High-school shop students attract skilled-trades job offers

Is there Really a difference between welding metal and welding software libraries? Pick the right tool for the job. If you’re wrong, or don’t know how to use your tools / understand the metals, you in for some trouble.

Most programmers think too highly of themselves.

Software projects have the exact same problems as construction jobs, with the main difference liability.

Yeah I would like to do that too but I have no interest in working for $60k for the rest of my life.

"Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck."

My oldest son is 17 years old and graduated one semester early from high school.

He now works full-time as a welder and heavy equipment mechanic with a base rate of $25/hour and will get many, many hours of overtime this summer.

He will easily gross > 70k this year.

Granted, this is in the Bay Area (so add some inflation there) and he has certain physical and interpersonal attributes[1] that make him special ... but this is, indeed, happening and my impression is that it would be repeatable for others like him.

FWIW, he's very proud of himself and we're very proud of him but ... we're also trying to impress upon him that wages - however high - are not a path to wealth and security. Owning things is[2].

[1] He's a big strong guy, projects as aged 20+ and is very outgoing and charismatic.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

You have to take into account, that you start to earn money from a very young age. And you don't start your career with huge student debt. Skilled workers have a huge head start and it's easy to find need jobs because of the demand. If you're smart and good at your job, you can create a decent life for yourself with skilled labor. Especially because all the smart kids seem to do the "smart" thing and go to college, leaving more demand for good laborers in the skilled labor market.

> paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.

Yes, paying dues, both in the sense of putting in the time to learn the trade well, and very likely for a good paying career in the trade, paying union dues. People have been doing this since the rise of professional guilds in the middle ages.

Today's kids can show aptitude, capability, and interest by doing well in shop class. An employer can take that interested teen or tween on at an entry level, add to their skill level, and make a profit on their labor. The worker can protect their labor value through a union, and probably should if only for the side benefits apart from negotiating contract labor rates.

Should they just go to college instead? Sure, if they have that interest, and can get out without a student loan debt bigger than some mortgages.

The difference between compensation in different countries is fascinating. In OZ/NZ tradespeople are the highest earners. For Australia I suspect this is explained at least partially by mining (I know people who earned $600+ per hour 10-15 years ago, and that included free flights in and out, free accommodation etc), and NZ needed to follow because of the ease of moving to Oz. Mining doesn't really explain why plumbers and carpenters earn like crazy as well though.

The quality of work though is extremely poor if I compare what one would expect in e.g. Germany. I guess that's the advantage of the German apprenticeship system where tradespeople get proper training and not take a couple month course at a tafe and then start their own business.

Plumbers make $70k to $200K.

https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/as-tech-job...

You don’t even need to be in the trades to make $70k/year. That’s just about $33/hour, you can make that in a fast food restaurant or grocery store these days on the low rung of management or even just a senior IC in services where I live.

I own Netgate (hat tip to the haters who will comment), the company that does pfsense and tsnr.

I also own Bump It Offroad in Windsor, CO. We do some CNC (plasma table) as well. I pay welders about $70k/year plus benefits, to start. They’re both college drop-outs, but smart and willing to learn.

Though I grew up in the trades, it’s not about “dues” for me, but more work ethic and willingness to learn.

Seriously. Choosing the skilled trade path makes a lot of sense right now if the default option for you is unskilled work, but the job market isn't so tough that one should abandon the option to get paid much more in a much more comfortable field of work.

Related is a certain actor, clearly following his passions, preaching the same nonsense: "give up on your dreams! go into skilled trade and wreck your body for okay pay!"

Part of the "follow your dreams" advice that a lot of people seemed to miss is that "following your dreams" doesn't mean "major in that subject and try to not get Cs", it means obsess over that thing and work so hard at it you're always in the top 1% or higher for that craft. The reason you should chase your dreams is they're the only thing you can reasonably hope to obsess over enough for long enough to have a competitive advantage.

While not all of them are "rich", everyone I know who sincerely followed their passion to the point that other people thought they were a bit crazy are all able to survive, often pretty well, doing something they love.

You assume desk jobs still exist in 10 years?

I have also known young people working in the trades who were all about encouraging others to go into the trades and how much better it was. They all did objectively well for themselves. It is a different life choice that suits people differently.

Neither path is necessarily the correct one for everybody, but the proportion of people going for degrees instead of other paths is too high.

Yep. My boss bitches about her work all the time. What does she complain about specifically? Having to respond to people on slack. Office workers don't know how easy they have it.

> If successful small businesses only exist to get acquired

The average small business does not exist to get acquired. Only a very small number of small businesses are even interesting to private equity.

Is it not also reliant on an affluent customer base that can pay high prices for services? In poorer communities are trade jobs lucrative? Obviously in places like the Bay Area they are VERY lucrative, but is that a sustainable narrative to re-tool the economy around?

are you suggesting that eliminating carried interest would deter private equity from bothering with small businesses, and make the remaining small businesses feel like a more reliable thing for workers and employers to engage in? because they won't get shuttered unceremoniously?

if I'm understanding that correctly, I have to giggle, because there are plenty of ways for institutional money to have lower taxes than ordinary income tax rates. waaaay lower than the carried interest "loophole".

also, to me, loopholes are unintended things that no one person in government or branch of government noticed. like a couple of private letter rulings from the IRS combined with an accounting tweak in a budget appropriations bill. carried interest isn't one of those to me when it was directly passed by congress explicitly and deliberately affirmed multiple times in subsequent legislation.

but I could be misunderstanding your post entirely.

The national average salary is $63,795 [0], so they're making about $4k more. Just because they're not earning 6 figures working in their first tech job doesn't mean that it's bad.

>I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental

I made $10/hr my first job after college while living in a studio by myself in 2011 (and that was with student loan payments!), and I was barely able to get by, so how were you barely able to get by then on almost $70k a year?

[0] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/

$68K/yr is plenty of money for a single person. And that's just an entry level salary, offered to someone in high school - you would have the opportunity to make far more as you gain more experience. By the time you're looking to start a family and buy a house I don't see why that's not a very promising career.

I earned that wage circa 2008 and saved half my salary.

What you say is true, but unaffordable housing is a product of too few homes, and not one of too low wages.

If there aren’t enough homes to go around, home prices will rise to a level that only the wealthier can afford.

Find a spouse with a job.

I have heard complaints that the German system is pretty class-based and forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary. The result is that upper class kids stay upper class, working class kids stay working class.

It's already been offered. The issue is automation remains cost effective because salaries remain relatively high.

$24 an hour for a fabricator out of high school is easily 20-30% higher the salary for a similar role in Germany.

US manufacturing remains competitive industries where a $20-40 an hour salary can be reasonably offered WITHOUT union guarantees. Otherwise the options were offshoring or automation. And for the kind of manufacturing roles that can afford to pay a relatively high salary, a college education is expected.

Skilled Trades increasingly require a college education, because understanding classical mechanics with calculus, being able to script in domain-specific CAD tooling, or understanding how to synthesize a compound does require at least an AP level education.

Doesn't matter because U.S. ruling class doesn't agree.

If you read the threads in /r/construction that come up about this or adjacent topics ("trades are a guaranteed job, better than college") they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.

Personally, my friend is a carpenter and lives with his dad to save money. This is in Seattle so tons of construction and work to go around. He says he wishes he studied computer science in college (has an english degree).

Pay differs a lot from place to place and sub-industry to subindistry. It's not uncommon to see people comment on redding claiming pay for something or another is far lower than I know of people earning in that field. To go by reddit you might conclude programmers make $40k/yr, since thats what they make in Japan or whatnot.

Not to say they they aren't correct here, but you shouldn't put too much stock in it.

Welding itself is also a pretty broad scope-- are you taking on broken trailer hitches or are you talking about underwater welding of pressure vessels? Programming robots to do automated welding? etc.

They are extrapolating the $70k figure:

"When Rios graduates next year, he plans to work as a fabricator at a local equipment maker for nuclear, recycling and other sectors, a job that pays $24 an hour, plus regular overtime and paid vacations."

This sounds like a union job, and the $70k figure sounds like towards the upper end due to hierarchy, so realistically he'll be earning maybe half of that for a couple years first.

I’m curious what the distinction is. I assume that the article isn’t just a complete fabrication, but maybe they highlight the 20 best stories and everything else is meh.

Kinda like saying you should go to code school because you can land a 175k/year entry level job at Google. Technically true.

We don’t Reddit in my household so I can’t respond directly, but there’s nothing strange about going to a welding class, picking the best student and offering them a $24/hr job with a lot of potential overtime. If you can make a clean weld they don’t care where you came from.