One of my bro’s is a tradesman. The sheer drudgery of laying tile all day every day or painting all day or … all day gets old. Fast. And the work exercises or overworks the same muscles & joints every day.
It amounts to assembly line work from the eta before ergonomic factory tooling was invented. IOW fadt-paced and uncomfortable.
Which ergonomic tooling was only invented because of the post-WWII confluence of union power and Federal pressure to offer medical insurance to workers & retirees piled all the expenses of disability on the manufacturers, not the workers.
By and large in the trades, all the disability cost and risk is borne by the worker alone. And there’s lots.
I have several relatives with peculiar and specific disabilities caused by job-specific injuries. Any young person starting out in the trades should talk to old people about to retire from the trades about pluses and minuses. I think almost anybody would benefit from five years in the trades, learning skills and saving up some money, but people tend to get trapped on the path they’re on.
That was exactly Bro’s case. Worked trades through college for spending money, graduated into a recession in his white collar degree field, & suddenly he’s coming up on 40 still bustin’ ass w saw & hammer.
He’s 60-something now, and crawling out of bed hurts. OTOH, unlike sedentary me, he’s got a flat stomach and arms & legs of steel.
Not all trades work is repetitive drudgery, though. I know for certain that for electricians, and probably also for other trades, if you specialize in repairs, it’s different every day. A large part of an electrician’s job is in figuring out just precisely how the amateur who came before you screwed everything up, and there are a lot of different ways for amateurs to screw things up.
I remember one job when I was a teen, and working as an electrician’s assistant, where the homeowners noticed that whenever they opened the refrigerator door, an arc jumped between the fridge door handle and the oven handle. That was a fun one.
Now, we also did some new construction work, and that could get kind of boring, but it wasn’t usually laborious like laying tile can be.
At least electricians will be working more or less in shelter, even if it’s unheated.
I framed houses for a summer/winter. Nothing is more demoralizing than getting to a job site and having to shovel snow out of a house that is not dried in yet. And then you get to start working with frozen wood and nails that stick to your fingers.
That’s the thing. Too many people get hung up on entry level jobs and static skill sets without taking into account their entire career progression.
Like when I hear people look at associates at the Big-4, law firms, or investment banks making “minimum wage” when you average out their long hours. Well the reason they do this is because partners and managing directors in those sort of companies can make a million dollars a year. Even if you don’t stay there 10-12 years to make partner, it still opens doors to other opportunities.
That said, I’ve met plenty of people who don’t want to do boring corporate office work for decades. My college roommate decided to become an electrician.
My original career was as a civil engineer. Not a “trade” per se, but I worked with plenty of tradesmen and contractors. I recall meeting one dude who used to be an executive at an airline or some such thing and was working as a carpenter. I didn’t get it at the time, but I do now. They make good money and do real work building actual shit. Back when I was working, I mostly just built pretty Powerpoint decks for executives.
As you are experiencing right now, being in an job type that job-hops by necessity is stressful. And requires saving money while working to fund the frequent and inevitable gaps in employment.
Learning is difficult and unpleasant for many people.
What one heck of a lot of the public wants is to finish school, take a job, and stay with that company / location for life. Or at least have that as a common viable option. Maybe they change jobs within the company and maybe they change skillsets, and maybe they chase promotions up the ladder of responsibility. Or maybe they don’t.
But they really, really want that to be their choice to make, not something forced on them.
The society they don’t want is one where the job evaporates out from under them, and no more similar jobs are to be had locally, or maybe even anywhere. It’s move, retrain, maybe both, or starve. That’s a misery treadmill far to many people are stuck on.
Most of us were (are?) raised by our parents to “fight the last war”, with our youthful expectations mirroring the world our parents had experienced to date and so expected for their immediate future.
But in a world where business moves faster than work lives are long (~= 50 years), it’s pretty inevitable that most people’s worklifes will encompass a revolution or two. We just need a lot more work on setting young people’s expectations about this.
When I was younger, I remember people telling us “You’re probably not going to have a career. You’re probably going to have two, and maybe even three.”
Hey man. I just wanted to get into implementing technology solutions because it looked interesting and paid well in the 90s. I didn’t feel like job hopping every 1-4 years as corporate America chases the next bright shiny object.
EVERY corporate job is now a “job type that job-hops by necessity”. The average tenure for most jobs is something like 4 years. Often much less. I think that’s a huge problem in terms of brain/skills drain. You never master anything. You just come in, learn a bunch of shit, then go somewhere else doing something different with different people who do it differently. There’s no stability or long term growth.
I think that’s part of a growing societal trend (spurred on by social media and digitization) to make everything more transactional. Whether it’s work, dating, relationships. or whatever, people want to have something when it’s convenient for them. When it’s not, they want to discard it. Flexibility is nice, but not a constant churn because the grass is always greener or no one wants to deal with the slightest inconvenience.
Part of the problem is how many companies handle compensation. Wage compression is the phenomenon of new employees making significantly more than tenured employees with experience. To combat this, the compensation team really needs to reevaluate the company’s salaries to make sure they’re at least keeping up with prevailing wages. If the only way to get a decent salary bump is by jumping from job-to-job then that’s what you’ll incentivize people to do. A lot of companies don’t want to go through the trouble of reviewing compensation on a regular basis.
Engineering graduates in the 1970’s were told that they should aim for 3-7 years for a job. Any less than that, and people would wonder what went wrong. Any more than that, and people would wonder what went wrong. (NSPE)
I mentioned my son’s situation earlier in the thread; his job was getting untenable so he gave his notice effective mid August. He just got an offer at what looks like a much better situation.
Millennial here. My husband and I are both highly educated (Masters and PhD) and I think we’ve come around to accepting that unless an inheritance is involved, we’re not buying a house.
Mortgages in our area run around $2500/month median and that’s about the cost of a one bedroom studio apartment rental as well (mind-boggling.) We’re living in a 2,000 square foot manufactured home and only paying lot rent.
I was a very successful academic, and as a woman I did learn that “do it better" was the best way to cut through any sexism. In graduate school I very seriously considered going on to get a PhD in social welfare. Multiple professors approached me about it. An Ivy League path to academia! Oh, it did appeal to my ego. There is a dark little part of my soul that wants to be the best and smartest.
But my husband was going through his own PhD and it was hell on both of us. Then I thought about how I would be trapped in the competitive overachiever cycle for life. And the final clincher was realizing I’d make more as a masters level social worker than an adjunct professor.
I’m now earning a reasonable income that is pretty high for a non-profit job. And more importantly I’m pretty happy with my career path.
It’s something of a myth that college degrees are now worthless or they’re only worth something if they are in certain subjects. The research doesn’t back that up. Trade school is a very good option for some people, but people with Gender Studies and English degrees are getting jobs no problem. I have an undergrad degree in Spanish. It’s still a worthwhile investment it’s just not as rewarding as it used to be.
The issue is that most jobs, even well paid jobs, suck worse and worse with each passing year. I’m not even sure what I would advise my kid to do at this point.
I remember one of my bosses telling me it took two years to take a new college graduate and put them through the mentoring and on-the-job experience to mold them into a productive, self sufficient employee.
He then added that the average new graduate in the industry lasted 22 months before moving on (either voluntarily or involuntarily.)
In his 1903 book Notes on Track W.M. Camp noted that it would take two years to train a railroad navvy to be competent in the different aspects of laying track. He lamented that the railroads refused to make that investment in people, preferring instead to hire larger numbers of untrained workers, pay them less, and throw them at the work. Many companies still do this.
Corporate office jobs suck because most of them are bullshit and people struggle to reconcile with the bullshit they actually do with the arbitrary and often conflicting standards and shifting goalposts set by the powers that be that define what “good” looks like.
Trades vs college is a stupid binary argument. We need accountants and engineers as much as we need plumbers and welders. People need to figure out what path makes sense for them.
I do think one of the problems with the way we run college in the USA is that it’s super expensive and tends to be treated like a magic ticket to the upper classes. Then kids graduate with no clear idea of what they want to do while loaded with a shit ton of debt. Trade school you at least are learning a tangible “job”.
Of course, going by the internet, soon we will be a nation of social media influencers using AI to set up online dropshipping businesses and media channels earning over $100k a month or more.
Certainly somebody will be doing that. Somebody else will be playing in the NFL or NBA.
But that’s sure not the way to bet for most of us.
And that is the central problem of jobs and employment in a celebrity-centric media culture. When all eyes are on some 0.00001% of the crowd, everybody has no clue how to be part of the 99%.
I think the central problem is that the constant barrage of generated social media content trying to sell people various coaching and get-rich-quick schemes has fed into, possibly created a perception that the system doesn’t work. Education, jobs, careers, banking, managing money, government is all presented as some sort of “scam” designed to entrap and enslave the clueless. So if you’re a real man and want to get rich and do real man shit, sign up for my product, course or coaching because they way you did things before will no longer work in 2025.
Even if you know that 99% of it is bullshit, that still doesn’t tell you what action you should take. Especially since education, jobs, careers, banking, managing money, government actually DOESN’T seem to be working for many, if not most people.
The problem is if you are trying to figure out what sort of career you want, it’s hard to figure out what will be a viable, long-term career for the foreseeable future. Any real job, whether it’s in trades or professional service, requires some form of training and education. There are very few jobs with any sort of future that will take someone right off the street.