I don't think any of this makes what I said less true.

There's a lot you can learn in many basic service jobs, and become much more effective than if you don't learn it.

But if the standard is "onboarding", then both are quick.

> In 30 days, the new welder probably has learned how not to set himself on fire, blind himself, fill his lungs with poisonous gasses, etc.

I am not a welder, but I've had some welding safety training. It doesn't take a month.

You both are talking around each other I feel.

In any job there is a spectrum from bare minimum to a master. This goes for welding and baristas. Is someone who pushes a button on a Nespresso a barista? If I go get a soldering iron am I a welder?

You overlay the normal distribution of all baristas and welders and look at the difficulty in learning various skills. I'm sure they are not exactly equal.

That sounds like a fun idea in theory, but in practice that distribution would require hours of research per job, or more, and I'm not aware of any source that publishes that sort of information. So it doesn't give me a way to sort jobs into "skilled" and "unskilled". Or to give them a reliable 1-10 rank on how skilled they are.

I can be pretty sure welder beats barista, but by how much, how it relates to other jobs, how we set various bars, that's all a lot more difficult.

I actually doubt there's a neat defineable ceiling for the skill of a welder nor a barista so it also comes down to where you make the cut-off because any improvements beyond that become negligible in terms of ROI. But that would also require being able to actually quantify that vague notion of "skill" which in turn would require an honest assessment of the actual real-world exhaustive job description of both jobs including all implicit, unstated and culturally expected parts (e.g. barista is a service job so customer service can be as big a factor as the actual coffee-making but we don't think of social skills as actual skills or emotional labor even if it's obvious when they're inadequate or badly performed).

So in other words, we could have an objective, empirical look at whether welders or baristas actually need "more skill" and which skillset is easier to master for the average person (which is its own rest nest of considerations again) but if we did the necessary (if not impossible) prep work to even get started on that, we'd have to already agree that "unskilled" is a descriptor for jobs that has very little to do with the actual skill requirements and more with attitudes towards those skills or the people doing those jobs.