California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
57 comments
·August 23, 2025runsWphotons
The jobs probably aren't disappearing because of AI but because of previous over-hiring and a slowing economy. It seems like a cover story to push people into accepting underemployment.
geremiiah
Kids who used to study electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering or go into finance and accounting, decided all to major in computer science instead, because if you are going to be an office drone, why not be an office drone in the field that everyone is getting 6-figure starting salaries in? Surely the overabundance of graduates in CS played into the current situation.
F7F7F7
CTE/Vocational education leading to underemployment is some straight up Boomer propaganda.
A 18 year old who goes from graduation to the electrical union will make $60k in year one.
Sure, not the total comp package that those in tech covet but have you looked at median income?
kubb
Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
mschild
What does the alternative look like though? Sure tech companies pay engineers well, but there's plenty of other jobs requiring a college degree that don't reach that salary level.
kubb
I didn’t say that there was an alternative. Just that 100k doesn’t make them rich.
globular-toast
Apple, Tesla et al tell you you're not rich, but you can be if you want to be. Learned helplessness.
madaxe_again
Outside of the Bay Area, sure - California is a pretty big place, and trades are in demand all over.
varelse
[dead]
hiAndrewQuinn
Let's run the numbers.
If I were an 18 year old financially savvy person making $100k a year in California, I would probably take home about $70k. About $1k, maybe $2k at the highest would be set aside for rent with roommates because I'm 18 and there's very little upside to me having my own apartment yet.
Groceries here in Finland are more expensive than I remember them ever being in the United States, and so based on my current budget I would set aside about $300 per month for food for myself. Maybe $400 if I wanted to go to restaurants more often. $500 is reasonable too. Over $1000 and you are deluding yourself or need to buy a rice cooker.
I'm still saving about $40,000 per yer, over half of my take home pay, conservatively. I'd consider that really good! What I do with that is my business, but on one extreme, if I threw all of that directly into my retirement fund, at a 7% real rate of return (reasonable given past index fund performance, already adjusted for inflation), I would have roughly $1 million in today's money by the time I'm 65.
But of course that's ignoring the real elephant in the room, which is that wages are famously sticky, and getting paid $100k by 18 is probably the single most surefire way to get paid $1 million by 30. The kinds of things and the kind of person you have to be to pull that off are where that price signal is coming from, and so I take away from this that, as is often the case in finance, these kids are probably not going to have to worry about that much money-wise even if they don't stick to a strictly calibrated plan.
imgabe
I'm not saying an 18 year couldn't easily live on $100k / year. They certainly can, but you do have expenses besides rent and groceries you know.
hiAndrewQuinn
I actually don't, those are the only two expenses my family has. Come to think of it those are the only two expenses I've ever had. I guess if we lived in the countryside we'd need a car, so, three expense categories total.
But alright, gather all of these other miscellaneous expenses up and take out another $10k per year to cover them. You still have $30,000 left if you're paying $2k a month on rent.
kubb
They’ll way to start families, not live with roommates.
idiomat9000
The demographics stats say no. It is not the job of the individual to engage in self destructive life plans because the previous generations have eaten the future and wrapped in nostalgia extruded plans think they can now comand them around like plantation owners cattle.
hiAndrewQuinn
At 18? Who is starting a family at 18 years old in that climate?
Claude Opus's Fermi estimate of the number of 18 year olds, making at least $100,000 a year, in California, with children, to be about 8 people. Not 8 thousand, not 8 hundred. Eight. Single digit. In a state of 40 million people.
vasco
When computers get much better at doing stuff I'd think more people would want to work with computers, this to me seems obvious. There will be even more computers and more people needed to deploy them and operate them. And by the time that is automated, most other jobs that require physical jobs will have robots doing them anyway, so it really is hard for me to understand that as computers get better people predict less people will work with them. Better tool = more of that tool. Paperclip would also say that over a long period of time all of our energy and available space would go to more and more compute. It's hard to think anything else is safer than computer.
solatic
Welding is supposed to be future-proof? At $90+/hour for unionized labor? Don't make me laugh. Look at the work Boston Dynamics has already done with neural networks and tell me that we're not going to see robots doing perfect welds in any space a human could reach, 24/7 around the clock without any need for rest breaks.
https://youtu.be/HYwekersccY?si=p5BZaGOUQJsqd1f_
What's the case for optimism here?
frainfreeze
Arc time is 10-20% of welders workday.
siva7
Blue collar is the only bastion safe from AI. As we office workers lose our jobs we need to retrain
torium
Spoken like someone who's never been inside an assembly line.
nkrisc
I don’t think robots will be replacing a toilet or retrofitting PEX in an old home anytime soon. Though it might be nice for the drywall guys to have robots make the cuts instead of the plumbers.
tails4e
It depends on the blue collar job, but electrician, plumber, roofer, all seem pretty safe from automation for a while at least.
bestouff
Wait for AI-powered robots in the field.
cadamsdotcom
> The cobots have already begun production performing high-volume and repetitive welds, but the technology still lags behind humans in artistic quality and problem-solving ability.
AI reduces the repetitive work humans have to do, freeing up our minds for creative problem solving - and creative problem solving is also amplified by having an AI to dialogue with.
Fraterkes
I’m not from California, and I’m not a teen, but this hasn’t been my experience
bsder
Here's what look like some real numbers: https://ibew11.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Residential-wa...
Those rates are nothing to sneeze at, but the work is often hard work out in the beating sun (not everybody is installing data centers in air conditioning). And the work takes a toll on your body.
Those are certainly not numbers that would make people genuinely qualified for software jobs think once let alone twice.
JumpCrisscross
> the work takes a toll on your body
It doesn’t need to. Not for welding.
bsder
> Not for welding
What? Where? All the welding jobs I have ever known were terrible for your body. Between the exposure to high UV, all the bits of toxic crap that you are breathing/ingesting, and the noise from heavy machinery, it's quite bad. And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal.
My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father. My grandfather died from a weird cancer from all the crap he was exposed to. My father quit working at the mill precisely because it was doing so much damage just by wear and tear. They both made a point to make sure that my job would be based around my brain and not my body.
Electricians, by contrast, at least don't have anywhere near the same level of exposure to toxic crap.
JumpCrisscross
> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father
How do they view modern eye, respiratory and skin protection every welder I’ve seen on an industrial site clad in?
defrost
> My grandfather did welding for Bethlehem Steel as did my father.
A company from 1857 that scarcely advanced it's Health & Safety practices.
> And that's not to mention just the baseline damage from lugging and hauling and hefting heavy pieces of metal.
Exactly - modern metal fabrication workers, fitters, turners, machinists, et al use forklifts, overhead cranes, eye protection, breathing rigs that filter out toxins and cool the face, and essentially work smart .. and that's been my experience since I first TA'd in a mining locomotive shed back in the late 1970s.
You can see examples of this in the heavy industry repair domain here:
colesantiago
Couple this and investing (and having no college debt) and they would be laughing.
Then they can just live off the interest and in 5-10 years think of buying a house instead of renting.
House prices needs to come down and crash though and more housing needs to be built.
globular-toast
"AI" might be the given reason but I feel like this is an expected correction regardless. Ideally people would gravitate towards jobs that match their interests and talents. But our education systems, governments and economies have been pushing more people into thought work even if that's not where their talents lie. This has actually made a lot of the trades very lucrative for the few that remained. Of course, that won't last either, though.
The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
CalRobert
But shortages of necessities are used to ensure that peer competition remains stiff enough to keep us outbidding each other for housing, etc necessitating optimizing for income, necessitating working more hours, for all but a lucky few.
That's good for CS and CE related work. Too many people went there not because they liked programming or engineering but because they wanted to get rich fast.
Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.