To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.
A trade being any job you can do with your own tools and is universally useful to people. So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need. Ideally you could arrive in a new town with only this skill and your tools, and begin to eke out an existence. I favor trades that are also useful to oneself, so the building trades are good because everyone needs shelter-may as well build your own or at least understand what you are buying. Doctor also works as a trade, because the need is so basic and universal.
A profession being anything else, basically, especially if it generally requires an employer (major capital investment) to be a useful activity. Interestingly, being a farmer falls into this category, since it requires land and equipment. Even if you own the land and equipment, you could lose it, and then your livelihood is out of your reach. So that’s a profession, by my narrow practical classification.
I figured with a trade and a profession, young adults are much better prepared to roll with the punches in the inevitable chaos they will confront, and be empowered to walk away from situations that are untenable. The power to walk away is highly underrated.
For myself, I have benefited greatly from my practical upbringing, and am a sophomore journeyman in many trades but my happy place is creating things. Electronics, a little mechanics, and software to breathe life into the soul of a new machine. Fortunately I have been hardcore unemployable by nature for decades, so I have developed the freedom to follow my own path, which is deeply gratifying. But without a strong trades type background this would not have really been possible.
I grew up in a trade. My folks ran a small auto repair business, and as such, I'm more than competent in a lot of automotive related things and a barely competent in a lot of the trades (carpentry, electrical, tile, accounting, taxes, etc). Essentially, anything we needed to get done to make the business run, I did alongside my folks and family.
I'm decidedly out of the trades as an adult.
Mostly, this is because of my folk's parenting in general. I was not good, due to the stresses of said work and business. But I imagine that's true of most small business owners.
But, it's also because the trades are quite hard on the body. I'm fully not kidding here when I say that my jeans were so dirty that they stood up on their own. Again, kid's jeans, and it wasn't every day, but at least twice a week. Heavy machinery like lathes will literally tear your arms off and beat you to death with them. I've grabbed 220V before and my Dad had to break the circuit with a broom handle, leaving quite the bruise on my arms, not to mention the near death of that kind of shock. Don't get me started on car exhaust and brake cleaners.
Auto repair may not be very exemplary of the trades as a whole, but I choose to take showers after work now.
Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, my hearing is shot too. My spouse is always having to say things louder and slower to me. Not a lot of fun for them to do. I also can't smell certain smells; I suppose this is due to the aforementioned brake cleaners (spray acetone really), but am not very sure.
Totally depends on the trade. Concrete foundations, roofing, anything that uses a wheelbarrow, etc. will eventually break you. Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in, but digging post holes or hauling shingles up a ladder is not the same beating as hanging cabinets, or wiring circuit breakers. Just saying there are different kinds of hard.
>Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in
Those trades mostly pay their dues when they are younger and then the next batch of journeymen and apprentices take over that part of the job as they move up into the less physically demanding parts of the job. Even fairly physical jobs like bricklaying, they'll have the older dude doing nothing but slapping the bricks in place, they get carried over to him by one guy, one guy is mixing up the mortar, one guy is unloading the truck, another is touching up the joints, etc. It's one of those things that explains why union jobs have so many extra people too. It's not one dude doing everything, it's 3 guys doing different parts of the job and learning how to do the next part.
For this reason, maybe a handyman / jack-of-all-trades will have less wear and tear on their body? Diversity in tasks could mean a week of concrete followed by a week of cabinets, then a day or two of building a staircase, three hours of adding a new receptacle, and then two days of painting? Although in some ways, a handyman's job might be harder - they should be a quick learner, have good support / contacts in specific trades, and it might require better/more marketing to get customers.
Those are vanishingly small jobs these days in the US at least. Most companies and guys will specialize in electrical or drywall or something as they become faster at it and time is money in the trades. These skilled jobs typically require more than a single truck's worth of equipment to do quickly.
Like, tying rebar is really hard to do by hand, but they make a gun that will do it for you in seconds: https://amsalesinc.com/products/rebar-tying-gun-makita-xrt01... . You can do a whole pad of concrete in an hour that would take you days otherwise. But that gun is thousands of dollars (supply and demand baby). So having a truck of these time saving gadgets for a bunch of job types isn't feasible. Hence the specialization.
Unless you live in a remarkably remote area, rental yards carry pretty much everything you can need. I've even rented $100,000 excavators I needed for a day quite easily, and it eats into the value of your labor maybe 20-30% at worst.
Oh, I very much have a lot of these jobs at the house. It's just that I tend to call a specialist [0] as the handy men around me tend to, well, not really exist anymore. Besides, most of the smaller things that don't require the really tall ladders, I can do myself.
[0] who then never shows up on time and charges too much. But that's a whole nother story about where I live...
but there's something to be said about doing something with your hands and going to bed physically tired...
your other option is mentally drained, potentially depressed, probably anxious - especially if/when something breaks on you
i went with the desk job, yearn for something else.. would rather have become a machinist or welder looking back. do both as hobbies now to clear the head from the desk job
Many of my friends are in the trades (I would be fascinated to know if that's common on HN, my hypothesis is that it is not) and the unspoken thing in a lot of "go into trades" rhetoric is that most trades people either get into management as fast as they can, a small amount start their own business and a share of that small amount are very successful, or a large amount of people trade $$$ for future health problems (not just joints, many of the materials used in trades are awful and many never wear proper PPE). It's important to look at the trades without the veil of blue-collar romanticism; the trades can be lucrative but tradesmen will be very quick to give you the tradeoffs.
Yes, all of this is very easily seen by the BLS statistics about the average/median wages of trades.
For every anecdote of a plumber making $20k/month in a HCOL area, there are probably 3-4 plumbers who are barely pulling $70k/year in M/LCOL and end up having health problems.
For my family it really wan't a trade off. This jobs was the only one we could do to make end meet.
My family is the 'petite bourgeois'(owners that labor alongside their workers[0]) that Marx said were the only people that actually had a choice in the class war and were the breeding grounds for fascism.
We did management too, but labored with the employees all the same. Did we get paid more? Sometimes, but we had to go without pay a lot and pick up other jobs. Still, my sibling and I went to college debt free, none of the employees' kids did that [1].
Karl Marx died 40 years before fascism was invented so I would be surprised if he said anything at all about it. Fascism is just repackaged marxism anyways with more nationalism.
I actually wouldn't be suprised, running your own shop in a trade or in software bootstrap day to day mode has to be remarkable similar. Including consulting gigs to keep yourself afloat.
For sure. I believe that a a person should work towards working more with their mind than their back, long term. A lot of professions are good vehicles towards that goal. But being able to do what you need to, and being able to make ends meet in a worst case scenario are both great sources of strength and significantly reduce your economic fragility.
Yeah, I agree with both your replies here. The certainty that I had when I was starting out in life that I could walk into pretty much any auto shop and have a job in a week, I dunno, I think I took that for granted. In that, I never really thought about it and my profession was more of a choice to me; I always had a backup. I guess a lot of my friends and coworkers really didn't have that sense about themselves, maybe.
The real question, per the WSJ article here, is: How does a kid go about getting this back up? I got it by virtue of birth. But some other kid would have to go seeking it out, at the expense of time they could spend studying or, you know, just being a teenager. I'm not sure that teenage me would have taken the 'learn a trade as a backup plan' route. In fact, I know I would not have done that.
I prefer trades as a backup to a profession, for sure. A trade can give you the runway to put yourself through school or to ramp up your capabilities in other ways, leading to a better long term plan. Getting old Is a bitch, to be sure.
I think that the connectedness of cars (requiring dealer-level tools for some operations, even if available to independents at a cost that’s difficult to recoup) and the prevalence of pre-paid service bundles with new and CPO car sales is moving mechanic higher up the capital intensity (or employer/pool required) scale.
I'm getting increasingly relevant personally as a double-whammy hacker and mechanic towards liberating people and the machines they fucking bought from daddy Chevrolet who doesn't want them to control their own machinery.
It's still possible, even if for some you need to swap the entire engine controller, to take that control back. Ultimately all these damn modules have to eventually switch bare copper conductors to make all the stuff work in the car, and if we have to, we can swap ALL the silicon involved.
I would love some actual right to repair legislation but our government is too occupied undermining people's civil rights and pissing off every other market on the face of the Earth.
I will never ever pay a subscription fee for my fucking heated seats even if I have to bridge the 12V across a big toggle in the dashboard and wire the stupid thing myself. You gotta draw a line somewhere and that's mine. Fuck ALL the way off with subscription gating features in the machine I already bought.
Every industry is feeling the same pressures. Even in "simple" trades the latent cost of running a licensed business is so high that you almost can't be in business yourself or with a couple people, you need to have a dozen guys running around doing gravy work (that nobody else can do, because no license, and that no other licensee will undercut any other on, because they're invested) under your license in order to stay above water in some markets.
There are a lot of things that work for one person or 10 people, but growing from 1-10 is the hard part. Even things like lawn care, as soon as you grow beyond what you can do, the first employee needs a duplicate of all of your truck, trailer, and other equipment, plus they aren't going to work as hard as you do and probably expect to be paid better than you pay yourself.
Sort of?, if you are sufficiently well rounded and can implement solutions from start to finish. It’s sort of Art adjacent, or entrepreneur adjacent. Still, I’d encourage strongly to learn carpentry, as in the rough construction level carpentry for anyone who is likely to focus on anything extremely cerebral. It is empowering to know you can build your own shelter, and construction carpentry tends to be a touching grass type of outdoor activity.
Programming also is kinda iffy as a trade in the “I just got dropped off in the middle of BFE and I need to eat” kind of way. It sort of requires a bunch of fragile situational trimmings that are not really under individual control … so I’ve looked at software as a profession, really. It doesn’t quite pass the doctor test. Not everyone needs a programmer, but everyone needs shelter.
True, but it still, generally, requires a whole lot of other societal components to be in place and functioning in order to generate most of its value. It tends to service the tyranny of needs in a very tangential way, or serves those needs only through the more direct agency of others. In that way it fails my test for a trade, in the same way that being a lawyer does. A trade should serve a universal human need with no intermediary. That’s what makes it especially resilient to chaos, and especially useful to the person with those skills.
It gets close when you incorporate hardware as well. Now you can make tools with a software component, sort of a technical blacksmith, but you are still reliant on a fragile supply chain. Perhaps the technological handyman or tinker is as close as can be achieved inside this scope?
I think “grey area” is the right way to think of carpenters and electricians and plumbers too.
You say that programmers need a lot of societal components but so does every one of those professions. Unless your kids are learning how to harvest and dry their own lumber along with classical carpentry with nothing but wood joints, they will need a massive supply chain for the lumber and fasteners - unless you expect them to hunt down bog iron and bootstrap all of civilization themselves. Same with plumbers who need PVC/copper/solder and a modern sewer/water system or septic tank. Or the electrician who needs copper wire and power infrastructure (or solar panels, which require semiconductor manufacturing). What good is an electrician without the power plants to feed their customers?
I like your approach but I can't help but feel that unless you’re going full apocalyptic prepper, the practical skills are an illusion.
It’s all about the degree of independence. There are a lot of places that you can’t find work as a data scientist, and. Being a data scientist does little to directly solve problems your family might encounter if your career gets eaten by AI or a pandemic. I’m not suggesting working in the trades vs a profession.. by I do advocate competence in a trade in addition to your chosen profession, with some exceptions.
Of course the knee jerk answer is a carpenter, but unless that carpenter knows how to make metal tools from scratch, hand hew a log, and fashion his own nails, I’m not sure how really useful they’d be apart from better physical fitness. A carpenter that buys nails at home depot by the box and sends plywood through a table saw likely isn’t going to have the practical skills to survive on a desert island without the modern supply chain.
Traditional woodworking and blacksmithing like that is now mostly a novelty in the developed world. No one really knows how to make their own tools from scratch which is what it’d take to bootstrap carpentry. The best realistic set of skills would probably be knowledge of how to work with fibers to make rope and gather pitch for adhesive. Then you could make a primitive axe that can do most of the hard work in bringing down and hewing trees.
If a carpenter can’t read a book and understand how to make a structure without metal fasteners, they are not competent in that field. And working with raw logs is also not much of a challenge.
I’m not an especially good carpenter, and I can work with limited tools. A chainsaw and an auger drill would be really nice, especially if I had to make lumber.. but an axe , drawknife , and chisels will do.
That’s like being a programmer that can’t write software without a framework and libraries. The idea is that tools make the job easier and faster, not that you don’t even understand how to do the job, but only how to staple code together. We all start out there, and while we may rarely if ever work that way, we can when it is needed, do something no one has done for us.
Obviously, different trades have different utility if you are talking about the breakdown of society, but I’m not really leaning into that particularly hard, more leaning into the breakdown of one’s plans or expectations, the failure of a company or the evolution of an industry, those kinds of force majure events that one can reasonably expect to have happen during a life lived.
Even so, there is some comfort in knowing that your personal knowledge and value to society is robust and resistant to black swan events, I suppose.
What are the characteristics that are actually useful on a deserted island? Outdoorsy (ideally, skilled in bushcraft), ex-military, able-bodied. On the first two, the programmer wins. On the last one, it's probably a wash. For every obese slob in this field, there's a carpenter whose back is fucked and is dependent on opiates.
Carpentry offers limited applicable skills if they're stranded 1000 miles away from the nearest Home Depot.
Depends on the situation... If the food source is on a nearby deserted island, connected by two small boats that can carry inconvenient numbers of people + food, and for some reason the boats must always be full and you must always take all the food by the end, well, give me an older programmer accustomed to puzzle interviews!
You can sell carpentry work directly to people in your community as an individual, and make a profit on every customer. Programming needs a larger customer base to break even, and you generally won't be selling software to individuals.
You can get started with programming for $15 for a monitor/mouse/keyboard from Goodwill and $50 for a PC off ebay (or $125 for a new N150 minipc, which are insanely powerful). Startup capital costs are negligible next to even (first-world) poverty living costs.
Sure, but how are you going to find customers? Within weeks of beginning carpentry you can make useful products that people will pay for. Even using less than $100 of hand tools (A saw, a chisel, and sanding + polishing can make useful and beautiful kitchen tools.) How long to go from beginner programmer to break-even revenue? Maybe if you're really smart and hit it big, at least six months. For most people closer to 2-6 years.
My answer to this question, having been a victim of this economic crash, is bug bounty programs. Chaos is a ladder. All this outsourcing, layoffs, and AI slop is an opportunity. That Apple AirPlay wormable RCE CVE is an indicator of how bad things have already gotten. It's pathetic how far even Apple has fallen in this race to the bottom.
These companies are running on fumes. They cut to the bone, through the bone, and everything is being held together by a thread.
But security research is really far removed from the skillset of a startup app developer. Realistically, even if you were capable of learning, which most aren't, it'd take longer for you to get up to speed than it would take for the market to improve.
The more relevant answer would be to bootstrap an MVP and pitch it to investors to get funding to scale. There's no piecework model for consumers like "install can lights" or "build a she-shed."
Maybe, but carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, etc all typically have apprenticeship opportunities and its extremely rare to encounter anything in the tech field like this.
Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things, while the tech industry loves to re-invent the wheel frequently.
> its extremely rare to encounter anything in the tech field like this.
That depends on where you are. In the US, it's rare, but our Japanese office actually had a pretty rigorous system for career growth, that involved what is, for lack of a better word, "apprenticeship."
> Additionally, the trades above don't have new tooling that comes out every few years that completely changes things
I wouldn't say that. I know a lot of mechanics, and they have experienced a big change, over the last decade or so.
One of the things about being a mechanic (or appliance repairman), is that you are responsible for maintaining a huge range of stuff; including things that are decades old.
I have a friend that sets up and maintains professional sterile stuff. This is big juju. These aren't little autoclaves, and they incorporate pretty much every trade you can think of, like plumbing, electrical, metalshop, mechanical, etc. Many of these units are huge. They also tend to be run by fairly advanced computers.
These units cost six- or seven-figures, and the customers like to keep them going for as long as possible. I often hear him talking about having to work on a decade-old sterilizer, in the sub-basement of some research lab.
If I’m bored I sometimes freelance as a field repair technician for service contractors. It’s typically opening up a machine I’ve never seen, and finding the combination of mechanical, electronic, and/or software fixes it needs to come back online. It can be a lot of fun, and the pay is not terrible. But you need to understand some analog electronics, strong digital electronics skills, basic programming paradigms, SQL, networking from the physical layer on up through the application layer, and also how to read between the lines on poorly written manuals and find the hidden truth that the various contradictions point to.
I’ve worked on everything from CT scanners to cutting lasers to ATMs, and done more server swaps, PDU replacements, and field upgrades than I care to count. It’s great when I need a break from the sea of bytes, and I get to see an inside view on a lot of cool stuff, and some pretty concerning things going on behind the scenes as well. I could say, I’ve seen some shit.
I’ve watched a 27 year old pentium pro boot up off the arm of Michelin, the sparkle of the token ring LEDs twitching furtively in the twighlight of an abandoned server room, screens blaring static amid a tangle of drooping cables and fallen raceways. Shit still gives me nightmares.
Unless you plan to work for a large tech employer, you can completely ignore the movement of the industry. Most of it is noise that isn't going to give you a productivity boost as an individual.
Setting up websites for people/small businesses? Give them each a virtual host/directory with mod_php if you need some CRUD. No k8s or AWS or react or anything needed. Your client's site is all in a tidy directory you could zip up and give to them if they want (e.g. you're going to move out of the business, or they want to work with someone else). I despise working with PHP, but it's the obvious choice if you were going to be a "trade web programmer" doing small jobs for people.
Writing custom software for someone? Do it with Qt's drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor and deliver it as a .zip or .apk or whatever.
It probably won't be as easy money as a SaaS megacorp, but I'm sure there is plenty of demand for programmers' services out there in the same way that you can find people looking for contractors for home renovations. If you're doing custom work, you can use whatever tools make you productive.
Tradeskill work can have a "quality appraisal" by the customer. A good car shop, a good painter, a good gardener. Code by an individual programmer is more difficult to appraise.
Many of the trades you listed require licenses, apprenticeships, or trade schools. Usually high schools make you choose between a college prep track or vo-tech track, so you can't do both. Also, those the tools for those trades (if going beyond a handyman level) are a significant capital investment.
> So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need.
I've hired all of these trades for my basic needs and I've never seen their licenses. They don't need no stinking license to get lots of residential work around here, just word of mouth that they are competent.
Just because you don't see fhwm, doesn't mean they don't have them or need them. I would bet your state/county requires electricians to have a license, and your mechanic is likely ASE certified.
That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them. I know for a fact that the current mechanic I use (the best I've ever had) is a farmer trying to make ends meet with no formal training. My electrician had a license as a lineman once but is now just supplementing his pension, unlicensed. Etc., etc.
The guy who came out to install a generator is licensed, and he needed one for the inspection, but that's an exception not the rule. The claim was that all you need is the skill to make a living, and around here that's demonstrated daily. Sometimes they don't even have the tools and use mine. Frequently they require cash, and that's standard procedure here.
> That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them.
Ok so in your small rural town, where people take up trades because they’re struggling to make ends meet, and where you have to settle for whoever is available, and where if someone screws you over word of mouth on its own is enough of a deterrent and is easily enforced, you can get by without relying on licenses. As far as giving general advice to young people, the original point still stands that you generally need to jump through some additional hoops to make a living off of many of the trades. Yes there are exceptions but most young people aren’t looking for answers that require you move out to the boonies and where you’re going to be scraping by.
Yeah, the GP's argument seems to be self disproving - the people doing this stuff on the shady side aren't able to make a living on it as they're barely scraping by.
Even in cities like NYC most handymen doing repairs, even in large buildings, are unlicensed. And if they are licensed, it's their employers that actually hold the meaningless paper while they send out unlicensed grunts into the field.
And then you have companies like my old one-- they didn't have a fire protection license, so they hired an old dude to come in once a year for $40k and borrowed his so they can now do sprinkler and standpipe work legally. It's the same idea everywhere, except more fraud is involved in the cities.
No, it might only be an exception that the person didn't break the law and got the inspection. Pretty much any electrical work that would require an electrician requires an inspection by code.
Just because some of the people around you aren't following the law doesn't mean that you can really make a living that way. All it takes is one mistake and you get wiped out because you didn't have insurance and were operating illegally. I've lived in rural areas and people doing stuff as a business without the proper permits is the exception.
In rural areas where people know one another, people like yourself get sniffed out before they reach the ol boys network. If you're known as someone who seems like they would like codes, licensing, and inspections then these opportunities won't even appear to you, which works out well for both parties.
People who trade this way with one another aren't going to want to wipe the other guy out because it is mutually assured destruction.
While I agree with the sentiment, population density tends to make regularization more important. In a smaller community, social proofs are highly effective. Less so as people become more commodified.
Go ahead and hire someone without a license, who cares, but if your livelihood depends on that trade, it’s probably a good idea to get a license, when the alternative is fines or worse.
Its trivial to hire unlicensed folks. Its even more trivial for any insurance company to void warranty case in case of ie electrical fire, flood from work by unlicensed plumbers etc. You do you, not everybody is living in the race-to-the-bottom mode.
Place I live in Europe, it would also be outright illegal. Biggest city or rural, folks here respect their local communities and only get official pros for any serious work.
This is why my house is uninsured and built totally without licenses or code inspection. Fuck paying out to some assholes just so they can void it as soon anything goes wrong.
I could literally rebuild it 3x for the all the bullshit insurance and regulatory costs were it I got inspections, licensing, and insurance.
Most people are incapable of assuming such responsibility as you described.
They've been brainwashed into "safety" since they were 3 years old, so anything outside of that box is literally unthinkable to them. Their mind literally shuts down trying to process it.
So it's workable for a niche group of people but not the majority.
The insane risk aversion in the USA is at least an opportunity.
I also got my land incredibly cheaply that way. No one wanted to take a risk on an unproven plot of land, everybody wants some place where they can already legally get water/power/electric. By doing all the legwork and legal to prove utilities I basically made $30k profit in a year just by passively testing and connecting water/electric/septic at my own risk.
Lol some boomer slumlord would buy it for cash to rent out if nothing else, considering I could sell for 1/3 the price of anything remotely similar and still break even.
Your story doesn't add up. If it's as rural as you say, there's not enough rental market to make it worth while. It will be an even smaller market if it requires a good old boy network to not wipe you out. Many rural areas have plenty of rundown houses that surely would be cheaper than your place if it's in as good a shape as you make it out to be.
Lol they all got bid to infinity during the covid mania, that's why I resorted to building a house myself in the first place -- if buying a rundown built house or even a shitty trailer were cheaper I would have done that in the first place.
I built this place for ~1/3 the price of anything else available because even a completely burnt out husk of a trailer is more expensive than DIY building a house due to the weird dynamics of the housing market that places a gigantic premium on being the guy who takes all the risk of connecting utilities and getting a permitted residential structure.
Your thesis that I can't sell an actual house for the price of all the unmortgagable burned out trailers that sell like hotcakes is interesting but false. I don't expect this dynamic to change much until most of those ~0% mortgages expire or a massive new supply of housing emerges.
You must not be that rural if stuff was being bid up. Run down doesn't mean burnt out. The thesis is that your house is likely unmortgagable/uninsurable if you ignored the permits etc.
But I have a legal permit. And that permit says I don't have to get it inspected, or need or license, or get code compliance checks. I used a rarely used 'loophole' to get that explicitly stated on my permit.
A lot of work gets done outside of that framework, and licensing in many places is not all that onerous. It depends on the location and the field, and there is a difference between the commitment level of learning a trade as a backup and personal development step and getting really serious about making money in that trade.
Yeah, it would be impractical to do them all lol, but you can get set up either by high school graduation or within two years afterward. So you go to college , if desired, at 19 or 20.
As far as the “track” available in high school, I’ve found it trivial to basically ignore it. You can pick and choose, but you may have to demonstrate ability to skip prerequisites, so that means independent study -a critical skill anyway. Also, summer school or community college in the summer can move a student ahead significantly.
Having raised 5 kids under this pattern it hasn’t been problematic or expensive. If the plan is to go to a prestigious university, you will need to do some extra academics or work yourself into a university program to make it obvious that going to a trade school doesn’t define your potential, usually completing a year of community college or participating as a research assistant etc by high school graduation is sufficient.
As far as tools cost, being a mechanic is the pricey one, with basic set of tools around $3000 these days because of the technology component.
But the other trades are not so bad.
If you don’t try to buy all new and vanity brands, you can get set up around $1000. Used tools are generally nearly as good as new ones. If you need advanced tools they are nearly universally available for rent, and often the first time you need to rent a tool, the job you do will pay for you to buy one for next time.
I think most people overvalue the dominant paradigm and pattern copying. It’s fine (even desirable) not to look like the usual applicant as long as your lumps are interesting or signal value to an institution.
$3k seems extremely low unless you're offering only a subset of services. Things like tire machines, alignment racks, and even just a smaller/non-shop air compressor is pricey. If you want to contract at a shop that has those, they typically want an ASE cert too
Being a mechanic is a lot like being a hair stylist. In many cases they're paying for a bay at a shop, and bring their own tools, in exchange for not having to do any of the business operations.
My optometrist wants to retire. Nobody wants to buy the (very successful) business. New graduates (only two took the state boards last year. Two.) want to work regular hours and go home. No interest in running the business, hiring and firing, purchasing and rent and all the rest.
They just want a gig. Do their expert thing and go home.
At the art fair downtown I noticed many of the stall operators are quite old. I quizzed a couple - same answer. They can get a partner in the (kiln, woodshop, metalshop etc) but not in the business side, selling at fairs. Nobody wants to do that.
Even retail - my sister had a chocolate shop. Her employees were business students! But when she wanted to retire, none of them, zero, wanted to take over the business. They wanted to exercise their speciality at some big firm.
The western world of business has changed beyond recognition since I was young.
The problem isn't that no one wants to do it, its that the math doesn't work out.
If you have 6 figures of student loan debt just to get an optometry degree, you don't want to double or triple that to buy an established business. Your interest cost will eat any hope of profit.
For small businesses, its the same issue. A pottery shop or fabrication shop isn't really worth a lot more than a used kiln or set of tools, but I'm guessing that the owners want to be bought out for a lot more than they can sell their old stuff for. There is a serious mismatch going on. At the same time, the work itself is devalued. Fewer people are going to lay out $1k on a handmade dinnerware set from their local ceramics people when they can pay 1/3rd the price from an importer.
>No interest in running the business, hiring and firing, purchasing and rent and all the rest.
Just like everything else these days the middle option is rendered economically useless by cost (time or money or both) of all the overhead and the juice isn't worth the squeeze unless you're employing dozens.
While I get that it's fashionable to peddle it that way because it confirms the HN audience's biases the overwhelming majority of mechanics are paid flat rate same as they would have been 50yr ago.
Renting a bay is the kind of thing a business owner does. Like a gas station with a 2-bay garage will be owned by a landlord who leases it to a tenant business. Perhaps the same or different business than is operating the convieience store.
You are describing being an automotive repair shop owner. A mechanic may work on cars, or they may work on generators, pumps, valves, augers, or any number of other kinds of industrial machinery that services a vast field of critical infrastructure. Most applications for mechanics are on-premise not in a shop… it’s just there are so many cars that we think of automotive mechanics as representing the field.
Oh, you can spend 50k on tools, of course. You can spend as much as you want.
But you don’t need every tool to work on every car.
Plenty of mechanics work with a single toolbox that you can carry by hand.
It will handle 90 percent of the jobs. The one semi-specialty tool you need for the job is a phone call to Napa away.
Before long you have 99 percent of what you will actually do covered. If you look at a mechanics toolset you will find that 20 percent of the tools get 99.9% of the use. A lot, maybe more than half, basically never get used at all.
In many things, a full set consists of perhaps 16-20 sizes, but for many types of tools, there are 3 sizes that get used all the time, and two that get used once or twice a year. The rest not at all.
Also, you can buy a “$10,000” set of tools for around $2000 if you are patient, less if you identify where you need really good tools and where middle of the road will work fine, and don’t let it become a vanity hobby.
Over time, you will likely have a lot invested in tools.. but you don’t need that much to start, unless you are talking about opening a full service shop from scratch, not just being a mechanic.
Yeah, the costs just aren’t that high. I’d say that adding a trade to my children’s accomplishments probably in total added about 3-5k to the cost of their education. In some cases, the educational component of the trade actually earned them money in the process. In the grand scheme of things, the cost is negligible.
That’s only an obstacle if one believes education should be finished by 22-23 years old. Doing another few years of formal education isn’t a huge impediment and is probably pretty beneficial before even considering GP’s main point.
Sure, resource potential is important. But putting all of your eggs in one basket can push you into a corner, especially in the sense of -feeling- cornered. Options, even if they exist primarily in theory, are a force multiplier.
For example;
If you have a “good” job, but it is trending toward a flat trajectory, and you have a set of skills that requires a complex set of circumstances to be employed, it may be too risky to move to a new location simply because the downside is so severe. It can be a 1:4 bet paying 10:1 odds, a bet you definitely should take, but if losing means your family doesn’t eat, you can’t take the risk.
If you know you can find a way to get by even with day labor if things go badly until you can stabilize your situation, you can take those beneficial risks.
It’s a matter of being prepared to roll with the inevitable punches, and being able to make decisions based on the knowledge of that readiness. Being less fragile, even antifragile.
Sure, and optimizing earning potential along with tactical flexibility is arguably the best way to maximize that potential. Having a trade as a backup skill gives you tactical maneuverability that allows you to be a more effective negotiator and to take beneficial risks. Negotiating power alone is worth any costs.
My nephew hates math. So he's not going to college right now. Instead he's going to vo-tech school. Where he takes math.
Anyway, he seemed very interested in being a part of the FBLA and went to the various functions and conventions that the organization had. I encouraged him to keep in the back of his mind that one day he's not going to be young anymore, he's going to be tired of someone else's shit, every person in their mid 50s and over he knows who is in a trade has needed multiple surgeries just to function on a daily basis, and he's going to be frustrated that his boss is buying a motorcoach to drive to his vacation home while he's struggling to pay the note on his truck. Learn a trade. And then learn to run a business. So that you can run a business while working your trade.
>To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.
I think one or the other is ok. My main thing is that you have to have some sort of plan. You can plan to be a software engineer or a hairdresser or whatever else, but you need to have some sort of plan. You can always update your plan, but you should at least have some vague idea of what it is. The 'failure to launch' folks that I know are all the ones that didn't have some sort of plan so they end up bouncing around from one low paying job to another without any sort of career progression. Even if they end up doing OKish as an office administrator or assistant retail manager, if/when they lose that job (often due to economic realities outside their control) they end up starting back over at the bottom.
Unfortunately a lot of people just “sleep through life” as i like to say. They are physically awake, but they make decisions like they don’t have any agency. Almost like they are asleep.
They think some higher power will magically drop a plan into their lap.
I believe a professional skill is an important educational goal, and insofar as a person is capable and interested they will more likely thrive with a professional skill.
But: professional skills tend to require a lot of dependencies and connections, can be heavily reputation based, and you can find yourself in a dead end of many kinds.
Having a trade gives you an opt-out so you can always move laterally and reposition yourself, probably to get back into your profession or a related one. Also, it creates a way to take a “break” to avoid burnout. And being skilled in trades, you can easily “earn” tens of thousands of dollars a year as a homeowner by not having to pay a premium for life’s demands unless you want to.
Just being able to credibly walk away is a huge advantage in negotiation. And even if you won’t, knowing that you could, really could, is a huge boost to well being.
It all boils down to plotting a course based on options rather than only constraints. Empowerment.
Thing is, most people won’t use that fallback, but it still provides a great advantage. With a fallback, you can take risks that can position you ahead of more timid strategies. Same as owning a little land with a simple cabin on it, outright.
For a few thousand dollars or even less, the worst that can happen is that you might have to go “home” and recoup. You always have a place to be. Even if you rarely go there.
So we'll all be living in wood huts because there are no architects and civil engineers and if break your leg the doctor will saw it off because no one studied biology and chemistry so pharmaceuticals don't exist...
What? I’m not advocating for forgoing education. On the contrary. I advocate for deeper, broader education and life experience. Not quite sure where you get that?
OTOH we’d be better off living in well built wood huts than in the conditions that people with a high degree of specialized education but no practical education can provide. I have a great respect for knowledge, science, and learning in general… but the “incompetent intellectual“ stereotype, so effectively weaponized in the culture wars, exists for a reason.
In the end, individuals and societies benefit from well educated people who have a well rounded education in not only the arts and sciences, but also in practical physical affairs of urgent application, AKA applied engineering or applied science.
Probably they misread you while arguing with their own ghosts. Your idea is perfectly reasonable and sound. It allows the lived experience to shape youngsters minds.
> You could caricature libertarianism, or you could engage with understanding what it actually is, whether or not you choose to agree with it.
Why is it that 99% of people arguing for libertarianism do a much better job making a caricature of it than anyone else that's intentionally tried?
I've tried to engage with them in good faith but ultimately all their arguments devolve into abolishing taxes and keeping track of existing bureaucracy on an individual level. Every. Single. Time.
It's not a practically tenable position. It's a youthful fantasy on the opposite side of the spectrum of property rights (the other side of the spectrum is communism).
I’d call myself a “spiritual” libertarian. Over the years, it became obvious that laws, regulations, compromises, and balances that curtail freedoms exist for a reason. It’s an imperfect world, And if the goal is to maximize human happiness and prosperity, a framework for cooperation is absolutely imperative.
I think it’s also good to push back against this flow of structure, because just as much as the idea that freedom and self-interest are the ideal drivers of society is a dangerous and intoxicating illusion, so is the idea that cooperation and goodwill can be legislated.
The reality is, of course, much more nuanced and poorly distributed. Incentives alignment to the common good is an effort that is a struggle to even properly define, much less to implement.
The fact that people seem to not understand that incentive alignment is the goal, rather than mothering or oppression, doesn’t help.
The problems of the state are much less tractable and congruous with personal experience than most people, including most politicians, appreciate. Relatable analogies such as running a business or a family used in appeals to “common sense” are farcical in their relation to the state, and often disastrous in application.
Statecraft is something that requires not only a deep understanding of political theory and practice, but also of psychology, economics, game theory, statistics, and a solid dose of intuition and luck. In short, it is demanding to the point of nearly being a fools errand, yet the electorate seems to favor simpletons, paternal figures, and shiny things that smell like upper class. I really don’t know if there is a way forward with democracy unless we lean in hard to education.
A trade being any job you can do with your own tools and is universally useful to people. So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need. Ideally you could arrive in a new town with only this skill and your tools, and begin to eke out an existence. I favor trades that are also useful to oneself, so the building trades are good because everyone needs shelter-may as well build your own or at least understand what you are buying. Doctor also works as a trade, because the need is so basic and universal.
A profession being anything else, basically, especially if it generally requires an employer (major capital investment) to be a useful activity. Interestingly, being a farmer falls into this category, since it requires land and equipment. Even if you own the land and equipment, you could lose it, and then your livelihood is out of your reach. So that’s a profession, by my narrow practical classification.
I figured with a trade and a profession, young adults are much better prepared to roll with the punches in the inevitable chaos they will confront, and be empowered to walk away from situations that are untenable. The power to walk away is highly underrated.
For myself, I have benefited greatly from my practical upbringing, and am a sophomore journeyman in many trades but my happy place is creating things. Electronics, a little mechanics, and software to breathe life into the soul of a new machine. Fortunately I have been hardcore unemployable by nature for decades, so I have developed the freedom to follow my own path, which is deeply gratifying. But without a strong trades type background this would not have really been possible.