Related to this is the death of vocational studies at the high school level. EVERYTHING is "college prep" and there is no other course. Huge numbers of people could avoid universities if we offered better vocational training.
I went to school in a more rural area. In high school we had the option to spend half the day at the vocational school in the next town over learning the trades. Our senior year they also had an assembly to tell us all that statistics were against us in college and only 15% would graduate, so we shouldn’t try.
My nephews are about to enter that same high school about 25 years later. From what I’ve gleaned, they still have the program for vocational training. I think the kids went on a field trip there is middle school.
> Huge numbers of people could avoid universities if we offered better vocational training.
Could they? This is a perennial HN complaint; however, the salaries for jobs that vocational schools would train your for show very little pressure to increase. That doesn't indicate some mythical pent up demand that a bunch of new vocational students could slot into.
Most people are going to college because they want to avoid working at the equivalent of an Amazon warehouse. If you can give them a way to do that, they'll happily skip going to a university.
Being an electrician or plumber is substantially less soul-crushing than an Amazon warehouse, and if you’re good, pays a hell of a lot better.
Is the pay better?
The pay seems pretty comparable to an Amazon warehouse until you pass at least 3 years of training.
And not everybody gets to wire up air conditioned data centers. A lot of wiring is outside in the hot sun climbing up and down ladders.
If the salaries were significantly better, I should think we'd see a lot of people beating down the doors to be electricians, but we don't ...
The Amazon warehouse across the street from me pays ~$19/h (CAD). Minimum wage is $17.20.
Electrician apprentices make $20-28/h. Once you’re licensed you’re pretty much guaranteed $30+/h, most break $40/h pretty quick if they’re good. If you start your own company (which isn’t that hard here!) you’re probably closer to $60-100/h depending on skill, niche, client base, and luck.
Plumbing is pretty similar but the ceiling’s probably triple that of electricians.
Trade school is so cheap it’s almost free. (My brother just finished an automotive mechanic program, I think his total out-of-pocket cost was like $1500 for a few years of school + apprenticeship, and he was making $30/h by the end of the apprenticeship. He’s now at around $36/h iirc, less than a year out of the program.)
I don’t believe it’s possible to make even apprentice money as an Amazon warehouse worker here. Maybe as a floor manager. And yes, obviously trades aren’t sunshine and rainbows, but if you have even a modicum of motivation you’re better off there than packing boxes.
If the money is superior, then why aren't the people working at Amazon warehouses moving to the trades?
It requires some effort. You have to actually sign up and attend trades school (which requires a non-zero amount of money up front and you’ll go 6-12 weeks without pay - which also can be a problem for some people), then spend some effort finding someone to take you on as an apprentice, and you have to actually think and learn things. Nothing particularly difficult but still, you need some non-zero degree of critical thinking skills.
If you don’t have that level of motivation (which again, is really not that high), you won’t succeed. You can walk into an Amazon warehouse (or honestly, any similar warehouse job) and start working either that day or in very short order, and get paid in 2 weeks or less. It’s the least amount of effort possible to get a job, but it’s also the least rewarding (mentally, financially, etc).
There are also some people who genuinely cannot work in the trades. Almost any kind of physical disability and you’re at a severe disadvantage. Same with mental disabilities (to a lesser degree).
There’s real downsides too. Some trades are fairly dangerous (electrician comes to mind, especially if you’re working with oldheads who are happy to work on live unfused lines/etc) and almost all of them will result in you degrading your body faster than average (although this is also true for warehouse jobs). Buddy of mine caught a piece of shrapnel with his eye (while wearing listed wraparound safety glasses, mind you) while grinding some metal underneath a car, and has permanent vision damage in one eye at age 24. You also have to be pretty tolerant of more… abusive working environments. Aside from general tomfoolery (“boys will be boys” type mindset), there’s a substantially higher chance than average that your colleagues will be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or all of the above, which isn’t great if you fall into one of those categories. It’s a lot better now than it was even 10-15 years ago, but it’s still very much a problem. (I’ve never had an office worker casually drop a hard-r while at work, but I’ve encountered enough tradespeople doing so that I’ve lost count of how many. And not even in an even remotely acceptable way, just whites dudes straight up using it to refer to someone as a slave or similar uses. In the past ~3 years.)
And honestly, probably a lot of people working at warehouses are moving to trades. Warehousing in general is high-turnover (40-50%, if not higher), so it would not shock me if a non-negligible portion of workers are switching to a non-warehouse career. I don’t know how to find stats on that though.
In short, lots of reasons.
All the electricians and operating engineers in the data centers I work at do quite well. We aren't going to need less of that skill set.
> however, the salaries for jobs that vocational schools would train your for show very little pressure to increase.
I mean another perennial HN complaint is about how "off-topic" university CS courses are. Personally, I disagree. I'm with Knuth on this one:
> People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
I mean the major thing I would change about code camps is make it a 1 year or 2 year process and actually get some depth and nuance instead of being a cram school focused more on trying to get you to pass the test than trying to teach you what the test is trying to test.
I live in a prominent college town, and all of the high schools around here have a lot of vocational studies. There is a multi-year track where students actually build an entire house, for instance. I found it surprising and a really good thing. Now, none of it is required, which I think it should be a little bit. But vocational studies is definitely alive in this area.