For plumbers, electricians and a few other trades you can become a journeyman apprentice in the US, and after a few years you can earn high 5 digits to low 6 digits with healthcare usually.
That being said, its a mature industry and not highly regarded in the US as it is a "blue collar" job. Stigmatizing & devaluing an honest days work is ridiculous to me, but that is what our society has done to these jobs.
So is it just the stigma that prevents people from getting 100K a year? I mean if it's as easy as it sounds in your comment, there should be loads of people signing up. And I'm guessing you don't end up with 80K+ in student loans?
Move to the US or get a job working on a project remotely for a US based company. Programmers in major US cities can earn $100k a year easily with no experience and just a degree.
That being said, people I know in Turkey were wholly unwilling to go to the US to work, they'd rather wait 2 or 3 years for their company to send them to work in Europe due to the political climate and laws in the US. That was under Obama tho, I'd be surprised if it hadn't degraded since then.
Pay in Germany is generally low. Where someone in Seattle would earn $120k to $140k easily, the same person in Germany may net only $40k to $50k. Housing and especially food & drink are much cheaper than the US though, $12 beers aren't anywhere near as common.
Definitely, I think its BS that there are massive pay disparities between the US & Germany, when I've had friends visit from Germany I'm impressed with their programing & english skills, and also shocked with the low pay in Germany. The English skills that my German friends have are surprisingly good, and they could easily work with Americans on the same project with similar levels of productivity.
Easy as in there's probably a lot of people that can handle it, if they decide to stick with it. Whereas becoming, say, an elite spy or soldier has harder requirements that most people won't meet. Or do a lot of people wash out of the trades?
You also likely can't work into your 60s doing work like this. Some people move into management, assessment, inspection, etc, but not everyone can do that. There's more going on here than stigmatization (which I rarely see in real life), these jobs have a different set of concerns that we aren't good at dealing with socially.
Barring accidents, injury, or bad luck (e.g. a car crash or something), you can absolutely save enough to retire as a plumber before your body starts to break down. Especially if you assume SS will still be around for a new plumber's retirement, which may or may not be the case. Even without, it's doable. I know two plumbers socially and both are in their late 40's. One owns a plumbing business so mainly does office/marketing tasks but one is just a standard plumber and does plenty well for himself and his family.
Which brings up another issue: manual jobs involve non-trivial amounts of physical risk. Not only does getting injured negativly affect your life you will always do better working than on disability. And I agree that it's possible for some people to own a business or or do office work, but not everyone who is a plumber today will be able to do that. There are fewer owners than workers.
I don't think we should discourage trades, but we can't sugar coat them either. I used to work as a mechanic and never met one that was 65 (the SS retirement age). The safety nets in place are optimized for people who work office jobs, not manual jobs.
This ^^, you can do well as a plumber and retire after 2 or 3 decades of working if you play your cards right, leaving you with a fairly functional body and freedom from working 1 to 2 decades ahead of most people in the US.
I've definitely seen people work to retirement or occasionally injury in both industries, in the latter case long term disability picks up the tab using money paid in during the first 30 or 40 years of working.
For a parent who believes college is not an option for his son, a skilled trade could be a pretty awesome job.
What contexts are we talking about for the regard afforded different occupations? Other parents at a school, former classmates at a reunion, talking to a stranger at a bar? what kind of bar? Making money, and being handy and able to work with your hands impresses people. Imagine telling someone in a bar that you are a contractor, plumber, fisherman, fireman, or lumberjack or telling someone that you do tech support at a call center.
Different people are simply going to think one job is cooler than the other, so his son should just choose the occupation that gives him the best life and ignore those who don't regard it highly.
Many require some sort of apprenticeship. The post is on the Mr. Money Mustache website, which is site dedicated to helping people lead happier lives that are less dependent on having lots of money and lots of "things". This idea runs pretty much against everything in a capitalist society, where consumption is encouraged and status is largely based on how much money you have. But you can live a good life with much less if you work to rid yourself of some of the harmful ideas that become ingrained in us as we grow up and live in this sort of society.
> Stigmatizing & devaluing an honest days work is ridiculous to me, but that is what our society has done to these jobs.
I have no idea how we got to this point. It's even more absurd because you call these people because you didn't know how, didn't want to learn, or didn't want to do a job _yourself_.
It's absurd; I honestly feel guilty about being a software engineer with a cushy job making high-end of average for the area when I feel like I do nothing at all. I type some stuff, other people are happy, I get money. I get it, it took a lot of time to figure out what to type in the best way, but it took the electrician I hired to rewire my house a while to learn the regs and best practices, and after spending 5 minutes in my attic in the summer did not envy his job of running cable up to it and then out to all the rooms upstairs, whereas I just sit on a porch swing or at my desk or on my couch while I work.
Im from the outside looking in, but I never understood why a lot of parents with kids with only average or below average academic skills don't think of encouraging their kids into getting a trade like plumbing, electrician, car repair etc. they don't "waste" time learning subjects that they see as irrelevant and everything they learn is directly related to their future career. I don't see a time where there isn't a need for those trades.
The reason I say I'm on the outside looking in is because doing any job that requires the ability to use both hands was never an option for me.
Some do, particularly when a parent is already in that trade, the child is on good terms with the parent, and the child shows some promise. These family businesses tend to work out well if the business is already successful.
But when the business isn't successful, the resentment builds on both sides. Blue-collar trades are not considered societally desirable and working in the parents' business or career some interpret as a lack of ambition. These factors combine with geography to greatly affect the dating pool for such people, further restricting an avenue of social mobility whose availability was more widespread historically.
The skilled trades are very highly regarded among many, many people -- just not the same people who go to four year research universities.
I was an officer and platoon leader in the Army, the endgame for a lot of my soldiers was to use their GI Bill benefits to get to trade school and then become an apprentice in a union. They considered making it in one of the sought-after trades really "making it."
If you've ever hired an electrician in the Bay Area, btw -- let me tell you, these guys are doing pretty well for themselves.
I'm actually reminded of this quote from Will Durant about Aristotle's attitude towards manual labor, which I've always found amusing so I might as well share it here:
"Such work in Athens had not become so complicated as it is today, when the intelligence demanded in many manual trades is at times much greater than that required for the operations of the lower middle class, and even a college professor may look upon an automobile mechanic (in certain exigencies) as a very god"
The skilled trades are shrinking though in major urban centers, and your average plumber or electrician isn't unionized. That being said, restricted supply is good for those who are skilled today as they will earn more!
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
- John W. Gardner
That being said, its a mature industry and not highly regarded in the US as it is a "blue collar" job. Stigmatizing & devaluing an honest days work is ridiculous to me, but that is what our society has done to these jobs.