Between personal experience and a lot of anecdotal evidence, it seems that finding competent, motivated and non dumb-ass contractors and construction tradespeople is very hit or miss, with there seeming to be a fairly significant chance (> 35-40%) of getting some flat-out stupid, incompetent, lazy, or unmotivated dunce who will do a half-assed job, not show up on time, not communicate, etc…
I mean, is there some sort of supply-and-demand thing going on where even substandard tradespeople can manage to stay employed?
Right now, we’re getting vinyl plank flooring installed, and the cretinous boob who is installing it just started chiseling up the kitchen tile without taping up plastic, etc… So now everything in our house is covered in a layer of fine dust. EVERYTHING. And he’s not particularly communicative, which may be a language issue. He seems annoyed that we want to know what his plan and timetable is, and so on.
The flooring retail place (a local family owned one) employs him, and the flooring retailer is otherwise fantastic to deal with- truly a good experience.
So I’m perplexed- why do they need to employ this clown? Why is he even employed if he’s this way? Why is this story not even unusual or remarkable? I’ve heard all sorts of stories, and have a few of my own of other boobs in the construction/maintenance trades (don’t get me started about the custom cabinets we got…), and they seem unfortunately all too common.
We’ve told two generations of high schoolers that their only path to career success is four year college (“Don’t worry about those student loans; you’ll pay them off with your first paycheck!”) and discouraged talented and diligent students from going into ‘the trades’ because those jobs are for chumps, never mind that being a successful independent tradesperson requires having the same planning, business, and basic finance skills as any white collar career in addition to the trade skills that take years of practice to develop and hone. As a result, finding skilled and disciplined tradespeople is very challenging, and those who are any good are in such demand that they have more work than they can possibly do.
There are good tradespeople but they are probably not going to be the ones working through contract or direct employment with a retail outlet where they are earning the minimum for guaranteed work. If you want to find good tradespeople you are going to have to do some legwork; talk to a general contractor and see if they know a contractor who has a slot between jobs, or go to a contractor supply and ask around, or just talk to other homeowners and get recommendations. If you just take whomever a retail supplier gives you, you’ve probably getting the guy who either has little expertise or just does the minimum because that is all he is being paid.
I imagine that skills in this kind of trade is a lot like software developer skills (which is a lot more of a skilled trade than people like to admit), where bootcamps can pump out a lot of junior people, but then there is a bottleneck in transitioning junior people to intermediate/senior people because that requires real experience/mentorship that can only be generated so fast.
Not for nothing, but while I was growing up I heard nothing but boosting for the skilled trades from teachers, guidance counsellors, and even random adults, and they all talked about other people who insist that the trades are for chumps and a four-year university degree was the only way to go and that I shouldn’t listen to them.
I never once met one of those university-only fundamentalists that all these people were so insistent were telling falsehoods.
I can’t speak to your personal experience but the trillions of dollars of student debt and glut of schools issuing business and finance degrees while vocational-technical education took a dive didn’t come out of nowhere. When you have people educated with a four year degree who consider ‘programming’ cell macros in Excel to be a viable career option if you can handle the McJob grind for forty years while it is all but impossible to find a skilled finish carpenter or an upholsterer who doesn’t have a months-long backlog, somebody has been selling the trades short as a career option.
This is the problem I see most often. Very talented trades people great at what they do going into business by themselves thinking running the business half is the easy part. Crap at time estimating/managing. Crap at customer communication. Crap at money management. But beautiful craftsmanship.
Actually the best contractor I ever worked with was a guy who was excellent on the business side and everything else he subcontracted. He had his own company, was a great salesman, gave time tables, gave accurate pricing, communicated status, etc. but when it came time to do the work actually didn’t do any of it.
So, basically a general contractor (GC). I’ve known a few people who decided they could build their own home by acting as their own GC while working their regular job and saving the ‘exhorbitant’ contracting fee, assuming that it was just a matter of making a few phone calls during the workday and showing up at the job site once in a while to make sure things were progressing apace. They discover that being a GC is actually a more-than-full-time job if you want any part of the construction process to come in on time, under budget, and with the correct permits, setback, hookups, et cetera. Being a GC is a set of skills onto itself, but even basic craftspeople need to know how to estimate, budget, communicate, and bill for their services, or else farm that out to someone who can.
My strategy is that any time I find someone who does good work, I ask THEM who they’d hire if they had some other type of work they don’t do themselves. The front end mechanic who did the shocks, struts and brakes on multiple vehicles recommended a super good body shop I would never have known about. The locksmith who did a job for me recommended people for other work and he knows what he’s talking about. The company that did the insurance repair work on my son’s house introduced me to a very good contractor who then went on to form his own business and guess who I call if I need something done? The guy who I call when I need heavy shit hauled away turned me on to the guy who did my roof. Word of mouth is the best method for finding good skilled workers but it does take a bit more time and effort than just hitting Craigslist or doing a Google search.
So the lawyer calls a plumber to get his or her toilet unclogged. The guy comes, fixes the toilet, and bills the customer $100 plus $200. The lawyer exclaims, “$300 for half an hour’s work!? I’m an attorney, and I only charge $200 an hour.” The plumber says, “Yes, that’s what I used to charge when I was a lawyer.”
I don’t doubt that society could do with a few fewer MBAs and a few more good plumbers, but I do doubt that it is purely the difference in “prestige” between these career paths that causes it. On average, the economy really does reward shitty MBA and finance jobs better than vo-tech, at least on a salary per unit effort basis. And it is mostly people making rational choices that leads to this mismatch.
It sounds like excel-macro dude has got themselves a nice cushy job that doesn’t require a lot of effort. If they switched to a skilled trade, they’d need a lot more hustle, and do a lot more physical labour if they want to get the big bucks. More likely they’d end up like the non-motivated, dumb-ass contractor that OP complains about – the excel-macro dude of flooring installation.
I fully agree, and I’ve actually got a BS in Computer Science and six years of professional development experience, and another five or six part-time SQL query writing/Microsoft SSIS experience. Pure development is very much more like a craft than more traditional white collar jobs than I would have thought.
Yeah, I remember them pushing us as early as 8th grade to pick the “college track” or the “non-college track” for high school. They were basically a sort of degree plan that dictated how many of each sort of courses you had to take.
The general approach was that if you weren’t totally brain-dead, or entertained ANY ideas of going to some sort of college, you took the college track. Only the people who were fully decided on trades, or who were obviously didn’t have the mental prerequisites for college were encouraged to go non-college track.
I ended up going to a private college-prep school, so of course that was centered around pushing us to go to the best schools we could get into. That’s why we were there though. But even the public high schools were treating the trade track as if it was, if not radioactive, mildly seedy or distasteful in some way.
This is an important point that is often forgotten. Also, the tendency in the construction trades is to deskill and divvy up the work so the employer can pay less. Thus roofers roof, drywallers drywall, and never the twain shall meet, and each is paid poorly. “Electricians” include master trades people and a lot of people paid poorly to pull wire.
Speaking of highly skilled, I ran into a guy who oversees maintenance and restoration of historic buildings around the world. The skill set cannot be that common, and I have no idea how much he makes but it must be a lot. I understand that he does have at least a master’s if not a doctoral degree, though; obviously one needs to be familiar with a lot of stuff.
Sometime soon I’m going to need to find an electrician, and I’m dreading it. If this was straightforward, like putting in a new outlet then I’d just find somebody on Nextdoor or wherever, but I need problems solved. I need somebody who is smart and experienced enough to diagnose the problems, and honest enough to not lie about what I need or that they “found” the problem, and are just charging for unneeded work.
Before that happens the utility company needs to do some work. I’ll try asking those people if they can recommend someone.
That is an excellent point.
A successful large scale business will employ a large number of the good skilled trades workers. Leaving less of them for small scale operators.
Also far too many small scale operations are at the level of outright scams. Due to the people operating them and to a large extent the lack of good regulation of that portion of the industry.
A large project will automatically involve large scale regulation and inspection on all levels. A small scale home renovation operator is often not under such levels of scrutiny. A small operator will often, through incompetence or outright criminal intent shaft both the skilled trades people and the customer.
I once had a girlfriend with two brothers - one was a plumber and the other an electrician.
They were both in 100% agreement that working on new builds was their preferred option.
Building sites meant starting from scratch, with only the other trades (they both hated plasterers with a passion) to worry about. Working with new parts and with supervision coming mainly from people qualified to make decisions. All at a rate agreed in advance.
Private work meant dealing with mistakes and shortcuts made by the original trades, and then often bodges done by householders over the years. It also meant dealing with furniture, kids and people who demand high quality work for low quality rewards.