I wish they did, of course. I personally lost a close friend to prostate cancer last year. He was 41 and was, before the cancer, one of the healthiest and most athletic people I knew.
The first inkling he had that anything was wrong was a backache that wouldn't go away; a stage 4 diagnosis ensued. He held on for 21 months from the onset of symptoms before the cancer took him.
If you read the threads in /r/construction that come up about this or adjacent topics ("trades are a guaranteed job, better than college") they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.
Personally, my friend is a carpenter and lives with his dad to save money. This is in Seattle so tons of construction and work to go around. He says he wishes he studied computer science in college (has an english degree).
>> they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.
Worse yet, when your body does fail or is injured, that wage tends to stop. Most tradespersons are working for very small companies, often incorporated as their own one-person company. If you cannot work, it all just stops.
One thing that makes the military different it that while the military can be very hard on your body (infantry) your wage does not stop if you are injured. A civilian carpenter with a broken leg must live on savings for a month. A military carpenter with a broken leg just won a month of desk duty without any drop in pay.
Absolutely. Some of my family owns a construction company and the career path for all employees in that company is basically to work your body while you're young and then move into management/estimating jobs before you do too much damage to your body.
The military equivalent is to work a few years as a grunt until you qualify for some sort of free higher education. Then you come back as an officer and get to boss around all those sergeants who once yelled at you. Depending on your exact path, its all generally pensionable time worked for the same company.
Indeed it’s hard to retire from the US military as an officer because there’s a big filter at Major. You generally need to reach LTC to make 20 years. Enlisting for four (or more) then going officer makes it easy to get 20 years and retire.
That is why the US armed forces has a rep for being so young. Other countries they dont kick people out so easily, but promotions are also much more difficult. Talk to a canadian or a brit. It is not unussual for them to be in 30+ years. And i've met canadian army captains who have been captains for 20 years, giving them more experiance than most american LTCs.
Well, yeah, not a lot of people are going to continue much past 20 years when that qualifies for immediate retirement pay and a private job can suppliment. There's up or out policies at various levels too.
Despite how maligned they've become, there are still some US trade unions who take care of their members in these situations.
But, yeah, on the whole this business about the virtue of trades and Boomer Facebook making baseless claims about how much money there is to be made is ... problematic. I've been there and these folks face all sorts of risks in the near (e.g. falls, electrocution) and long (e.g. Mesothelioma, (increased risk of) Parkinson's, etc.) terms. Working conditions have improved and seemingly everyone wears hiviz nowadays (possibly performatively / to virtue signal) but corners are absolutely still cut and I've heard many jokes and seen many eyes rolled on OSHA's account.
My old man is a tradesman, qualified as an electrician, worked and kept studying as he went and ended up as senior management.
My little brother has severe dyslexia and ADHD, couldn’t even finish school so went into trades, did some time as a diesel mechanic and qualified as a welder. Now builds race cars for a living ( Dakar ) and is a senior mechanic on track for management.
Ambition and luck plays a role but although yes both of their bodies are a little more beat up than mine, they get actively headhunted and even when they don’t have a full time job they can very easily fall back on the skills they have to fill gaps, people always need tradesmen.
Neither of them are struggling in life, other than some bad decisions.
Both of them are also on most countries critical skills list and emigration has always been an option if the local market drops off.
For those reading this, trades are not nearly as bad as is being described here, there are plenty stories of SEs working for horrible companies.
Pay differs a lot from place to place and sub-industry to subindistry. It's not uncommon to see people comment on redding claiming pay for something or another is far lower than I know of people earning in that field. To go by reddit you might conclude programmers make $40k/yr, since thats what they make in Japan or whatnot.
Not to say they they aren't correct here, but you shouldn't put too much stock in it.
Welding itself is also a pretty broad scope-- are you taking on broken trailer hitches or are you talking about underwater welding of pressure vessels? Programming robots to do automated welding? etc.
"When Rios graduates next year, he plans to work as a fabricator at a local equipment maker for nuclear, recycling and other sectors, a job that pays $24 an hour, plus regular overtime and paid vacations."
This sounds like a union job, and the $70k figure sounds like towards the upper end due to hierarchy, so realistically he'll be earning maybe half of that for a couple years first.
48k at 2000 hours. Getting to 70k would need roughly 600 hours of overtime at time and a half but some of these places do double time on weekends nights holidays etc.
I’m curious what the distinction is. I assume that the article isn’t just a complete fabrication, but maybe they highlight the 20 best stories and everything else is meh.
Kinda like saying you should go to code school because you can land a 175k/year entry level job at Google. Technically true.
P-hacking is allowed and encouraged outside physical science where getting stats of medicine and building a bridge wrong have obvious side effect
News media will whittle down their data set to get a result that only matters where cost of living is high, and there’s a tiny number of the workers overall.
Leads the innumerates in rural Somewhereville, Flyover, USA, to be all confused they don’t make SF salaries in the middle of nowhere.
Yea, welding offshore/underwater pays very well. Food-grade welding a bit less. Both have fairly miserable working conditions, are hard on your body, have some amount of danger, typically require lots of OT to make the claimed income, and unless you’re union, with mediocre benefits.
Great job for those who enjoy that type of work and/or want to hustle and save then move on. But any claim that it’s easy money or typicsl is just wrong.
We don’t Reddit in my household so I can’t respond directly, but there’s nothing strange about going to a welding class, picking the best student and offering them a $24/hr job with a lot of potential overtime. If you can make a clean weld they don’t care where you came from.
Not OP, and I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but why? Reddit now blocks many IPs (requires login/signup to see the page now). Plus the site takes a few years to load, if you don't know about old.reddit.com. I imagine many people no longer go to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc anymore because of this. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Reddit has about 500 million users. That's about 7500 million non-users, or 850 million English-speaking non-users. (Assuming all reddit users are english-speaking? Don't know if the site supports other languages.) Just looking at those numbers, I'm confident there's plenty of other people like me who looked at the site once or twice, found it unpleasant to use and with a low level of discourse, and never bothered actively going back; and these days stumbling upon it in web search is indeed actively unpleasant because of performance and UI issues.
Goes back at least slightly before that, as I've had 2038epochalypse.com registered since March 2017, but I can't recall whether I thought I was being clever or whether I heard it somewhere else.
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BS in EE. Designing analog and digital circuits, laying out PCBs, bringing up boards, debugging hardware, simulating designs (including EM simulations for antennas, transmission lines, etc.), and consulting on hardware improvements are all no problem. I have an extremely well equipped EE lab bench, including for RF out to 8 GHz, and am very comfortable doing fine-pitch soldering under a microscope as needed.
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A few months back, I got excited about pulse generators that had rise times on the order of 15 to 30 picoseconds. There aren't a lot of those available, and I was curious about what would go into their design. so I decided to build my own. https://voltative.com/pulser
Indeed. I've unsubscribed from all subreddits that have become infested with political content, and I've "unfollowed" all of my acquaintances on Facebook and LinkedIn who post anything political. So much more enjoyable.
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[1] https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Compositions/stand_alone.pl...