And so what? "You can succeed if you go into trades... but make sure you don't end up in some of these widespread roles" is a very different narrative than what is usually presented.
There isn’t any automatic get rich easy scheme. To some extent you have to keep your wits about and make sure you are getting your worth
Everyone I know in the trades "put in their dues" with at least 10 years of working for someone else, doing the shit jobs, working outside in the rain, in the mud, in the heat, in crawlspaces, in attics, etc.
The smart, driven ones learn all they can, advance, build relationships and reputation, and start their own businesses. The lazy or dumb ones continue to do the crap jobs for their entire career.
And even that, management and business skills are not the same thing as being good tradesman. Just like with programming, you can be smart and driven and not be management material.
The question was whether trades arw good occupation. Not whether you can be better off by stopping being tradesman and going into management.
Imagine this for software engineers. "Yeah, SWEs get paid shit and have a bad working environment but some of you will become managers and get paid bank." That wouldn't exactly be a "wow software is an incredible field to be in" situation.
If people want to say "we need more tradespeople - going into the trades will be good for your career" then it better be the case that the actual laborers are getting decent pay.
Ah, the social mobility of the american dream.
In a poorer society equivalent menial labor is more poorly paid than in a richer society.
All the other stuff like expertise and value is, counterintuitively, near irrelevant. For instance postdocs are some of the most highly educated and ostensibly highly skilled individuals - and many have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get to where they are, yet they earn about as much as a plumber does, because there's far more supply of postdocs than there are jobs/positions for them.
So putting all the theory into practice. There are usually three possible reasons. Supply is too high = excessively high rates of software training/education. Demand is too low = not many roles for software developers. Or the companies that are hiring aren't making much themselves so the "maximum affordable cost" is relatively low.
unless its UK, then the house with that pricetag was last fixed in the 60's, needs total rewiring, and has energy efficiency of a damp tent.
Fair point about scale of jobs however. Things need done and eventually a real world timeframe.
There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.
Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.
> There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.
> Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.
Did you think about possibility that his current employer will crush him like an egg for competing with him on weekends?
sometimes licenses are different between working for yourself vs someone else. Other times your employer can't take on jobs without you and your license present.
Then there's insurance differences between self-employed and employed ______ tradesperson.
From other specialist non-trade business I'm familiar with, people are normally aware of new employees coming to town before they even start working. People talk to each other.
> Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.
You can’t do a good business without leaving visible traces - permits, customers, suppliers, etc. all provide ways for information to leak. If his employer is exploitative, he has above average odds of correctly fearing retribution and depending on the area that could mean unemployment. It’s not exactly uncommon for companies to discretely agree not to hire certain people.
This is the key reason why for most jobs, small town America is flyover country, an economically inefficient, exploitative, broken system. Without a large labor & employment market within easy commuting distance, your skills aren't portable if you get fired, and your boss can't readily find a replacement, so most employment relationships end up in a reluctant, often abusive state from one or the other.
This is why the normal trajectory, for a skilled tradesman, is apprenticeship -> experience -> accumulate clients -> go independent.
If you want to go independent in something like software you need, among other things, a good idea. If you want to go independent in the trades, all you need is a good reputation and enough people with your card. You don't even need to try either really. Do a good job and people themselves will proactively ask for your contact information. Finding a good and reliable tradesman is not easy.
A jobbing plumber just needs to text his buddies asking if they've got any work for him this week, do the job and leave with cash in hand the same day.
If you're good at plumbing but disorganised or don't have great self-discipline, the latter is a much simpler way of working.
Going into freelancing, the first thing you should be thinking is "I am a business that employs one person: me."
"Well if you aren't in one of the good areas you'll get fucked" doesn't tend to make it into articles like the linked above and I think it is worth knowing.