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Bloomberg To HS Grads: Be a Plumber
An anonymous reader writes "This being college graduation season, the insights provided by commencement speakers should be familiar by now: find work in a field you're passionate about, don't underestimate your own abilities, aim high, learn to communicate and collaborate with others, give something back to your community. Billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose current job is Mayor of New York City, evidently decided to break the mold by advising less academically adept youngsters to consider a career in plumbing. High wages, constant demand, no offshore competition. 'Compare a plumber to going to Harvard College — being a plumber, actually for the average person, probably would be a better deal'. Ouch! And hey, like a lawyer, a plumber can always dabble in politics."
Plumbers don't have to put up with as much shit as most IT workers
rewriting history since 2109
As much as we need competent programmers, DBAs, network administrators, etc., we also need plumbers, carpenters and electricians. Not everyone has the talent or desire for college, and I think we as a society ought to recognize that. Of course, that means less income for colleges and bankers providing student loans, so I'm not surprised that this is being billed as a radical idea.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
Billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose current job is Mayor of New York City, evidently decided to break the mold by advising less academically adept youngsters to consider a career in plumbing
Without reading TFA, the key part is "less academically adept". Not everyone is well suited for a CS degree or an MBA
Perhaps not as plumber specifically, but if someone have no talent or interest for their current degree, they should switch to something else instead of just pushing on (as everyone in CS seems to do)
People with skills and trades will almost always find work even in shitty economies. If you know how to make something, build something, or fix something that everyone uses, then someone is probably going to pay you to do that.
My advice to kids, whether family or kids I mentor, is to finish school with a skill. Doesn't matter if it's programming or plumbing.
Bloomberg is a pompous, gun grabbing, authoritarian, elitist, fucktard 99.99% of the time. However, he was able to accumulate a fortune, so I guess he knows about money.
On this point, he's right. As of now, trade schools are probably some of the best deals around in terms of ROI for education. I'd rather be a plumber or an electrician than have a sociology, political science or ethnic studies degree (and the associated debt) from a prestigious university.
If anyone asks my advice, I tell them to look in the medical field. Going for MD is a long, hard, debt-laden road of course. Many jobs can be had with only a 2 or 4 year degree however.
I usually work with IT support, but took a sidejump as a construction worker for 6 months years ago.
It was good because:
-You can leave your work when you go home
-You feel less like a cog in a machine and more like a decision maker (if you're in a small team)
-You can see the work you do, and you can see the difference between good work and bad work
-It's fun to work fast, easy to take pride in a good job
-It trains your body (bye bye back problems)
-You learn to work with different people. Construction workers, carpenters, plumbers etc are a lot about social networking and less about skirting around the issue. You will gain more can-do attitude and learn to work with people who are that way
-Pay is actually decent compared to working at a grocery store etc. 30-50% more.
-Less jabbering with customers, more plain work.
The downsides:
-Have to get up early.
-It's hard work.
-Bosses in these workfields are usually very temperantal. They're either very happy and fun to work with, or very angry and irrational.
-Possibly dangerous, both short term and long term (but don't let that deter you).
I recommend it!
There's always jobs for people who aren't afraid to do physical work. Just view at as getting paid to do excercise.
If you love working on cars and want to be a mechanic, you don't go to college for engineering, you go to trade school and get certified. If you want to work on planes, you go get your A&P, you don't get a degree in aeronautical engineering. We need people to fix our cars, unclog our pipes, weld stuff, etc. These jobs aren't glamorous, but they are stable, pay much better than you think, and can be obtained by attending a much cheaper trade school than going to a university. I currently work part-time doing unskilled labor, and one guy I work with, after only being there 7 years, makes over 70k a year working no more overtime than many salaried employees. When he tops out in 3 more years he will probably be making close to, if not more than $100k. And this is in a job that requires no more than a high school diploma.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There is nothing wrong with becoming a Tradesman. Plumber, Electrician, Welder or Mechanic, etc
Just as we need Engineers, Nurses and Lawyers (I can't believe I'm including Lawyers!), we need the folks that keep our machines running. Just as not everyone has the money, or the aptitude to become a Doctor, I know many people who do not have the abilities to become a carpenter or metal worker.
I don't much care for the way some look down on the tradesmen that keep things running. Where I live there is a shortage of plumbers and electricians. Out west there is a shortage of carpenters. As a resul the ones that do exist command high wages, and are busy with lots of work. All this without the debilitating school loans that many University Graduates have.
From my perspective, it sounds like good advice
The most insulting part of his statement is that a hands on trades type job is just for the less academically adept.
While I am partial to electrician work, a trades type job is great for just about anyone.
I am actually getting out of software development full time and working toward becoming a professional electrician because I am very into renewable energy and would love to work outside installing solar and wind equipment.
Electrician, plumber, carpenter, mechanic, heavy equipment operator, landscaper, etc are all great jobs for a person who wants to do them, academically adept or not. Suggesting they are only for "less"er people is insulting, stigmatizing and shameful.
Wax on, wax off baby!
If your job can be automated, it will be automated. Most jobs that involve sitting in front of a desk at a computer will be automated as AI improves. AI won't get rid of *all* the jobs, but it does allow one person to do the work that at one stage would have required many people. Plumber is bloody hard to automate and it's pretty difficult to come up with software that allows one plumber to do the work that five plumbers did a couple of years ago.
But doesn't address how we could reshape our educational system to fit that new model. Perhaps make high school six years, with the last two intensive training in trade specialties, for those going that route, and college core courses for those going on.
That would change college from 4 years to 2 and let them focus on specialties, almost like a finishing school.
Everyone goes to school until they're 20, with an option to learn a trade, then you're on your own.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
As a retired contractor I have dealt with union plumbers most of my life. When I retired (2007) a journeyman made about $35/hour with $18/hour in benefits (Health & Welfare). That comes to about $110,000.00/year, but most took the winter off and collected unemployment about $600.00/week. Not bad for 5 year apprenticeship. JUST SAYIN' John
When I hear people complaining that they can't find skilled people, the part they usually leave off is "I can't find skilled people....for the amount of money I want to pay."
If there's a shortage in the market, then the value goes up, attracting more people, so there shouldn't be a problem in the long term.
The mayor did have a valid point that there's nothing that makes a lawyer worth more respect than a plumber, other than class behaviors.
I'm not sure how much respect of a profession matters in attracting people. Lawyers don't get a lot of respect but many people want to become lawyers for the money. No reason that shouldn't work for plumbers.
-- Everything is wonderful until you know something about it.
Funny, that's not what I was thinking when I had to hire a plumber because my main line out of the house got clogged with "flushable" wipes. (I was so glad that I wasn't the one dealing with that literal shit. I was totally happy to pay him for his work.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Get paying on those loans... the Dept. of Education needs more money to roll in.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/obama-student-loans-policy-profit_n_3276428.html
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You may be laughing, but the behavior of plumbing at relativistic speeds is actually quite difficult to predict. Plumbing around black holes is even worse, although the upside is that at least EPA won't nag you if you happen to be releasing toxic chemicals into the black hole: it all ends up as mere mass, charge, and angular momentum anyway. (Bilingual bonus: in my native tongue, "illegal dump" translates as "black dump".)
Ezekiel 23:20
Bloomberg made his money off the finance industry and he's in politics.
Trust him when he says that the world will never run out of assholes.
Go to a community college, transfer to a university for the last 2 years, and save potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. A few years after college (aka experience), they are worth the same. Unless you plan to be President of the US, there is no real reason to go to these top schools.
I teach engineering at a maritime academy and it dazzles me that so many students pay through the nose and suffer through 4+ years of regimented academics for a license that they could get by just sailing as a paid vessel assistant for a few years after high school and taking a Coast Guard examination. This is a practice called hawsepiping and used to be the norm for the profession. Marine engineers are really (for the most part) mechanics, and much simpler vocational school would be more than adequate for these jobs.
Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license and many whine and cry about having to read, write, do math, and take engineering coursework. I do think that degree is worth what they pay, but it really a form of insurance so they can remain employed after they come ashore, and getting 20 year old boys who aspire to be sailors to think about what they are going to do later in life (hell, later in the *day*) is hard.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Because for most people, college is trade school for people "too good" to go to trade school. That's putting it charitably since for the majority, it's probably just a 4 year extended vacation with some academics.
The reality is that most people would be substantially better off if they had parents that actually stayed together by that age in their lives and would let them work full time while living at home to build a really large amount of savings. In terms of material prosperity they'd have little to no debt, 4 years work experience toward their future and a massive pile of cash even if they were making minimum wage for the whole time.
Or maybe go into theoretical physics.
You need to work with a plumber for 5 years before you can become a plumber. And then you must pass a test Looking at the help wanted ads there no plumber apprentice jobs out there
Jack of all trades,master of none
Hiring price fighters to aid you in arguments with your !"$%# neighbor is more expensive, and if the neighbor hires their own fraught with high risks for YOU.
I think I prefer lawyers, after thinking about this for a few seconds.
The San Francisco plumbers' union was (is?) famously a Mafia operation. What's it like out there? Is he getting any kickbacks? Etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is the end goal of life a high salary?
I understand his advice, if followed, and if you work your way, either through trade school or apprenticeship, to journeyman, and then to master, you can expect a $80K+ a year income.
Is this the end-all, be-all of human existence?
A high salary is not why I went into the sciences - I went in with a passion for knowledge and knowing how things work, and why, and how to build things that, because they were barely within the boundaries of the rules, did amazing and astonishing things. A high salary resulted because I was successful at pursuing this passion.
I would instead advise people to try to find three things for which they feel passion, and are good at, and then find someone willing to pay you to do one of them.
If you can only find one thing for which you have passion, if you can still find someone to pay you to do it, then you are ahead of the game, compared to what Bloomberg suggest, if it happens that none of your objects of passion include plumbing.
There are plenty of people who look at the top end paychecks available in a profession, and choose a profession on that basis. Those who do will never reach the top end of that pay range if they do not posses a passion for the profession; they will always be middle tier, and they will watch the clock until it is time to check out from their job, and "get back to their 'real' life". This is where a lot of unemployed IT "professionals" come from.
For those clock watching 8 hours of their day, they will be miserable, working at something for which they have no passion, having intentionally turned their soul off for those eight hours in exchange for money. They will sell half their waking life into misery to benefit the other half of their waking life. And at the end of the day in their "real life", they will find they can not take joy in their "real life", as they anticipate, after sleeping, returning to their job for the next 8 soulless hours of work.
Do something you love, and for which you have passion; reclaim your soul for those lost 8 hours of your life.
If there was a local hiring apprentice plumbers near me, I would not think twice about ditching IT forever.
Even 40+ years ago, when I got my BS in engineering, any sort of hands on experience was disappearing from the requirements. Even the lab instructors often didn't know how to use some of the instruments (Oscilloscopes, signal generators, etc.) or how to troubleshoot a circuit that wasn't doing what the design said it should.
Engineering is really a combination of Art and Science and no one can learn to be an Artist from a book. Technology needs both and both are required to keep the modern world working. I am in awe and have utmost respect for a skilled craftsman/artisan and our world needs more of them.
I am a third generation engineer, and many decades ago my Father often told me that I should be a plumber or an auto mechanic and there were many times during my working career that I realized just how right he probably was.
Plumbing has been very hard work. But the fact I can work anywhere in the country( and I have )it's quite liberating to just get up and leave.
I literally have made quite a lot of money from plumbing and my service calls rival or exceed that if doctors or lawyers. It's actually a great trade but its tough.
I am a plumber, that's how I feed my Family and take trips to Europe, build a new home server (24 TB zfs ), and generally make as much as my doctor/wife.
I don't see the downside to working with your hands, and seem to remember that the maker concept is fueling a new attitude to working building/creating/rigging stuff.
It's a win-win.
That and I really like being able to be an asshole if you piss me off, on a construction site it's a man's world.
Try that shit in IT........
there has been too much of an emphasis in the last 10-20 years for EVERYONE to go to college, whether they were really qualified or not, that the technical trades have been neglected.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Have gnu, will travel.
He means well, he realized everyone is not smart enough to think for themselves. He realized the masses have to be encouraged and herded. That is an elitest point of view and I agree with him.
However he shouldn't start trying to make laws that prevent the adept from having a choice. His attitudes towards restriction (Tobacco, Salt, Large Sodas) infringe upon my freedom. That noted, he's not a bad guy, just don't be the piece of shit trying to force an ideology on someone.
This argument starts up every time somebody had to pay their plumber 80 bucks an hour to fix the toilet, their fility stinking filled with shit toilet. They then think the plumber doing a job they never ever want to do themselves, is rolling in it and the IT being their shit but piles of money.
As if that 80 bucks is pure profit. Meanwhile the daddy plumber knows just how much of that costs goes to cover unpaid hours, taxes, insurance, tool costs etc etc. And he also knows how much Mr Doctor and Mr Lawyer charged him for his children's delivery and to deal with that frivolous lawsuit.
So... what is he going to want for his kids? The same as himself in a world where just getting by is the same as being a loser OR to aim for the top?
And don't for a second think that Bloomberg is interested in the fortunes of the public. He just wants more plumbers so he can pay less, same reason his kind wants immigrants to bust unions and high wages. Sure kids, all become plumbers and wave bye bye to 80 bucks as the competition sky rockets. And then you look longingly at IT graduates making high wages because nobody learned how to code anymore.
Simple piece of advice for live: NEVER listen to a billionaire, they didn't get rich by looking out for other peoples interest.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A plumber goes to a doctor's house to fix a leak.
He works for 15 minutes and then asks the doctor for $200
The doctor says "I don't even make close to that!!"
The plumber replies: "When I was a doctor, I didn't either"
The Trades have been overlooked as a viable career choice for quite awhile. And there's great money in it. My mechanic, being one of the few truly honest ones in the area, is turning business away he's so booked (Yes he is expanding to meet demand).
The trouble with trades these days is you often get the bottom of the barrel guys without many other options available (One could say the same for police, but that's a whole other story). So your mechanics, plumbers, electricians often won't give a crap about the client and only the pay-cheque. When you find an honest trades person you are loyal to a fault and become their greatest advertisement.
So yeah push those who might not the top of the heap academically but aren't the bottom by any means into trades.
The key question today is to chose a job that can't be offshored and pays a decent salary. Medicine is the sweet spot but the rest of us have to be creative.
TCAP-Abort
Over 100 posts and not a single Super Mario reference...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Being a plumber is the only reliable way of getting the benefits of trickle down from a plutocrat.
But more felds do need a trade school setting or at least more on the job trading.
IT needs to move to more of a tech school / trade school setting and less college.
Seek not the advice of successful people; they do not wish your company.
Here's where he misses the boat: Nobody should do a job they don't enjoy if it is avoidable.
I'd much rather work for less money and enjoy my job than hate my job and have more money. This of course assumes both paths are fully available and that I don't have an enormous money problem.
Jobs you enjoy lead to passion, and passionate work often leads to promotions, business opportunities, other interesting work, side projects, etc.
I'm an engineer. I recently moved to a job where I get paid less and the cost of living is enormously higher. But I LOVE the work. And that, my friends, is priceless.
And the tech / trades schools need to freed from being part of the collgle system.
Too bad for the summary that "Joe the plumber" wasn't actually "Joe," but Sam; wasn't actually a plumber, but an apprentice plumber (not licensed); and at the time of the question that made him a conservative darling, was outright lying (the business wasn't up for sale, he couldn't have afforded it even if it was, nor could he have run it because he wasn't a plumber).
All that aside, we should be reforming out high schools and advanced learning to be more similar to Germany, where people who want to pursue academic careers can get to college, and people who want to pursue vocational careers can get into technical schools. High school is where that really begins, where people start building interests that will stick with them for life.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
In most parts of the USA you have to be a master plumber (~5 yrs on the job and pass your exams) to be a licensed plumber.
The trouble with being a plumber is that most of the work is in building and remodeling. With housing construction way down, most of the people in the building trades are hurting. It's great during a building boom, though.
A related trade is HVAC - heating, ventilating, and air conditioning. There's more electronics and control involved than in plumbing.
Yeah.... I do know those differences.
You talk like someone who's been immersed in academia for too long.
Had you spent some time in the real world, perhaps you would have learned why, in many cases, real world examples are the most accurate predictor of what your experience will be.
Data and analysis are fine, right up to the point where they collide with reality. At that point, I'll take "anecdotal evidence" from someone who has been there and done it over predictions made by someone who knows a lot of fancy math any day of the week.
And THAT is a piece of wisdom that they won't teach you in college. You only pick that one up after a few decades of actually dealing with reality and noticing how little the world cares about what the data, analysis, and models say should happen.
Yes, you can go to college and become successful. What I'm saying is that it's not the college education that made you successful, as much as certain groups would like everyone to believe that. Success comes from skill. Either skill at a particular vocation, or skill at playing corporate politics. Neither of those skills can be mastered in a university setting, mastery comes from actually doing it in the real world.
I love it when liberals get butt hurt. They get SO catty.
It's fun, isn't it? This probably makes me an asshole, but sometimes when I'm bored I provoke them just so I can sit back and laugh at their response....
Yes, you can go to college and become successful. What I'm saying is that it's not the college education that made you successful, as much as certain groups would like everyone to believe that. Success comes from skill. Either skill at a particular vocation, or skill at playing corporate politics. Neither of those skills can be mastered in a university setting, mastery comes from actually doing it in the real world.
Well I have spent quite some time in the 'real world' as you describe it (as if universities were not part of the real world). I think you should bear in mind that your experience involved a relaxed attitude to what was a fairly vocational course at a two-year business school, and yet you feel you can generalise your observations to make dismissive (and implicitly self-congratulatory) comments about tertiary education in general. There is a big difference between your experience and a rigorous academic degree course from one of the leading universities. If you think the benefits of university centre solely around networking opportunities and 'jump[ing] through hoops' perhaps that says more about your approach to education than about education itself.
Bloomberg has a point. For the longest time, and while the majority of the world was mired in poverty, the US, with its highest rate of HS graduates, was well equipped to be the predominant manufacturing/economic engine of the world. Now that world poverty has been cut in half, and with increased literacy rates world wide, stuff simply moved overseas.
And the country, all of the sudden, had an emergency need to re-educate its masses. The solution? College!!!!
We treat/treated college as if it were a silver bullet, while all this time we have been treating vocational education like a pariah concept, a joke. Part of a good solution would have included a revamping of vocational education at the HS and community college level. We need that, we desperately need that.
So, Bloomberg is right. For many people, plumbing or any vocational skill set would be a much better deal. We have a shortage of vocational workers, and we have an excess of college graduates (many who graduate in degrees for which there is no economic demand.)
So, it is not a matter of who is intelligent and who is not (having a STEM degree doesn't necessarily indicate practical intelligence, nor lacking one indicates stupidity.) It is a matter of economics, plain good old supply and demand.
It is ridiculous to contemplate a nation with HS graduates and college graduates, and nothing in between. Alas, that's what we have been collectively aiming for the last 20 years, as if that is going to solve the challenges of globalization.
Unlike being an investment banker.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Based on your defensive posture, I can only draw two possible conclusions.
1.) You are currently a student enrolled in one of those ridiculously priced "leading universities"
or....
2.) You are a professor who either works for one of them, or earned your degree there.
After nearly 3 decades in this line of work, I have never met a coworker or colleague who considered their time in college to be anything other than a gigantic waste of huge sums of money. And that includes colleagues with Masters and Doctorates from "leading universities".
Stop being a dumb old fart. You can be educated even when you are working a trade. Learn to express yourself correctly. More importantly, being a plumber or anything else does NOT mean lacking in education. And, further more, education is way much more than what you learn in any school. One has to wonder how he ever got to be Mayor of New York. Certainly wasn't because of education.
Based on your defensive posture, I can only draw two possible conclusions.
1.) You are currently a student enrolled in one of those ridiculously priced "leading universities"
or....
2.) You are a professor who either works for one of them, or earned your degree there.
After nearly 3 decades in this line of work, I have never met a coworker or colleague who considered their time in college to be anything other than a gigantic waste of huge sums of money. And that includes colleagues with Masters and Doctorates from "leading universities".
Neither of those things are true. In fact, I'm not American, so my university course was not 'ridiculously priced' at all and did not involve 'huge sums of money'. Maybe your line of work doesn't benefit from anything you could learn on a degree course, and all the skills needed can be picked up by spending a few hundred bucks on books from Amazon.com. I'm sure there are plenty of software development jobs that meet that description. That doesn't mean that nobody benefits from university. Your excessive confidence in your conclusions about why people go to university, why people might defend university education or what people might gain from it are just based on wild generalisations from your experiences and those of the people immediately around you. It's an example of the limitations of 'anecdotal evidence'.
As for 'defensive posture'... You didn't finish your degree and it just so happens that your considered position on universities is that they are worthless. At the first sign of criticism your assumption is that I must have a vested interest. Hmmm...
It's always better to be a Morlock than an Eloi.
Also the Eloi are... mmm... deliciousss!
Plumbing used to be great in the UK £50-60K was possible. Then Europe opened up and Eastern Europeans started cutting into the wages considerably, it still pays better than the median wage, just a lot less than before.
Damn! You stole all the good ones! I have to do all the plumbing and electric works in my house myself because all the "professionals" are full of shit (pun intended).
Go fuck yourself.
He means well, he realized everyone is not smart enough to think for themselves.
Probably why he decided to make himself Mayor-for-Life, since not everyone is smart enough to select a well-meaning mayor.
That's a great plan for society. Leave knowledge to the elite; they are they only ones that can afford it. You don't learn anything useful in college, so why bother. Heck, high school is kind of pointless. Why not start a trade at sixteen, that's more money is your pocket. Why not fourteen? That's the ticket. Leave that higher education to those elite know-it-alls.
We don't need to value teachers, educators at all; the internet will fix that with some YouTube videos. After all, you don't understand that stuff, so how can it possibly be worth anything? Let's be honest, not everyone can be educated. You know deep down that you aren't smart Best not to try.
That's a world worth living in. Call it the New Dark Ages. College prices are a concern because they are pricing out people from becoming educated, from having choices. College is not the problem; the cost is. Cheaper loans, more grants and scholarships, more public support all need to be considered alongside cost controls. Sure, it's not for everyone, but it should be a choice for everyone. Everyone can benefit from a higher education, from learning. Smart has nothing to do with it.
An uneducated populous is ripe for exploitation. History (one of those "useless" subjects) teaches us this. Look to the source of this advice, the value of controlling knowledge and the media in this age. Why bother thinking for yourself when you can have somebody do it for you?
There is value in culture, in art, in science that goes beyond money. It is crazy that we are so focused on what it takes to survive these days, not thrive and grow. We don't have to embrace a gold-paved road to a new Dark Age. We can do better.
Actually, in most of the States we've worked in, the plumbing trade is licensed in stages. Baby plumbers get apprentice cards for four to eight thousand working hours, the hours are signed off on by the responsible Master plumber before State testing for a Journeyman license, and then a given number of work hours are required as a Journeyman to test at the State for a Master's license. Normally, there is but one Master per plumbing company, and he's generally not the fellow crawling under your sink. In fact, he's often the owner of the Plumbing Company. Various other licensing levels exist (tradesman, irrigation specialist, fire protection, water well, etc.) and each State has it's own Plumbing Board and unique licensing requirements.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I think you should bear in mind that your experience involved a relaxed attitude to what was a fairly vocational course at a two-year business school, and yet you feel you can generalise your observations to make dismissive (and implicitly self-congratulatory) comments about tertiary education in general. There is a big difference between your experience and a rigorous academic degree course from one of the leading universities.
Then I will speak as someone who graduated with honors with a rigorous academic degree from a US News & World Reports top-10 school. College is not a trade school; it is meant to teach you how to think, and to expose you to a lot of ideas. Most of the material in most of my classes has not mattered an inch in my years since graduation, and it doesn't need to, because if you know how to research, how to learn, and how to engage ideas, you can learn the fine details of the job as you go. The degree shows perseverance and is used to thin the stack of resumes in the HR department. But unless you're in a semi-trade-school major (engineering of the non-software type), don't expect to crack open your textbooks at the office.
Paying a licensed tradesman to work on your home is no more guarantee of proficiency than a driver's license is a guarantee to responsibly operate a motor vehicle. That said, the State is in the business of protecting citizens, often the most vulnerable, from unscrupulous contractors. Licensing and insurance requirements are two ways they attempt to do this. There are also issues involving public safety with some of the trades, particularly plumbing and electrical.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
3) Don't chew your fingernails.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
...and refuse of your fellow waste expellers. There be gold in that crack. Thanks Bloomberg! We needed a report on what people have known for 50 years: Plumbers, Electricians and other Industrial Service industries jack up the consumer on their pricing.
Wait for the mad rush into those careers. Perhaps we can get rid of a lot of incompetent IT staffers who rushed to the Dot.com era to make a quick buck and finally get back to quality solutions, products and services. I doubt it, but one can dream. Fortunately, the traditional hard sciences have real barriers to entry that a pretty face, a young eager and motivated stooge has to have: scientific accredited crudentials and brains to back it up. Any half-wit can learn to program. Very few are really excellent at it.
Glad I did Mechanical Engineering before Computer Science.
Yeah. Just like Mario and Luigi.
Ouch! And hey, like a lawyer, a plumber can always dabble in politics."
Unfortunately it didnt go well the first time around, since the unstoppable leaks gave us Watergate.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
After insisting, for years, that the US needs more H1Bs, because of a desperate shortage of trained Americans. Bloomberg now recommends that Americans become plumbers, to avoid offshore competition.
If you needed college to teach you those things then you were an idiot and probably still are. So the whole "it teaches you how to learn" idea is highly overrated. If anything, it's really nothing more than an excuse that University staff can use to ignore you and make you fend for yourself.
You should already know how to think before you even apply to college and things like research and exposure to diverse ideas are things that you can totally do on your own. It was this way even before web and is even more true now.
Universities have lost touch with their Renaissance roots. Too many people are drinking the kool-aid and believing their own propaganda.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Data mining is overrated for anything more than exploratory analyses though. If your data collection process is so canned that you can accumulate the troves of data necessary for mining, you can't really make much more than the most general of statements. This is why I am besieged by ads in Norweigan on a daily basis. I have a vague interest in foreign cultures, yes, but do I care much for Norway? Not really (it's not a bad place; I'm just ambivalent about it).
This isn't to decry data mining completely- it did, after all, uncover my interest in foreign cultures. But not in quite the right way... I feel like the advertising that is informed by data mining is like that party guest that no one invited. He seems like he belongs, he could be fun but there's still something a bit off and nobody really knows where he came from.
Referring to the post from idle tank/septic tank cleaner this job cleaning the night privies and disposal was the highest paid job in UK circa 200AD to 1750AD outside 'politics' (Crown /diplomats court layers etc). The families concerned laid off cash as loans to aspiring politicians. Muck pays. Just make sure you have an other 'job' for status e.g. church lay officer / treasurer etc
Regards Eion MacDonald
The real problem is that kids aren't given the suggestion to look at trades these days, they got the same spiel that we were getting in the 80's and 90's, that going into technology is the way to go. But everyone needs someone to lay and fit pipe, fix their car, and so on.
Unfortunately, to fix someone's car these days, you need to get into technology as well :(
It used to be that you could fix a car or a television set if you were a reasonable tech.
But now it's all electronic and you basically swap the entire component (logic board, control device, what have you) - and you essentially need the diagnostic equipment from the original manufacturer to plug into the on-board circuit to read out the fault codes.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
An almost fanatical devotion to the pope?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
He forgot to mention one other benefit. If you become skilled enough as a plumber, you may get selected to perform in your union's annual holiday production, The Buttcracker Suite.
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Honestly, I have thought of doing this. I don't see anything wrong with it either. Although plumbers might have those times where it's an extra dirty job. Makes you wonder if the extra pay is worth it though, lol.
FTFY,
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."