Why are people talking like being a mechanic is bum work, or like there’s a huge overhead cost in being a mechanic, or that you have to go to trade school to be a mechanic, or like mechanic work is going away?
None of these is true.
Mechanics will always have work, usually with overtime, and usually pay is very decent.
No degree required. Certs optional.
Tools are very affordable when you’re not buying them all at once.
Lots of room to change specializations.
ICE mechanics are still going to be hugely in demand because the Internal Combustion Engine isn’t going anywhere, even if they stop putting them in some/ most automobiles. But there are dozens of other mechanical disciplines, and as long as you know how to (when to) then a wrench, you can always get a job.
A bearing is a bearing, whether it’s on a crank shaft, an electric motor, a tail pulley, or a garage door.
every mechanic I have met hates their life, unless they work for like a really high end place. and those jobs are far and few.
i had family in auto work, electricians, and line workers. they all basically said ‘go to college working in the trades is fucking shit.’
working in an office is a lot easier on your body and doesn’t leave you with medical problems. my electrician uncle lost one leg in his 50s and then other in his 60s. the mechanics i knew all worked for their dads and were townies we never left where they grew up, etc.
they made decent money, sure, but i would never ever want to trade live with them. i’m in my 40s and healthier than I was in my 20s. money isn’t everything.
I… uh… i am a mechanic. I just don’t work in a car shop that pays only billable hours. Why would you do that to yourself?
That would be like getting a minimum wage serving job and hoping the tips will be reliable. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I never struggle for hours, I have great benefits, non- union, no certs, degrees, or specialization required. I make enough to pay all my bills, invest in retirement, and still have money left over for life afterward. I work with a gang of guys all doing the same. We work in a field where we can go pretty much anywhere and get another job paying about the same.
I’m not sure why the mechanics you have met can’t find these jobs, but they have all misinformed you.
i work in IT. it’s so easy, just get a six figure job like me.
it’s not that the vast majority of positions in the field… are part time contract work that pay shit… and jobs like mine are difficult and rare to find and typically only go to those with tons of experience or elite degrees, like myself. it’s not that 22 year olds even struggle to get those shit jobs that get their foot in the door.
or that it took me over a decade of experience and working to get to this wage level… no it’s not that.
i also don’t understand why 22 year olds don’t have 500K in assets and just buy houses instead of renting and living with roommates, it’s so easy!
Wow, you have it hard in IT i guess. Maybe you should have looked into being a mechanic.
You don’t need a degree to get jobs as a mechanic, so no formal education necessary. You don’t have to worry about jobs being hard to find because basically everything that moves has bearings that need to be changed. You don’t need to worry about contract work because there are substantial amounts of mechanic jobs that pay hourly and offer tons of overtime.
I’m not sure why it’s so offensive to you that plenty of people don’t have the experience you heard about from “every mechanic you met.”
the average mechanic wage is 50K a year. average IT job wage is 100K a year.
that’s not a livable wage unless you live in bumfucksville parts of the USA, and the mechanics that live there are not making 50K, they are making like 30K.
but please tell me how everyone should go be a mechanic and they’ll make 150K a year? i guess?
just because you got lucky or did well, doesn’t not mean every other person will have the same luck or skill in their career.
you certainly are not educated. you’ve made that very clear but your insistence ignorance that being a mechanic is ‘so easy’.
Wow, for someone so educated, you sure make a lot of odd assumptions.
Perhaps I am more educated than you assume, even if a formal education is not required for my job.
Also, I’m gonna make an assumption now about your education, based on things you’ve said here… someone as condescendingly smart as yourself and using averages to discuss things like this has certainly taken at least some statistics classes and understands what a “standard deviation” is… and how that might be affected by extremely low paying jobs in one sector, even if those are not the most prominent paying jobs or abundant positions in that sector.
I think the standard deviation of pay for mechanics is much wider than you think, and possibly skewed by other factors than just simple geography.
I’m not saying that all mechanics make IT wages, but i am saying that I didn’t have to spend 10 years in school and $150k in debt to compete for a position that I earn 6 figures in. My job is not competitive for positions, they’re pretty abundant. Base pay for this position in my area (not a big city) is substantially higher than the national “average.” No formal education required.
But I must ask, why u so mad bro? Sounds like you’re living the dream life, no need to have an aneurism about other people’s money
Basically nobody has 150K in debt form an undergrad degree. They have like 30-40K of debt, which is easy for them to back back over 10 years with when the starting salary is 50-60K and in 10 years they will most likely double that salary.
but keep telling me how everyone should be a mechanic and college is stupid. Please. because anyone who went to college is a dumb loser or something, or i dunno, maybe you are talking about your own poor choices when you were younger? I definitely have met very dumb folks who have 150K in debt from college, who were very mad about it, who also terrible employees and people in general.
A mechanic making over 100K exists, yes, but they are rare, and would be in highly specialized areas and likely late in their careers. There are bicycle mechanics who make over 100K a year, but for every 1 of them, there are about 1000s of them making 30K a year with the top end wage being about 45K after decades of experience. Should I tell folks to go be a bike mechanic because it’s a good career path because like .01% of professional race mechanics make good money? Becuase yeah, they have about a 1/10000 change of that career path, and a 99999/10000 change of working 40 hours a week in some crappy bike shop making 20 bucks an hour for the rest of their life.
Oh my life is the dream life. I get mad other very dumb people tell me that I’m the richest bastard in the world, or that i’m a poor piece of shit. of which there a lot of on lemmy. Instead the boring fact that I’m in the 85th percentile of income and the 90th percentile of asset wealth. I even was a landlord for a few years, which you know, makes me capitalist hyper scum.
But i prefer facts, statistics and reality, to emotional reasoning, which makes folks very mad. but they tend to respond to that stuff wtih ‘u mad bro? lolz i so smart u dumb because anecdote anecdote anecdote’.
I don’t think i said any of that. I think you’re just more upset than you need to be. You are angry typing and making all kinds of mistakes.
I never said college was dumb, I said you don’t need it for my job. I graduated college with under $5k debt. You said college for 10 years, and that would put you at well over an undergrad degree, unless you were taking like 4 credits a term. A masters degree will cost you around $150k and 10 years.
I never said everyone should be a mechanic, but there is nothing wrong with it. It’s not hard to make money unless you stay in a dead end position. That’s the same for almost any career tho.
I also never said you were either rich or poor. I don’t know or care about your financial positions in life. Much like your genitals: unless they’re being used on me, it’s none of my fucken business what you got.
I did make poor choices when I was young, but I am now older and have made much better decisions as I grew, coincidentally enough starting with a bicycle mechanic job. It was super cool and I learned a lot. But you are right, it didn’t pay the bills.
So I found a different mechanic job, one that paid around triple the bike mechanic job. It was somewhere I’d seen advertised for some time, so i checked it out and it made sense. I drove all over my state doing field service work. It was a good job, but i was at the “national average” pay for mechanics at that time. So I found another job, it paid around 50% more and had much better benefits and all the overtime i wanted (it wasn’t mandatory). I worked there a couple years and found another job that paid 25% more, and for the first time in my life, I was earning over $100k, and no overtime necessary.
The thing is, these last several jobs have been constantly hiring entry level mechanics at “national average” or higher since long before i started.
You seem to have a lack of understanding about being a mechanic. I can guarantee you that, as a mechanic. Unless you don’t want to try, the chances of you being stuck in a bike shop at $20/hr for the rest of your life is much lower than “99999/10000” (999.99%🤣) in fact, it doesn’t even approach 100/10000 (you know, 1%).
Anyway, don’t be so mad, and don’t take everything so personal. I’m not trying to make fun of you or hurt your feelings.
It can be both, can’t it?
People should be paid a living wage. If you do more work than is the defined norm you should be paid increasingly more sums of money.
The intent of overtime laws was to encourage companies to hire someone else instead of making someone work 80 hours a week.
A business saying that they’ll pay you more if you work more at your discretion doesn’t bother me. Even with a perfectly good wage and benefits you’re going to have cases where people want a touch more more money. I had a coworker who did contracting jobs to pay for a new deck. He didn’t have to, but it kept his budget from getting weird.
I’d rather have the ability to pickup an extra shift when times are tough. I have my friends that are on a strict 40 hour week and when the check doesn’t cut it they are fucked. OT has allowed me a lot of luxuries I otherwise would have had to scrimp and save for.
Meanwhile most people are fucked if their car breaks down. I just pick up an extra shift and the problem goes away.
Thats exactly the point, if you are on a 40h week and that doesnt cut it, something is very wrong. If you say to work extra as a bonus, well maybe. But if you need it to make ends meet it’s completely fucked imo.
I worked 3300 hours a few years back. I was not prepared for what the overtime would do to my taxes. Still brought home more than I ever had before (or since). Also was not prepared what the overtime would do to my personal life or my mind.
shop rate around me $180/hr now. the mechanics better be making at least a quarter of that. my company only charges half that rate for custom machine building
They make a good living, but they are paid flat rate, and there is no guarantee that there will be steady income. If there’s a lul, the mechanic might make $0 in a given week. Also, if for some reason a job takes longer than the billable hours for that job, they are essentially working for free. Of the trades, it’s the shittiest one to make good money in imo.
so many bozos on the internet they know what these fields are like, and it shows they know nothing.
folks who post how wonderful it is have survivorship bias. your average mechanic/plumber/electrician isn’t making bank, they are making average to below average wage. and the income is not steady, it’s sporadic. you might make 100k one year and 60 the next, or spend 2 years with minimal income because construction market or similar is slowing down.
Why are people talking like being a mechanic is bum work, or like there’s a huge overhead cost in being a mechanic, or that you have to go to trade school to be a mechanic, or like mechanic work is going away?
None of these is true.
Mechanics will always have work, usually with overtime, and usually pay is very decent.
No degree required. Certs optional.
Tools are very affordable when you’re not buying them all at once.
Lots of room to change specializations.
ICE mechanics are still going to be hugely in demand because the Internal Combustion Engine isn’t going anywhere, even if they stop putting them in some/ most automobiles. But there are dozens of other mechanical disciplines, and as long as you know how to (when to) then a wrench, you can always get a job.
A bearing is a bearing, whether it’s on a crank shaft, an electric motor, a tail pulley, or a garage door.
do you know any mechanics?
every mechanic I have met hates their life, unless they work for like a really high end place. and those jobs are far and few.
i had family in auto work, electricians, and line workers. they all basically said ‘go to college working in the trades is fucking shit.’
working in an office is a lot easier on your body and doesn’t leave you with medical problems. my electrician uncle lost one leg in his 50s and then other in his 60s. the mechanics i knew all worked for their dads and were townies we never left where they grew up, etc.
they made decent money, sure, but i would never ever want to trade live with them. i’m in my 40s and healthier than I was in my 20s. money isn’t everything.
I… uh… i am a mechanic. I just don’t work in a car shop that pays only billable hours. Why would you do that to yourself?
That would be like getting a minimum wage serving job and hoping the tips will be reliable. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I never struggle for hours, I have great benefits, non- union, no certs, degrees, or specialization required. I make enough to pay all my bills, invest in retirement, and still have money left over for life afterward. I work with a gang of guys all doing the same. We work in a field where we can go pretty much anywhere and get another job paying about the same.
I’m not sure why the mechanics you have met can’t find these jobs, but they have all misinformed you.
i work in IT. it’s so easy, just get a six figure job like me.
it’s not that the vast majority of positions in the field… are part time contract work that pay shit… and jobs like mine are difficult and rare to find and typically only go to those with tons of experience or elite degrees, like myself. it’s not that 22 year olds even struggle to get those shit jobs that get their foot in the door.
or that it took me over a decade of experience and working to get to this wage level… no it’s not that.
i also don’t understand why 22 year olds don’t have 500K in assets and just buy houses instead of renting and living with roommates, it’s so easy!
Wow, you have it hard in IT i guess. Maybe you should have looked into being a mechanic.
You don’t need a degree to get jobs as a mechanic, so no formal education necessary. You don’t have to worry about jobs being hard to find because basically everything that moves has bearings that need to be changed. You don’t need to worry about contract work because there are substantial amounts of mechanic jobs that pay hourly and offer tons of overtime.
I’m not sure why it’s so offensive to you that plenty of people don’t have the experience you heard about from “every mechanic you met.”
the average mechanic wage is 50K a year. average IT job wage is 100K a year.
that’s not a livable wage unless you live in bumfucksville parts of the USA, and the mechanics that live there are not making 50K, they are making like 30K.
but please tell me how everyone should go be a mechanic and they’ll make 150K a year? i guess?
just because you got lucky or did well, doesn’t not mean every other person will have the same luck or skill in their career.
you certainly are not educated. you’ve made that very clear but your insistence ignorance that being a mechanic is ‘so easy’.
Wow, for someone so educated, you sure make a lot of odd assumptions.
Perhaps I am more educated than you assume, even if a formal education is not required for my job.
Also, I’m gonna make an assumption now about your education, based on things you’ve said here… someone as condescendingly smart as yourself and using averages to discuss things like this has certainly taken at least some statistics classes and understands what a “standard deviation” is… and how that might be affected by extremely low paying jobs in one sector, even if those are not the most prominent paying jobs or abundant positions in that sector.
I think the standard deviation of pay for mechanics is much wider than you think, and possibly skewed by other factors than just simple geography.
I’m not saying that all mechanics make IT wages, but i am saying that I didn’t have to spend 10 years in school and $150k in debt to compete for a position that I earn 6 figures in. My job is not competitive for positions, they’re pretty abundant. Base pay for this position in my area (not a big city) is substantially higher than the national “average.” No formal education required.
But I must ask, why u so mad bro? Sounds like you’re living the dream life, no need to have an aneurism about other people’s money
Basically nobody has 150K in debt form an undergrad degree. They have like 30-40K of debt, which is easy for them to back back over 10 years with when the starting salary is 50-60K and in 10 years they will most likely double that salary.
but keep telling me how everyone should be a mechanic and college is stupid. Please. because anyone who went to college is a dumb loser or something, or i dunno, maybe you are talking about your own poor choices when you were younger? I definitely have met very dumb folks who have 150K in debt from college, who were very mad about it, who also terrible employees and people in general.
A mechanic making over 100K exists, yes, but they are rare, and would be in highly specialized areas and likely late in their careers. There are bicycle mechanics who make over 100K a year, but for every 1 of them, there are about 1000s of them making 30K a year with the top end wage being about 45K after decades of experience. Should I tell folks to go be a bike mechanic because it’s a good career path because like .01% of professional race mechanics make good money? Becuase yeah, they have about a 1/10000 change of that career path, and a 99999/10000 change of working 40 hours a week in some crappy bike shop making 20 bucks an hour for the rest of their life.
Oh my life is the dream life. I get mad other very dumb people tell me that I’m the richest bastard in the world, or that i’m a poor piece of shit. of which there a lot of on lemmy. Instead the boring fact that I’m in the 85th percentile of income and the 90th percentile of asset wealth. I even was a landlord for a few years, which you know, makes me capitalist hyper scum.
But i prefer facts, statistics and reality, to emotional reasoning, which makes folks very mad. but they tend to respond to that stuff wtih ‘u mad bro? lolz i so smart u dumb because anecdote anecdote anecdote’.
I don’t think i said any of that. I think you’re just more upset than you need to be. You are angry typing and making all kinds of mistakes.
I never said college was dumb, I said you don’t need it for my job. I graduated college with under $5k debt. You said college for 10 years, and that would put you at well over an undergrad degree, unless you were taking like 4 credits a term. A masters degree will cost you around $150k and 10 years.
I never said everyone should be a mechanic, but there is nothing wrong with it. It’s not hard to make money unless you stay in a dead end position. That’s the same for almost any career tho.
I also never said you were either rich or poor. I don’t know or care about your financial positions in life. Much like your genitals: unless they’re being used on me, it’s none of my fucken business what you got.
I did make poor choices when I was young, but I am now older and have made much better decisions as I grew, coincidentally enough starting with a bicycle mechanic job. It was super cool and I learned a lot. But you are right, it didn’t pay the bills.
So I found a different mechanic job, one that paid around triple the bike mechanic job. It was somewhere I’d seen advertised for some time, so i checked it out and it made sense. I drove all over my state doing field service work. It was a good job, but i was at the “national average” pay for mechanics at that time. So I found another job, it paid around 50% more and had much better benefits and all the overtime i wanted (it wasn’t mandatory). I worked there a couple years and found another job that paid 25% more, and for the first time in my life, I was earning over $100k, and no overtime necessary.
The thing is, these last several jobs have been constantly hiring entry level mechanics at “national average” or higher since long before i started.
You seem to have a lack of understanding about being a mechanic. I can guarantee you that, as a mechanic. Unless you don’t want to try, the chances of you being stuck in a bike shop at $20/hr for the rest of your life is much lower than “99999/10000” (999.99%🤣) in fact, it doesn’t even approach 100/10000 (you know, 1%).
Anyway, don’t be so mad, and don’t take everything so personal. I’m not trying to make fun of you or hurt your feelings.
HAAANK DONT ABBREVIATE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE HAAANK
Trade work is admirable work. Never downplay fields that allow overtime. My best salary years are in an industry that allows unlimited OT.
I must be a psycho for thinking people should be paid more rather than work themselves to death.
It’s a cold world to live in when people think like this.
It can be both, can’t it?
People should be paid a living wage. If you do more work than is the defined norm you should be paid increasingly more sums of money.
The intent of overtime laws was to encourage companies to hire someone else instead of making someone work 80 hours a week.
A business saying that they’ll pay you more if you work more at your discretion doesn’t bother me. Even with a perfectly good wage and benefits you’re going to have cases where people want a touch more more money. I had a coworker who did contracting jobs to pay for a new deck. He didn’t have to, but it kept his budget from getting weird.
I’d rather have the ability to pickup an extra shift when times are tough. I have my friends that are on a strict 40 hour week and when the check doesn’t cut it they are fucked. OT has allowed me a lot of luxuries I otherwise would have had to scrimp and save for.
Meanwhile most people are fucked if their car breaks down. I just pick up an extra shift and the problem goes away.
Thats exactly the point, if you are on a 40h week and that doesnt cut it, something is very wrong. If you say to work extra as a bonus, well maybe. But if you need it to make ends meet it’s completely fucked imo.
I’d rather times not be tough, but it seems that’s no longer allowed.
I worked 3300 hours a few years back. I was not prepared for what the overtime would do to my taxes. Still brought home more than I ever had before (or since). Also was not prepared what the overtime would do to my personal life or my mind.
Yup two years ago I worked just over 3500 hours. I basically lived at work to help put my wife through college and hold down the fort.
It was very difficult but worth it.
shop rate around me $180/hr now. the mechanics better be making at least a quarter of that. my company only charges half that rate for custom machine building
Mechanic pay is ass these days. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless it’s like specialized and unionized.
How much do you think mechanics get paid today?
They make a good living, but they are paid flat rate, and there is no guarantee that there will be steady income. If there’s a lul, the mechanic might make $0 in a given week. Also, if for some reason a job takes longer than the billable hours for that job, they are essentially working for free. Of the trades, it’s the shittiest one to make good money in imo.
so many bozos on the internet they know what these fields are like, and it shows they know nothing.
folks who post how wonderful it is have survivorship bias. your average mechanic/plumber/electrician isn’t making bank, they are making average to below average wage. and the income is not steady, it’s sporadic. you might make 100k one year and 60 the next, or spend 2 years with minimal income because construction market or similar is slowing down.