- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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This thread has a lot of people saying things like “don’t get a degree” or “get a trade cert” or “work in a different field to get experience” which I feel completely side-steps many issues and the realities that many people face. It’s just a fundamentally broken system. The value of degrees fluctuates so much because of a political climate that has the stability of a pane of glass being violently thrown off of a building and a job market that prioritizes either posting ghost jobs to overwork employees to death or outsourcing its candidate search to whoever can guess the most buzzwords in an application.
Honestly, if you’re in this situation, and you have any interest at all in education, or just think it wouldn’t drive you mad, look into substitute teaching. In my area the only requirement to be a substitute is to have any bachelor’s degree and to be able to pass a very rigorous background check. (Think fingerprinting.) I’m currently exploring a mid-career transition to K12 teaching, and I’m planning on doing a bunch of substitute teaching in the coming school year. Substitutes make about $260/day in my district. Not amazing money, but it still comes to a solid $30/hr or so. And there’s enough demand at least where I’m at that they often have postings go unfilled.
And hell, just getting out of the house and regularly interacting with people will do wonders for your mental health. I wouldn’t recommend substitute teaching as a permanent career. But for someone in transition or trying to get started, it’s a great option. It’s a very useful way of getting past the trap of “I need experience to get the job, but I need the job to get experience.” At least in my area, if you’ve got a bachelor’s and a clean criminal record, you can become a substitute.
$260 a day is quite decent
In my area, the average monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment is $1500/month, or $18,000 per year. If you maxed out substitute teaching, teaching every day you could? That would bring in about $45k/year. And the job comes with no health insurance, retirement, or other benefits. On days you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Full time teaching positions do have benefits and pay better, but those require more extensive licensing.
You could earn a subsistence living substituting where I’m located, especially if you got roommates. But it’s not a long-term viable career if you want to have any hope of home ownership, retirement, etc. A great option for those in transition, but not a career.
I was going to say lol, that’s double the average wage in my city
It’s a maximum $45k/year job that offers no health insurance, retirement, or paid leave. Sure it’s $260 per day, but that is only for the school days that you work. Considering the number of days in the school year, and the reality that you won’t be able to find a position every day? If you max it out and sub as much as you can, you’re talking about $45k/year with zero benefits.
Not a bad gig if you’re on your parent’s or spouse’s health insurance. But if you try and work that your whole career, you can forget about ever being a home owner or retiring. Starter homes here go for $400k.
Great option for those in transition. But there’s a reason I call it decent, but hardly amazing.
Still not awful for my area, with a median income of 47k. But to be fair my area is poor as shit.
And I imagine that subs in your area probably get paid proportionally less. Though maybe not.
Looking into it, substitute teachers in my area make from 40-50k on average, so really not far off. Considering many jobs in my area already don’t provide health insurance, it’s really not the worst option for people specifically in my area. I’m sure this is by far the exception of course, just thought it was interesting.
Although TBF it probably isn’t an every day kind of thing.
Anon was 23 in 2022.
Rest assured, it’s much worse now.
DO NOT BECOME A MECHANIC
Why not?
Maybe don’t specialize in internal combustion engines, but… EVs still need repairs even if their predicted lifespan is significantly shorter. Won’t need head gasket replacements, but brakes are still brakes, struts are still struts. I suspect if you specialize in high voltage systems, you’ll still have a good career ahead of you as a mechanic.
We have come to the point where me must accept that it is normal for people to spend their early 20s smoking weed and masturbating
was it ever not normal for people from middle class and upper middle class families to do that?
The social contract has been destroyed. Time to get the pitchforks!
If mechanically inclined, consider FAA Airframe and Powerplant mechanic. You’ll never want for work the wages are great and there’s contracting opportunities all over the world. Really the worst best part is that the defense and “war” sector of aircraft work does pay the best.
Idk if mechanic is a great job with EVs and all the internal tech cars have, but hvac, plumbing, welding, etc will always be in need.
EVs actually tend to use fewer ECU modules than IC vehicles - even Hybrids are driving a trend towards mechanical and electrical simplicity.
The IC manufacturers are fighting repairability tooth and nail, but the only ones who can afford their new shit are the last people who would embrace being locked-in to dealer repairs.
All that, and the dealerships/service-centers will always require mechanics, as the manufacturers themselves will always prefer to be able to fix and re-sell used cars.
What’s wrong with being a mechanic?
Probably just that he’s already spent 4 years getting a bachelor’s degree and only now finds out it’s insufficient to land a job and now he has to do more school and cross his fingers that improves his job-seeking situation. (It should, but so should a bachelor’s degree.)
Honestly, “what’s wrong with a master’s degree” is almost as good a question, except that it would likely require going into more debt than trade school would.
Mechanics also have the cost problem. A good mechanic will have to put an amount of money into tools that is comparable to the cost of a university degree. A career mechanic will spend tens of thousands on their tools.
They accumulate over time as you work on different cars (and thus earn money) though, university degree is an upfront cost.
Yes if you want to start a VW dealer, you need like 100k USD worth of VW special tools alone in the US if I remember correctly from some Eric The Car Guy video from 10-15 years ago. If you want to just start an honest shop for honest people, you can probably get started for under 10k in tools and equipment, particularly if you have tools at home from fixing your own cars.
Or you can get a job as a mechanic and your employer should be paying for the tools you use.
and then he gets those degrees and finds out those degrees don’t get him jobs either.
It is more than likely a relatively shitty hard job.
Most shops have a shop time per hour, which lets say it’s 60, you would probably make like 20 an hour. But your hours are not time worked, they are what the body that sets the job time. So say you have to replace a water pump, and the job time is 10 hours. If you can do it faster you still make ten hours, but if it’s slower you still only make 10 hours.
There are pros and cons to every job of course, but generally speaking they get paid by the job, which can be profitable: if you’re quick, know what you need to do, and have what you need to do it. OR the exact opposite, figuring out what is wrong, doing a job, and you have to redo it because the parts that you got from the manufacturer are faulty, you still only get paid for one job. Or if that aforementioned water pump actually takes you 20 hours, it would hurt your bottom line.
My highschool autoshop teacher worked at a dealership with the only real exception I’ve heard about automotive, which is electrical. His shop time and pay was 100 an hour, but he hated that job.
That’s dealer mechanics, dealer mechanics don’t fix cars, they replace parts, often whole systems at once*, and the manufacturer tells them how long it must take to replace a part and for some marques even which part must be at fault for whatever symptoms. Seriously, factory repair manuals are INFURIATING to read sometimes as a shade-tree mechanic working on my own cars.
Independent dealers and outright third party shops that don’t specialize in any particular marque, will often charge you by the actual time taken, and the mechanic will get paid for time spent working. They’ll also be better at diagnosing the actual issue because they play by their own experience not a set of rules and might help you save money by replacing only what needs to be replaced.
* Good luck getting your auto transmission transmission solenoids replaced at the dealer. What do you mean 500€ for a set of solenoids? No, if it shifts wrong, the transmission is broken, it’s 21915€! And you’ll be paying twice as much per hour compared to the actual automatic transmission specialists who will replace the parts that need replacing and might not even drop the transmission. Also what do you mean transmission fluid change? It’s lifetime fluid, it’ll never go bad!
(variations of this transmission are used in like 20 different marques, GM’s 8 speed is also a variation of it, etc, I just used Audi because I could easily check their dealer pricing on a random model’s part code for the ZF 8HP and yes, a set of solenoids does cost under a grand even for such a modern transmission, with genuine ZF parts. I don’t know what the car manufacturers try to tell people on the 8HP, but for the 6HP most marques said the fluid is lifetime. ZF says it’s 5 years or 80 000 km between fluid + filter changes for 6HP. I wonder who knows these transmissions better)
Oh and for the price check to get a transmission part code, I used a model that’s depreciated enough that they now cost about 10k.
I feel so sad for the younger people. At least companies seem to be hiring again, people are getting cold calls. I told my son not to go to college, he’ll just become a debt slave.
My advice would be to find any entry level position at a company that does tuition reimbursement. Call centers often do this so they can hire from within to avoid paying market rates.
I got my career start as a customer service rep and ended up a senior IT engineer, and got my IT degree in the process, of which they covered 2/3. That’s why I didn’t mind being paid 50% market average.
My second piece of advice is to get your basics at a community college. Substantially lower costs, smaller class sizes, and the exact same classes as a university. Just make sure the desired university accepts the credits, but there’s often agreements between universities and near by CCs. If you get your associates, some universities have scholarships for that.
Although if you’re interested in IT, certs are a better use of money. A degree shows knowledge of theory, but many certs show technical knowledge.
I graduated into Bush’s recession, so I went to get a PhD in education. They pay you a small wage to do research, guaranteed for 5 years in my program. Graduated that into a healthy economy that… old professors weren’t willing to retire from. Finally give up after several second place rejections and take a simple adjunct professor job just in time for the pandemic, cutting my classes to a third.
But hey, at least I didn’t get that job at NCES; Trump 2.0 royally fucked all those education PhD federal jobs.
the problem with folks and their degrees is they fall into sunk cost fallacy. you have to get a job in your field or you have wasted your entire education. oh and if you can’t do that, you have to get another degree in another field to get another job that field.
no, you don’t. what you need to do is learn to market your skills to appeal to a broad range of employers, many of whom are looking for skills more than degrees. you may also have to be willing to move, or take on other compromises to find work.
but many folks can’t do that because of a sense of pride, arrogance, or stubbornness. they’d rather work shitty low wage jobs ‘in their field’ and be forever fucked, than like, try something different. and they view those of us who chose that path as ‘traitors’ or something. it’s totally absurd and is entire a problem of not being willing to give up ‘the dream’ and all the emotional expectation tied to it.
i’m glad i quit my PhD and tried something different with my life. higher education has distorted itself into a bureaucratic ponzi scheme run by petty people.
i won’t even get into the stupidity of ‘useful’ vs ‘useless’ degree nonsense that so many mostly use as a way to punch other people who had different courses of study than they did, despite the fact generally higher education kind of teaches most students the same skillsets, but then again, the students are go out of their way to avoid learning those skills and part of how they justify that is by claiming such skills are worthless,
such a stupidly vicious circle of stupidity and laziness. that influences and idiots also exploit by defaming higher education as a whole based on loud cohort of people who choose to be helpless and blame their uni for not getting them a job they thought they deserved.
That’s a fairly broad take that didn’t really apply to me. I wanted to impact education policy in the US because I noticed how decrepit it was. I was denied that opportunity but managed to get some top tier data analytic skills through the process that I could capitalize on if I was willing to work in the private sector (such as health insurance or financial industry predictive models). There is still massive demand for those skills.
But I don’t do that, not because of sunk cost but because I don’t want to contribute to systems I find immoral. I took a job in a Psychology department, which isn’t my field, since it lets me teach while taking care of my children.
You are right, though, the research field has some serious issues that need to be resolved. There has been some push for open source materials that people can contribute to, but given the current state of affairs globally, it’s not something people can really deal with right now.
That said, a PhD in any research profession is a passion project. You don’t do it for money, but for intellectual curiosity or some other reason. Towards that end, they should be stubborn – they’re already rejecting the idea that education is a means towards profit.
Unfortunately, that also means most PhDs are already wealthy going into it (especially those who can actually afford to finish) which means, at least in education and politics, those perspectives dominate the field. It’s a real problem when they don’t understand how 99% of the rest of us live.
Out of curiosity, which field did you need to leave? Each has their own problems.
I ducked into grad school thinking it’d help.
Then it was a single skill I picked up on my undergraduate that landed me a job. From there I just pick up experience where I can and take on responsibilities of higher jobs and then apply to those jobs elsewhere.
It took me 2 years to start making more than 80% of my graduate professors and 7 to make more than all of them.
This sounds like one of those things where for 299.99 you too can discover this one skill. Then you sell a 2 week bootcamp where you teach people that skill and it turns out the skill is just applying to lots of jobs.
This is me but I’m in my 40s with over 25 years experience in my field. My ex left me hi and dry when she left me and I can’t find a job despite my applying anywhere and everywhere that might pay more than minimum wage. I’ve still got my own place, but the shame I feel having to ask my parents for money is unbearable at times.
I’m currently trying to start my own business, but I still need money to pay bills in the interim. Capitalism is a fucking cancer on society.
Yet folks on my Lemmy post said its the best time ever to start a business and everyone can do it. I do not understand how. Even though I have hard work ethic and a ton of ideas. I do not get how it works.
If you really want to know how I can help with some of it. I started a business last year. I am a skilled laborer by training but my business isn’t in the same field. The main steps are:
- Go to your Secretary of State website
- Start your LLC (maybe something else but LLC covers most things for most people)
- Get your ein from the IRS website
- Use whatever monies you (proprietor) have to buy equipment, advertising, whatever. Save your receipts.
- When you file your (personal) taxes deduct everything you spent money on that is common and appropriate for your business.
- Get all the money you spent back. Now you have the things you bought plus they money you spent on it.
- Try to profit the second year and hopefully not have to use your (personal) money anymore.
- Once you get to the point your revenues exceed your costs try not to embezzle from yourself (LLC.) the tax code favors businesses to the point that stealing isn’t really necessary.
That’s a general idea of how it goes. It cost me $75 I think and took a week for the SoS to approve my filing. I did all of the paperwork on my phone and it took less than an hour total. How to make money from a business is another topic but if you got a good idea or marketable skill don’t let the official/legal part put you off.
You can always start a business. It only takes a little bit of money to setup an LLC or something.
Whether or not that business makes money… Probably best not to talk about that.
it is easy.
just have wealthy family willing to give you start up capital, and who will give you money when you crash and burn your business.
anything is easy when you use other people’s money to do it. including living life. hence why streaming and influencing is such an appealing lifestyle for so many folks.
Have to say, this is an extremely self-defeating attitude.
Yes, you’ll have trouble if you want to start a business that requires millions in startup capital or highly specific skills or hard-to-obtain licenses. But immigrants come to this country, often not even knowing the language, and they manage to start up businesses without any family help or advantages.
The key is they focus on businesses with minimal startup costs, or ones where you can start small and reinvest the profits into growing the business. You don’t try to open a car factory. You start mowing your neighbor’s lawns, possibly even using their mower. Use the money from that that to buy more equipment. Iterate. Pretty soon you’re operating a whole lawn care business.
You can search for lists of business types that require little start up capital or licensing. Research those, find something that appeals to you, and give it a go. If it fails, try something else. If everything fails despite your best efforts, at least you can sleep at night knowing you tried your best.
yup, that’s my murican right there. and now get your pitchfork and throw over your billionaire government!!!
