When I was in school, I was always told “If you get a college degree you’ll on average make 500k more over the life time of your career regardless of what you get your degree in!”
Then as I finishing school, it was all about “If you get into tech you’ll make big bucks and always have jobs!”
Both of those have turned out not great for a lot of people.
Then whenever women say they’re struggling with money online, they get pointed to OF… which pays nothing to 99% of creators. Also very presumptive to suggest that, but we don’t even need to get into that.
So is there a field/career strategy that you feel like is currently being over pushed?
(My examples are USA, Nevada/Utah is where I grew up, if maybe it’s different in other parts of USA even.)
If you want a house, start saving in middle school.
Networking (AKA meeting people) is a good way to get jobs.
While skill and experience matter, networking is often the catalyst that connects you with the right opportunities. In a way, it’s like investing in your social capital—often as valuable as any degree or certification.
College actually helps with both skill and networking at the same time.
In my experience, this highly depends on the college. Mine really didn’t do shit for me as far as networking goes. And what connections i did make didn’t end up helping anyway. Maybe it starts mattering more once you’ve got some experience?
If it weren’t for networking I would have never gone from being a line cook that barely graduated highschool to a CAD tech for a land surveying company. Had literally zero experience and was definitely not what I thought I’d be doing in five years when I was working the closing shift at restaurants every night until 2:00 AM.
I literally got my current job by meeting an old co-worker at a book store and letting him know I was looking after our previous company got shut down. I did happen to have the right skills, but my local area was flooded with software developers in an area that really didnt need that many. But I got the job.
This is essential. Speaking from experience as a guy with bad mental problems who can’t do relationships. Work on that, kids!
“Go to trade school” is my guess. I’ve even suggested it. I’m not sure it’s really being over pushed, but maybe it is. Easy answers to complex questions are a trope.
I’ve heard there’s an enormous demand for experienced tradespeople, but apprenticeships are pretty much full up…
Kind of a nobody-wins situation. Money to be made, just not by anyone on the ground floor.
If Trump gets elected, and he mass deports millions of people, there will be a surge in construction demand.
There will be a surge in “nobody wants to work anymore”.
We could literally shut down the economy in defiance if we all got together and did something about it.
Pipe dream, though, tbh.Trump may beat everyone to it. Bash on immigrants as he loves to since it brings out poor white folks, many of his financial backers are industries like service (hotels, restaurants, Ag) who are already understaffed because they’ve made the jobs so awful only truly desperate or illegal workers will stand them. He will seriously trigger “a day without immigrants” meanwhile upending prices through tariffs that will screw most Americans who are already living in debt and skipping basics. Unfortunately for America, there will not be another election if he wins this week.
I haven’t met any parents telling their kids to go into the trades aside from one dad who is already in the trades and knows the life.
Most of the parents of high/middle schoolers I speak to are pushing STEM and entrepreneurship. I coach this age group, and the parents still want their kid to go on to higher education. They just are more aggressive about it being a meaningful degree.
There is also more discussion of the cost of schools. A degree from a local school with in state tuition or a community college transfer is looked upon more favorably now. Frankly, a lot of the elite schools are bullshit and the general public is waking up to that now. The work a student is willing to put into learning is much more important than if the school has a high rank.
I have definitely heard parents encouraging kids to go into the trades. Could be a regional thing. Anecdotal either way.
I agree elite schools are bullshit for the vast majority. There are some PhD and medical programs that aren’t. But that’s a tiny percentage of students who would benefit.
Yeah, it is definitely dependent on region and lots of other factors. Plus, I fully admit it is a small sample size. But I just wanted to say my part because suggesting the trades certainly isn’t as universal as advising kids to go to college was a generation ago.
Also, I agree with the elite schools for grad programs. But so few kids get to that point and would have to get through undergrad (and likely crippling students loans) to even apply to for the good grad schools.
The downside to that is it is much harder to continue working as you age depending on the trade. Usually the “best” route there is to start early, learn what you can, and go independent eventually hiring other people to do the hard stuff you no longer can do.
Also need to be careful specializing… I went super specific and well… Yeah… Ice cream refrigeration machines aren’t exactly ubiquitous. I should have stuck with residential HVAC but I hated crawling under houses and being on call all night :/
I currently work in a factory (yeah I’m just chock full of bad decisions) and I can say from what I’ve gathered from my coworkers being a “machinist” isn’t so much of a viable trade anymore. Everyone pays like shit now.
from what I’ve gathered from my coworkers being a “machinist” isn’t so much of a viable trade anymore. Everyone pays like shit now.
Yes, agreed at least for my industry. My company hires “machinists” with no experience or education, gives them minimal training on how to push a button and not stick their hand in running machinery, and expects at least half to leave for a job that offers ten cents an hour more as soon as they can. They killed the pension for new employees and wonder why no new employees have any “loyalty” to the company.
I’ve always had massive respect for welders. That shit is an art. Not so with the folks we are hiring these days. Fast food fry cook wages don’t get you artisan welders.
Glad you mentioned that. It can be very hard on the body, and for older people they will likely want to transition into ownership, or a supervisory or admin role…and those slots are limited.
We need to think about using technology to help people work less. Not just fatten profits.
We need to think about using technology to help people work less. Not just fatten profits.
It’s such a hard topic to deal with because you have to tackle the concept of ownership.
As it currently stands in capitalist economies the owner, as the title implies, owns the means to increase productivity that would enable people to work less, but since they are the owners they see it is morally repugnant to have other people who did “nothing extra” get “more” money as the math is essentially: less work, same pay = greater value, except you didn’t provide any greater value to them, the machine/technology that they own did.
It’s a shitty situation for sure :(
Yup, this is all true. Worker cooperatives, unions, and expiring patents faster are all things that can help. None are a magic wand. But they make a difference.
Excellent point right here. I spent nearly twenty years in a trade till arthritis began to develop. I spent the last three years of that job using the education benefits to get a degree and a new tech skill that has morphed into my current career. (I looked into running my own crew but that particular trade was and is in a downturn.)
Only thing I’ll disagree with you here is the machinist comment. My dad’s been a machinist for like 45 years now, same industry, same building.
He is constantly complaining to me that they can’t find machinists, or even people who are willing to learn. I have zero machining experience, and he was trying to get me hired at one point, that’s how desperate they were getting.
And it’s not a bad company, to be clear, they’re a government contractor, have very good benefits, competitive pay (he’s even complained they’ve given guys with a year’s experience multi-dollar raises to keep them), etc.
According to him, if you have mechanical aptitude and are willing to learn all of the intricacies of machining, you can and will make a decent salary for the rest of your life so long as you’re willing to work.
John Deere and a few others recently paid like 20m to build a diesel tech training center for my university that includes several large vehicle bays and a fuel development lab, with the expectation the students would work for their companies after graduation. It’s starting to look like these kids will be opening their own businesses and ending the cycle of ripping off farmers in the community.
As a former mechanic with lots of lovely health issues before even hitting 40, I really hope they do work for themselves so they can get out of the grunt work when they are my age and still earn from their experience
It’s the new thing that parents want their kids to do. I feel like it’s going to backfire, lol
Agree. We need trades people but we also need jobs, re-shoring, affordable housing, affordable health care, affordable education, etc. to go along with. It could become another bubble like pharmacists and knowledge workers.
The longer I’m in the workforce the more I think David Graeber was right.
I’m dreaming of an oversupply of trade workers. It’s too expensive right now to get any work done. Lots of scammers too.
“Just be a YouTuber/streamer/influencer”
Is this a thing people say unironically? It’s as dumb as saying “just go be a movie star”
I hear this from some of the kids that I coach. I remind them that they have to do something worth watching. I know that some lucky content creators make money with low effort posts, but in a world where everyone wants views, you need to be good enough at something to catch peoples attention.
That tracks. I volunteered with a week long program to teach html and the basics of building a website, and I went back to work after day one because all the students picked social media marketing. 😆
Maybe something about learning how to use apostophes or whatever.
No one seriously thinks OF is a viable career path do they? Sex work has never been a career thing, at best you get a couple years of good earning and then you get forgotten. At worst, you get a pittance and mental health issues.
Tech has worked out for lots of people, just because some are laid off every so often, doesn’t mean the rest aren’t doing really well.
OF is a lottery for pretty girls or for people in very niche communities.
Like if your thing is wearing girly socks and mushing Jello between your toes, you could probably make some money on onlyfans but just being a generic 6.5 out of 10 or better looking? No chance in hell.
Have tried being a hunter/gatherer?
NO TRESPASSING
As someone without friends, I hear a lot of “if you want friends, get a job.”
Plot twist: I actually do have a job, many of them don’t.
Well, I really hope that it remains “go to college”. As someone with a good career in my area, with good positions and salaries, even without a college education, I still think that the lack of college education still makes me have several gaps and difficulties.
I was fooled for some time by the idea that college education isn’t needed and I hope this generation doesn’t do the same.
But some careers I think it will be good for the long future:
- AI industry
- Data security
- Green energy
- Finance (always, but it costs your mental health)
And, the thing that I wish someone told me in a trustable way when I was a teenager: go with your happiness, the sucess is there, because success is WAY MORE than make money
The world has been changing fast and I think the safest advice in terms of always having work is to learn something to do with bedrock infrastructure, like plumbing or welding.
As we approach the singularity, more and more things will be done by fewer people.
No one has a plan for the singularity, they are hoping that AI will figure it out.
May God have mercy on us all.
We’ve been “rapidly appeoaching the singularity” for quite a while now, and the current tools being marketed as “AI” don’t actually have any “intelligence” to them. We are not going to magically turn what we have now into “AGI”, it’s simply not possible given our current models and techniques.
From someone in tech, at absolute best this is something that we might see strides in by the time we all die of old age, and that’s being absurdly optimistic. The only people pushing the idea of a faster timeline are those with money to grift off the idea.
I see where you’re coming from but look at semiconductors. Right now Nvidia has dethroned Intel, and nvidia’s own insiders have stated that they are designing chips based on AI which they are then using to power the AI which design the next round of chips.
Maybe the stuff that you and I have access to will never cross the border into AGI territory to some sort of AGI scenario, but that doesn’t mean that there are not systems and processes in play that can.
And here we have issues with the many different definitions of AI. Nvidia used machine learning to simulate countless iterations of their chip design to find the best configuration and layout (for the specific goals they set their AI to optimize for). They did not use chatGPT or anything that has textual output. It literally cannot spontaneously develop that ability.
It is constrained by the bounds that are inherently neccessary to make it function and by the goals it is created to optimize for. It cannot just arbitrarily “choose” to go do something they aren’t pointing it at. It may do things that aren’t intended, but those are “happy accidents” related (again) to the goals it is given to optimize for. Like a delivery AI jumping off a balcony because it’s the fastest way down, since no goal weighting was given to self preservation or damaging the package.
At the very least, until we have some way to codify the abstract concept of comprehension into a scoring system can be optimized for, none of these things are going to even approach AGI. This is due to the simple reality of how they work under the hood, and don’t for a fucking second believe the charlatans saying that we can’t understand them. We may not be able to discretely track each and every step a model takes in modifying it’s weights or each decision poiny when optimizing for specific output, but that’s a matter of storage space to store each step and drastic speed loss that would occur recording each step. It is not some inherent untracable magic in how they work.
Computers, even quantum computers, work through billions of discrete traceable steps occurring each second. AI still needs discrete inputs, discrete goal/optimization/math to discern good output from bad, even if we choose not to track each step in between.
Put as simply as possible: You cannot duct tape infinite speak and spells together to spontaneously create an intelligence, and that is effectively what current AI is doing in ever increasing amounts. We’re brute forcing it by throwing ever increasing amounts of resources at it, with rare and minor improvements in the underlying math occurring at far slower rates. The nvidea chip thing is just improving the ability of chips to do the math we’re already doing for this stuff even faster, so… more brute forcing.
Edit: Also, nvidea is making more money than they ever have riding this hype train. Of course they’re going to push the idea that absurd leaps of progress are right around the corner, and that their products will get us there. They are the best in the market right now, but anything beyond that is pure conjecture to help drive sales. Their chips are not fundamentally doing anything new, just the same things but more efficiently.
- “Learn how to teach yourself”
Any career advice coming from the prior generation is useless because it doesn’t apply to your generation.
Even starting a major because everyone’s currently hiring in that field is useless. By the time you’re finished, so will all the other students who started at the same time to get a good job down the line.
I gave up my initial plan of becoming an ecologist and went into IT for job security. And now I’m about to be laid off cause the company I work for is close to going under, for the third time.
Meanwhile friends of mine who started their careers as social workers, physical therapists, nurses and in the trades are buying houses while I live in a moldy apartment.
My advice is to just do what interests you, you probably won’t starve. Also, disregard this advice if you’re just starting out your career. I’m 40, so my experience won’t be helpful to you 20 years younger people.
But who do you think is hiring you? Strictly people of your same age?
It wasn’t long ago that I heard that analytics was about to be replaced by AI.
Physical therapists, nurses and people that went into trades I can see making good money, but social workers I am kind of surprised to hear. I thought those were for the most part not paid as well compared to how taxing their jobs can be.
Social workers doing clinical therapy at the federal level make bank.
Depends. My friend who went that route positioned herself in a freelancer consultant role for government institutions and schools.
She makes 6 figures.That makes sense. I can definitely see consulting work paying to dollar in many different professions.
But that seems to me like she has carved out a lucrative niche for herself, which wouldn’t scale as advice for a larger number of people. Whereas with the other professions you can probably make good money even just doing more “regular” work.
Nurses seem really unhappy
(disclaimer that this is purely my impression from what i’ve seen mentioned online, not firsthand knowledge)
Which isn’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I was under the impression that the problems have more to do with high workloads and work environments that are chronically understaffed, not necessarily because of low salaries. Not claiming that all nurses are payed well, but it seems like that at least in the US there is a somewhat reasonable path to making good money (assuming you are willing to switch jobs and maybe continue to get sought after qualifications along the way).
I gave up my initial plan of becoming an ecologist and went into IT for job security. And now I’m about to be laid off cause the company I work for is close to going under, for the third time.
Sorry to hear
I tell my kids that a) they must graduate high school, and then either go to college or learn a trade. Regardless, they need to be educated.
The (Graphic) Design industry is being overmarketed by influencers trying to sell their overpriced courses, so that they can get a passive income instead of actually working in the field. They have no desire to teach nor mentor students, and the industry is actually extremely saturated with very little prospects unless you land a bingo of both skills and networking.
“Give up hope now before the pain of existence rips it away. Oh, also eat healthy, and do some light exercise daily that stuff is important too.”
If you want a good job, become a social media influencer. It pays more than most other jobs, and you can be the worst type of person and still make it big.
That seems like survivorship bias. Curious how much the average aspiring influencer goes on to make in the field…
