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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Ask yourself this though: why aren't people going to trade schools more often? If it's such a high demand career, with such reasonable pay, then surely it should attract talent; especially when one considers the extreme affordability of trade school in comparison to university education.

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".

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People I know look at restaurant workers and retail store employees as the people you say "You go to college so you don't end up like them."

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.

> People I know look at restaurant workers and retail store employees as the people you say "You go to college so you don't end up like them."

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.

Well I don't treat them like garbage. I treat them like human beings but sometimes I wonder about how a 40 year old person ended up working in a fast food place.

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.

One of the major advantages of being a small businessperson is rarely talked about: the ability to minimise taxes.

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.

I don't think people generally point to tradesmen as someone you don't want to be, but rather the trades are never considered because a four year college degree is seen as an absolute prerequisite for class standing.

My parents steered me away from the thought of going into the trades due to the idea of working with your body/hands vs working with your mind. More or less saying "how will you be able to find work when you're physically ill/injured", of course this can happen to the mind too. For a lot of people at least the body goes before the mind does. Plus for some time my parents were in unskilled trades so maybe that was also an angle.

The main reason is just because it's hard. For all the talk you see on HN about boring office jobs, the physicality of a job like plumbing can really put a ton of wear and tear on your body by the time you're in your 50s.

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