This is something I’m worried about. I actually have a decent-paying blue-collar job, but I want to be an engineer and expand myself. A lot of entry engineering positions pay less than what I currently make. I’d be happy breaking even, but pay cuts are a hard decision to make.
If you can keep the roof over your head, the goal is to look at longer term earning.
This is a painful trap that keeps a lot of lower income and skill folks down, life forces them to take the short term earning to stay fed, thereby missing out on longer term opportunities
In hindsight I would have been much happier, healthier and wealthier if I had just gotten a construction job or something after HS instead of torturing myself through a CS degree lmao
I work in IT, and I’ve sometimes thought maybe I should’ve gone into construction or something that doesn’t have such a breakneck pace of changing technology.
What was working in construction like, and how does it compare to your IT job now?
Not the person you asked, but I grew up in a rural blue collar area. Construction beats up your body, and even with the right PPE you are at high risk of injury from accident or simple repetitive stress injuries. The work is often exposed to the elements, on stressful timetables, with pressure to work long hours.
Some of the trades can be better, but many have the same issues I listed above. Lots of people in trades or construction feel 60 at 40 from beating their body up.
Backbreaking is the best way to describe working construction. We did general framing/siding/roofing, and my body hurt every day after I was done. I went into IT specifically for the mental challenge, and because I saw how my uncle and grandfather's bodies were broken by a lifetime of construction and didn't want to deal with it for myself.
I'll gladly take learning new skills constantly over breaking my body.
I’ve grown up doing hard manual labor most of my free time and let me tell ya, I vastly prefer that over taking exams and being stressed 24/7 for years.
My first employer out of college told me explicitly they hired me because I was willing to stick with a 4 year program, and though I didn’t have experience they were confident I’d stick around enough to be trained. I got an art degree and it was a computer science job 🤔
This is a weirdly reductionist take. Implying that anyone can be “trained to code” seems to imply that coding is a rote skill that can be easily trained into anyone, completely dismissing the fact that some brains will just inherently do better at it than others. Also the generalization you make about companies that are willing to to train their potential hires is not true everywhere.
As someone who isn’t a coder, I was able to pick up enough Visual Basic back in the day to figure out how to make some basic apps for myself. It only involved learning a few concepts and commands. That should be enough for anyone with a college degree to do. Simple coding at a low level, learning enough to maintain a website that’s already been designed for example, as long as nothing catastrophic happens, can definitely be done by anyone.
The problem now is that it can also be done by AI.
They gave Mario an American accent for star appeal. I’d say that’s more egregious. Maybe if this was the era where Mario never talked in the games, when we had Mario cartoons where he had an American accent, but he doesn’t have one anymore. It just irked me is all.
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