A common piece of life advice I see is "work in trades" instead of going to college, and while I think there is certainly some value in exploring alternative paths rather than going into debt for a dime-a-dozen degree, I do wonder how the advice of working in trades proliferated. It is career advice that sounds good on paper, but is also not as cut-and-dry as the comments would have you believe.
I'm sure it started from hearing random folks who supposedly work in trades are making great money, but the concept of working in trades becoming pushed more and more by the redpill community seems a bit suspicious to me. When did the sentiment of working in trades start to become more common? Was there a particular person or organization who made it more popular?
I think it is important to understand the origins of "popular" sentiments in order to truly determine whether there is an ulterior motive. For example, the common idea of "there aren't enough people in STEM" isn't really true, it's just a claim made by industries to pressure Congress into allowing them to import more cheap labor.
Could there potentially be a larger interest pushing the idea of working in trades as being a lucrative career path? Perhaps it is far-fetched to assume that there are greater forces at play who have an interest in convincing people to work in trades, but trades play a crucial role in maintaining a functional society, and without these people, the current status quo would fall apart. Glorifying trades would upset the status quo of "intellectualism," but appealing to male pride and honor and appealing to the men who see the futility of modern society is a viable means of ensuring that men remain working for a system that thinks lesser of them.
I'm not saying that working in trades is bad or that going to college is better. Working in trades is very admirable, but it is also important to be mindful that there is no surefire pathway to wealth or a fulfilling life. Neither STEM or trades may be the gateway to success that is pushed on the internet, and it is important to consider the path you take based on the circumstances you have been given.
Speaking as someone who has proliferated this advice, I can say a lot of it is disgruntled college grads who see the cost-benefit of a trade education compared to college. Most of my generation was sold the "just go to college bro! don't worry about a job, your degree will take care of that" horseshit.
Jobs that need a college degree are either highly specialized like Doctors, Engineers, Lawyers, or highly incestuous like Teachers. Everything else (history, philosophy, political science, liberal arts, music, theatre, and even most sciences) should be viewed as a fun thing to study, not a career developing endeavor. Contrast this with trades, where literally everything is a career-developing endeavor.
I know I could buy a house with the money I sank into college, and while I did end up having a career related to my degree (Computer Science), The skills I apply in my job can be taught in half the time I spent in college with a third of the tuition. I don't use any of the stuff I learned in macro economics, psychology, chemistry, or even the 4 levels of calculus I completed. It was all generalized fluff and hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted.
Give me the tuition I spent and 10 motivated highschool grads, and I can bring them up to my level in 2 years. That's what trade schools do.
I don't know how much you've interacted with people in other engineering disciplines, but my experience as a fellow CS guy who has is we're among the most "trade-like" engineering disciplines. Especially among the older guys who tend to be a bit biased against advanced degrees or degrees from schools that are very theory-focused.
My buddy who does computational fluid dynamics for spacecraft has a very different view on university education and degrees than I do.
But you're right that university focused on the wrong stuff. I've used Calculus twice in my career and Calc III once. I learned all this math that was 1000x more complex than I nee for a job, but what I would have benefitted from is more experience dealing with systems that are 1000x bigger than the toy projects we worked on in school.
The OS class I took where we had to make a Linux kernel module was among the most practically useful pieces of coursework I did.
My particular area of expertise involves a lot of imaging/image processing and controls/closed loop control systems, but I didn't learn any of that in school.
ding ding ding, this is the Crux of it right here. it has been my experience that you learn almost everything you need on the job, the prior education is just to build a solid foundation. I remember avoiding the graphics classes like the plague because it looked so ridiculously complicated, but I did take classes like machine learning. both of these are advanced classes that definitely help exercise my ability as a programmer and problem solver, but I ended up using neither of them professionally.
we live in a world where we can learn these things on our own given enough motivation and know how, we don't need to pay tens of thousands of dollars for some old fart to draw it on a chalkboard.
This is what I saw a lot of my professors talk about introducing to their students in college, trying to give their students a taste of working in a team, integrating what they write into a larger package, and using provided code that can't be altered to create a solution to the problem presented.
Yeah we did most of that, but it was with toy projects. Then for my first job I was appointed sole maintainer of this 25 KLOC application. The scale of that was so much bigger than anything I'd done in school.
“Everybody needs to go to college” is the lie higher education sold the nation to constantly increase college tuition.
here here. the cost of tuition has risen far above the rate of inflation, and most of that is because of the demand for college thanks to their successful brainwashing that college is just the next step in life after high School.
The federal government getting into the student loan business was the final nail in the coffin.
EDIT: they also dumbed down high school to help push everyone to college. Back in the day, you could be a success in life with just a high school diploma; now they’re purposefully worthless.
About 20 years ago when it became obvious that there would be a shortage.
And now today, there IS a shortage.
You're reading way too much into it, and I'm guessing you're in your mid-late 30's and thus about 15 years older than the intended audience. It's not advice for you, it's advice for people who still have choices to make.
And the circumstances a 20 year old has been given right now is that if they become a plumber or an electrician, they can make bank about ten years faster than their college educated peers.
Tradesmen are more certain of their progression. Basically, their life gets better and they get paid more the longer they work.
Office NPCs are lucky to get cost of living raises.
Yes, building houses in your local community is "breaking your back for globohomo"
I make lawnmower gearboxes for an American company who primarily sells in the US, Canada, and Mexico, working in a shop that has been owned by the same family since it was founded.
I am a slave to globohomo, please send help.
Office NPCs used to get paid better than tradesman with raises and everything. Maybe not all of them but enough. You legit would do better by working in an office. Wages have gone to shit. But the demand for trades has been there enough that their wages are relatively better than office jobs now.
I could be overestimating how much tradesmen keep. Pretty sure they'd make more than 100k after apprenticeship though. You can, of course, work at a place that gives good raises. I have done that. Over the past 3 years if you didn't get a 25% raise you got a pay cut. I think a lot of people got a pay cut. The commies aint' wrong about that.
I'm not the intended audience, at least not anymore, that is true. I think it is important to ask who does the appeal to work in trades really benefit? Opportunities to move out of trades is limited if so desired, and recommending someone to dedicate their life to such a physically demanding career in a society that views trades so poorly is perhaps something that needs to be analyzed further.
The intended audience.
I don't think you understand just how critical the backlog is going to get in the next two decades. There will be electricians making a hundred an hour in 2030 even with no inflation. They'll be making more, with just journeyman training, than most lawyers.
Because you can't build mcmansions without electricians. And in some midwest cities right now it's a six month wait to get one for a new build.
The Canadian government currently has plans to build over a million houses over the next five years; how many lawyers do you figure they'll need :p
As many as the lawyers say they need. I think I saw a turtle in that development zone, so you're going to need to wait for us to figure out how much it's going to cost you to proceed.
Completely wrong.
Consider someone in their 40s who's worked in trades since they were 16 and spent their money at least somewhat responsibly.
Yes, their body may be starting to fail, but that means nothing if they're moving into any sort of office job.
They also have at least one vehicle, probably a house (mostly or completely paid off), and savings.
They understand the needs of employers, how to work in order to acheive results, and usually how to operate a small business.
In what way is this person at any sort of disadvantage compared to the average spoiled brat just out of high school?
I know several people who moved out of blue collar work (not just trades, stuff like trucking as well) with no issue.
Edit: And consider the opposite; have you ever met a desk jockey who decided to get into trades at 40?
I've heard several people express this desire. I hope it works out. Lots of uh talent flooding certain office jobs.
Not precisely. I do know a desk jockey who started a homebuilding company past 40 after having only done amateur work in the mean time. But no, not someone who just up and decided to be an electrician.
If you mean "really wishes he had picked up the trades instead of what he did"? Yeah, that'd be me. But actually do it? No. I'll just stick to farming on the side.
Trades require managers who know the trade. That's a pretty clear path if you ask me.
you don't need to be in your 20s to launch a new career. I would argue the stability of a trade job gives the person more opportunities to shift life trajectories than the student debt-ridden jobless liberal arts grad at the same age.
Someone who doesn't want to see their job sent overseas. You can't do that with electricians, the houses that need to be wired are here, not over there.
Retiring baby boomers are gutting the trades, and a young man just entering the work force now will be able to write their own check in 10 years.
If they can show up on time, every time, and pass a piss test.
I first noticed the "push" probably right after the financial crisis. I think there was a significant push and especially for the next 5 years after for trades among college educated people because many college educated people found their college degrees worthless.
I do not believe there was anything malicious involved in the "push". It's just a lot of young people saw years of schooling wasted. I remember around that time I took a summer job and was working construction. One of the full-time workers had a philosophy degree and I was shocked because I didn't think people with degrees worked in "construction". He told me "what else was he supposed to do with a philosophy degree?"
I'm 35yo and my generation grew up being told by our parents that you pretty much HAD to get a university degree. There was a HUGE push for education in the 00s and 10s but most jobs out there don't actually need a college education at all nor does a college degree actually guarantee a good job.
A lot of people would have been better off just going straight into trades instead of going to college. My generation realized that so they started their own push to suggest people go into trades instead of education.
I am around your age and worked at a Fed Ex facility right after high school. When I was loading trucks I found out my sup was a philosophy major. Being a kid with a big interest in philosophy that jarred me.
I decided to not go to college. It's worked out for me.
Life experience, mostly.
Before I went to school, I spent a summer cleaning up after trades in residential housing to save up money (paid my rent and bills for the first two years).
After I graduated, and got a job in my field, I was making the same as I was before.
I stuck with it for five years and got my wage up maybe 20% beyond that.
I got into a situation where I wasn't working and needed income fast, so I got into roofing (barely a trade, usually not even unionized). I made 25% more than I had been making in my first year roofing than I had with five years of experience and a bachelors degree. And then I got raises. And then I started taking side jobs.
There is literally as much money as you want to make in trades, all you have to do is get it.
There is no conspiracy behind trades. The conspiracy is that everyone can pay to get a magic piece of paper that will allow them to get rich without straining themselves, and that's being pushed by the diploma mills and whoever is making money off student loans.
From the lack of tradesmen.
There are reasons to not do these trades. People aren't dumb.
So, fact is, you have people that have been in the trades trying to get out, and young guys seeing the effort it would take to earn big are dissuaded. Even if the rate is 300 bucks /hr.
Meh, you have to be careful with any sort of overhyped "solution" you find on the internet.
Most of the time, people won't tell you about the downsides to their "perfect solutions", and act like its only positives all the way through. (I'm not knocking on trades mind you, I think its a fine solution for some, but not all)
Come to your own conclusions based on your observations, experiences, and experiences of those you know and can trust, not what some idiot on the internet pushes upon you.
I don't know where it "came" from, but I think some people my age (late 30s/early 40s) who lived through one of the (if not the) first generation of the "everyone must go to college" push made the basic observation once they got a bit older that a lot of their friends spent a lot of money on a degree they never actually used for anything.
Of my close HS friends, I use my degree (CS), the EE uses his degree, and the accountant uses his degree. For everyone else college was effectively a "finishing school". I think my class valedictorian (who went to a pretty good university) ended up selling insurance.
Beyond that very pragmatic observation there's a question of "what kind of world do we want to create?" And there's something to be said for /ourguys/ not all just moving to the Big City to work some office job and instead staying local, building our own people up, and trying to make the place we came from a better one.
Of course that doesn't require working a trade, but it's probably a bit easier to build that sort of local business as, say, an electrician than an engineering firm. But if you can do that with an engineering firm, you probably should.
But I don't think the end goal should be working as (eg.) an electrician your whole life. I think the goal would eventually to work your way up to being the owner. I always liked welding and probably would have done that if the whole "programmer" thing didn't work out, but breathing those toxic fumes every day (even with the ventilation) isn't a healthy thing to do for 40+ years.
Perhaps, but the opposite position I've heard that attending university is somehow the way one enters "elite" circles is equally absurd. If you're near the bottom of the totem pole at some MegaCorp like most people with a degree you aren't "elite", and it doesn't matter how many degrees you have and from which schools.
To be honest it seems more a return to tradition as before the push to enter higher education and incur debt to do so, this was the path most took. Whether you were born into it or found an apprenticeship, most men would learn a trade to master in and they would in turn have apprentices in the future to pass on their knowledge.
It was an effective way to ensure no shortages but thanks to the higher education push, we now have shortages across the board.
The trend comes from - amongst other things - television host Mike Row (Dirty Jobs) and his nonprofit, dating back all the way to 2008. He was also interviewed by Ben Shapiro on the Daily Wire, which probably helped popularize it amongst the 'red pill' community. Mike Row's facebook community is allegedly also rather large.
Usually, when a television host attaches himself to a public cause, the ulterior motive is to advance his own career, but also to curry favor with institutional forces to help guarantee he has a stable television career.
And the institutional forces in question have projected a shortfall in skilled labor since 2008, that keeps on growing. (One side effect is that Ivy League or university/college educated people are fast-tracked into centers of powers, whereas tradespeople are typically powerless (and if white, the punching ball of the virtue signaling elites.)
"Close the border, undo most 20th century business legislation, starve the Welfare Chimera, and deport commies" is a more controversial solution than a Playskool compatible silver bullet. The trades have a market limit, and have their share of Byzantine regulations. People aren't mad enough that there aren't enough viable options to guarantee middle-class income off a single earner for the native-born populace.
Trades is iffy. I am sure that there are great trades, depending on area, company, people involved, etc.. However, I worked for a plumbing company in Seattle that scammed customers, had equipment older than I was that was never cleaned and constantly breaking down and was all kinds of sketchy. Also, all the 24 hour plumbing companies in the greater Seattle metropolitan area are owned by the same 2 brothers, and if they are all of similar quality I would recommend not using any of them.
Likewise, at my current warehouse company I did a stint in transportation and discovered companies have been giving CDLs out like candy. Mexicans, Ukrainians, even some Indians and Africans who can't speak or read English very well driving 20 ton vehicles and ignoring safety rules... if they are even aware of said rules or mentally capable of following them. Sketchy as shit.
Trades had a reputation for being dirty with workers of less than ideal quality and character, which, alongside the progressive belief that each generation will be better off than the previous, is why so many families don't support members going off and joining the trades... well, that and the non stop social striver propaganda to go off and go to university to get a good job.
Haha, I never knew the bros were quite so entrepreneurial. I guess business in the Mushroom Kingdom isn't exactly thriving.
This is a pretty interesting subject because, as you point out, it's heavily romanticized. I have a couple of tree thoughts:
It didn't originate anywhere, it's just an obvious counter-swing from the push for everyone to go to college.
As an adult who has had to hire a couple of tradesmen, what we really need is intelligent people to pursue trades. For decades we've been saying that only dumb people become plumbers/carpenters/painters/etc and it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy - 90% of these people are dumbasses and it's incredibly difficult to find someone to do a job without babysitting them through the whole thing so they don't fuck up or take some huge shortcut.
While it is noble to work in a trade and not something I would discourage, bear in mind that the argument that trades won't be automated will be moot when (multi-)national companies take over the sole trader and the small business owner. Robots with advance mechanics and AI can easily out-perform a human and provide a service critical to trades - 24-hour emergency call outs that a sole trader can not do and costs more money for a small business owner.
The red pill and increasingly now the black pill community - by and large I refer to the self-help gurus - engage in survivorship bias. They only ever see the winners in anything. They don't tell you the many people who failed, whether that's a trade, higher education, bodybuilding, looksmaxxing and so forth. People are sold a dream - quick, easy solutions - and encouraged to join programmes to find solutions to their problems for a monthly fee on a course designed to fail but the provider will also engage in survivorship bias there too - by only showing the winners and not the many losers who "didn't try hard enough" and need to be upsold on a more expensive programme. Survivorship bias can be written as the phrase "history is written by the winners".
For every successful tradesperson, many failed as as more people chase a trade to specialise in, there are only so many customers and so much cash going around, many will fail. That's what you're not being told. It is not the easy, guaranteed money maker people claim it will be for everyone.
I've often adjusted that type of advice to something more like "find something someone is willing to pay for," but I do like to consider trades too because it's forgotten or looked down on in the land of everyone go to college. If you're throwing money at college, make damn sure it's not in some wasted shit like an English degree. I told a friend's kid if he insisted to going to college even with no idea of what he wanted to do, at the very least just get a business degree, because he's going to work for a business and it checks a box for those that require it.
I'm much more anti big university and anti student loans than I am no college at all. I saved a shit ton of money on my degree because I had an unlimited free tuition scholarship to a community college so I took every single thing I could there and transferred it. The university advisors hated it, but I was following the rules and as long as you check all the boxes to get the degree they can't do shit about it. Even if I hadn't had the scholarship the money savings would be immense. I worked full time and paid the tuition myself. It was a six year grind. Lived with my parents a lot of that time, so the choices were to go to the college in town or not go at all. There was no going off to the "college experience" where I drank my liver out. I was way too damn busy anyway.
What did it get though? Well I got an engineering degree that was paid for the day it was awarded to me. That's really what I think the end goal should be. If you aren't going to one of a few specialized things like doctor or lawyer where you need an advanced degree and are all but guaranteed a big payday, don't even consider anything other than the goal of a paid off paper with whatever degree or qualification the day you are doing. Can't do that? Go slower. There was zero chance of me drowning in debt from my degree and can't get hired because, well, I didn't owe anything for it. I bought a house at age 25 instead. That small cheap house turned into a check to me for a bit over $60k 6 years later when I sold it and bought something else. The degree bought me a foot in a door. I don't really use it that much. I think that's common though.
Trades let you get away from women. That is the major benefit.
nobody needs a diversity coordinator.
everyone needs a plumber.
Stolen from a Youtube comment on this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPekVVXu3oA&t=664s :
I’m 65, a metallurgist by trade, and I work in industrial sales. I live in Kansas (far from being a progressive state) after fleeing liberal “Moscow on the River” (Minneapolis, MN) years ago. Many of my customers frequently complain to me that “nobody wants to work”, “they can’t find workers”, and that “young men aren’t stepping up to the plate”, especially with blue collar trades and as blue collar workers. Two issues come to mind here.
After the 2008 fiscal crisis where you had a ton of unemployed college graduates with huge student debt to repay with no high powered office job waiting for them.
Remember these kids were told their entire lives that education = success, and that working with their hands was beneath them.
Well all of the sudden you had a ton of boomers about to retire from the trades and surging demand from people who no longer worked with their hands...
I am lucky that I am old enough that I was able to get a job in IT than move into software development without a degree. There are tradeoffs. I am no where near as 'mobile' as someone with a degree, but on the flip side, I bought my house at 23 and it has been paid off for years. If I was doing it all over again in this age, I'd probably take the electrian apprenticeship route. Can you still do that? When I was younger you could go to trade school or apprentice to someone directly. Still had to write some tests, but it was better for those who didn't do well in the classroom.