Have you tried to hire a skilled plumber, landscaper, carpenter, or mason in a major city lately? There's a massive tradesperson shortage.
This has siphoned off the historical supply of labor in trade schools.
Maybe for some types of frontline workers, but certainly not for skilled tradesman, who are making bank right now and have for at least the past 20 years since I've lived in my current city. And in terms of "refuse to respect", honestly I think it's the opposite: supply has been so high for skilled tradesmen in my area that it is customers who have consistently been disrespected. I can't tell you the number of times I've hired a plumber, AC guy or other worker, confirmed a time, and then that person just doesn't show up, or at best you get a call 15 minutes before saying they're canceling. It always baffled me how these businesses could give such poor service (I mean, a lot of this type of work is referral based), but it's because demand is just so high they can do that.
Of course it's not everyone, and once I found a good, reliable plumber I hung on for dear life, but the lesson I've learned is that workers follow same incentives of supply and demand as employers do.
But we don't see this, why? I posit that it is because people who work trades are looked down on socially. People point at the mechanic, or plumber, or HVAC technician and say to their kids "you have to go college so you don't end up like that guy".
I would never say that about mechanics, plumbers, and HVAC technicians. They have skills that I respect and value. I often ask them what was wrong and their analytic and problem solving skills often impress me.
I got a new HVAC system with a 2 stage compressor. Everything was working fine until the summer when it would shut off cooling just when it got hot even when the thermostat was saying it was cooling.
The technician determined that the system worked fine in "low" mode and when the thermostat went into "high" mode the enter system shut off.
He traced the thermostat wire through the crawl space and found a splice. 20 years earlier when the house was built someone spliced the cable and only spliced together a few wires that were needed for that simple system. He connected all of them and now the 2 stage compressor works great.
It took him an hour of debug going back and forth measuring stuff with a multimeter inside and outside.
I was impressed.
That certainly happens even more often, but within that statement is also an implication that one must go to college to avoid that kind of work. And why is that kind of work so bad? Mostly because they have to deal with people who treat them like garbage because they think so little of them.
I know there are lots of reasons and many of them are outside of the control of the person.
I should really change my statement to "Learn some skills whether a 4 year university degree or technical / vocational / community college so you don't end up working fast food or retail."
Why is that work so bad? The low pay is the main reason. You can learn the skills required in a few hours or days. I feel like their managers and employers treat them worse than the customers.
I am absolutely in favor for more education and financial assistance for higher education. The low end jobs are the first to be automated away. Fast food and warehouse robots are going to get more popular and I already use the self checkout line 80% of the time.
Jobs for people without specialized skills are going to get rarer in the future.
You can live in your workplace, have a company car, company utilities, company equipment. Some customers will pay you cash. You can easily allocate business income to your spouse or children (if you live in a country without combined income taxes). You can buy products at wholesale rates.
When you're just an employee, you usually have very few of these tax optimisation opportunities.
The other factor is that the education system is dominated by people with university degrees (ie. teachers), who consciously or not direct their students to pursue the same lifestyle and career values as them.
And then that's how you land up with the only 25% of kids that enter college actually graduating. So many kids who aren't sure what they want to do (or just straight up aren't cut out for that kind of work) are shoved into college, rack up debt, drop out with nothing to show for it, and don't know where to go next.
I’ve hired contractors that ripped out all the copper and left.
I lived in a house where the owner had hired a landscaper that got paid but didn’t show up for a year.
Nobody needs more than a month of training and a YouTube account to do these jobs. The problem is not skill; it’s trust. Low skill jobs unfortunately attract a lot of unsavory characters, and push out good people.
What a wild economy. I have no complaints, I understand why it works that way. And all my plumber had to do was smile, provide a bit of customer service, and repair one pipe.
Unfortunately, most of they ways in which they do so were already done in the 70s. It's just repeating that work in more modern languages / stacks.
Some software is valuable according to this definition, e.g. Google search. Some is not, e.g. Google ad algorithms.
Software is an enabler. It depends what it's enabling.
Would be interesting to know the proportions.
But the plumbers all use Google and have iPhones... But they aren't getting any stock from the companies making these as part of their comp package.
Editorial: More lawyers make the country more complicated and less competitive. We need more and better people going into industrial and medical skilled trades. Think CAD/CAM, not plumber. On the other hand, I think basic legal education would probably have been more relevant than almost anything I’ve ever learned in a classroom, and law school might have been worth it just for my own purposes. Minus the political activism of course, which I guess is center stage now.