof-of-concept for leveraging social media to astroturf. CMV.
Why do you think ghislane was power-moderating reddit until 2019 and eglin was [redacted] {user has unfortunately died in a vehicle collision and subsequent lithium fire}
Just as soon as the porn stops being so abundant and interesting to occupy all of OOP's free time
Yeah because this guy is totally trying to be a useful member of society with his lounging around all day watching TV.
I bet back in the day people wished Hitler kept jerking off 3 times a day and painting.
While college sure aint the answer to everything, spending your days jerking off and watching TV sure aint the answer either.
Pretty sure wanking doesn't take him all day. Jerking off is not the problem.
1: is your name a reference to the stormlight archives
2: the person self describes their life as jerking and TV watching, don't think OP is being unfair
1: no, what's that?
2: yeah but still. I mean, don't put us all in the same bucket, I jerk off too. OK maybe not 7 times per day. But even then there's time to do stuff. Watching TV is the real issue there.
Character in those books named Adolin Kholin
If you described yourself as only doing anything all day I would say it's probably unhealthy and not the path to success
It can take a surprisingly long amount of time and a lot of energy š
Can confirm a Masters is pointless. Especially when everyone else at your table in the pub has a PhD.
Iām laughing to think what happens when the market is saturated with PhDs.
Will everyone need to be a professor to be competitive?
I wasnāt actually in competition with them at least, as they were all post-docs I know. The masters never did anything for my career in software that starting a year earlier wouldnāt have done better, except that the state paid for my ales.
Why are people talking like being a mechanic is bum work, or like there's a huge overhead cost in being a mechanic, or that you have to go to trade school to be a mechanic, or like mechanic work is going away?
None of these is true.
Mechanics will always have work, usually with overtime, and usually pay is very decent.
No degree required. Certs optional.
Tools are very affordable when you're not buying them all at once.
Lots of room to change specializations.
ICE mechanics are still going to be hugely in demand because the Internal Combustion Engine isn't going anywhere, even if they stop putting them in some/ most automobiles. But there are dozens of other mechanical disciplines, and as long as you know how to (when to) then a wrench, you can always get a job.
A bearing is a bearing, whether it's on a crank shaft, an electric motor, a tail pulley, or a garage door.
do you know any mechanics?
every mechanic I have met hates their life, unless they work for like a really high end place. and those jobs are far and few.
i had family in auto work, electricians, and line workers. they all basically said 'go to college working in the trades is fucking shit.'
working in an office is a lot easier on your body and doesn't leave you with medical problems. my electrician uncle lost one leg in his 50s and then other in his 60s. the mechanics i knew all worked for their dads and were townies we never left where they grew up, etc.
they made decent money, sure, but i would never ever want to trade live with them. i'm in my 40s and healthier than I was in my 20s. money isn't everything.
I... uh... i am a mechanic. I just don't work in a car shop that pays only billable hours. Why would you do that to yourself?
That would be like getting a minimum wage serving job and hoping the tips will be reliable. Ā ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
I never struggle for hours, I have great benefits, non- union, no certs, degrees, or specialization required. I make enough to pay all my bills, invest in retirement, and still have money left over for life afterward. I work with a gang of guys all doing the same. We work in a field where we can go pretty much anywhere and get another job paying about the same.
I'm not sure why the mechanics you have met can't find these jobs, but they have all misinformed you.
i work in IT. it's so easy, just get a six figure job like me.
it's not that the vast majority of positions in the field... are part time contract work that pay shit... and jobs like mine are difficult and rare to find and typically only go to those with tons of experience or elite degrees, like myself. it's not that 22 year olds even struggle to get those shit jobs that get their foot in the door.
or that it took me over a decade of experience and working to get to this wage level... no it's not that.
i also don't understand why 22 year olds don't have 500K in assets and just buy houses instead of renting and living with roommates, it's so easy!
Wow, you have it hard in IT i guess. Maybe you should have looked into being a mechanic.
You don't need a degree to get jobs as a mechanic, so no formal education necessary. You don't have to worry about jobs being hard to find because basically everything that moves has bearings that need to be changed. You don't need to worry about contract work because there are substantial amounts of mechanic jobs that pay hourly and offer tons of overtime.
I'm not sure why it's so offensive to you that plenty of people don't have the experience you heard about from "every mechanic you met."
the average mechanic wage is 50K a year. average IT job wage is 100K a year.
that's not a livable wage unless you live in bumfucksville parts of the USA, and the mechanics that live there are not making 50K, they are making like 30K.
but please tell me how everyone should go be a mechanic and they'll make 150K a year? i guess?
just because you got lucky or did well, doesn't not mean every other person will have the same luck or skill in their career.
you certainly are not educated. you've made that very clear but your insistence ignorance that being a mechanic is 'so easy'.
Wow, for someone so educated, you sure make a lot of odd assumptions.
Perhaps I am more educated than you assume, even if a formal education is not required for my job.
Also, I'm gonna make an assumption now about your education, based on things you've said here... someone as condescendingly smart as yourself and using averages to discuss things like this has certainly taken at least some statistics classes and understands what a "standard deviation" is... and how that might be affected by extremely low paying jobs in one sector, even if those are not the most prominent paying jobs or abundant positions in that sector.
I think the standard deviation of pay for mechanics is much wider than you think, and possibly skewed by other factors than just simple geography.
I'm not saying that all mechanics make IT wages, but i am saying that I didn't have to spend 10 years in school and $150k in debt to compete for a position that I earn 6 figures in. My job is not competitive for positions, they're pretty abundant. Base pay for this position in my area (not a big city) is substantially higher than the national "average." No formal education required.
But I must ask, why u so mad bro? Sounds like you're living the dream life, no need to have an aneurism about other people's money
Basically nobody has 150K in debt form an undergrad degree. They have like 30-40K of debt, which is easy for them to back back over 10 years with when the starting salary is 50-60K and in 10 years they will most likely double that salary.
but keep telling me how everyone should be a mechanic and college is stupid. Please. because anyone who went to college is a dumb loser or something, or i dunno, maybe you are talking about your own poor choices when you were younger? I definitely have met very dumb folks who have 150K in debt from college, who were very mad about it, who also terrible employees and people in general.
A mechanic making over 100K exists, yes, but they are rare, and would be in highly specialized areas and likely late in their careers. There are bicycle mechanics who make over 100K a year, but for every 1 of them, there are about 1000s of them making 30K a year with the top end wage being about 45K after decades of experience. Should I tell folks to go be a bike mechanic because it's a good career path because like .01% of professional race mechanics make good money? Becuase yeah, they have about a 1/10000 change of that career path, and a 99999/10000 change of working 40 hours a week in some crappy bike shop making 20 bucks an hour for the rest of their life.
Oh my life is the dream life. I get mad other very dumb people tell me that I'm the richest bastard in the world, or that i'm a poor piece of shit. of which there a lot of on lemmy. Instead the boring fact that I'm in the 85th percentile of income and the 90th percentile of asset wealth. I even was a landlord for a few years, which you know, makes me capitalist hyper scum.
But i prefer facts, statistics and reality, to emotional reasoning, which makes folks very mad. but they tend to respond to that stuff wtih 'u mad bro? lolz i so smart u dumb because anecdote anecdote anecdote'.
Trade work is admirable work. Never downplay fields that allow overtime. My best salary years are in an industry that allows unlimited OT.
I must be a psycho for thinking people should be paid more rather than work themselves to death.
It's a cold world to live in when people think like this.
Iād rather have the ability to pickup an extra shift when times are tough. I have my friends that are on a strict 40 hour week and when the check doesnāt cut it they are fucked. OT has allowed me a lot of luxuries I otherwise would have had to scrimp and save for.
Meanwhile most people are fucked if their car breaks down. I just pick up an extra shift and the problem goes away.
Thats exactly the point, if you are on a 40h week and that doesnt cut it, something is very wrong. If you say to work extra as a bonus, well maybe. But if you need it to make ends meet it's completely fucked imo.
Iād rather times not be tough, but it seems thatās no longer allowed.
It can be both, can't it?
People should be paid a living wage. If you do more work than is the defined norm you should be paid increasingly more sums of money.
The intent of overtime laws was to encourage companies to hire someone else instead of making someone work 80 hours a week.
A business saying that they'll pay you more if you work more at your discretion doesn't bother me. Even with a perfectly good wage and benefits you're going to have cases where people want a touch more more money. I had a coworker who did contracting jobs to pay for a new deck. He didn't have to, but it kept his budget from getting weird.
I worked 3300 hours a few years back. I was not prepared for what the overtime would do to my taxes. Still brought home more than I ever had before (or since). Also was not prepared what the overtime would do to my personal life or my mind.
Yup two years ago I worked just over 3500 hours. I basically lived at work to help put my wife through college and hold down the fort.
It was very difficult but worth it.
shop rate around me $180/hr now. the mechanics better be making at least a quarter of that. my company only charges half that rate for custom machine building
HAAANK DONT ABBREVIATE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE HAAANK
Mechanic pay is ass these days. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless it's like specialized and unionized.
How much do you think mechanics get paid today?
They make a good living, but they are paid flat rate, and there is no guarantee that there will be steady income. If there's a lul, the mechanic might make $0 in a given week. Also, if for some reason a job takes longer than the billable hours for that job, they are essentially working for free. Of the trades, it's the shittiest one to make good money in imo.
so many bozos on the internet they know what these fields are like, and it shows they know nothing.
folks who post how wonderful it is have survivorship bias. your average mechanic/plumber/electrician isn't making bank, they are making average to below average wage. and the income is not steady, it's sporadic. you might make 100k one year and 60 the next, or spend 2 years with minimal income because construction market or similar is slowing down.
Honestly, if you're in this situation, and you have any interest at all in education, or just think it wouldn't drive you mad, look into substitute teaching. In my area the only requirement to be a substitute is to have any bachelor's degree and to be able to pass a very rigorous background check. (Think fingerprinting.) I'm currently exploring a mid-career transition to K12 teaching, and I'm planning on doing a bunch of substitute teaching in the coming school year. Substitutes make about $260/day in my district. Not amazing money, but it still comes to a solid $30/hr or so. And there's enough demand at least where I'm at that they often have postings go unfilled.
And hell, just getting out of the house and regularly interacting with people will do wonders for your mental health. I wouldn't recommend substitute teaching as a permanent career. But for someone in transition or trying to get started, it's a great option. It's a very useful way of getting past the trap of "I need experience to get the job, but I need the job to get experience." At least in my area, if you've got a bachelor's and a clean criminal record, you can become a substitute.
If I wanted good advice I'd go see a shrink, not a green text forum. Nerd. /s
Greentexts are a lot cheaper though. Kinda like self medicating with alcohol.
Yeah! Drinky-drinky no thinky! Just like dad taught me.
I'd also recommend driving a school bus. $35/hour and subsidized health insurance. You only have the little bastiges for 15 minutes at a time and you don't have to teach them shit. You don't need a bachelor's degree (or even a high school degree) and god DAMN do my coworkers show the results of that.
$260 a day is quite decent
In my area, the average monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment is $1500/month, or $18,000 per year. If you maxed out substitute teaching, teaching every day you could? That would bring in about $45k/year. And the job comes with no health insurance, retirement, or other benefits. On days you don't work, you don't get paid. Full time teaching positions do have benefits and pay better, but those require more extensive licensing.
You could earn a subsistence living substituting where I'm located, especially if you got roommates. But it's not a long-term viable career if you want to have any hope of home ownership, retirement, etc. A great option for those in transition, but not a career.
I was going to say lol, that's double the average wage in my city
It's a maximum $45k/year job that offers no health insurance, retirement, or paid leave. Sure it's $260 per day, but that is only for the school days that you work. Considering the number of days in the school year, and the reality that you won't be able to find a position every day? If you max it out and sub as much as you can, you're talking about $45k/year with zero benefits.
Not a bad gig if you're on your parent's or spouse's health insurance. But if you try and work that your whole career, you can forget about ever being a home owner or retiring. Starter homes here go for $400k.
Great option for those in transition. But there's a reason I call it decent, but hardly amazing.
Still not awful for my area, with a median income of 47k. But to be fair my area is poor as shit.
And I imagine that subs in your area probably get paid proportionally less. Though maybe not.
Looking into it, substitute teachers in my area make from 40-50k on average, so really not far off. Considering many jobs in my area already don't provide health insurance, it's really not the worst option for people specifically in my area. I'm sure this is by far the exception of course, just thought it was interesting.
Although TBF it probably isn't an every day kind of thing.
Me too brotha, me tooā¦crank that hog for me one time please o7
To be fair I was like that when I was 23 a long ass time ago, too...
The only 23 year olds who didn't go through this phase... were the people who had family connections to get them a 100K job after graduation.
rest of us took 6-9 months to find work, often while doing part time stuff to pad or resumes. if you don't have connections getting a job is difficult and takes a lot of work.
we also had degrees from frickin' Harvard. but we had no connections and no idea how the real world worked. I got my first real job 8 months after graduating, after working full time all summer and part time the entire fall. and i was living away from home, off my savings that entire time.
Idk about that. I knew plenty of people who got entry level jobs at Schlumberger or Dell or corporate equivalent, earning $70k+ walking in the door.
If you had top grades and interviewed well, it's possible. But we're talking college grads and maybe one in five or one in ten, depending on your school. It wasn't the "normal" experience. But it wasn't pure nepo shit either.
Spent six months volunteering at a literacy center, which gave me some glowing references and a genuinely good feeling about getting up in the morning in the intermediate time.
Also spent a bunch of time at the gym, which was great once I got back into the dating scene.
First job out of college was a tiny Medical IT company with maybe a dozen employees. Started at $15/hr while they billed me at $80. Spent seven years polishing my resume (should have been out the door at 3, but I was naive and they did up my pay to $35/hr before I'd finally left).
All that is to say, your starting salary isn't forever. Five and ten years of experience counts for a lot.
But staying in the service sector is a dead end. The most dogshit small time IT job is better than carting boxes around, if you want to work in IT. The grungiest nursing job is better than flipping burgers if you want to work in medicine.
Put years on a resume and keep looking for new opportunities. But don't get stuck in the quagmire of retail, unless you actually want to try and climb that career path into management or supply chain or whatever.
And absolutely, stay the fuck out of masters programs. That's for people who have a job lined up, not people looking for work.
Or for people to get at night after they already have a job.
I feel like I'm alone with this one, but if you have options, swallow your pride and take them. It's a paycheck, and can always lead to something better. I took a paycheck job at a retail store and I'm on the management team. Is it something to brag about? God no, it sucks. But my bills are paid and I can advance.
That was my thought reading this. 'I have bills but I choose not to work because the jobs are beneath me' People used to see the schooling as a way to skip entry level work. But now as a society, all it means is that you put money in before time. Its just not that special any more.
20+ years ago I put myself through college in an IT field, went to work in an industrial plant right next to the guys from my highschool, that dropped out to work. They had 3+ years work experience over me, I had to start at the bottom. In the time since then, I have worked in a dozen places, for a variety of wages to support my family. Where I am now is no mistake or act of luck. It takes hard work.
my brother is unemployed for 5 years now. but it's entirely because he's a cunt who won't take a lower paycheck or work for a company he thinks is 'below' him. he has more or less fucked himself because he thinks he should be only be hired for top level positions. the industry he is in also shrank a lot and he refuses to change industries.
Anon was 23 in 2022.
Rest assured, it's much worse now.
So they're like, 60 now?
If you can't get a job in your field with a graduate degree, why does anyone think that if you get a master's, suddenly the jobs will appear?
Usually, you need a lot of less skilled workers, and as you go up in skill, the demand for the numbers of workers goes down. So getting something more advanced/specialized may actually shrink your pool of options.
Plus, people with entry jobs with graduate degrees are more likely to shift jobs because someone is offering a higher skill position with more pay, so entry jobs should become available more frequently. In contrast, highly specialised jobs requiring the masters degree and whatnot will have some quadragenarian holding it as a salaried/tenured employee.
that was me in the 80s, so nothing really changes without a ton of actual luck. and yes i tried mechanic school, and welding school. got nowhere with either one. do have the skills to make and fix my own stuff though, which i wouldn't trade for a desk job
easiest way to get a job is to have daddy hire you at his company or call a friend to get you job at theirs.
and then lecture and look down on folks who are struggled to get jobs because they don't have a daddy like that.
otherwise you're gonna struggle and struggle until you get a lucky break. the average job search is 3-6 months, which mean often it's longer than that. a lot of places will take 1-2 months to hire you from start to finish. my first job took 3 months to hire me from first interview, which was in late oct, and I didn't start until Feb. and of course once I was hired in December, I got multiple interviews and 2 more offers... because that's how life works. after months of nothing.
yeah my daddy was in prison back then. he didnt give that much of a shit about me anyway.
Why does he not say what his bachelor's degree is in? It seems highly relevant
It's not.
what's relevant is his work history and how he is applying for jobs. i hire for my company. lots of people have shitty worthless resumes and letters because they literally don't know how the apply to jobs. and then a chunk of those with recent applications, dont' reply or interview terribly.
but they are 22/23, they don't know this shit and they have to learn it.
we dont' give a fuck what your degree is in, but we expect a demonstration of professional competence and the ability to tell us how your skills would apply to the job. and most people can't do this... they apply with boilerplate language that shows us they didn't read the job description or they resume highligths irrelevant things. copy pasting the same application to every job is the best way to ensure no employee ever looks at it.
and we dont' even get a ton of applications, we're a small company with no clout, we maybe get 30 applications per position, not like 300 or 3000. but typically 90% are trash and we might try to contact/interview 3 people for 1 offer.
we've honestly hired people from shitty no name schools over people with more relevant degrees and from fancy schools... because their application was relevant and in the interview they showed competence and maturity and the ability to process new information. a lot of folks freak out and freeze up and can't answer basic questions, like how their degree/work history is relevant to what we are looking for in an employee, so they don't get hired.
i got hired on the spot basically because during my interview I asked them questions about their security postures and practices, and like their upgrade timelines... which all showed I knew what the fuck I was talking about and had experience doing IT operations. they told me later that out of various other people and previous employees, not a one of them had shown that level of curious and engagement with the job and often they ended up being shitty employees.
a lot of applicants have no idea what your job involves skillwise. company names dont always give a hint, and unless youre a huge conglomerate youre media footprint is miniscule at best.
unless it's like written in the job description, which it almost always is.
but it's true that many candidates, can't frickin' read, or don't bother to.
Truth. This is sadly something you learn after landing your first job, not before.
My eye opening moment was seeing the technical guy at the interview light up when I said I'm open to learning their domain knowledge. I didn't have a degree, but I made up for it by showing interest in the field by doing my own projects, as a hobby. I was the only guy in the department without a degree for a long time.
First job hunt took a while, second and third was basically on the spot, first application sent.
You'd really like to think so.
But a 4.0 GPA will get you a job basically anywhere, because managers assume you're a quick study. Sub-3.0 means they think you're lazy or hard headed. When you're skating near 2.0, you can have a degree in Rocket Science and recruiters will just assume you sucked at it.
Worked at a tech company that was hiring anyone with a 3.5+ from Data Scientists to English Lit majors. Then they just throw everyone into New Hire Training and gave them a coding crash course. The English Lit kids didn't do any worse than the STEM crowd on the tech side. And they were way better at collaboration, documentation, and delivery.
You can always get a job as a prison guard. Sidebar, you get a job that's below you and then start a business on paper that's doing something relevant to your degree field and you hire yourself. Then you put that shit on your resume, wham bam thank you mam, one year later and some interview preparation you got your pick of the litter.
Prison guards make $55/hr, and I still wouldn't give up my $21/hr job to work in a Vitamin D-deprived hellhole full of "customers" who hate you for merely existing.
Triple the pay, and maybe I'd consider it. Prison sucks.
There's a reason they're always hiring
Would rather live in a giant vase than contribute to prison industrial complex.
There's a reason they're always hiring.
I did this to become a programmer. No CS degree, learned to program by working on a personal project (music composition software), formed an LLC and sold the app as shareware back in the day when there was such a thing and people would pay $29.95 (!) for it. Still didn't make nearly enough to live on, got a real job with a resume that listed my own company as my first employment. Wasn't even dishonest about it, listed my role as "sole proprietor". Maybe the people reviewing my resume didn't know what a proprietor was.
TBF this was the '90s when Internet startups were hiring anything with a pulse.
Yeah but this demonstrates exceptional interest, merit, and success.
Good shit, Although it seems you legitimately did something which is better. As always, can't get a job? Hire yourself. Gotta work the system sometimes instead of just giving up. Also yeah soul proprietor doesn't sound as fancy shmancy as CEO. They legit may not have been aware or understood you had the gumption to do something for yourself.
I would add in the modern context for people here to open a static website, have some social media account attached to the business with some content and that will really help with the legitimacy.
My retirement plan is a tent in the park.
Mines a hole in the dirt
I wish I had been born with enough people to play democracy.
Mine is my other kidney.
Mine is as a mime in a mine.
I don't remember ever commenting on 4chan...
It almost feels like my own lifs
The world will always need electricians (and if society collapses you'll have the knowledge to not die when salvaging parts from the clankers that countries sent in after they ran out of human meat for the grinder)
Me too, thanks.
DO NOT BECOME A MECHANIC
Why not?
Maybe don't specialize in internal combustion engines, but... EVs still need repairs even if their predicted lifespan is significantly shorter. Won't need head gasket replacements, but brakes are still brakes, struts are still struts. I suspect if you specialize in high voltage systems, you'll still have a good career ahead of you as a mechanic.
Lack of work is not the issue.
The issue is the customers are morons, the bosses are morons, the dealerships are morons, working under warranty pays bloody half the usual hours, and no matter what happens to a car after it leaves the shop, you will be blamed.
I don't know a single goddamn mechanic that enjoys their job and doesn't work for a really reputable shop. Chances are you will work in a shithole.
And the pay is shit.
Pfff you only have a PhD? You need at least 3 PhDs to apply for a job
Glad I didn't go to uni. Wish I did an apprenticeship sooner.
Welcome Anon!
Signed, A 2006 graduate
I graduated with an IT degree during a major IT downturn and felt the exact same way. Worked restaurant gigs applied for hundreds of jobs and started thinking about moving abroad to find work.
I ended up getting a low level shit paying job as tech support at a tiny company and worked my way up.
You didnāt mention your degree but I advise just starting somewhere with some opportunity to move up.
Network, network network! After my first job I have always gotten jobs by knowing someone who can get me in. Especially now with the bullshit hiring processes you need to know someone on the inside more than ever.
Have sex with dogs on camera to supplement your income. Do it with humans if you don't care about the paycheck, you ethicscel, you. Fuck a goat and get a new grandma, it's in the fine print. Eat bull testicles, lose the lottery until you win. Obviously. These are basic money making strategies of our lord, Jesus Christovich. That boy fucked all the dogs on camera. That's how I know this works.
The education system doesn't provide stats about job demand after going through it. Even rough estimates would be tremendously helpful.
Fun fact Obama made a site that would let you see the average graduate salary compared to the degrees cost. The soulless animals in the GOP shut it down.
Rebranded indentured servitude. You would think educators would be smart enough to not participate in this exploitation of the workingclass.
I guess the smart people aren't in charge anywhere, not even in the education system.
That's just misdirected. The people who teach and educate, at least from what I've seen (and mind you, I'm from Europe from a country that doesn't have a for-profit university system in place), are quite often just passionate about their topic. Them being part of the same messed up system as you doesn't mean they're the ones to blame.
Anon is a loser and it shows. Instead of doing something with free rent and free time he "jerks off and watches tv". He doesn't even have any responsibilities so what stopping them from picking up and going there the job market is? You can get a low paying good job anywhere around the world just by the virtue of being a westerner. Sure you won't be buying super cars but you'll grow, experience life, do something rather than whine on racist boards like a little bitch.
"just travel the world bro!" wow incredible advice, please write a book
yes instead whine how you have no opportunities with one the most privileged passport in the world. Skill issue, no one can help you at this point if you can't take advantage of all advantages you are given.
what a toxic mindset
Nah so tired of incels and losers ruining the world. Yall need to start taking some responsibility
Why is learning a trade only considered a last resort? Even on lemmy, I got downvoted to shit when I commented that people should focus less on degrees and more on industry certification, to have some actual value they can sell to potential employers. An electrician certification proves that you can do something. A bachelor's degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.
Relying on just degrees that virtually everybody else has is stupid. Anon has nothing that stands out from the soup of zero-experience job seekers.
It's actually quite difficult to get into a well paying trade, all the apprenticeship programs run on nepotism and then you usually still need to go into business for yourself to actually make a living, and they're all absolutely saturated since they started pushing trades on millennials and z twenty years ago. Trades are the same gamble as conventional college anymore. There just aren't any available jobs.
the need for EV automotive mechanics will only grow, id probably do that if I was in the OPs shoes
Because a lot of trades are pretty bad for your health. They require getting in potentially unsafe environments, dealing with substances or byproducts that can lead to cancers or other occupational diseases. They also require a lot more physical work. So of course people would prefer a cushy office job to trawling through crawlspaces lined with asbestos to plug in a light. Not to mention that a lot of trade jobs are not that great paid when starting out, the good pay comes with years of experience and until you get there you have to suffer through all the above. Sure some office jobs don't pay well starting out either but you just sit on your ass in a air conditioned office instead of nailing 2x4s in the hot sun for 8 hours.
People always ask this question but they never consider that there are actual valid considerations that make trade jobs unattractive compared to other jobs.
Edit: Oh also a lot of well paid trade people run their own companies which is an additional stress and a lot of people don't want to deal with that. My father is in trades and he ran his own company and I watched him age 20 years in the span of 5 due to all the stress and physical work he was doing. Running a company, even a small one is no easy job.
The pay part of that equation is dependent on where you are, and what trade you're talking about.
Where I am, trades generally get paid more than any office job you're going to get with just a random bachelors degree. And if you join one of the trade unions, especially one of the higher skilled industrial ones (so like electricians, pipefitters, millwrights, etc, as opposed to general labour or residential construction), your pay will be much higher than entry level office positions, and will likely stay higher than anyone who doesn't get themselves into an upper management type position.
Electricians, pipefitters, and millwrights have really hazardous jobs. Thatās why they get paid so well, directly and indirectly (because it takes a lot of training to do those jobs safely).
Iām not trying to discourage anyone from taking these jobs, but theyāre not risk free.
Define "really hazardous".
What are the rates of workplace injury for trades compared to the rates of people getting long term health effects caused by sedentary work conditions?
Per 100k full time employees, 1.6, 3.1, and 1.8/year versus 0.8/year for electricians, pipefitters, and millwrights, respectively, vs office workers.
ā¦ youāre looking at those backwards, those are all lower rates lol.
Falls are the largest issue with trades and cause the most injuries, and all of the trades you listed are the ones that use heights the least.
None of the ones you listed Even come close to the top 10
A construction flagger is at far higher risk of injury, and that has almost no training as well, the risk is a very small portion of the pay.
So based on those statistics, I will say that those trades are definitely not "really dangerous". Tortilla manufacturering is twice as dangerous at 6.2, and hospital workers were up above 10. Going from 0.8 to 1.6 is like going from laying on your couch to walking down the sidewalk.
When I started in construction 20 years ago minimum wage was $10, but most trades start at $15, this is for a laborer, apprentices got $18
After 4 years I was 33.50 an hour and still had room to move up. My direct supervisor was making $50, but he had a cash bonus to pay for his truck, instead of them giving him one.
Now minimum wage is $15 and most trades start at $21 and hour.
legally the company is supposed to pay apprentices 60% of the lowest paid journeyman, but they can hire people specifically to lower this -.- fourth years get 90%, it goes up each year. It forces a raise after finishing each schooling section.
Trade jobs frequently require buying a lot of the equipment and protective gear. Most of the high pay examples include a lot of overtime, and may be limited when work isn't available. A lot of trades don't have a regular 40 hour work week, if the weather is bad for a week they may not make any money.
It really depends and is a lot more complex of a comparison. Trades are important and I think they should have more stability and require less personal cost, although most of that would be addressed if we had single payer healthcare and UBI.
If youāre buying your own equipment and gear, find a better company. A company is supposed to pay for any and all safety gear, and all equipment should be owned by the company.
The only thing a tradesperson should have to bring to a job is their tools.
Sitting on your arse all day, everyday is equally bad for your health. I'd probably argue even worse, you can't get PPE to help protect you from sedentary working conditions.
Wrist braces, chairs that encourage you to sit upright, risers for your monitor, a standing desk, etc...
You can also choose to be active in your time off, or during breaks or while waiting for something to load. If you work a physically demanding trade, no amount of elective sedentary behavior in your free time will compensate for the damage and strain you're putting your body through at work.
Also, this is all without mentioning the fact that some people have disabilities that prevent them from doing many trades.
Yeah you can. Adequate breaks for eyes, standing desks, under desk elliptical/treadmill, etc... not that most employers will supply or allow it, but it can be overcome.
It's not even close. When I went from 50:50 lab/office to 10:90 lab/office I gained like 12 kg and outgrew all of my pants in a year. Granted a bit of that was stress with my asshole bosses but I believe that just working on my feet a couple of hours versus being sedentary made a massive difference.
Reread my post. You can do things at a desk, in an office, or at home...
Nah, I got the meaning of your post. Standing at the desk, even with a treadmill, is not the same as natural movement. Taking breaks from a physically passive activity is not tge same as being constantly physically active.
You probably weren't burning significantly more calories. What happened is you likely started eating or drinking more calories at your desk where before you were too busy. It's like a thirty minute jog to work off an oreo, it's unlikely you were actually burning that many more calories. But then most people still think exercise and metabolism have a lot of control over your weight when it's almost exclusively how much you're eating and drinking. Nobody is breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
Itās definitely no where close to worse.
Depends on which trade and location you're comparing with. Things vary wildly in the trades.
Name one that is better for your health than (checks notes) ... sitting down.
Locksmithing and similar type trades. Not construction trades. You're on your feet, but you aren't necessarily breaking your body lifting and such.
Yep..... Certain trades are worse for your bones and joints, but not much is going to be worse for your systemic health than sitting for half the day.
As someone who's worked in construction and now works in orthopedics and rehabilitation, I think the biggest issue with a lot of people in trades like residential construction is that they don't really learn how to prioritize their physical health until a lot of the damage is already done. Once you're a bit older you kinda learn that even if carrying that 80lb bag of cement by yourself is faster, it's still better to take the time to grab a dolly or another person. Most of the issues would be solved if we had better regulations.
The effects of sitting on your arse can be mitigated with 30 to 40 minutes of daily vigorous exercise. There are a bunch of studies showing this. It's not remotely the same thing.
Standing desks to transition from aitting to standing and exercising on breaks is the PPE for office work.
It'd be lovely if the US had more requirements for providing better tools for office workers. I've never had a job be willing to fund anything outside of pointing me at a used desk with a 15 year old computer.
I'm not saying that everyone who doesn't get an office job should immediately become a tradie. When you have nothing else to offer, just having some industry certificates is an advantage. Even if the certificate is unrelated to the job. My first job was assembly machine operator in a factory. My boss straight up told me that he hired me because of my Cisco and ECDL certs that I got in high school (for free because Europe).
If you don't get the office job you wanted, you've still opened up some options. Tradie life isn't glamorous, but it pays better than complaining on an internet forum.
And if you do get a job and it doesn't work out, you'll still have something to fall back on.
Of all the working class, they are often worked the hardest.
An electrician certification doesn't mean a whole lot either. Both are just paper. Degrees with work experience and trades with apprentership time hold a little more value, but its still hit and miss.
Where are you that a trade doesnāt require 4 years of schooling and on the job training?
Most places wonāt even let you do the schooling without being indentured and working for a minimum amount either.
They know you need both.
I'm in the US and I never got any formal education in my trade (HVAC-R). Most of the techs here didn't. The few techs we've hired who did go to trade school came out of it with practically no knowledge which couldn't easily be taught on the job in a couple months. It seems like, for HVAC at least, the tradeschool programs teach enough that maybe you could manage some light residential work, but they barely touch on refrigeration, let alone the heavy commercial and industrial refrigeration we often do. When evaluating candidates, a tradeschool cert means less than a year of experience in some sort of maintenance position.
The same seems to be true of many other trades. At least in my state no certs are required or even beneficial to become a licensed plumber or electrician. Those liscenses are all based solely on years of experience. Technically you can become a master electrician solely with an electrical engineering degree and 0 years of experience but if you have that degree then you probably have better jobs available to you.
No certs necessary for locksmithing either.
Australia. And yes, you have to do on the job training, but that doesn't mean anything. The quality of the work experience is highly variable, so you could spend all of it learning, or all of it buying coffee and sweeping floors.
Thatās just how everything works though?
Not every electrician is going to be working on panels, some just wire plugs instead, people specialize and are payed differently depending on the tasks. Very rarely do you find someone who does the entire trade regulary. Theyāre not going to be as good or fast as the ones that specialize, so itās a delicate balance.
Just like every graphic artist may not be being Mona Lisaās, they could be doing mangas or just heads or something.
Not all doctors are cancer specialists, some are just family doctors, thatās literally how every job and training works everywhere.
Do you think that everything you learn with a degree is used while working? Because theyāre taught useless shit too.
My point is that by the time you have the paper, in either case, there is zero reliable proof that you can do either job. Real world work experience (successfully ran a sparky business, or successfully held a job for a few years) counts far more than the paper does.
If you canāt handle the trade, a companyās not going to keep you on, and the next company will look at your apprenticeship record and see your lack of training. From there youāve flunked out.
The system protects itself. So yes if you have a ticket, you can atleast do something in that trade. A degree, IS just a piece of paper. A trade certificate shows you are competent and able to complete tasks. And be able to stick something through to completion (4 years). So yes, that āpaperā holds a lot of information. The person while training also builds up a portfolio that they can use to show to future clients or employers of the work they did. A degree doesnāt allow any of this, or provide any information about the person. Other than they could āaffordā to sit in a class for a few years.
To finish an apprenticeship you need to hold that job for four years dudeā¦ while working on the jobs that entire timeā¦. theyāve met your arbitrary distinction lol.
Your point is, you apparently donāt know how an apprenticeship works.
I agree with you overall - the paper is important and it holds a lot of weight.
There's also a lot of hiring in smaller companies that overlooks certificates. On the job experience is weighted pretty heavily as well in the trades. If you can't handle it, you'll get fired eventually, but companies are happy to employ mediocre trade workers without certs.
You are assuming that the company cares about training, and not just a source of cheap labour. Apprentices are paid barely above minimum wage in Aus, and there are kickbacks to the companies to encourage employing them.
If it worked as you described (which is how it should work), I would absolutely agree with you, but the system in Aus happily churns out some absolute duds. Just like the uni system.
Also, for what its worth, many uni degrees include a year of paid internship, but there are similar issues that allow duds to sail through there as well.
Depends on where you are in the world. Here you have to have a portfolio and working experience among other qualifications before you can take the assessment. You're not an electrician until you're on the register after all that.
I went to electrical school right out of high school and was an electrician for 10 years. Learned a ton of practical skills, can fix just about any household or mechanical issues, and bought my first house 5 years in. Best decision my parents ever encouraged me to do. Would recommend and also not sure why it gets so much flak
It's mostly just that in a lot of places you either need the right last name or be close with someone with the right last name to get an apprenticeship.
Some of the best advice I ever got was "it's not the grades you make, it's the hands you shake"
What did you end up doing afterwards? I'm interested in becoming an electrician out of interest, for the practical skills, and the fact it seems there would be work wherever I find myself in the future. I just don't want it to be my final stop necessarily. I'm curious what kind of things the trade can lead too.
I actually switched into IT. My commute to work was pretty bad and my brother and friend had a work from home job, so they put in a good word for me, and here I am. Honestly I got pretty lucky with this one as I don't have any schooling for it, but I do pretty well in interviews so I was able to land the job. That was 5 years ago.
I was able to bullshit my way through the interview saying electrical had a lot of transferable skills like troubleshooting problems, working with work computers, plus I do a lot of PC work on my own time as a hobby (which is true) etc etc.
Got my red seal (Canada) so if I ever want to go back into the trade, I can really easily and would be starting again at journeyman wage.
I think electrician will be one of those jobs that will always be in demand, but you might have to go where the work is. I'm from BC and spent my first year working out in Alberta doing a camp job. After that though, 9 years pretty steady at home until I left it on my own terms
Why is it that you think that an electrician certification is less about checkboxes than a 4-year university degree? Or that the checkboxes are somehow more difficult to game? Most trade schools themselves are a joke, so you have to play the meta game of getting the cert and networking your way to a job. You know, same as your university degree.
The fact is, most trades pay shit, and their big advantage is that you get to start earlier in life, and that you have more opportunities to get overtime pay. That can be a good option for your 20's, especially during a jobs boom (most trades are infamously boom and bust cycles), but by your 30's you will get passed up by most of your degree holding peers (and you'll totally get left in the dust in your 40's and 50's).
It's not good advice to young people. Electricians, plumbers, welders, etc. don't get paid very much on average, and the ones who break out from that low pay are either highly specialized or climb the small business/management ladder (at which point they benefit from concepts taught in school as well).
Where are you that plumbers donāt get paid well? At least where I live, plumbing is the default āI want to make a lot of money and donāt know what to do with my lifeā recommendation. Most trades people I know, on average, make more money than most office people I know, on average. Office jobs may have a higher ceiling but that doesnāt necessarily mean most people are making more. Cut out the top and bottom extremes in pay and trades are definitely the better route to decent pay cheques, at least where I live.
I'm in the U.S. Here's an interactive, searchable table of U.S. stats for all job codes Note that you can dig around the site by state, as well.
It shows the mean, median, 10th percentile, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and 90th percentile wage, plus the number in each job, by both hour and by year.
For 47-2152, "Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters," we have 465k people making an average of $72k. The 10th/25th/50th/75th/90th percentiles are $44k/$50k/$63k/$85k/$108k. Those numbers are exactly what I'm talking about: a high floor and a very flat trajectory, where the 75th percentile doesn't even double the 25th percentile.
Compare to something like Human Resources Specialist, one of the more unremarkable college-educated office jobs. They're averaging $82k, with $47k/$59k/$76k/$99k/$129k on those percentiles. And they have a clear pathway towards Human Resources manager, where the average is $164k and the spread is $88k/$111k/$149k/$199k/$268k.
Note also that the U.S. employs almost twice as many HR specialists (912,000) as plumbers (465,000) in our job market. And HR Managers are over 200,000 people.
Start digging into different jobs and you can see a lot of the same trends. Non-college educated white collar jobs (secretaries, assistants) don't pay well, and jobs requiring a bit of a certification but not full blown bachelor's degrees (paralegal) are comparable to plumber incomes.
But my general point is clear: the trades have a high floor, very flat trajectories, and a low ceiling. They deal with higher unemployment rates and the jobs are harder on the bodies. The college educated pathways have a huge up front cost (tuition and late entry into the workforce), and take up to a decade to actually catch up. But most of us work 30-50 year careers, so a 10-year break even point is actually pretty good.
And if you want to work with your hands, the educated blue collar job fields can be super lucrative: field engineers, outdoor researchers, even things like surgeons.
Here too. Our friend's kid went into plumbing, he gets steady well paid work with a company plus under the table jobs at least one per weekend. He's raking it in & happy about it. It is a demanding and often stinky job but very lucrative.
Thereās nothing inherently wrong with a skilled trade.
That said historical opinion on the quality of jobs they offered has lead to lower enrolment. Combined with an aging population has people aging out of the workforce creating demand in the ālabour marketā.
When the underlying reason to pursue any career is capitalisms incentive structure and you can see those wheels grinding it gives the jump on the bandwagon vibe of suggesting a trade the ick.
From personal experience there are two sides of the trades.
Do well entrepreneurs who earn a good living offering services and exploiting labour as any good capitalist does.
Commodified labour who is paid a āfair wageā for their skills but are generally not benefitting from the systemic demand of their skills beyond that.
Itās fair that the hand weāre dealt gives us a choice between a useless degree and a diploma that offers a job
Itās also fair that game is bullshit lol
Nobody I knew that went to trade school was ever able to get a job doing that trade. Granted, we all graduated during the 2008 crash, and were in a very economically depressed rural area.
Because it's not even an option for most people.
https://hcs.la/life/story/2025-12-18/the-disappearance-of-young-people-in-trades-and-how-the-education-system-is-responsible/
That really depends on the program. A general studies BA from a correspondence school might not indicate much, but a BS in the focus of a highly specialized university does.
Agree, I am 3 years into a bachelor's degree and like 9 months ago I realised I haven't really developed any meaningful skills. I have no idea what job I even could have anymore. I chose to pursue BBA because at the time it seemed like an easy way to get a decent office job, and at the beginning all the teachers assured that i'd find my specialty during the studies. Turns out, I do not want to see money, count money or think about money, I just want a job where I create something, do something. So after i'm done with this shit, I think I'll try to just get a source of income and work on a game or maybe just go to a trade school later
That's a big sandwich.
Uhh, yea
Fuck, I meant that's an expensive sandwich.
Additionally these days anyone can cheat and get through college knowing damn near nothing. I think trade schools (i think) usually still require in person testing of the hands on skills.
I donāt envy anyone trying to break into the games industry right now - you graduated at exactly the time all the investment left, layoffs hit, and jobs dried up.
Itās hard enough trying to find positions right now if you have years of experience, let alone as a fresh grad with none.
Exactly. Shits fucked, I dont think i deserve the debt im stuck with.
Was ever gaming industry the place to be?
It always seemed that the big companies kept fucking everyone over, not just the devs.
Me in game dev school right now š„² Fortunately I have previous experience and while I'm studying for design I've already been a programmer for a number of years. I'll make it but yeah... Applying for jobs won't get me anywhere I'm gonna have to know a guy who knows a guy
Aināt that the truth. Iāve worked in games for about 15 years and almost every job Iāve had has been because I knew someone at that company already.
Not saying regular applications without a referral never work, but the odds against you are astronomical.
You all happen to have an open position?
Fortunately, the indie scene is still booming. If you went into games because you love it, you still have a fair shot at making something you want and finding an audience.
Anon discovers capitalism and for-profit post-secondary education.
Could be worse. Could be living in China with even more capitalism.
Could be better?
I got my degree in 2014 at 22, and it still took scores of applications to get even a handful of interviews and one job offer for $17 an hour. I can only imagine what young people deal with today. I know it's only worsened in the last half decade or so.
Yeah.... The early 00s seems to be the last time when just getting any practical degree seemed to be a decent investment. After the 08 recession things seemed to only really bounce back for people with specified graduate degrees.
At this point I would say that it's better to wait to go to school until you know what you want to do, and only if that job requires a specific degree. Anything else just seems to be gambling with loans.
I encouraged my sister to not go to school (against what everyone else in my family told her). Now she's in several thousand dollars worth of debt and has no degree. She wanted to do nursing, but she actually does not enjoy caring for super needy people. It took a couple months of wiping butts in the old folks home for her to flunk out.
She didn't take out a loan, but they take what tax refunds she would get each year.
She can be a nurse and have minimal patient care... Like surgery or other out patient areas.
Wiping butts is usually a cna or licenseless role in my experience....but nursing homes are about the worst place to nurse.
Unfortunately there are a lot of different types of nurses with varying degrees of education and ability to discharge care. Some of the stuff that nursing assistants and even some LPN have to do is pretty grueling. I think a lot of nursing schools that act almost as certification mills kinda mislead a lot of students on what they're going to be doing.
But overall nursing is a great job if you have the right education, a lot of RN and especially APRN can basically find a job anywhere in the country virtually overnight and make pretty good pay.
If she is still interested in nursing, I would suggest a more traditional education route instead of an LPN school. As an RN or APRN you can pick and choose where you work and with what patient population.
Coming out of grad school in 2024, I had to submit ~300 applications to get 4 interviews and 2 offers for engineering roles. From what I hear, it's gotten even worse since then- companies are posting fake positions to look busy even in the middle of hiring freezes and ai bullshit has infected the recruiting process too.
Edit: reading this back, I feel like it reads as if I'm trying to one-up your job search struggle, which was not my intent. I was just confirming that it has continued to get worse
We have come to the point where me must accept that it is normal for people to spend their early 20s smoking weed and masturbating
I only did 1 of those and managed to get a house by my late 20s a few years ago.
I did both, quit the weed a long time ago.
To compensate I still crank my hog like it owes me money.
was it ever not normal for people from middle class and upper middle class families to do that?
The social contract has been destroyed. Time to get the pitchforks!
I graduated into Bush's recession, so I went to get a PhD in education. They pay you a small wage to do research, guaranteed for 5 years in my program. Graduated that into a healthy economy that... old professors weren't willing to retire from. Finally give up after several second place rejections and take a simple adjunct professor job just in time for the pandemic, cutting my classes to a third.
But hey, at least I didn't get that job at NCES; Trump 2.0 royally fucked all those education PhD federal jobs.
the problem with folks and their degrees is they fall into sunk cost fallacy. you have to get a job in your field or you have wasted your entire education. oh and if you can't do that, you have to get another degree in another field to get another job that field.
no, you don't. what you need to do is learn to market your skills to appeal to a broad range of employers, many of whom are looking for skills more than degrees. you may also have to be willing to move, or take on other compromises to find work.
but many folks can't do that because of a sense of pride, arrogance, or stubbornness. they'd rather work shitty low wage jobs 'in their field' and be forever fucked, than like, try something different. and they view those of us who chose that path as 'traitors' or something. it's totally absurd and is entire a problem of not being willing to give up 'the dream' and all the emotional expectation tied to it.
i'm glad i quit my PhD and tried something different with my life. higher education has distorted itself into a bureaucratic ponzi scheme run by petty people.
i won't even get into the stupidity of 'useful' vs 'useless' degree nonsense that so many mostly use as a way to punch other people who had different courses of study than they did, despite the fact generally higher education kind of teaches most students the same skillsets, but then again, the students are go out of their way to avoid learning those skills and part of how they justify that is by claiming such skills are worthless,
such a stupidly vicious circle of stupidity and laziness. that influences and idiots also exploit by defaming higher education as a whole based on loud cohort of people who choose to be helpless and blame their uni for not getting them a job they thought they deserved.
That's a fairly broad take that didn't really apply to me. I wanted to impact education policy in the US because I noticed how decrepit it was. I was denied that opportunity but managed to get some top tier data analytic skills through the process that I could capitalize on if I was willing to work in the private sector (such as health insurance or financial industry predictive models). There is still massive demand for those skills.
But I don't do that, not because of sunk cost but because I don't want to contribute to systems I find immoral. I took a job in a Psychology department, which isn't my field, since it lets me teach while taking care of my children.
You are right, though, the research field has some serious issues that need to be resolved. There has been some push for open source materials that people can contribute to, but given the current state of affairs globally, it's not something people can really deal with right now.
That said, a PhD in any research profession is a passion project. You don't do it for money, but for intellectual curiosity or some other reason. Towards that end, they should be stubborn -- they're already rejecting the idea that education is a means towards profit.
Unfortunately, that also means most PhDs are already wealthy going into it (especially those who can actually afford to finish) which means, at least in education and politics, those perspectives dominate the field. It's a real problem when they don't understand how 99% of the rest of us live.
Out of curiosity, which field did you need to leave? Each has their own problems.
This is me but I'm in my 40s with over 25 years experience in my field. My ex left me hi and dry when she left me and I can't find a job despite my applying anywhere and everywhere that might pay more than minimum wage. I've still got my own place, but the shame I feel having to ask my parents for money is unbearable at times.
I'm currently trying to start my own business, but I still need money to pay bills in the interim. Capitalism is a fucking cancer on society.
Don't look down on trade schools. The trades are a great way to make good money and not likely to be replaced by AI... If I was that age today, I would be very strongly looking at that type of work. Or something in the medical field.
You're assuming this exists tho....
https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2026/04/the-death-of-education-the-death-of-vocational-education
I think there has been a clear pivot towards trade schools in recent years. I recently toured my old high school as part of my 20 year reunion. It is far more focused on the trades now. Back when I was going they got rid of all the shop classes. Now they're back and they have a big focus.
I feel so sad for the younger people. At least companies seem to be hiring again, people are getting cold calls. I told my son not to go to college, he'll just become a debt slave.
My advice would be to find any entry level position at a company that does tuition reimbursement. Call centers often do this so they can hire from within to avoid paying market rates.
I got my career start as a customer service rep and ended up a senior IT engineer, and got my IT degree in the process, of which they covered 2/3. That's why I didn't mind being paid 50% market average.
My second piece of advice is to get your basics at a community college. Substantially lower costs, smaller class sizes, and the exact same classes as a university. Just make sure the desired university accepts the credits, but there's often agreements between universities and near by CCs. If you get your associates, some universities have scholarships for that.
Although if you're interested in IT, certs are a better use of money. A degree shows knowledge of theory, but many certs show technical knowledge.
College is not only about a degree it's part of our social culture and you're making your child miss out on that due to fear.
If you got the degree you can land a basic government job that isn't in a major city. Process permits for 20 an hour in a small town easily. And the smaller more rural towns don't usually require a degree and will consider someone who will just live in town.
And from there you can work you way up way better than any corporate environment.
Honestly? You don't need a degree for any of those admin jobs in mid-sized cities either. At least in the US, give or take.
I don't just mean the admin jobs though. There's some field jobs, especially in water (drinking and waste, which I followed) and food (inspecting restaurants I avoided.) Health departments, for example, are in need of staff across the country, especially after the 2023 culling of covid funding. Public service is retiring fast.
Agreed, I think I sorta group those types of jobs as admin in my head which is inaccurate. Like working in a health department seems administrative, but clearly thereās field work there.
Public service can be hard to break into as well. It often takes months to years to land a local government job.
Definitely can be, though I walked into a rural health department who had paper applications. They didn't use online applications as a screening method. Got the job that month. They were also a weird teamsters union department, and probably wouldn't have hired me if I weren't white. So the mileage definitely varies.
(And yeah I processed paperwork 80% of my time there.)
There should be more of a plan for young adults and society than "good luck," if they want it. The fact that it's basically chaos is insane to me.
āHeard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: so far so good... so far so good.ā
The deprivation of basic human needs and the concomitant necessity of serving capital... These are foundations of capitalism.
If your search for being used (ie. "employed") is chaotic and fearful, that's a benefit for those who might want to use (i.e "employ") you.
It's a feature, not a bug.
Its the effects of the long lasting ageism. We have been indoctrinated to infantilize those that are the most in need of protection - and now when they become legally of age - full competency is expected.
That is what market socialism would be. A Nordic model, but with decentralised planning and ownership in the hands of the workers, rather than the CEOs.
If mechanically inclined, consider FAA Airframe and Powerplant mechanic. You'll never want for work the wages are great and there's contracting opportunities all over the world. Really the worst best part is that the defense and "war" sector of aircraft work does pay the best.
I just got my PhD in December and still jobless. I agree with this sentiment.
You just gotta accept a job that's way worse than what you got your PhD for.
\s but not really \s
Itās terrifying though. Donāt these people worry what will happen when their parents die? Even if the house is paid off, you still have a lot of monthly expenses.
OTOH, a paid off house is all you need for basic subsistence. If you only have to pay property taxes, insurance, and maintenance, getting a couple of roommates would cover that plus something left over for food and other essentials each month. Not a glamorous existence, but it will keep you off the street.
Remember, every home is a potential revenue stream for its owner.
Yeah I'm sure it causes lots of worry and stress. What's your point?
This is why there's a homelessness epidemic
No alternative than to keep looking for a job. At least evictions take months to years to complete. They're lucky that they have parents to live with currently.
you will inherent your parents money when they die. most likely.
and if you can't afford the property, you sell it, and live off that money with which you can downsize or rent.
or you can rent out the spare bedrooms
Or the parents are in terrible debt too, or they need to go to a nursing home so you sell the assets they have to cover the costs until they're exhausted. For many there's nothing to inherit.
yeah, so those people better get jobs and start saving. and not repeat the mistakes of their parents.
but if you can live at home after graduation, it's unlikely your folks are in terrible debt.
Yet folks on my Lemmy post said its the best time ever to start a business and everyone can do it. I do not understand how. Even though I have hard work ethic and a ton of ideas. I do not get how it works.
If you really want to know how I can help with some of it. I started a business last year. I am a skilled laborer by training but my business isn't in the same field. The main steps are:
That's a general idea of how it goes. It cost me $75 I think and took a week for the SoS to approve my filing. I did all of the paperwork on my phone and it took less than an hour total. How to make money from a business is another topic but if you got a good idea or marketable skill don't let the official/legal part put you off.
I have been home brewing for a few years and looked it up out of curiosity. Fucking hell the taxes and regulations are oppressive if I wanted to try selling anything. Then there is distilling that I would probably not even be given permission to do and the vast majority of the cost of your end product is gone to alcohol tax and VAT.
Also all the ingredients I use? Illegal if I wanted to sell any product made with foraged berries. So I couldn't even sell jam.
I was thinking more of a side business than full time. Possibly a semi retirement option if I pay off the mortgage in several decades.
You can always start a business. It only takes a little bit of money to setup an LLC or something.
Whether or not that business makes money... Probably best not to talk about that.
it is easy.
just have wealthy family willing to give you start up capital, and who will give you money when you crash and burn your business.
anything is easy when you use other people's money to do it. including living life. hence why streaming and influencing is such an appealing lifestyle for so many folks.
Have to say, this is an extremely self-defeating attitude.
Yes, you'll have trouble if you want to start a business that requires millions in startup capital or highly specific skills or hard-to-obtain licenses. But immigrants come to this country, often not even knowing the language, and they manage to start up businesses without any family help or advantages.
The key is they focus on businesses with minimal startup costs, or ones where you can start small and reinvest the profits into growing the business. You don't try to open a car factory. You start mowing your neighbor's lawns, possibly even using their mower. Use the money from that that to buy more equipment. Iterate. Pretty soon you're operating a whole lawn care business.
You can search for lists of business types that require little start up capital or licensing. Research those, find something that appeals to you, and give it a go. If it fails, try something else. If everything fails despite your best efforts, at least you can sleep at night knowing you tried your best.
What's wrong with being a mechanic?
It is more than likely a relatively shitty hard job.
Most shops have a shop time per hour, which lets say it's 60, you would probably make like 20 an hour. But your hours are not time worked, they are what the body that sets the job time. So say you have to replace a water pump, and the job time is 10 hours. If you can do it faster you still make ten hours, but if it's slower you still only make 10 hours.
There are pros and cons to every job of course, but generally speaking they get paid by the job, which can be profitable: if you're quick, know what you need to do, and have what you need to do it. OR the exact opposite, figuring out what is wrong, doing a job, and you have to redo it because the parts that you got from the manufacturer are faulty, you still only get paid for one job. Or if that aforementioned water pump actually takes you 20 hours, it would hurt your bottom line.
My highschool autoshop teacher worked at a dealership with the only real exception I've heard about automotive, which is electrical. His shop time and pay was 100 an hour, but he hated that job.
That's dealer mechanics, dealer mechanics don't fix cars, they replace parts, often whole systems at once*, and the manufacturer tells them how long it must take to replace a part and for some marques even which part must be at fault for whatever symptoms. Seriously, factory repair manuals are INFURIATING to read sometimes as a shade-tree mechanic working on my own cars.
Independent dealers and outright third party shops that don't specialize in any particular marque, will often charge you by the actual time taken, and the mechanic will get paid for time spent working. They'll also be better at diagnosing the actual issue because they play by their own experience not a set of rules and might help you save money by replacing only what needs to be replaced.
* Good luck getting your auto transmission transmission solenoids replaced at the dealer. What do you mean 500ā¬ for a set of solenoids? No, if it shifts wrong, the transmission is broken, it's 21915ā¬! And you'll be paying twice as much per hour compared to the actual automatic transmission specialists who will replace the parts that need replacing and might not even drop the transmission. Also what do you mean transmission fluid change? It's lifetime fluid, it'll never go bad!
(variations of this transmission are used in like 20 different marques, GM's 8 speed is also a variation of it, etc, I just used Audi because I could easily check their dealer pricing on a random model's part code for the ZF 8HP and yes, a set of solenoids does cost under a grand even for such a modern transmission, with genuine ZF parts. I don't know what the car manufacturers try to tell people on the 8HP, but for the 6HP most marques said the fluid is lifetime. ZF says it's 5 years or 80 000 km between fluid + filter changes for 6HP. I wonder who knows these transmissions better)
Oh and for the price check to get a transmission part code, I used a model that's depreciated enough that they now cost about 10k.
So cut as many corners as you can probably get away with. What a great incentive...
Probably just that he's already spent 4 years getting a bachelor's degree and only now finds out it's insufficient to land a job and now he has to do more school and cross his fingers that improves his job-seeking situation. (It should, but so should a bachelor's degree.)
Honestly, "what's wrong with a master's degree" is almost as good a question, except that it would likely require going into more debt than trade school would.
Mechanics also have the cost problem. A good mechanic will have to put an amount of money into tools that is comparable to the cost of a university degree. A career mechanic will spend tens of thousands on their tools.
They accumulate over time as you work on different cars (and thus earn money) though, university degree is an upfront cost.
Yes if you want to start a VW dealer, you need like 100k USD worth of VW special tools alone in the US if I remember correctly from some Eric The Car Guy video from 10-15 years ago. If you want to just start an honest shop for honest people, you can probably get started for under 10k in tools and equipment, particularly if you have tools at home from fixing your own cars.
Or you can get a job as a mechanic and your employer should be paying for the tools you use.
and then he gets those degrees and finds out those degrees don't get him jobs either.
just having a job these days is you being ahead.
Personally, Iām pretty sure society is going to collapse (or at least begin to) within our lifetimes. Having strong knowledge of a practical skill will be priceless. Trade school is the way to go.
Honestly as someone who spent ages getting into Tech and Linux. If I could do it again, Trades school would be my route. Constant work, no AI bullshit and you can run your own business very easily since your in high demand
I keep telling myself I need to get off the computer and get into the garage and do some real shit. I just really enjoy computing in general though, especially learning Linux. The other issue is that "real shit" allllll costs money. Its free for me to learn Linux all day. It costs thousands to to an engine swap. Even building some wood shelves...hundreds of doars in wood and screws. Plus its hard on the body...idk man. I'm glad I'm old so I dont have to think much about future shit. If I were graduating now I'd be ultra depressed.
If only Anon could find a career jacking off and watching TV.
I think that's called being an influencer.
Porn film quality assurance
/j
Fluffer
Idk if mechanic is a great job with EVs and all the internal tech cars have, but hvac, plumbing, welding, etc will always be in need.
EVs actually tend to use fewer ECU modules than IC vehicles - even Hybrids are driving a trend towards mechanical and electrical simplicity.
The IC manufacturers are fighting repairability tooth and nail, but the only ones who can afford their new shit are the last people who would embrace being locked-in to dealer repairs.
All that, and the dealerships/service-centers will always require mechanics, as the manufacturers themselves will always prefer to be able to fix and re-sell used cars.
2meirl4meirl
Trade school is a good idea. I wish I had the money to go back to school for that. Just pick a trade that's hiring.
I ducked into grad school thinking itād help.
Then it was a single skill I picked up on my undergraduate that landed me a job. From there I just pick up experience where I can and take on responsibilities of higher jobs and then apply to those jobs elsewhere.
It took me 2 years to start making more than 80% of my graduate professors and 7 to make more than all of them.
This sounds like one of those things where for 299.99 you too can discover this one skill. Then you sell a 2 week bootcamp where you teach people that skill and it turns out the skill is just applying to lots of jobs.
The tool is organizing boot camps.
Just in time for the EV revolution. How about drones? I hear they're all the rage.
Yeah mechcanic is a dead job. You want to be an EE or CS degree, cars are rolling spyware with a billion chips now.
However, body work will always exist!!
AiEvDroneCoin is the next big thing.
Even white privilege will run out as the planet continues to be destroyed... at least for non-billionaires...
yup, that's my murican right there. and now get your pitchfork and throw over your billionaire government!!!!!!!!!!
USA is a shithole. If op lived in a developed country they would still have healthcare, vacation time, childcare, public transportation, and a better minimum wage.
I live in Canada, have all of those things, does not change job prospects whatsoever.
And in the US, you wouldn't have any of those things if you don't have a job.
And on top of that, a job doesn't guarantee any of those things either.
Do you want to reject society and become homeless tho?
This is not the topic
They're not wrong though.
USA being a shithole is always the topic.
Classic quarter-life crisis. It'll get easier eventually. The problems will remain, but you'll learn to live with it and to navigate the waters. If you're lucky, you'll even find your way.
He's got a real case of the Mondays doesn't he ?