15 thoughts on “More so than a university degree.”
Nothing wrong with being a tradesman and working with your hands, i worked sheet metal for 48 years. Hard work paid the bills and with what i learned over the decades working with other tradesmen on their trades helped me to save a lot of money being able to fix what needed to be around the house instead of paying someone else to do the repairs.
More aches and pains than i wanted to retire with but i know that every dollar i earned was honest. I hope that Mr. Trump gets trade schools going. It would help breed a new generation of self reliant young men
I learned early in my engineering career to put down my pencil and go ask the shops how to do something. I’d then go do the math to get the specs right. It saved me hundreds, if not thousands, of hours and my designs always worked, never caught fire, and no one was hurt. I also made a lot of friends doing that!
Thank-you. Dealing with folks that have degrees but no common sense was a real pain-in-the-butt. We always appreciated the engineers, tooling, and IT that came out on the shop floor and talked to us.
You know the hierarchy of degrees, I’m sure:
BS – self explanatory
MS – more of the same
PhD – pile higher and deeper
I have the first and my son has the second. He was a mechanic first, however. I started as a Field Surveyor and went back to college for a BSCE.
I think it was the so-called educated elites in America that felt superior with their PhD’s that did that. In other countries it is respected to be a tradesman.
I worked in a high precision machine shop for over 10 years, my job was supplying material to the machinists for production.
I’d tell them as I gave them their material. “This material is full of perfect parts, your job is to find them.”
No. Most of us are going to tell you that you are correct. Tradesmen deserve at least as much respect, if not more.
What Karl said!
No. This is absolutely *not* true:
Trade schools teach a trade. Universities teach only conformity and “expert” worship.
A trade school graduate has very likely aquired a useful skill, you should give him a chance to demonstrate this.
Anyone with a recent “degree” should be assumed useless until proven otherwise.
As an employer, this became obvious to me in 1995.
A newly graduated Engineer will not be worth his salary for his first 10 years.
Ahem! A well skilled machinist knows all those trades.
And I can cook too.
daddy-o
Amen
Culinary Arts? Around these parts, getting an AS in Culinary Arts qualifies you for a $12/hr job. You might even find a job making biscuits for Hardee’s (Carl Jr’s. for you left coasties)
Even back in the early 70s a Culinary Arts certificate didn’t get you much of a livelihood. A nurse’s aide made more money than someone with a Culinary Arts certificate.
I worked as an electrician to live and pay for my degree in Electrical Engineering, then worked as an electrical engineer and got my PhD in Information Theory. That was more than 30 years ago, and when I see what comes out of universities nowadays I can understand why a current four years degree is considered pretty worthless, but it wasn’t always so and hopefully it won’t remain so in the future since something’s gotta give…
Nothing wrong with being a tradesman and working with your hands, i worked sheet metal for 48 years. Hard work paid the bills and with what i learned over the decades working with other tradesmen on their trades helped me to save a lot of money being able to fix what needed to be around the house instead of paying someone else to do the repairs.
More aches and pains than i wanted to retire with but i know that every dollar i earned was honest. I hope that Mr. Trump gets trade schools going. It would help breed a new generation of self reliant young men
I learned early in my engineering career to put down my pencil and go ask the shops how to do something. I’d then go do the math to get the specs right. It saved me hundreds, if not thousands, of hours and my designs always worked, never caught fire, and no one was hurt. I also made a lot of friends doing that!
Thank-you. Dealing with folks that have degrees but no common sense was a real pain-in-the-butt. We always appreciated the engineers, tooling, and IT that came out on the shop floor and talked to us.
You know the hierarchy of degrees, I’m sure:
BS – self explanatory
MS – more of the same
PhD – pile higher and deeper
I have the first and my son has the second. He was a mechanic first, however. I started as a Field Surveyor and went back to college for a BSCE.
I think it was the so-called educated elites in America that felt superior with their PhD’s that did that. In other countries it is respected to be a tradesman.
I worked in a high precision machine shop for over 10 years, my job was supplying material to the machinists for production.
I’d tell them as I gave them their material. “This material is full of perfect parts, your job is to find them.”
No. Most of us are going to tell you that you are correct. Tradesmen deserve at least as much respect, if not more.
What Karl said!
No. This is absolutely *not* true:
Trade schools teach a trade. Universities teach only conformity and “expert” worship.
A trade school graduate has very likely aquired a useful skill, you should give him a chance to demonstrate this.
Anyone with a recent “degree” should be assumed useless until proven otherwise.
As an employer, this became obvious to me in 1995.
A newly graduated Engineer will not be worth his salary for his first 10 years.
Ahem! A well skilled machinist knows all those trades.
And I can cook too.
daddy-o
Amen
Culinary Arts? Around these parts, getting an AS in Culinary Arts qualifies you for a $12/hr job. You might even find a job making biscuits for Hardee’s (Carl Jr’s. for you left coasties)
Even back in the early 70s a Culinary Arts certificate didn’t get you much of a livelihood. A nurse’s aide made more money than someone with a Culinary Arts certificate.
I worked as an electrician to live and pay for my degree in Electrical Engineering, then worked as an electrical engineer and got my PhD in Information Theory. That was more than 30 years ago, and when I see what comes out of universities nowadays I can understand why a current four years degree is considered pretty worthless, but it wasn’t always so and hopefully it won’t remain so in the future since something’s gotta give…