The Myth of the Wealthy Welder
theatlantic.com
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I made good money doing it, but the work was hit or miss and it wasn't really the welding I was getting paid for, it was knowing how to cut up vans and modify them for severely handicapped people and I'd learned how to do that by building "custom cars" with my father who was a "bodyman" by trade and went on to become a "custom car builder".
By the time I quit customizing vans for the handicapped the State of California required you be a "certified welder" to do the work I did on the vans and cars they purchased for people who were in wheelchairs so you had to pay to go to a "welding school" to get a certification.
But none of those welders I met who did that actually knew how to weld. How to lay down a bead that penetrated the steel. They all did what those I learned from called "bird shit" welds. A cold weld that laid on top of the metal and didn't penetrate all the way through, and were thus prone to fail. And none of them started those jobs for much more than $5-$7 an hour.
That's when I decided to learn how to code. It was only a few years after that when the Internet started taking off, so I learned HTML and Perl by buying books written by the likes of Steven Brenner, "Selena Sol", Lincoln Stein and Randal Schwartz and there were no college level classes that taught it. I got invited to teach some after hour classes at SMS because they didn't have any at the time.
Now, more than 20 years later companies want to hire someone with a CS degree, and really they often don't know any more about it than those guys who took those welding classes did about laying down a bead that stuck.
But in both cases those who sold the classes lobbied their State Reps to make them mandatory and raked in the cash afterwards.
One of my first job’s after hishschool was Aluminum TIG and MIG welding. I learned to weld throughout highschool and was hired because of the reputation my school had for teaching welding.
Unfortunately, I think most of the trade skills are no longer taught at that school.
My welding career was only for a couple years, but during that time I focused on improving my TIG skillsets and was able to move into the number two postion at a high end shop that manufactured Aluminum wakeboard and fishing towers (Samson Sports).
The welding quality was superb, and every inch was looked over for visual and structual perfection. Needless to say, the pay still wasn’t that great.
In fact, I'd argue that a graduate knows much more than most people think. The problem is that it's usually general knowledge that doesn't apply to some specific framework that 90% of developers use. It's all abstracted away to learning X framework.
A ton.
The metallurgy of welding is complex. When performing a bespoke weld, you have to know what type of filler metal to use (it frequently is not identical to the pieces being welded...), heat pre-treatment, heat post-treatment, and range of available current for the job. All of those factors vary with the job. While the reference texts can help you, you have to at least know enough to figure out where to look. Then you need to have enough practice to to recognize when things go wrong, and how to correct it.
Much as in the current programming industry, the problem is people coming out with an education on paper, yet not actually knowing either the theory or practice the of welding.
I would say that's a function of a lot of complex items, including their prior educational experience, general intelligence, and just how closely they read the book. There exist many books I've "read" once and mostly forgotten, and precious few I've read a half-dozen or more times and know intimately.
If the former, I agree with you. If the latter, not so much.
> In fact, I'd argue that a graduate knows much more than most people think.
In my experience there are two kinds of graduates, those who spent years memorizing material to get a piece of paper, and those who learned how to learn and applied it to get their piece of paper.
When folks talk about shit graduates they have the former in mind, when folks extol the virtues of a university education they are thinking of the latter.
Unfortunately universities spit out both and it's very hard to distinguish on-the-fly.
While granted there's obviously people who don't take college seriously, many do. And unfortunately, I'm one of those people that worked very hard to get through college and didn't attend hardly any social functions. Same as high school. I would spend weekends from 8am to 6pm reading textbooks and doing assignments.
However, I often feel that doing this was somewhat of a detriment to both my ability to socialize and my ability to really solve problems organically.
And once you get into industry you have to unlearn that because the clear objective goals and grades disappear, and you are left with an array of subtle values and more pernicuous consequences to any action. And that stuff is absolutely vital to being good at intellectual jobs - it's mostly crushed out by the system, fostering the "narrow STEMlord" mindset that is constantly surprised by things blowing up when they followed the book exactly.
Part of it is because most businesses are run by people that have no knowledge of the timescale of their projects and therefore try to squeeze as much work as possible in ridiculous time frames and society trains you to stop "whining" and get it done.
The lack of empathy in industry is enormous due to profit motive. And because of the ambiguous nature of software, it's always difficult to know exactly what needs to be done. And because most people want to please their bosses, the incentive to estimate low and push yourself to get a project done is very real.
Which is one reason I continue to think that a broad education, including humanities and social sciences, is valuable even for folks looking to work in STEM fields. It's in those academic disciplines that you learn to work with subtle nuances, and how to originate and defend an opinion or point of view.
Why? Here's the repo, clone it, set up the dev env, maybe connect to VPN to reach some test instances, here's the issue tracker, here's a ticket, explore it, see if it's reproducible, if yes, get to the root cause, solve it, get it reviewed, goto 10.
Naturally, this should lead to a lot of questions, but which part is not a clear step with clear goals? Plus in industry the employer has vested interest to make you efficient, because it pays you. It'll check up on you daily. (Or initially/constantly you will do pair programming, get mentoring, sprint retros, etc.)
And if you are stuck you can ask questions and there are usually domain experts right next to you.
Though if there were more emphasis on hard math/CS/programming/ITsec problem solving, that'd probably translate well to industry setting.
Fast forward to 2019. auto mechanics START at just shy of 22,000 a year and thats assuming you keep track of your time and work for a shop that doesnt engage in the rampant practice of wage theft. master mechanic? depends, maybe $28 an hour in 2019? but nowhere near the $46 an hour a twice convicted tombstone welder made back when the Love Boat sailed.
The problem is not trade, or college, its the seemingly endless wealth gap between people who do work, and people who just seem to collect mansions and yachts.
Hell, raising kids and taking care of disabled/elderly people is an investment in the economy too. Those folks and their caretakers are consumers just as much as you and me.
Why does there need to be a privileged reward to invest? Everyone and their dog knows if you keep your money stuffed in your mattress it’ll lose value over time from inflation, and who doesn’t want to have a nest egg to retire on? Nobody needs an additional incentive to invest their capital beyond the bare bones basics of personal finance.
TLDR: RoI (capital) > RoI (labor), with the expected consequences.
I get that Piketty's work isn't without controversy or criticism. Summers and others have criticized it, but their critiques haven't seemed very strong.
One article [1] (which discusses Piketty's shortcomings) claims the biggest reaction to Piketty is silence:
"But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the field—even to this day."
"The economics elite, it seems, answered by stonewalling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so it would not have the impact on economics research agendas that it merits."
[1] http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-...
edited for a typo
Let's also keep in mind that that is a policy choice, because it's necessary to dislodge workers off their sticky wages and some sort of mumbo jumbo about the Phillips curve.
His thesis is actually that r > g, wherein r = ROI of capital and g = the rate of economic growth (gdp).
This has to be true, because rich people exist and we can measure that they get richer and richer faster than others. You can gauge faith in the likelihood that it will continue to work that way given that funds like Y Combinator exist and are successful, and because activities like buying and maintaining rental properties "works" in terms of creating personal wealth faster than the rate of economic growth.
Thus it’s not true to claim existence of rich people implies r>g. If it were that simple people before Piketty would have reached that conclusion earlier.
The papers linked in this thread show the flaws.
It’s also the case the rich don’t get richer, if you mean a rich person gets richer. For any dataset where you can track rich individuals over time, pick a level you call rich, track everyone meeting that definition, and you find they get poorer, reverting to mean. That is why most millionaires are first gen. It’s why the Forbes 400 is mostly first gen; the rich that were top 400 lose wealth. It’s why St. Louis Fed has papers showing the majority of the top quintile or the top 1% are not there 10 years later, or from generation to generation.
Sure some rich keep wealth. But for any level called rich, if you track all those in it, that group mostly falls out.
Perhaps you've heard the expression, "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer"
What Piketty did was put extensive data and a pretty rigorous methodology to work to explain why. I've not read a critique that undermines his main conclusions in a meaningful way.
It's no secret that if you already have a pile of money or capital assets you can put those to work for you which will also generate income and you will come out ahead and faster than someone without the same pile of money.
Cf https://boingboing.net/2016/08/23/bill-gates-net-worth-hits-...
> We find evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-histo...
> I conclude that Piketty’s data for the wealth share of the top 10 percent for the period 1870 to 1970 are unreliable. The values he reported are manufactured from the observations for the top 1 percent inflated by a constant 36 percentage points. Piketty’s data for the top 1 percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810–1910) are also unreliable.
http://voxeu.org/article/piketty-s-housing-capital-results-n...
> A key observation in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) is that the share of aggregate income accruing to capital in the US has been rising steadily in recent decades. The growing disparity between the income going to wage earners and capital owners has led to calls for government intervention. But for such interventions to be effective, it is important to ask who the capital owners are.
> Recent research has shown that the long-run rise in the net capital income share is mainly due to the housing sector (e.g. Rognlie 2015, Torrini 2016 – see Figure 1). This phenomenon is not specific to the US but has been evident in almost every advanced economy. This suggests that it is not entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that are taking an increasing share of the economy, but land owners.
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99455/...
> The results from at least four studies were compared for three measures of income change: change in median incomes, share of growth captured by the top 10 percent, and the changing income share of the top 1 percent. In all cases, Piketty and Saez (2003) were the outlier, showing the most increased inequality. And in all three measures of income change , Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) found much less growth in income inequality than Piketty and Saez (2003).
For example Magness & Murphy prefer the UK's Office of National Statistics to Piketty's figures - because it's supposed to generate gold-standard objective economic data.
In reality the ONS produces the UK's unemployment figures by considering anyone who works one hour a week as employed. Similarly anyone who labels themselves self-employed for tax purposes is considered "employed" even if they do no work at all.
It says this clearly on the ONS site.
It's quite strange to accuse Piketty of cherry-picking and distortion when these egregious - even comically obvious - distortions pass for official economic "fact" at the national level.
So amongst those that are not professionally immune to this kind of argument, Picketty get's a, 'well, duh'. Amongst the rest (mainstream economists) it gets a resounding silence. It isn't really relevant to the field, because the field is constituted by a kind of professional avoidance of politically charged topics.
It's in the name, after all. One performs labor to (ideally) incrementally increase ownership. The concept thrives in the public mind as go-pay-off-a-house but (ideally) would also stick as go-buy-some-equities too.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=14000&year1=19...
If he stopped welding around the time that the Internet was taking off, that would mean that it was $5-7/hour in the early to mid 90s NOT 1970. The "now 20 years later" later in the comment backs this up.
$5-7/hour in the 1990 is $20-30k in 2019 money, which is about what your example mechanic is making.
Even if he meant $5-7 (average $6) in 1975, the $95k doesn't work. bls.gov inflation calculator gives $12,000 a year in January 1975 (2000 hrs at $6/hr) as $59k for August 2019.
$12,000 salary in January 1998 is $19,000 today.
You skipped a couple of steps. The full process goes like this:
1. Hire someone to produce something. Pay then $X.
2. Sell the the thing they produced back to them for $Y where Y>X.
3. Pocket $(Y-X)
4. Use some of the proceeds to pay lobbyists to pressure legislators to pass laws that make it illegal for anyone else to enter your market
5. Buy yacht
That's assuming you get 40 hours a week of work.
I learned MIG basics in an afternoon. So far none of my welds have cracked. I'd expect much better welding from people coming out of school than what I can do.
Considering my lack of experience I suspect over time I'll find at least one weak joint. That said it's really not hard to tell if you get penetration, especially if you grind them.
Well, not just welding: we're considered engineering tradespeople - that's what it says on my trade certificate.
Earned over $100k last financial year, doing 50+ hour weeks, so plenty of over time, we certainly work for it.
If you're in the right workshop, or doing the right site work, we're getting paid reasonably well. If you can buy a house away from the major centres, maybe one that needs a bit of a refresh, and don't need a brand new car every few years, we can live quite comfortably.
"If you want to feel old after 42 years, keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears"
My dad did blue collar labor his whole life and his body hurt. He would take something like 6 ibuprofen every morning with breakfast. To do that kind of work requires you putting your family above yourself, which is a noble thing. I think what people miss in the old "you could support a family doing this" was that it was very much you actively harming yourself so that your family could be better off.
It's the same thing with coal miners. They get all sorts of terrible health consequences from the work, but it is a noble sacrifice to them.
My dad was adamant that we were going to college and living a more comfortable life than he did. So here I am, a software engineer with plenty of worries in the world, but at least a job that won't leave me broken and in pain after I do it for twenty years.
I didn't read this article word for word, but it seemed to have a bit of an agenda to it. The number one determining factor of how far you will make it if you're working class is how driven you are. If you are lazy, you'll struggle your whole life. There isn't any family safety net to keep you ignorant of that.
It's important to give people access to opportunity, but it's up to the individual to be self-motivated enough to take it. Education isn't some magical panacea.
There are no guarantees. There's ample opportunity in this field for atrophy or strain to take its toll. Take care of yourself, pay attention to the complaints and do something about them.
I expect there are jobs that are "medium duty" that are actually health-enhancing. Somewhere between back-breaking labor and sedentary engineer.
Maybe being a mail carrier and walking most of the day.
- Wake up early -- not too many chances for late-night drinking then feeling bad about it.
- Walk a long way, whatever the weather. The post office supplied excellent waterproofs (this is Denmark).
- Walk up so many stairs. Many apartment buildings have the letter boxes in each apartment's door.
- Occasionally run away from a dog.
My dad is 71 years old (I'm 28) and has been doing autobody repair work for 55 years (still working to this day). He has mild arthritis, but he's in remarkably good shape.
On the other hand, I'm starting to develop a gut after 7 years of full-time programming. I genuinely believe that if I were to keep up my current lifestyle, I'd be in for a bad time by the time I hit 50.
Ideally, I should be doing more physical exercise, but the difference is that it's a choice that I have to make whereas it's not a choice for my dad, and it's hard for me to find motivation to go to the gym.
So, in terms of health, I suspect that:
Desk job + gym > Physical labor job > Desk job with no physical activity
I’m saying this as a office worker who’s lost 15 pounds by diet change small walks. Looking to add some days at the gym soon.
I have an uncle who is a plumber of a similar age and is in pretty great shape for his age. My understanding is that most of his aches and pains are related to a car accident he was in when he was young and reckless.
That's mostly diet. With a better diet and 20 minutes of working out a day, you could make yourself healthy. Hell, run just a mile a day, and do pushups, pullups, and planks every other day. It's amazing how short workouts done consistently can actually keep you fit.
I don't have any trouble at all keeping my weight under control, but in order to stay strong and flexible I still need to work at it constantly.
To that end, I have a weight bench, barbell and dumbbells in my lounge room, and a pull up bar hung between two door ways in the hall.
I find 'working out' tedious, incredibly boring. But I'll walk by the pull up bar and do 10 pull ups multiple times a day, or grab a couple dumbbells and do a few sets here and there.
> I work in metal fabrication and my I'm lathe.
In my experience it's much more about how you manage the money you make, i.e.:
1. live below your means
2. invest the difference - put your money to work for you
For example, in the last week there was a bank that accidentally deposited $120,000 in the account of a couple. The couple immediately went on a spending spree, buying all kinds of very expensive items. By the time the police got involved, the money was gone.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2019/09/08/bank-acc...
Criminality aside, the "gee I have some extra money, let's go shopping!" is how one remains poor for life.
Not to mention people are encouraged to do zero planning for the student debts and get pressured by family to buy new cars.
There’s so much of wealth that comes down to lifestyle and educating people on personal finance which would go way farther than just telling people to get a $100k degree and ‘study hard (for rote testing)’. Here in Canada where I live the debt levels are still insane and didn’t decline like the US did, even without the healthcare bills excuse.
Politicians love blaming external factors and rich people/big corporations for all our upward mobility issues, which obviously play a roles but it’s hardly the full story, I’m curious how far we could improve things through culture and how we teach our kids to spend money. This was a personal finance culture that was far more popular in the west in the recent past eras which we people constantly romanticize about and point to different single things to explain it all away (ie unions).
My girlfriend is amazing with money and saves everything, both her parents do the same, which is the opposite of me in my early 20s before I read into it and my parents growing up too. I’m convinced parenting combined with culture (she’s Han Chinese and they tend to be thrifty similar Scottish people and Jugaad in India[1], among others) has a significant impact on these trajectories.
I've inherited not spending money from my (not Scottish) parents. It's taken an effort to spend money in social situations, so I'm not seen as miserly.
If you're highly driven to achieve the goal of spending-consuming, that's unlikely to get you anywhere particularly interesting.
My parents were careful with money, but not necessarily frugal. I think part of it was the fact that my mom (and probably my dad at least at one point) had a pension to look forward to. I've thought before a lot on how that probably changes the calculus quite a bit.
I seem to have picked up some pathological fear of not having enough, so I probably live excessively below my means.
Growing up, I didn't even know that normal people could invest money in the stock market. Even now, I have friends that look at me sort of funny when I mention having a significant amount of money in the market. Usually they ask why I don't do something useful to it like buy a nicer house, car, etc.
They either start their own company/contracting, become highly specialized professionals, or get a degree and take some boring white collar job that pays better.
Managing finances is just a gimmick when you have zero disposable income. That's basically 24/7/365 crisis management.
Sure, if you manage to get some savings/credit-score together it's very important what you spend it on. (Eg classes/moving or finally doing that trip to Vegas you always dreamed about.) But if you can't increase your income significantly, then investing or spending it makes no difference. (Because investing it is just continuing the saving, for whatever purpose, let's say to have a rainy day fund, or medical emergency fund, amd spending it just decreases the years you spent saving up, but your overall lifetime income will not change much, thus your range of possibilities won't either.)
I've been a software contractor for the last ~18 months. I do it because it affords me the ability to spend my time exactly how I want to, mostly reading and researching. But I also have reduced my contracting time as much as possible and this year my income will have been ~30k.
I've gotten to the end of my rope, and it's stressful and weighs on me 24/7, especially with my fear of an upcoming recession.
I decided to find a job again and in just a month I've been able to get multiple offers lined up for 5x my current income.
On the one hand, I use my position to its fullest--and I've spent the better part of a year learning things I never would have learned in a University or employment setting.
On the other hand, I recognize that this is an incredibly privileged position, one which I don't feel very deserving of. I understand the market forces, yes, but I can't help but feel a tinge of guilt knowing that I can be somewhat irresponsible financially just to pull myself out within two months of a new paycheck.
I've worked in metal fabrication on and off for over 20 years, and my observation is that's a cultural thing combined with long running fatigue from working too many hours standing up. That and metal fabricators aren't known for their diet being particularly great.
I'm fairly active, both mentally and physically, never really drank much, and never smoked cigarettes. I could kick most of the guys I work with in the head, whereas most of them wouldn't be able to lift a foot above their hips. People usually guess my age between 6 and 10 years below my actual age.
Metal fabrication doesn't have to be hard on the body.
I entirely agree with you that the number one determining factor of how far you'll get in life--and by that I mean how well you'll do setting and achieving your own goals--is how driven you are.
And highly driven people tend not to hang around the workshop floor for very long, so the workshop floor tends to suffer a driven-person-drain by attrition as the highly driven people drive off to greener pastures.
Training a batch of people for six months who will mostly be useful after completion and are mostly likely to complete training might be a good proposition. If training time is four years, 50% of entrants complete training, and 50% of those trained are useful... the case might be weaker.
Invest x months of training at y cost.
Then the person leaves right after training for a higher-paying job.
That dis-incentivizes training.
Those help a lot.
in IT this is a real problem. it takes about half a year to make someone productive. it takes another half year or so before i start getting a return on my investment. if they leave then, i am barely breaking even. if they leave earlier, i am making a loss. a friend of mine tried this business and couldn't make it work financially.
It's also exactly how the master-apprentice system works. It's a good system, is fair, and works. It's also vastly superior than the system where you pay to be trained by someone who is not a working master and end up learning substandard or obsolete methods.
A lot of the local network engineers in the Austin area owe their start to working on that NOC desk- they were fairly large so they kept 30ish people fairly busy. Once they reached a certain level of competency they either moved to supervisory positions or got poached...
Possible legalisation of drugs and stuff around that is a matter of interest for me, so if you can elaborate on that I'd appreciate it.
Even if drugs were legalized, this would still happen.
They test for drugs because being under the influence of drugs (including alcohol) is a safety hazard. I suppose if tests were developed that could differentiate between "I'm intoxicated" and "I smoked on my day off", the situation could change.
My bigger problem with legalisation is my experience of the utter fucking stupidity that suddenly manifests when drugs are present. Responsible use just does not seem part of many people's nature. I include legal drugs like alcohol in that.
---
Bit of info, more FYI than actually relevant to the point here, but interesting: a mate of mine works in the office of a largish UK company.
He mentioned that there is drug testing for him and others in the office, at which point I predictably blew my top, assuming it's fucking intrusive American working practices come with American companies trying to spread fucking witless American drug policies over the world (and that is real problem IMO).
Hold on, said my mate, and pointed out that the company has a sizeable workforce that goes out to fix heavy, moving infrastructure under risky conditions. Drug testing is necessary under those conditions, agreed? And if they test them, the company can hardly make an exemption for the office staff, right?
Couldn't agree more.
But fairness comes in under the law, it's formalised as discrimination. That is something companies are rightly keen to avoid.
And also how the law works, what's the legal test to determine fairness?
If you're going to say something potentially very useful, at least back it up.
There are other professions which have problems with substance abuse but which take an approach that is more focused on rehabilitation. I have heard of this occurring for dentists and medical doctors but I haven’t heard of drug testing all practitioners and can’t imagine the uproar such a proposal would cause.
> I definitely don't want coke/meth heads though.
Why do you think that is worse than MJ? I know a guy who uses meth and he's reliable and can hold down a job. Have you any reason to hold that view other than from anti-drug propaganda? (not intended as snark)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/welders-cutters-solderers...
The guys who actually do well, and who do make $150k a year were not enrolled in some shitty associates degree program (this article should really be on the failure of the US higher education scam); they're highly skilled former Navy machinists.
And of course, the reason working class jobs like welder don't make more is simple: we keep importing new low skilled laborers, driving the price of low-skilled labor down. Mercantilism and labor laws could fix this. Instead we get dimwits from the Atlantic suggesting welders go to English class.
You want to learn how the math behind Dijkstra's algorithm works, get a BS. You want to learn how to build a network, get an AS.
I myself learned welding on the job: at a muffler company, and again later in a government lab. The answer to social problems is not always "more school."
It's such a waste of money it should just be considered fraud.
I could say the same about a BS couldn't I? How was it put in Good Will Hunting? “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
Spend four years at junior college(s) taking useful sounding classes. German, welding, programming, calculus, jazz band, EMT, with no intention of getting an associates degree (which is of little value in any case).
Cheap, and you might actually learn something. In the modern era, I'm not so sure that following the obvious path is the right idea anymore.
In general, no. Professional welders who do well economically typically have a few things in common that have nothing to do with their origin or education:
* They work very hard (60+ hours a week or more), usually on an hourly wage and make overtime pay/holiday pay/hazard pay
* They work either for themselves or in a small shop rather than for a large business or manufacturer. Large businesses typically cap salaries for their workers at a number high enough to attract the skills they need, but low enough to protect profits for the shareholders.
* The welders have the needed certifications or specialty skill set to meet the demand in a particular niche of the market
* They live near or are able to commute or move to an area with significant demand for their particular specialty.
The most obvious example at the moment are the welders in the oil patch (Bakken shale) in North Dakota. Many of the welders working there are working nearly 24/7, making a lot of money because oil production requires pipeline welders and the oil companies are paying lots of labor overtime to avoid any interruptions in production.
For the most part, the only qualification needed is the welding certificate for the type of welding they'll be doing. The employers don't care that you didn't finish high school or that you are an ex-con, as long as you have the paper (you passed the welding tests) and can read basic instructions you're paid a decent hourly wage.
Since there's such demand, you can work as much as you want, and since you're hourly you get overtime and holiday pay.
Another example is nuclear welders... TIG welders who are certified for welding stainless, monel, or other piping types used in nuclear reactors do fairly well. They have to have certifications in the welding types used (TIG or specialized stick, mostly) and they have to pass the basic security checks needed to work on a reactor site. Reactors need maintenance, and they aren't going away soon, so there's a demand.
The myth of welders being rich is something pushed by the various politicians who benefit from being able to say that student loan debt isn't a problem. It's true that a welder CAN make a ton of cash, but those examples aren't the entire workforce and there's always a price to pay. An underwater welder can make over $1 million in take home pay over a 5 year career that usually ends due to chronic injuries from high pressure environments that last a lifetime.
I spent about a week at a natural gas power plant in Oregon being built to work on some telecom. Welders there ranged from 80k-120k that I knew. To be fair, I don't know of any welder above water that could make 150k. I only know the 150 range to be for deep sea oil guys. But that's just my experience. Either way, it's not like you get out of the gate being that class of welder. It's getting cert'd in difference environments, tolerances and types of welding, along with experience that get you to that level. And I don't know a single career blue-collar that thinks otherwise. Unless they're really stupid and anything above 30k a year is unbelievable to them.
"You mean you have to develop extra skills that separate you from the herd to get paid more? No! Really?" Same goes for programming too if we're all being honest.
I've read about these "saturation divers". Guys that go down inside a diving bell for weeks at a time and breath a mix of helium. Only highly skilled divers can do this (ie, lots of experience), and if I remember correctly, have to stop by age 40(ish). So there's this narrow window of time where they can make that kind of money. But these guys could make $175-$200k.
Obviously this is a tiny, tiny fraction of welders for only a portion of there career. I just found it really fascinating how the whole process works. Living down there for days or weeks at a time.
It takes a lot of work experience and education to meet those qualifications, though. You're welding specialized alloys and need to make absolutely airtight welds in weird orientations and tight spaces. Mistakes get expensive fast. These folks aren't just out of tech school. They're mid-late career professionals who are _really damned good_ at what they do.
Saturation divers (i.e. "deep sea oil guys") and even some salvage divers can all make significantly more, but that's an additional, hard-to-find skillset tacked on top of the welding certifications and it's often contract work instead of full-time. It's also a lot more physically demanding and damned dangerous. The $150-200k/year welders exist, but an awful lot are ex-Navy folks with a decade or so of experience working in very extreme environments.
While I do see the value in theoretical and academic knowledge. I really do. There's zero fucking reason to assume it's grander than practical/vocational knowledge. One of the few jokes I like out of the Big Bang Theory (fucking hate that show but my ex loved it), the group was driving out somewhere for some reason, but the car breaks down. Whoever the main guy was says "Who knows anything about internal combustion engines?". All of them start saying they know plenty, yada yada. "Who knows how to fix one?" Silence.
Both sides need each other, academic and vocational. Neither side can advance without the other. But I'll gladly be the one to rag on academics if they act superior to the tradesmen until that stupidity ends.
I think the ongoing repetition of the claim, and the fact that it seems to work for those repeating it, would suggest otherwise?
The main point of the article is that politicians from a particular party say that they do. It then goes into a lot of examination as to why that's not true.
The usual problem is that there are big swathes of the population living in regions without a healthy/diverse/growing economy. (Eg areas that are or once were monocultures of one particular sector, and/or are/were based on natural resource extraction. So basically fossil jobs and auto making are the prime examples.)
The needed retraining, relocation, and/or regional revitalization is completely non-existent in the Trump era, and it wasn't really effective/serious during the Obama administration either.
So, nothing to do with how much a plumber makes in a big city.
My friends who got into welding mostly did so through aprenticeships with unions or on the job non union apprenticeships.
They will probably not become millionaires selling their time as welders but they are solidly middle if not upper middle class. They go on international vacations and eat at fancy restraunts. They are fairing on average far better than my friends with "soft" liberal arts degrees.
Yeah it's not a total panacea easy road to riches but learning a trade like welding seems like a super high EV move for a lot of people who want a stable career right now.
You might also like "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell which talks about this phenomenon also.
Could be myopia on the part of the author in looking at a college-trained welder, since the author seems to imply traditional college is a better path to financial stability than welding college (which may be entirely true).
I mostly like the idea of it as a means to an end. Not so much a way to make money working on trailer hitches but as a necessary skill for a race car fabricator or artist.
Truth is, we should probably all start over every decade or so. It's impractical, but you'd go to your grave with a more interesting resume.
First, it cherry picks a single example of someone who obviously had a ton of other shit going on (got fired for missing too much work) and then seems to draw from that the conclusion that "Welding won't make you rich". Then it complains that the 150k salaries for welders bandied about are rare, but so what? Did anyone think a welder right out of the gate would make that much money? I think most of us understand that your average developer isn't making 400k a year at Google, either, but that doesn't mean that's an invalid data point.
The reason people should be interested about the trades are:
1. They are immune from offshoring, which has had a huge impact on other blue collar jobs like manufacturing. 2. If they are a viable, and secure, path to the middle class, they should be supported.
There are lots of valid issues to discuss (the toll it takes on your body is a big one), but would be better to see it from an article with better data and less out-of-the-gate bias.
If you read it, they say the 90th percentile welder gets paid $60k a year. That is, the average 15+ year experience welder gets paid way less than 50% of the original $150k claim.
What this says is that the 90th percentile for this entire group of "Welders, Cutters, Solderers and Brazers" was $63,740.
But the small table there also says that there is a big difference in the average between "specialty trade contractors" and "manufacturing", which isn't that surprising. It also says nothing about the age range (I don't know where you got your 15+ year experience data from), so when looking at percentiles, it wouldn't be surprising that the field has a ton of junior folks that brings down the average.
It would be very interesting to see what the distribution looks like for master welders with at least 10 years experience, but the article has none of that data.
Furthermore, if you dig into the 150k claim, you'll see that that is almost always for welders in high demand areas, like oil and gas during the fracking boom. That doesn't make it apocryphal, just constrained to a specific industry.
The people doing well at the trades are bright, skilled, conscientious people -- above average at all of those qualities. Just like the 'professionals' doing well with their college degrees.
What kind of piss-poor journalism is that?
No job is immune from measures that eliminate skilled labor. Consider plumbing. Sure, you need someone to plumb a house. But where my house is plumbed with copper sweat fittings, a contemporary house is plumbed with plastic tubing and swaged fittings that take much less skill and effort. On-site carpentry work is replaced by increasing use of prefab components and things that just snap together. Jobs won't disappear overnight, but there's still a downward pressure on skilled labor content. Prefabrication could easily affect the domestic market for welders.
>>> 2. If they are a viable, and secure, path to the middle class, they should be supported.
In my view, support labor through better labor laws, and a stronger safety net that includes health care and retirement. Support education. The trades go through boom-bust cycles. The fact that politicians are talking about training more welders could be a signal of the end of a cycle. A career has to last 40 years. Which trades will be in demand in the next decades?
Then I end up in the DIY section, and for about ten seconds I think I hit paydirt. Then I realize that every. single. video. is by some guy who knows his way around an arc welder. And not like "This video is for people who know how to weld," just, "okay cut these pieces and then you weld em together and then you're done." Like everyone or their brother knows how to weld.
Now I bring this up because clearly there is some subset of people who are saving a great deal of money by making specialty tools out of stock or scrap instead of buying it. I know a bunch of amateur carpenters and a few woodworkers, but didn't think I know any amateur welders.
I don't know if its a time and place thing where those skills were more relevant to a rural farm boy in the 60s than they are today, or just that such people still have those skills, but I'm just not one of them...
I currently feel comfortable doing basic home plumbing, electrical, my own auto maintenance, building small pieces of wood furniture, and light metalwork (bending, drilling, riveting, etc). Next up that I’d like to learn is welding and fiberglass. With so many resources out there for free, your only limitation is time and access to basic tools.
When the commercial offerings are $100,000+ but you can make something good enough yourself for $20,000 or less, well, yeah, it is well worth it to take the time to learn welding, since you will more than make up for it with just one such project.
That's how/why my grandfather knew how to weld. And all his children. And his grandchildren too. His kids all went to college but also got a big boost from having practical hands-on skills to augment with theory and specialization. One of my uncles got a PhD and then spent most of his career helping grad students fabricate equipment for their field experiments, because hardly any other students or professors knew practical welding/soldering/instrumentation.
Hire one and have a go on any 5mm+ steel job you have and you will likely surprise yourself.
The inverter welders are also way easier to use (and portable) compared to the old school transformer welders (i.e. don't buy a second hand transformer welder unless you are a hipster).
Now, this won't make you good enough to weld on a bridge or an airplane, but you'll definitely be able to stick metal together for doing one-off stuff at home.
It's the same as in software: All those people who think they know how to do programming because they can whip up some shitty python script. But that's the easy part. Making an application that works superficially is practically trivial. Making something that is proven to work, that scales and will still work in 10 years is where the money is.
Across the country, high schools have been cutting shop classes. Administrators push 4-year college as the only viable option. Anything else is increasingly viewed as irresponsible advice.
At the same time, 4-year college costs have been skyrocketing. Students are taking on levels of debt that the previous generation would have thought obscene.
Meanwhile, the breadth of degrees that can reasonably be expected to service the debt of a 4-year college stint, let alone earn a living afterwards, appears to be shrinking.
Just because some degrees are currently in high demand doesn't mean that will be the case in 1, 2, or 5 years. Tech recessions can be brutal given how leveraged the booms are.
At the center of all of this is automation in numerous forms. The changes we've seen so far will only accelerate. There's little evidence to suggest that today's economies will be up to the challenge of providing economically viable pathways for young people starting out.
The myth of higher education as the pathway to a middle class lifestyle has all the hallmarks of an idea that will die a slow, agonizing death. We're utterly unprepared for what comes next.
Something tells me these things are related...
My old man taught wood shop in a high school. Year after year, there was less and less demand/attendance. To stay securely employed, as he was getting closer to retirement he pivoted over to teaching drafting and then CAD which had tons of interest and were supported by administration. By the time he retired the wood and metal shop classes were gone for good. Pretty sad and worrying to think that since then an entire generation has gone through that school with no opportunity to learn how to actually make a physical good with their hands. We have YouTube now if we want to learn, and it’s a great resource, but it’s hard not to think something has been lost.
Welcome to globalism? 98% of the physical goods you buy are made in the developing world, there's not much point in acquiring these skills here.
But a lot of folks feel the squeeze so they buy the crappy Target one instead.
I went to the sonoma county fair a few months ago, the student exhibits had a section with welding. There was a lot of pretty good looking work there.
I mean, the people putting forth the narrative that you can make good money as a welder don't draw any of the distinctions you outline in their anecdotes either.
So if you are looking at software development with the same eye, you're going to see high floor, high ceiling, and come to a different conclusion about the profession as a whole.
The line between software and IT is blurry. Depending on where you draw the line the floor for software can be pretty low.
"Welders at the 90th percentile of income for the profession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, earn $63,000 a year before taxes. Those are, statistically, the top earners, and they are usually expert welders with decades of experience."
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/production/welders-cutters-solderers...
Cherry-picked example. Although I do think the Conservative opinion of skilled trades is not really rooted in reality. Most of the better-off tradesmen are sole proprietors.
And of course, the trades aren't a panacea. Demand ebbs and flows and sometimes work can be hard to come by. But I see nothing wrong with suggesting it as an option to a college degree (and the debt that goes along with it). Even if the salary isn't that high, it still beats being unemployed with $20K in student debt.
That's like saying the better off developers are senior software architects or consultants.
If you want to optimize your trade career for money owning your own business is simply where that path leads.
Some people just don't apply themselves. Some just have bad luck. Some have a combination of the two. It's unfair to Orry Carriere (the individual in question) for us who aren't better-versed in his personal history to assume which of the above cases (or perhaps others unmentioned) he falls into.
But regardless, the article seems to have cherry-picked Mr. Carriere. Alternatively, how would someone who graduated in the middle of his class (or near the top) and never was fired from their job have done as a welder?
I'm quite open to the argument that the "wealthy welder" is truly a myth.... but this article was not the most compelling, objective way to make the argument.
The first is that we're equating high school performance to life performance. High school in America is a joke for a variety of reasons (lack of funding, gentrification etc) and I don't think highschool performance represents how well a person does at all given how many different circumstances can affect that at a young age.
Second, 'missing too much work' in America can mean things such as 'taking time off because you're sick' or 'having to deal with familial emergencies', all of which many jobs do not at all allow any leeway in.
The person in the article made multiple efforts and worked hard to try and get a better job/life for his family. The fact that you immediately isolate out the things he's had to deal with make me wonder if you've experienced poverty or had to deal with shitty jobs in the past.
Welding school is typically 5k to 15k [1] and takes two years or less. Despite how things played out for the particular case covered by this author, there is a good argument for welding. It may not make you rich. However, if you don't like the traditional college route, then welding and similar trades offer comparatively good pay/training trade-off.
* https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/average-cost-of-c...
I'm a software engineer - that is what I know, and what I do. But I'm already above the "age ceiling" that we all know exists - but somehow (maybe due to the fact that I keep my skills current?) I have stayed employed and haven't been subjected (to my knowledge) to not being hired because of my age. I'm also not in SV or any other "high earning" area, and I like small "mom-n-pop" vs large established companies (with all the politics and other junk) - so I've never earned 6 figs - nor will I likely ever. But what I do earn pays my bills and keeps a roof over my head, and allows for entertainment for me and my family.
For now.
But someday that won't be there. Then what? Well - I intend to work until I die - that is, code forever. I know there are plenty of software engineers out there much older than I am who are still employed. So maybe it isn't as bleak as I think. But I do know this: When I am not employed, I can't just "go around the neighborhood" or "advertise on craigslist" or "hang out a shingle" that says "Got a broken fence? I can weld it for ya! Call me @ xxx..."
Which is something tradespeople can almost always do. In their "retirement years" they can become handypersons, do side-jobs welding or carpentry, or maybe simple auto repairs (or even more complex ones if they have the tools and strength left). Plumbing and electrical isn't out of the question either. They may not make bank, but they likely won't starve, either.
For myself? I'm not sure what I could do. One thing I do know I can do - just not well enough to be employed at it - is weld. I can also use a hammer, saw, plane, whatever - I do have some wood and metal shop skills. I also work on my own automobiles. Whether I could convince someone else to let me fix their issues - well, that's just some marketing and hopefully doing it right for them (just hand me that grinder and paint - I'm no tig stacked-dimes artist).
So there's that to be said about the trades - that it is something that can be done to keep some form of food on the table, even if it's just helping out neighbors for a few dollars. Nobody wants to hire an aging software engineer to code up a simple website or something like that any longer it seems. Those older SWEs typically find their gigs maintaining aging and creaking software in a language nobody uses any longer (and fortunately for me, I do have skills in Perl, VB3 thru 6, classic ASP, some COBOL - and it seems PHP may be headed that way too).
And I'm with ya, "grinder and paint makes me the welder I ain't"
Today software puts food on the table.
The main thing is to panic now instead of panic later. Ease into a Plan B before it's a dire necessity.
> When I am not employed, I can't just "go around the neighborhood" or "advertise on craigslist" or "hang out a shingle" that says "Got a broken fence? I can weld it for ya! Call me @ xxx..."
Also... I have no idea why you think you can't do this. Before I went to college for computer science, I did exactly this, and made quite a bit of money. But, I think this goes to what I said above... some people are aggressive with their skills and money and you tend to not find them at work.
No particular reason we should be teaching welding at a college as opposed to an actual trade school. Tradesmen should not be held up by a need to analyze “The Purple Letter” or “Sir Gatsby & The Green Knight”.
I think that thesis is pretty defensible. Clearly a liberal arts, or for that matter professional, degree isn't for everyone. On the other hand, pretending that some sort of idealized working class living exists in the US today for anyone who just wants it enough and will work hard is disingenuous at best. There has been a lot of cynically dishonest political rhetoric around these topics in recent decades.
Some have been arguing that skilled trades are the answer to those who are facing a lack of opportunity, this looks in depth at how one person's attempt to join the skilled trades went (poorly) and also looks at statistics for welders generally and shows that it's a mixed bag.
While it's true welders aren't rich, the question is actually how to provide education resources to allow everyone to see succeed to their ability, without making your parents' wealth the biggest factor. I think it's clear that vocational education is a part of this, and that college for all is not.
So much misinformation around anything to do with pay, don't believe anything you hear, I've heard some really outlandish numbers quoted from a variety of places. The BLS (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/) is probably the most accurate source of information you'll get. (Quoted in TFA)
>Its premise was that in rural Ohio, there was such a shortage of skilled tradespeople that employers were regularly hiring welders at salaries of $150,000 a year and up.
So because In-And-Out pays managers $160,000 a year [1] we should conclude that fast food is (in general) a highly paid occupation?
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/01/25/n...
Average salary of electrical lineman: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/lineman-sal...
If you're a welder in a small mid-west town with no obvious industry, your prospects are going to suck. If you're willing to go to the oil patch for a few years, you could do really well.
You can join the IBEW as an apprentice, get work experience, an education, and get paid...no student loans required.
I'm not sure how your friend did it, but they should have done more research...
Not only is it not bad, it's higher than the median salary of many college graduates, even of highly accredited known public schools.
Likely the successful tradesmen who has instilled a sense of worth in "dirty jobs" and working final product.
Anecdotally, I have some college educated friends that describe the majority of their desk jobs as tedious, repetitive, and duplicative data entry; A plumber or welder's job certainly has comparatively longer term viability.
Orry had been working hard for five years...
Isn't there some contradiction in these two statements?
I'm not making a judgement as to whether those are reasonable terms, only pointing out that such jobs exist, and could be similar where this individual worked there.
As for me, going to college was absolutley the thing that really changed my life course.
I grew up on a dairy farm in northern New York. Milked cows until I was 18 and then my dad sold the farm. So I joined the Navy. I did that for 6 years and then when I was about to get out in 2002, I can still remember an officer (you know, a guy with a degree) explaining to me that I was making this huge mistake getting out. Because I was successful in the Navy. Already an E6/FC1. My career was made.
So I asked him, if I'm successful on the inside, what makes you think I cant be successful on the outside? So I got a lot of reasons. It was a good pitch. He even talked to me about getting an associate's at the local college. I was almost there anyway, just a couple classes and I'd be done. At the end, he questioned if Bard, a private liberal arts school I was accepted to, was even accredited.
That's when I knew, not only did he not care, but he would seek to harm my potential future growth just for some metric.
Anyway, so I did go to Bard college. Graduated with a degree in economics, now I'm the CTO / CPO of a middle market company (7 or so years after graduating college).
Had I of stayed, I could have done other blue jobs on the outside someday. I know a guy who works on powerlines in Texas. Says he likes his job. Takes advil like its candy. It pays the bills.
My wife and I have saved a lot, even with two kids. Last year, after our company consummated its sale to a PE company, we've been able to buy our own house in Brooklyn.
If I became a truck driver like my dad did after the sale of the farm, I'm not sure I'd be in the same place today - but it's possible I suppose.
My brother is in the trades. Hes a master plumber and runs his own plumbing company. He's also been successful. His back is also totally shot.
They do seem to make a lot of money.
During IRAQ II I saw a local add (Uk) offering £40K tax free for a basic car mechanic going out to Iraq to presumably work for the Military or PMC
That's against 52K on glassdoor for being a military officer. But I am pretty sure that 52K is taxable itself so the actual different is smaller.
First, they seem to ignore that there is still education needed. And most people who claimed they were going skilled trades ended up doing low skilled manual labor.
And second, they overvalue their education. I've had people claim their skills were good enough to call them an engineer. (But if you give them a real world engineering question, they don't make an attempt)
Third, I've seen fantastic technicians, able to solder a board-mount LED by hand saved us literally thousands of dollars. There is value here, but this person was physically talented from decades of experience.
We were both surprised at how similar many of our courses were. The big difference was that the standards for pass/fail were lower at his, and that he didn't have any of the 300 or 400 level courses where all the interesting stuff was IMO. And I didn't have any of the hands on courses that was the interesting stuff in his opinion. He had an advanced soldering course. I had an "optional" 3 hour tutorial in it -- it was optional in the sense that you didn't have to attend, but you'd fail your labs if you couldn't solder...
There are plenty in the middle who can do both - and more than a few of them with such knowledge have never take a college or university course in their life.
You see the same thing with software engineering sometimes - the CompSci graduate who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag even if given a github of fizzbuzz, versus the person who never went to college yet makes 6-figs in SV hacking on code (yet doesn't have the "book understanding" of data structures or algorithms).
...and tons of people in between those who can combine both.
Slap 'em together with similar people in the trades - well, you'll find yourself a myriad of people at all levels and understanding of "mechatronics" and/or robotics and such.
It is quite likely that your roommate could learn what you learned - and you could (or have) learned what he knew. It ultimately all depends on having the motivation and desire to pursue it.
Where you might have the advantage is that you could probably pick up his skills from online resources and simple practice projects or whatnot. He would probably struggle to do the same, without actually going into debt and attending some kind of university course(s). Some of it can be approximated with self-study and some online MOOC training, but not all of it, unfortunately - and he wouldn't have the "piece of paper" at the end.
These days most people use ovens and solder paste with laser cut stencils, which make this stuff mostly about the tedium of ordering, identifying and placing components on the board with tweezers. The solder self-corrects. There is thus little physical skill required in SMT style soldering, at least at moderate component sizes.
Source: I trained my company from scratch to the point where we can turn over new prototype quantity boards in 2-3 days (including design, fab, receipt, assembly). Nobody has decades of experience.
I know one anecdote doesn't mean much, but I have two friends who are making around $100k/year as stick welders (boiler type work) in the New Jersey area. They do more than just weld though - I'd say that 50% of their job is actually welding and the other 50% is miscellaneous boiler repair work.
One of them has only been doing it for about 4 years, after going to a two year school.
My other friend is making around $80k/year as a "burner mechanic" with absolutely no schooling at all. His only prior experience was that he was a DirecTV installer. He is very mechanically inclined though.
The key is getting into one of those companies that does work at state locations - I'm not sure exactly how this all works, but it's something like "if you're working on a state site, you have to get paid the prevailing wage", which is usually very high. Couple that with overtime and you'll see welders making $80+ an hour.
I'm sure there are welders who make far less, but that's probably the case with any industry. My friends are probably at a gig equivalent to FAANG in the software world.
a) Be willing to do it in conditions nobody else wants to.
b) own a business and employ other people who do it.
There are three people I know who weld but don't make much money. One makes most of her money on banking software, and the other two don't have degrees.
I heard a lot of people talk about taking these jobs but they never seemed to exist.
"Don't do what I did to get rich, it's not a good idea."
Other (used-to-)pay-pretty-ok blue collar jobs are things like plumbers, electricians, and union telco work, if you can get it. Plumbing isn't too hard to pick up; I don't know if you need licensing for that (or why), other than a professional liability insurance policy of some kind. AFAIK there's still pretty good demand for plumbers and electricians, although I haven't done any kind of research on the market and expect it varies a lot by locale.
Never mind if they try to hang out their shingle as a plumber or electrician. It'd be an interesting study to compare the number of calls that Charlie vs Charlene would get in that field, but I think we all know the answer.
I suspect there is some truth to that however, I regularly see women with 'welder' listed on their dating profiles (mostly tinder, although I've seen 2 on Facebook dating app, within 15 miles of me, since it rolled out making matches in Indy yesterday) and personally I only know one male that welds for a living.
I see plenty of female automotive techs/mechanics around too. I think out of my last dozen oil changes there has been at least 1 woman in the bays working and as many as at least 3 and my last brake job was a woman (she called me out to do the 'well we could machine your rotors butttt...).
I'm sure there's a lot of sexual harassment and general unpleasantness still there in a random shop but I feel like there are a lot more 20-40ish women in these sorts of jobs than there were even a decade ago. Indianapolis could be somewhat of an outlier though as we have a huge FFA presence here and in surrounding towns as well as a few trade schools that just do automotive, welding and electrician training.
What I've never seen though is any women doing HVAC or plumbing. One would think women would be more inclined towards plumbing given they are generally smaller and can fit in those tight spaces better, instead in my experience I've generally seen plumbers that are built like me, like a refrigerator, grumbling and groaning while they try and snake their way under a sink or behind a toilet.
Similarly, getting a start and sticking it out is just as difficult for women today as it was in the pre-war era. The post war period has been ingrained as the normal baseline in our collective imaginations, though it is anything but normal.
I am willing to wager that Rosie the Riveter isn't the norm for the US and if she or your aunt was trying to make it as a welder, they both will not find the supportive environment that existed post-war
There are indeed women working trades, but not many of them. In Canada, for instance, they are 4.5% of the skilled trades workforce. [1]
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3823621/women-skilled-trades-manu...
And although it claims the "myth" started in 2015, I started to hear about this (and I am from Brazil, not US even) around 2005 or so.
I finished college around 2009, and know from personal experience, that the "politicians" the article is against, are saying the truth, I ended college with huge debts, didn't got any decent jobs, and right now I work in a field not related to what I learned in college, I finished paying the loans only last year, and will finally marry this year, and will live in a tiny cramped apartment with my wife, with no vehicle.
The friends I had at high school, the ones that went to college, are in similar situations... But the ones that went to trade school, all of them own their own house, are married with kids, own multiple vehicles...
So I have no idea where the idea that this stuff is a "myth" came from.
And I am sorry of how much I belittled a friend in high school, when he said he would not go to college, and go learn welding and how to operate CNC machines... Back then all "adults" convinced me he was going to be low class and poor, and that I should aim to enter a pretigious university. That guy while I was still in college, had bought the motorcycle of his dreams. When I finished college, he was paying for his house. When I was strugglign to find jobs, in part because everyone wanted experience instead of education, and thus I was 5 years older with zero experience compared to my competitors (either 18 year old guys with lots of energy, or people same age as me, that skipped college but had 5 years of experience on the job), he was complaining of how many job offers he had to turn down...
The other is here in the Netherlands, works in off-shore and has gradually transited from welding to safety officer. He made a ton of money doing welding though (diver / welder) and has a lot of property that he rents out. He could retire anytime he wants (and is still < 40).
Welding would just be learned as part of the job, whether as plumber or mechanic, once upon a time even as electrician (who now doesn't even learn to solder).
I say "had", because the mechanic nowadays is taught mostly as a "Mechatroniker", since electronics have become ubiquitious in machines.
The secondary education systems differ from the US, I hear. Nevertheless, most training happens on the job, with one school day per week over 3 odd years in case of these jobs--which ammounts to 6 month of schooling. Pay starts at ca. 15 Eur after graduation (and is miserable, below minimum wage, for the apprenticeship). Several possibilities to diversify afterwards exist, but many slug along without going for e.g. technician or master studies. The exams can be taken out of school under certain limited conditions. etc. p. p.
"Schweißer" is not a registered apprenticeship, but qualification is offered and eventually necessary; job opportunities exist, almost solely through temp agencies, starting at ca 12 Eur; no publically indexed opportunity in Berlin. One adverisement mentions that up to 100 different welding techniques exist (need to be known, as they say) from once a mere five.
I'd imagine kinds of certificates in welding can be optained in crash courses. In contrast, professional-welder does not strike me as an entry level position, nor as a common job. I haven't met any, to say the least.
I do remember a special note about the welding jobs done on the Wendelstein-X project, mentioned in a podcast with the leader of the programm. That was followed by a note about a Swiss specialists detecting defects in custom coils, who was described like the master of an arcane art in the best tradition of swiss watchmakers. (check alternativlos.de if you understand .de)
3rd world to 1st - that gets more interesting. I recall a story about EU tunnel boring machines where the drilling head was welded together by a team flown in from south africa. Thought that was weird - that's a country with zero tunnel boring experience.
Bit more thinking later I realised...that's actually not a bad strategy. Throw some Euros down and get the top 0.1% of the skillset of a 3rd world country. Welding is welding and top 0.1% is pretty grand.
If there was any price differential between the best welders in these two countries, it would be rendered nil by the cost of flying and housing a team.
It's not huge money, but once you start factoring in that tax is much better for the self employed, costs of living, commute time etc it does look like a good deal. Even if you discount the estimate by 1/3 it still compares very favourably to most white collar careers.
I don't recall ever hearing that welders were "wealthy", I heard (and continue to hear) that they can be middle-class. Which is something that some who took out big college loans to get a journalism degree, struggle to do.
Why do I have a responsibility for someone else’s economic prospects? The man profiled in the story didn’t sound like he was a victim of anything I’m responsible for: I didn’t make him late for work so much he got fired. I didn’t ask him to get married and have two kids at age 21. There is a whole bunch of “not my problem” going on there.
I’m also not convinced only $30-40 per hour in a pretty cheap cost of living area is a bad wage. That’s much more than many degreed people working in the city make. Also the potential with welding is that he could start his own shop and be making some serious money. The national demand is huge. My dad is a retired precision machinist and his “side business” in his garage makes him more money than his job working with physics Nobel laureates at a major university ever did. Most of his business is contract work for universities and oil field tooling companies and he hires welders almost continually. Most welders he works with are at full capacity and can’t hire people fast enough. The problem is that many people that go into the trades are like the guy profiled in the story: unreliable, often losers, who don’t stick around very long. The good ones, the sky is pretty much the limit. The economy is flying — there is a lot of work. Same thing in the construction trades as well, especially plumbing.
Welding, and trades in general, pay big money in the big cities along the coasts. I bet the union welders putting up sky scrapers and fixing public works are making six figures, minimum.
Mic drop
No student loans, dual-income with a CRN, and you're living pretty high in the rust belt.
In all seriousness, it sucks people were duped into a welding career not all it's cracked up to be.
This right here. Says it all.
I've worked in machine shops all my life, and while it is true that welding was one of the highest paid occupations in that environment; it's also true that it's not something that anyone can do with a week of on-the-job training.
Most welding jobs are sticking wrought iron railings together, or playground equipment, or repairing mufflers. It's easy. It's cheap. It is, quite literally, something for a disposable employee to do. It doesn't take skill or experience to replace a muffler. It takes a hack-saw and a MIG welder. There's no reason anyone would or should pay a Jiffy-lube muffler installer $150k/year. It's not a job that warrants that kind of pay. But most "welders" go into the trade thinking that's what they're working towards. It's not comparable in any way to the work performed by a professional welder. They really shouldn't even be called the same thing. It's like labeling a script kiddie a programmer. Misrepresenting the script kiddie takes more away from the actual programmer than it gives to the fake one.
That being said, "real" welding is where the money is. It's being certified by some authoritative body to perform your job, whatever that may be. Aerospace, architectural, nuclear, underwater, ect. It's being able to read a complex blueprint and create assemblies that are conforming to a long list of criteria. Criteria that come from a) the government, b) the customer, c) your own quality department, d) your engineering department, e) your own experience. I bet you that if you took most bicycles from Wal-Mart and had the welds x-ray'd that 100% would fail standard NDT testing like X-Ray, FPI (fluorescent particle inspection), MPI (magnetic particle inspection). It requires a very low-level understanding of the science behind welding. On a molecular/chemical level.
The welders who take their job seriously, climb to the top, take their time, can read a blueprint, and are professional in their appearance, work ethic, mannerisms, and products do well. They will reach $150k by working on mission-critical components that people's lives depend on. You can't substitute an actual welder for "a welder." They need to be responsible, talented, and intelligent.
Sadly the people being pushed/drawn into welding careers aren't any of those things. They are simple people looking for an easy way out of poverty. As a result, there are now hundreds of thousands of under-qualified people trying to get into a career with mere thousands of openings. The ones that do get in hover close to the bottom because they need the same skills to be good at welding that they needed all along. The bar for welding is just as high as for being a doctor, or a programmer, or any other profession.
So in the end, you can be a wealthy welder or a poor welder. You can be a wealthy programmer, or a poor programmer. It all comes down to the word "professional". If you're professional chances are good you're intelligent and will do well no matter what field you go into.
My last shop was NADCAP certified (for aerospace with 5 x-ray certified full-time welders. We had one who only made it about 9 months or so. His welds were GORGEOUS. This guy should have been working in a motorcycle shop. His work was just so neat and tidy! But he couldn't pass X-ray or FPI to save his life. He would wait nervously for his parts to return from NDT vendors to count the parts he would have to rework.
After he porked 400 or so inconel rings for tungsten inclusion we had to let him go. He was a good welder, but he wasn't good enough to be working on airplane parts.
This guy was fired twice for missing work. So that's just a bad sign off the rip. I think welding is being pushed too hard. Every one needs to do their research and see what trades are in demand where they reside.
12 -18
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/26693cff-8967-4b2c-a62...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/e30dd4d1-fe81-4f71-825...
20 - 23
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/2541dfe5-4f21-41fa-aef...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/59ec0ea9-e975-4ff8-931...
Unlisted, but based on reading 20+. Mostly 5XXX, CuNi, etc.
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/cf1967b7-0e04-4a5f-9ff...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/b3482924-7abe-44bd-b76...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/29c1474d-a58c-4299-aba...
https://gmn.avionte.com/basic/posting/d5ff023f-c22e-4ad9-95d...
>His first year at CVCC went well, mostly. It wasn’t completely smooth—he failed his required English course, which was offered only online. But in his welding classes, he earned nothing but A’s and B’s. After that first year ended, he ran into some bureaucratic trouble with his financial aid, he told me, and he took both the summer and the fall of 2017 off from school. For a while, I wondered whether he might just be finished with college. But then he started up again as a full-time student in January 2018.
Why would anyone pay to go to college for welding? Unless it is some specialized area (Underwater welding), you can join the Iron Worker's 4 year apprenticeship program.
4 years of work/classes once a month. Start at 60% scale (16-18$ depending on state) in year one. 10% pump in pay each year so by the end of your program when you have your journeyman's card you get (26-32$) depending on the state.
You have to pay like a $400 sign up fee to get in the union (way cheaper than college) and continue to pay your union dues, however that gets you the benefit of getting on a list to be called when contractors need to man a job.
A lot of times it just takes one job with a contractor where you do well, and they will call you direct anytime they need a job.
There are lots of Iron Workers in my area at least who only work 9 months out of the year and make $100,000 + by working shutdowns (emergency repair jobs) through the union hall.
You can get all your welding certificates without going to college which is what any job requires. Experience and certs proving your welds are up to par.
Also FTA
> It was hard work, loud and dirty and repetitive, but it paid $13.90 an hour, more than Snappy Lube. After a year and a half, Orry was fired for missing too many days of work, but he soon managed to land a job at another steel-wire factory. Then he got fired from that job as well.
> It was by that point the spring of 2016, and Orry was 24, separated, and unemployed. He was raising two children with his ex-wife, Katie, and he was living with a new girlfriend named Crystal. Orry had been working hard for five years, and yet he was broke, with nothing saved.
It doesn't explain why he was fired other than 'missed too many days' - and doesn't say any reason for the 2nd. This sounds to me like it's more about the personal work ethic of Orry and budgeting skills vs being a welder you will be poor.
Anecdotal I know, but a friend of mine right out of high school got into the trades with the above mentioned path. By 24 (2 years into his journeyman work), he had a modest two bedroom house, wife, two kids and had no issues with money or bankruptcy. He also only worked shutdowns where he may work 28 days in a row, 12 hours a day, and then have an entire month off until the next job. This life isn't for everyone but hey for some it works some it doesn't.
I do hire people every once in a while and I want them to be reliable, smart and educated in this specific order of priority.
Education is important, but I'm sure my plumber who charges a thousand bucks cash for half a day work earns more than most college graduates in this country.
Education can and does come in a variety of ways. Expecting it to look exactly the same and work exactly the same for basically everyone doesn't make sense.
I'd love to see more of an emphasis around lifelong learning instead of demanding 18yo make lifetime decisions with near-zero life experience.
This is because education level is a major factor in voting patterns. So conservative pundits have made open war on it, to the nations serious detriment. They could instead work to lower the price of education but that is absolutely not the agenda for the same reasons.
It's not entirely unprecedented, universities have been called communist incubators for decades. What is new is the shift in portrayal from communist to being a bad investment (but with no intention of fixing that). Also new is the willingness to cast off the nations future for political gain which previous conservatives apparently were not willing to do.
There are similar patterns for climate change, guns and renewable energy.
What? Conservatives have been advocates of school choice (shown to reduce the price of education) for decades. Conservatives have not made open war on education at all. Conservative pundits themselves tend to be some of the most educated people. I mean, I'm pretty conservative, and graduated out of a top-ranked, intensive engineering school.