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I’m a classically trained auto mechanic. My pay tops out at $38/hr. In the 80’s we made 50% of the door rate. Today that would be $110/hr. I make roughly a third of what my profession used to.
I suppose it could mean that! As in, trained under a master tech. Well done. And I was. My school training was part in class/lab and part apprenticeship under a master tech. He hated what they taught in school. I’d show up at noon and he’d say “alright, what do we have to unlearn today?”
That would be exactly true. Never underestimate the value of a tech degree from a community college. You’d be making the same mistake that was made by everyone else that overestimated the value of a 4 year degree in theology for the last thirty years.
Odd. I’m not looking for the name of his employer. Just like “ Midwest north, farm territory, working on big rigs.” Or “oil sands, gmc duramax and trailers”
Roughly 40% of Americans have a BA or above, but only 15% of Americans make 100k or more—and that’s trending *down* (from 18% in 2020), even as 100k means less and less…
It’s definitely lower than 40%, but not by much. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2022, 34.2% of adults over 25 who were born in the US had a Bachelor’s Degree or higher, and 29.4% of adults over 25 who live in the US but were born outside the US had a Bachelor’s degree.
Had to do some digging to find a number that accounts for people under 25, but if you look at the population as a whole, only 31.3% of US citizens have a college degree of any kind, including Associate’s degrees. For some reason the Census Bureau seems to only include people over 25 as adults.
Why would you want to look at people under 25 at all? A quick Google search puts the average age to get a bachelor's somewhere between 22-24. Seems like including the age range where people are still working towards a degree world deflate that statistic a lot.
Because the person I replied to suggested the 40% may include students, and plenty of grad students are under 25. They’d still have a Bachelor’s degree, but wouldn’t be included in the over 25 demographic.
I feel like that number is probably pretty accurate. Not all bachelors degree holders are the same. I’ve met bartenders, Uber drivers, barbers, etc with degrees. Even low level office jobs that didn’t require a bachelor’s a few years ago now do. I live in a rural city in the Midwest and the stats show that even way out here about 36% of people here have a bachelor’s degree
One of my employees has a master's degree but insists on working for me as a food runner and at jewel as a stocker. I keep telling him to find something in or close to his field, or at least an office job that just requires any degree, but he just doesn't try for em.
Been looking at jobs a lot the past couple months. So many of them want a Bachelors Degree any more.
Really makes me wish I could’ve actually finished school back in the day.
Never too late to go back. I dropped out in second year when I first went. I re-enrolled 13 years later taking one or two courses a semester while working full time and eventually got that BA.
I went to school at 21. Dropped out after a couple years. Went back at 30 and finished at 35. Currently 45 and in the best situation of my life.
Going back is definitely something to look into
America is pretty well educated. The issue is that most of that 40% got degrees they can never do anything with. They are educated, just don’t make really good decisions in life.
Degrees aren't vocational programs. They're supposed to prove you can learn to do whatever the job is. Before the great recession any degree from my school would set you up well immediately. I make over 100K due to my creative writing degree.
That's what they're currently being misused as but it's absolutely not what they're meant to be. They are supposed to teach you the critical thinking skills, academic methods and background knowledge that you need to work in academics or related industry fields.
But the eternal rat race and economic incentives for companies to not invest money into training employees that may switch to competition two years later have pushed the task of pre-selecting talent onto educational institutions and the prospective employees themselves.
Education isn't about job placement. It's about education. It's not your place to declare whether or not a degree is valuable based upon its job earning material.
As someone with multiple degrees I don’t even know what educated means anymore. I don’t feel like I learned anything. I have “real” degrees, mind. But you don’t have to learn much to pass and I feel stupider every day. Education does not necessarily mean you’ve learned anything. Just speaking for myself here.
These days, undergrad degrees like gender studies are often stepping stones to more lucrative degrees (law, business, etc.). There are gender studies grads making ridiculous amounts of money out there, but it's not a terminal degree.
I know a lot of people who did psychology or political science, literature or art and aren’t doing anything with it. For me even with a finance major I worked a job in finance had no idea how to do anything when I first started.
That's actually by design. Historically, the purpose of a college education was to provide you with a well-rounded set of skills, and then employers would be responsible for training you up. It didn't used to matter as much as your degree was in, though having a degree tailored to the company's interests gave you a leg up in the job search.
But things have changed since then. Employers increasingly expect job applicants to have all the skills a position requires, which essentially transfers all financial burden of acquiring those skills onto the applicants. It also disadvantages people for not having the "right" degree, even if they'd be perfectly capable of doing the job with a modest amount of training.
Yes it makes sense, from a employer perspective, but almost every entry level job requires 3-5 years of experience, which is difficult for graduates. But I think colleges need to do better at preparing people for work. My excel skills were not that great when I started and now I’m an expert from just online courses.
People used to be able to get a job in whatever regardless of their degree, within reason of course. You still wouldn’t have ended up a doctor without an MD, but you weren’t completely pigeonholed into specific tasks and even software like you are now. Somehow businesses and our culture both decided that’s not appropriate and now you’re shit out of luck without a masters and 5 years’ experience. Seems to me like toxic expectations based on increasingly unrealistic perfectionism infiltrating every facet of our lives but eh
I have an English/history degree and it has gotten me into the doors of every industry. It legit doesn’t matter. I’ve done everything from food service to biotech. It’s the super specific degrees like fashion, sports management, that have a harder time. However, I don’t want to work a white collar office style job so I don’t go for them. I started working with animals like 4 years ago and haven’t left it. Good money, active both physically and mentally, and fulfilling for me.
Employers just need to know that:
1. You're someone who is committed to something.
2. You have invested your time and energy into learning something specialized.
3. You show up every day to contribute to the greater good of your team.
4. You have the skills to demonstrate Continuous Improvement.
I'll hire you right now with those qualities. The degree teaches you these things but smart people can also demonstrate the qualities. It's about assessing future potential.
You gotta realize most people don’t work in the subject they have a degree in. Plenty of corporate, white collar gigs require degrees as a barrier for entry, but don’t particularly care what flavor you have.
You hit the nail on the head....That's the scary part $100k (2024 dollars) is about $75k in 2016 dollars. So you really need to be making closer to $150k-$200k to afford a comfortable lifestyle you could just 10 years back... Wealth inequality and consolidation of wealth is good. To turn America into a land of only.rich and poor
Adjusted for inflation, a person with a degree in the seventies could expect to make *$90k* at an entry-level job. A degree used to mean you'd be incredibly prosperous. Nowadays, a degree will make you enough to just barely support a family if you're *lucky*
That 18% going down is also a function of baby boomers retiring who most likely make over that amount and then leaving the market faster than jobs being replaced
A lot of people here are mentioning bloated, irrelevant, or outsourced jobs.
But even for jobs that are still very relevant the pay has stagnated. I work in a very busy, and imperative role in investment banking and even there pay has flatlined over the last few decades. I was discussing my bonus in private with one of my mentors. 40 years ago he received a bigger bonus than I did last year. Not adjusted for inflation, literally just higher.
My friends in law and engineering are seeing the same thing. The pay In 2024 is not so different from what it was in 2004.
This is the result of a corporate workforce that has received 1-2% raises year over year when inflation and COL overall has vastly outpaced.
I've noticed this too. I work in an engineering field that is absolutely essential and is impossible to outsource. Even in my field, people are making less than they did 30 years ago. This used to be an absolute home run of a job where you were set for life once you managed to break in. Now it's just another job where job hopping is the only way to get raises.
My wife does design at an architectures firm and the pay for Architects is horrible for what I would consider a professional degree.
The thing that drives me crazy is I know people like to complain about certain liberal arts degrees being useless blah blah blah but even professional degrees are severely underpaid. Most have loans as well because of the extra years added to become an architect. It's crazy how everything has fallen off. The folks often work 60+ hour weeks since that's the culture.
True. I got a BA and then later a PhD in chemistry, not an irrelevant job at all. Ten years ago when I was first choosing chem a BA would earn you 55-60k starting. Ten years later a BA will earn a chemist 55-60k starting. Adjusted for inflation that's 45k.
>Work really hard for years, get promoted, get to $35/hr.
Not really anymore. You can only get wage increases by job hopping. And now you you'll never accrue vacation because it doesn't make sense to be loyal to a job that doesn't give raises.
That's not entirely true. You can work for a place with an EBA and fight for yearly wage increases.
Long service leave here in Australia also incentivises staying with a company or industry. Ten years at my place can give you a 13 week block you can take off or have paid out
They're talking about blue collar jobs, your pay goes down a lot of times when job hopping since now you'll have to prove yourself all over again at a new company. Unless you get a degree
>They're talking about blue collar jobs,
So am i. Welder in aero. I'm usually in the top of my department in whichever company I join but companies have been giving something like 2% raises but paying new hires more to match inflation. The only time they ever are willing to negotiate is when I got one foot out the door. By then, for me anyway, it's too late and I'm taking the better money at the next company regardless of location. They're preying off the fact that most people don't want to move and disrupt their families. A weld test is the only "proof" that I need to get established in this line of work. I'm always up front with what I get paid two other employees and I almost always start at a higher rate than people who have been working there for years.
Currently working at a job that doesn't give raises. The way they characterized it was
"Raises need to be fair and equitable among all employees"
Basically saying, you only get a raise if everyone does, and that's not happening.
Yeh IDK what job everybody on reddit has where they make MORE by job hopping. The only way I've ever seen this work in blue collar jobs is if you go from a worker at one company to a supervisor at another.
Skilled labor has been stuck at yhe same pay scale for decades now. The only way to get more is to stay somewhere long enough to get raises and promotions. Job hopping just resets you back to zero in my field. Unless you are quitting within the first year or something, in which case you will quickly run out of jobs to hop to.
Blue collar jobs around my area are $17-$18 an hr starting. You'd be better off working at McDonald's at $16.50/hr and saving gas money than having to travel half hr to two hrs to work sites and making an extra $1.50 an hr.
Exactly what type of blue collar job are you talking about where it’s like that? My brother’s a plumber, step brother is a union electrician and I’ve been a CNC Machinist for 18 years. There’s plenty of work on a higher pay scale if you have the right skills/experience. If you’re forced to take that kind of a pay cut you either don’t know how to negotiate your wages or are living in an area that’s a job desert.
I work in health care.
Something is about to give.
At our doc level, no raises or anything has been given.
Fees for services have gone up, entry level wages go up, everyone above us have gone up, but our wages have been stagnant.
I make good money yes, but my relative value has dropped a lot.
I have people under me that make very very comparable hour by hour money and way less stress or work
I’m a sleep technologist at a hospital and I make the same as an RN even though it’s a much less involved job.
I also have a degree in neuroscience. I left academia because the pay was shit. I know several post docs in research who make less than I do.
The job market is very strange right now.
I think it's a combination of over-saturation of workers and increases in technology that are disproportionately effecting white collar jobs.
E.G. with the sharp rise in remote work companies have an easier time hiring overseas for jobs that just a few years ago were almost impossible to do without being on site.
That and it was only recently we started shipping every kid possible to college. Over saturation is going to be a huge problem. On the flip side you can now easily make $100k a year doing the right blue collar work.
I used to heavily advocate for blue collar work, but as I’m aging I realize how longevity and quality of a life is a real issue. Blue collar work can be a great path for many, but be wary to pick something that won’t leave your body absolutely destroyed after 15-20 years.
This is why financial intelligence is key. Lots of blue collar workers start relatively young and don't know how to properly handle the influx on cash. Nowadays they don't just spend it, they build up debt and accrue property on loans.
If you're making 100k+ a year doing blue collar work you've gotta be smart about it. Save, budget, invest, and plan on an *early* retirement.
I stopped doing manual labor that doesn't provide me with any sense of a retirement by 60. Idgaf what the feds say - blue collar workers need to be out of the game by like, 55.
I see this a lot. Trade workers who’ve blown out their back usually in their early 50’s who have basically nothing saved for retirement, applying for disability, not necessarily eligible and now asking how they’re supposed to afford to live. It’s a shame. Lots of workplace injuries too. I tell my boys not to go into labour for these reasons.
I see a lot of this in my job. You’re trading your body (usually your back) down the line for money here and now. Then you apply for disability at 50-60 with little to no retirement saved.
Remember there are restaurant servers making 2000 a week, and entry office workers making 13/hr. Its not so much about the pay anymore, rather the opportunity to work where you want
Yup. My wife used to be a four star hotel front desk manager, degree in hospitality management. $23/hr cap
She now makes $200/day on a very slow lunch shift working 3-6 hrs at a mid upscale restaurant. $400+ during nights.
Why tf would she go back to 40+hrs/wk for almost half the pay?
Just because someone isn’t in the field they went to school for doesn’t mean the degree isn’t being used. I’ve worked outside my degree since graduating and it has gotten me every job offer AND a higher pay rate upon hiring. So it’s being utilized. So many of my peers think I did nothing with my degree cause I work in animal care and not English/history, because I’m not going around announcing every little thing in my career it’s helped with lol
THIS. A lot of ppl equate major choice to specific vocational training and that’s not the case. The knowledge you gain in xyz major gives you a set of knowledge that you then take and apply to different problems etc that life presents you. It colors the lens of whatever field you end up in.
Also important— the attainment of knowledge for the sake of it is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself and idk how that gets lost in this convo. I think it’s about money and the value proposition of that degree, but that again goes back to the notion of which major/set of knowledge is determined to be valuable in the vocational sense. People seem to lose sight of the fact that we are people/humans whose lives have purpose outside of the confines of The Machine to which we are cogs. /
/rant
It was never my plan to work in the field that I studied but I wouldn’t have got my first office job without a degree. It’s mostly older people who accuse me of having wasted 3 years of my life studying but what they don’t understand is that things are different now and “entry level” means you have a bachelors degree at the very least. Maybe back in their day they could walk straight out of high school into some office clerk type position but that just isn’t the case today.
It's funny you say that because a ton of tech jobs have tried moving to India or Mexico and are having problems with being able to put out work as efficiently
That’s because they’re only writing stories on the ones that failed. Look at the trends.
US Tech jobs are still 25% below pre-pandemic levels and lay-off’s are continuing 4 years out. Most of those have either been outsourced, automated or redundant.
I can only speak to IT/ERP consulting, but you’re definitely not giving the customer the same experience if you just offload a bunch of your workforce to remote workers in India (which many firms are doing). The bottom line probably looks better, I don’t disagree, but I do wonder how sustainable it is.
Don’t get me wrong, the Indian consultants are very smart people and they have good technical chops, but there are tremendous barriers in terms of language/accent, culture/norms/expectations, and especially business acumen…the Indian folks I deal with typically just don’t have a good understanding of the weird nuances of corporate America and how our companies operate.
There is a big gap between the average offshore Indian consultant and an American/European consultant that was hired out of industry. I assume there is a similar story for other fields. The geographic and cultural gap is real.
I want to know where you're outsourcing, our company's been trying to outsource every since PE moved in, and they were able to ax jobs where the whole role was mapped out in a wiki easy enough, but for the teams where documentation just can't cover enough ground or a high degree of autonomy was needed, the outsourced staff assigned were worse than useless. The teams that got hit with layoffs and then dismissed their offshores are by far the worst off these days because the company is trying to force a "no more domestic, hire more offshores" strategy and it just doesn't work nearly as well as they expected.
And I mean hell, I'm leaving this field for accounting(done with tech's instability) and even there, everyone I've talked to already in industry has been playing the same tune, "babysit the offshores, try to get as much work done as possible with the added burden".
"Babysitting" is the perfect description, IME. Generally speaking, you have to be overly specific about what you want and how it needs to be done, to the point where it's almost easier to do it yourself.
I'd just love to meet the masterminds that determined saving \~300K in our department through layoffs was going to be worth it when if we lose one, *one* of our big contracts, we stand to lose at *minimum* 500k. First week on the job the offshores interrupted access for 6 of those contracts, and after dismissing them we're now slowly but surely losing to our backlog so I can all but guarantee within the next year one of our clients is going to pull the contract and our SBU is going to have a worse bottom line than when they started, not that they'll ever realize it was their fault, they'll just use it to further justify gutting our department or divest the whole damn unit.
I have not once seen an outsourced tech group retain quality moving to India. It's always worse. It meets some level of competence, but always worse. If you want Indian guys with the exact same competence as the Americans they are in America already making US salaries.
You get what you pay for.
Crazy how on the one hand you have people posting about how they only have two hours of actual work a day and just fuck around for the rest their shift, but then you also have people complaining that they’re not getting paid enough for doing almost nothing
Because it’s genuinely not true. MANY businesses have found that outsourcing tech to those regions is as bad or worse than outsourcing manufacturing to low quality regions like China. Save on the (fabricated) quoted cost; then spend more than you did before having to fix the mistakes of an inept offshore team. It’s a weird part of the modern business cycle.
My only question is, at what drop in quality? I'm not knocking these people but there appears to be a real narrative that overseas workers do not have the quality that American or their western counterparts do.
They said the same thing about garment workers in the 1980s. That a single mom working a sewing machine in Scranton for $3.35/hr produces a finer quality product than a single mom working a sewing machine in Honduras for 27c/hr.
If your white collar job requires interacting with clients in any way, of course an American worker will be better. That's obvious to anyone who has ever called a customer service number in the last 10 years. But if it is just shuffling paperwork around and doing excel spreadsheets or writing reports or whatever it is people in cubicles do, those jobs can be done just as well in Manila or Bangalore.
I feel like the only actual drop in quality will be caused by th3 language and cultural barrier, as demonstrated by Indian call centers. Its hard to outsource something properly if the service requires near native level English.
Thats an interesting thought. Can you provide a few examples? Outside of blue collar becoming management for their previous roles, i cant think of any examples
Almost any white collar job that deals in movement of data. Another commenter said Grey Collar work. This term was coined for jobs that appeared to be white collar but were just data assembly lines. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became the new Henry Fords…so to speak.
If your job is part of a giant purchasing process, like a T&C review and approval, you likely have a grey collar job.
Edit: changed a word
I’ve seen grey collar defined as jobs that are skilled hands on work but not labor intensive.
Most of the people who work in offices are not white collar anymore. The white collars are the ones being paid for applied knowledge.
Filling out forms and having meetings about which forms need filled out is not white collar
lol this is just cope from people who dont want to acknowledge that sitting at a desk all day is in fact white collar.
*you are aware that these labels are based on physical vs non-physical work right*? just because data entry pays low *does not* make it 'blue collar'.
by the same token being in a high paying trade in no way makes you 'white collar', its based on physicality not pay rate.
I wonder where service industry jobs fall. I work in retail as a cashier jockey. It's fundamentally different from a trade like plumbing or auto mechanics or coal digging, but it sure as shit ain't white collar. I've always considered it modern blue collar work.
iv seen quite a few supply chain positions, like planner/buyer/ supply chain analyst, become more available. Having lower requirements akin to production assembly or operators.
Even some more managerial ones here an there.
I think the best way to phrase it, is the decimation of the middle class. It’s a trend that western countries are working hard at for about 40 years. For about 100 years (until the 1980s) the middle class had been the engine for economic prosperity. The development of urban centers, extended commerce, etc. At some point the leadership (all parties) were duped into changing direction and taking different ways. The results are evident these days.
And it's a dangerous thing too, I think. There's this idea of [elite overproduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction), where you have more elite members in society than can fit into a society's power structure; this includes educated, middle class professionals.
People who know how society works, how the elite class operates, and where the levers of power are can also inflict tremendous amounts of damage if they wanted. Intra-elite conflict usually precedes large-scale popular conflict.
Unless your definition of middle class extends up to around the 90th percentile, people who were making 100k in the recent past were not middle class. I'd argue they aren't middle class today either to be honest, even with inflation. They're in the top income quintile.
>A lot of professionals with at least several years of experience don’t make more than $100k per year these days.
They never did. Even before all of the pandemic related inflation, $100k was not a common salary. Only something like 15-20% of full time workers make that.
I think a lot of discussions on reddit give people the mistaken impression that $100k isn't that much. It absolutely still is a lot.
Right, nobody in my family has ever seen $100k and I’ll probably be the first, it’d be life changing and I could certainly be comfortable. I feel like a lot of people on Reddit are out of touch and have developed expensive lifestyles and think everyone else has the same pay and lifestyle.
White collar jobs have been bloated AF these last decade. The bubble is popping due to oversaturation of workers, outsourcing, and ai. Tbf, most of my white collar friends tell me that they're just trying to look busy most of the time.
I wish this was me. Anymore I'm slaving away, barely able to keep up with my workload despite churning out projects every two months (while having 4 on my plate at any point that I'm juggling) that would've taken 10 guys a year to draft plans for a few decades ago.
Meanwhile my wages are worse than what they were getting paid back then after adjusting for inflation despite doing the same work at 50-60x the pace they were.
There are opinions and there are facts. While I understand the sentiment, math doesn’t agree with you. Low wage workers continue to see less wage growth than higher earners.
>Low wage workers continue to see less wage growth than higher earners.
The lowest wage workers have seen the highest growth currently. It's 12% at the bottom ranks, adjusted for inflation mind.
Its cause a huge portion of white collar jobs and positions dont actually produce anything or do much. Less and less companies can afford to pay people to produce nothing.
It’s all jobs what are you smoking? Blue collar, white collar, grey collar, working class, etc. Plenty of people are underpaid compared to inflation and the cost of living.
Because a lot of white collar work is no longer "skilled" labor.
It's customer service jobs that require you to wear a collared shirt.
We're a sales/service economy so a lot of jobs are retail jobs where the customer wants to believe they're being served or sold to by "professionals."
It's a lie agreed upon to make the number go bigger.
The last comment you made I think sums this up. For generations kids were told to do well in school or “you’ll be a garbage man”. Our society treated blue collar careers as those reserved for people with low IQs or a criminal record. Couple that with many people in their 30’s and 40’s growing up during the massive technological boom/internet boom that created millionaires in wild numbers.
Fast forward to today and there’s a market of people overwhelmingly chasing riches in the tech sector/white collar jobs, while those companies shifted from innovation to maintaining growth and pleasing shareholders. With a high number of candidates, you can reduce wages because if one candidate says no, there’s a line of others waiting to say yes. Meanwhile, the things that require skilled manual labor (you know, all the things that society depends on every second of every day), saw a dramatic drop in recruitment. This led to a shortage in supply for these skilled laborers, meaning the value of their skills skyrocketed. I know of multiple trades/blue collar careers that will pay you a good wage during your apprenticeship/training (60k range) and pay for your schooling to become a journeyman/certified in a field. Some even offer to buy your tools and/or give a signing bonus type deal. Once you’re a journeyman, your wages increase drastically and you get to pick the work you do. You can make a comfortable 6 figures, or you can grind and hustle your way into the upper class range of wages. Tach on the fact that almost all of these careers have strong unions that offer pensions, great benefits, negotiate better pay/working conditions regularly, and protect workers rights. Add it all up and you’re looking at easily the best way to earn a living that will provide for a family.
Here’s the catch: you have to work for it. You’re going to be outside, you’re going to be on your feet, your hands will be calloused, and your back will be sore. You also have to learn an actual skill, one that people depend on and if done incorrectly can cause serious consequences. Sorry to say, but not everyone is willing to take that on. They want to do as little as possible (physically) and make the most because they got a piece of paper saying they passed enough tests and paid enough money to have one.
That would put you above even the median in HCOL areas like Boston, which is pretty solid pay for a median area.
Reading this thread i feel like reddit doesn't grasp reality. They think everyone is cranking 200k/yr or some shit?
I mean it’s not a competition though? Like companies are underpaying for all positions that aren’t executive positions; white collar, blue collar, are just terms used to foster division in the working class when the actual enemy is the ones who don’t provide anything of value to the world but parasitically leech money from those who do.
I'm a civil engineer working in the UK, I have a degree. My Grandad is also a civil engineer.
When he was 25 he could buy a house and support a wife and two kids. Wife a SAHM.
I at 25 couldnt afford to live alone.
In the UK and USA, we have a unique problem as University educated individuals. In that we arent competing just against UK/USA trained educated people. We're also competing against the mass immigrant student population from the rest of the world.
Last year in the UK we had 500,000 student visas granted. Our student population is approximately 3 million.
In the UK and USA, we are now competing against the best educated from basically every part of the world. Supply has outstripped demand essentially. As well as the number of universities increasing offering the same/similar qualifications.
I imagine when my grandad was 25, there might only be 30 universities in the country. Whereas now there are hundreds. All offering standard civil engineering qualifications.
Supply has increased massively.
Yea. I have a friend in DC with a degree in Political Science, working as a policy advocate. He's making $67k... which is about as much a bartender makes in DC. He can afford to either live in a 400sqft studio *or* with 4 roommates. Not particularly comfortable either way.
I'm an EE making $87k in a MCOL area. It's not bad, I wouldn't complain about my salary. But it's definitely *not* as good as it was 5 years ago.
My father was an EE for Lockheed and I got a look at his paycheck in the early 90s when I was home from college, he was making $85k then.
Heck I was making $36k as an IE in a low cost geo in 1996. That $36k might be $87k today.
Almost like too many people can fill those roles, and so the demand for them is lower, so they can give a lower salary and only the desperate but still equally qualified will apply and be happy with the job.
The wage isn't for how valuable you are, but how in demand your qualifications are. If someone can and will do it cheaper, the company will hire them instead.
So, because so many people wanted those jobs, specifically because the job paid well, the companies know they can pay less and sift out easily 80% of applications. And the 20% that still apply are just as qualified, but really need a job right now, so they sign the contract.
We will see another job rise in wage due to people not doing it for whatever reason, and that will end up being a job people strive for.
I know this is going to ruffle some feathers, but take my anecdote with a grain of salt.
I have no college degree (not even associates) and am in the insurance industry. I did 3 years in the Army and then got hired as a customer service rep at my company. I have worked my way up the chain and now make over 100k. My wife, who does have a college degree, did the same and makes just a few grand more than I do. A lot of the people I’ve encountered in my line of work have multiple degrees and are the most pretentious, unintelligent and lazy people I have ever met.
Based off my 12 years in the industry, I’ve come to the following conclusion: degrees are worthless and should not have been used as the golden ticket to escape poverty or even remain in the middle class. It was a scam.
That being said, it took me 12 years to get to where I am and only took my wife 9, so her degree held some “value” but I don’t think it would have been worth the time and money spent to obtain.
What you don't realize you are dismissing is a "Bachelor's degree" is now the equivalent of what a High School education was 50+ years ago. Our secondary education is so poor now many people graduate High School and cannot even do basic arithmetic without a calculator.
I’m not dismissing that, though. I’m saying that’s the problem. People were fed nonsense, convinced it was the only way forward and then went into severe debt to do it, only to find out it was essentially worthless because the “higher” education wasn’t based on actual employable skills.
The market is extremely saturated with degrees that are also worthless, because people didn’t realize you had to major in something useful as well.
Depending on your field. Most Corporations still mandate a Bachelor's degree for most jobs. You will not get into any type of Engineering, Finance/Accounting, Environmental sciences, or most medical fields without one at the minimum. Also, most professional licensing boards have phased out the people who can sit for exams without an approved amount of relevant coursework which often is a bachelor's degree. I work in the Civil Engineering field and have to listen to a bunch of Non-Degree people Bitch and moan all day because they do the same jobs as Degreed licensed Engineers without Pay and upward mobility. There are jobs to stay away from if you don't have a degree and anything related to Engineering is one of those you will go nowhere. Sure, maybe a Liberal Arts degree is a waste of money but to quote one of my College Professors “You are here to get an education not to make money, if you wanted to make money you should have just skipped college and found a trade”.
Yes. All the people hyping the trades need to understand it’s a life changing job, similar to joining the military.
In bed at 8pm , up at 4am, tired as hell everyday.
Speak for yourself I could never sit at a desk and talk on the phone all day. Blue collar is definitely hard on the body but you also can end up pretty unhealthy from a sedentary lifestyle as well.
I guess it depends what your doing though. I have an interest in the field I’m in so it’s not entirely soul sucking
We flooded the market with over educated people believing a degree was a licence to print money. Meanwhile blue collar jobs continue to pay big. This will continue till people wake up
I have three friends from highschool who all went into HVAC right out of highschool while myself and a few others did the college route. I never really used my degree, I was in debt and constantly trying to find a career that fit. These guys were making "buy a house, have a family and start investing" kind of money before they were 30. 15 years later and they actually have a retirement plan and I'm finally where they were in their early 30's. It was never offered to me as an option. I thought blue collar workers were settling because they couldn't cut it in college. This is the overall message I was taught in the 90's and it's flat out wrong. Everyone I know with a white collar job now is doing math in their head to figure out how long before they're replaced by AI. I know that's not the case for every job but robots aren't doing HVAC, at least for a good long while.
"I did 4 extra years of school, and I only get twice as much as most other people"
It's kind of hard to care when homelessness is still such a huge issue somehow.
I'm a blue collar raised HS graduate who is looking at a DM position that pays 110k per year in a low cost of living city. Skipping college was one of the better decisions i made. I manage many college graduates who are hampered by debt while i have none and live pretty well as a SM
idk man, being able to work from home kicks so much ass.
Honestly I’d take a pay cut if I was promised 100% remote. The perks are just better not to mention most white collar jobs are easier than blue collar jobs. You’re literally just in meetings for half the day not doing shit
I make $100,000+ year and I'm a high school graduate. But I'm also an IBEW member. Union jobs in skilled labor are just about the last bastion of living wage jobs that don't require degrees. With OT and raises, I'm gaining on my friend who is a lawyer. I'm hoping to overtake him in the next year 🤞
Depends. The pay for moderately skilled white collar jobs, the kind you could get with a random bachelor’s degree, has definitely gone down. Doctors, lawyers, mid to late career engineers, and software devs all make as much or more now than they did in the past.
Blue collar factory jobs have mostly gone away due to factory closures and automation and the factory jobs that are still around are largely non-union. So pay has fallen a lot in manufacturing. On the other hand construction trades still pay well.
So it’s complicated. White collar wages haven’t fallen more than blue collar wages. The job landscape has just shifted over time. Real wages have fallen a lot for mid-skill white collar jobs and manufacturing jobs but are as high as ever for high skill white collar jobs and union construction trades.
Funny, I make about 150k as a union electrician plus great benefits and retirement and I graduated high school in an institution.
Looks like I turned out alright.
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I’m a classically trained auto mechanic. My pay tops out at $38/hr. In the 80’s we made 50% of the door rate. Today that would be $110/hr. I make roughly a third of what my profession used to.
What does "classically trained" mean in the context of an auto mechanic? I've been a mechanic in the past, just wondering
He tunes engines using Beethoven symphonies
It’s called the autotune.
God this needs more attention
You joke, but the belts on a Ducati motor are actually tuned to tension like a musical instrument.
Love it
It means trained in a shop instead of a school
I suppose it could mean that! As in, trained under a master tech. Well done. And I was. My school training was part in class/lab and part apprenticeship under a master tech. He hated what they taught in school. I’d show up at noon and he’d say “alright, what do we have to unlearn today?”
I thought it sounded funny. I just mean that I grew up doing it and then went to school for a specific manufacturer.
[удалено]
That would be exactly true. Never underestimate the value of a tech degree from a community college. You’d be making the same mistake that was made by everyone else that overestimated the value of a 4 year degree in theology for the last thirty years.
He only works on Hyundai Sonatas, which is a Korean Classical Music car. -paraphrased John Mulaney
As inflation/costs has multiplied many many times. So we’re having the finances 1/6th or way less than what we should.
Why does your pay top out? You can switch companies, I'm a mechanic and make 48 with no certs or official training
Where? I mean, what do you work on, what area, etc.
He will never answer that because the likelihood of that person working as a normal mechanic is almost 0.
Odd. I’m not looking for the name of his employer. Just like “ Midwest north, farm territory, working on big rigs.” Or “oil sands, gmc duramax and trailers”
I work at a new car dealer and our flat rate guys make $32-50/hr depending on training and experience.
Pay rates can vary pretty heavily based on what area you live.
Roughly 40% of Americans have a BA or above, but only 15% of Americans make 100k or more—and that’s trending *down* (from 18% in 2020), even as 100k means less and less…
I gotta question that 40%. It seems way too high.
It’s definitely lower than 40%, but not by much. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2022, 34.2% of adults over 25 who were born in the US had a Bachelor’s Degree or higher, and 29.4% of adults over 25 who live in the US but were born outside the US had a Bachelor’s degree.
It could be including students.
Had to do some digging to find a number that accounts for people under 25, but if you look at the population as a whole, only 31.3% of US citizens have a college degree of any kind, including Associate’s degrees. For some reason the Census Bureau seems to only include people over 25 as adults.
Why would you want to look at people under 25 at all? A quick Google search puts the average age to get a bachelor's somewhere between 22-24. Seems like including the age range where people are still working towards a degree world deflate that statistic a lot.
Because the person I replied to suggested the 40% may include students, and plenty of grad students are under 25. They’d still have a Bachelor’s degree, but wouldn’t be included in the over 25 demographic.
It probably isn’t that many people in context of the whole country
Students working to earn their BA probably shouldn't be included in stats of people who have BAs.
I feel like that number is probably pretty accurate. Not all bachelors degree holders are the same. I’ve met bartenders, Uber drivers, barbers, etc with degrees. Even low level office jobs that didn’t require a bachelor’s a few years ago now do. I live in a rural city in the Midwest and the stats show that even way out here about 36% of people here have a bachelor’s degree
One of my employees has a master's degree but insists on working for me as a food runner and at jewel as a stocker. I keep telling him to find something in or close to his field, or at least an office job that just requires any degree, but he just doesn't try for em.
Maybe they 1) don’t exist anymore 2) don’t pay as well
Been looking at jobs a lot the past couple months. So many of them want a Bachelors Degree any more. Really makes me wish I could’ve actually finished school back in the day.
Never too late to go back. I dropped out in second year when I first went. I re-enrolled 13 years later taking one or two courses a semester while working full time and eventually got that BA.
I went to school at 21. Dropped out after a couple years. Went back at 30 and finished at 35. Currently 45 and in the best situation of my life. Going back is definitely something to look into
I'm having a very hard time grasping that a 3rd of americans went to college for 4 years ...certainly not where I come from.
80% of Americans live in major metro areas, but that would probably sound crazy if you yourself didn’t.
Lotta literature and psych degrees out there
And education. Look at how many teachers are saying "Fuck this" and bailing.
America is pretty well educated. The issue is that most of that 40% got degrees they can never do anything with. They are educated, just don’t make really good decisions in life.
Degrees aren't vocational programs. They're supposed to prove you can learn to do whatever the job is. Before the great recession any degree from my school would set you up well immediately. I make over 100K due to my creative writing degree.
That's what they're currently being misused as but it's absolutely not what they're meant to be. They are supposed to teach you the critical thinking skills, academic methods and background knowledge that you need to work in academics or related industry fields. But the eternal rat race and economic incentives for companies to not invest money into training employees that may switch to competition two years later have pushed the task of pre-selecting talent onto educational institutions and the prospective employees themselves.
Education isn't about job placement. It's about education. It's not your place to declare whether or not a degree is valuable based upon its job earning material.
As someone with multiple degrees I don’t even know what educated means anymore. I don’t feel like I learned anything. I have “real” degrees, mind. But you don’t have to learn much to pass and I feel stupider every day. Education does not necessarily mean you’ve learned anything. Just speaking for myself here.
Yeah I can't imagine what someone does with a gender studies degree other than teach.
These days, undergrad degrees like gender studies are often stepping stones to more lucrative degrees (law, business, etc.). There are gender studies grads making ridiculous amounts of money out there, but it's not a terminal degree.
I know a lot of people who did psychology or political science, literature or art and aren’t doing anything with it. For me even with a finance major I worked a job in finance had no idea how to do anything when I first started.
That's actually by design. Historically, the purpose of a college education was to provide you with a well-rounded set of skills, and then employers would be responsible for training you up. It didn't used to matter as much as your degree was in, though having a degree tailored to the company's interests gave you a leg up in the job search. But things have changed since then. Employers increasingly expect job applicants to have all the skills a position requires, which essentially transfers all financial burden of acquiring those skills onto the applicants. It also disadvantages people for not having the "right" degree, even if they'd be perfectly capable of doing the job with a modest amount of training.
Yes it makes sense, from a employer perspective, but almost every entry level job requires 3-5 years of experience, which is difficult for graduates. But I think colleges need to do better at preparing people for work. My excel skills were not that great when I started and now I’m an expert from just online courses.
People used to be able to get a job in whatever regardless of their degree, within reason of course. You still wouldn’t have ended up a doctor without an MD, but you weren’t completely pigeonholed into specific tasks and even software like you are now. Somehow businesses and our culture both decided that’s not appropriate and now you’re shit out of luck without a masters and 5 years’ experience. Seems to me like toxic expectations based on increasingly unrealistic perfectionism infiltrating every facet of our lives but eh
I have an English/history degree and it has gotten me into the doors of every industry. It legit doesn’t matter. I’ve done everything from food service to biotech. It’s the super specific degrees like fashion, sports management, that have a harder time. However, I don’t want to work a white collar office style job so I don’t go for them. I started working with animals like 4 years ago and haven’t left it. Good money, active both physically and mentally, and fulfilling for me.
Employers just need to know that: 1. You're someone who is committed to something. 2. You have invested your time and energy into learning something specialized. 3. You show up every day to contribute to the greater good of your team. 4. You have the skills to demonstrate Continuous Improvement. I'll hire you right now with those qualities. The degree teaches you these things but smart people can also demonstrate the qualities. It's about assessing future potential.
Okay, I have those qualities. Hire me.
You gotta realize most people don’t work in the subject they have a degree in. Plenty of corporate, white collar gigs require degrees as a barrier for entry, but don’t particularly care what flavor you have.
They use it as a stepping stone to being a lawyer, or go to graduate school. They go into HR. Lots of uses.
How many people do you think have Gender Study Degrees foh
That's because you lack a proper liberal arts education and think of school as a vocational training program.
Probably why gender studies isn't a common degree to begin with.
Aka the majority of the population is getting absolutely destroyed
You hit the nail on the head....That's the scary part $100k (2024 dollars) is about $75k in 2016 dollars. So you really need to be making closer to $150k-$200k to afford a comfortable lifestyle you could just 10 years back... Wealth inequality and consolidation of wealth is good. To turn America into a land of only.rich and poor
Ugh I try and not think about what my salary today would be back when I started adjusted for inflation.
Adjusted for inflation, a person with a degree in the seventies could expect to make *$90k* at an entry-level job. A degree used to mean you'd be incredibly prosperous. Nowadays, a degree will make you enough to just barely support a family if you're *lucky*
Yes, because when everyone started getting degrees more high-paying jobs didn't magically appear
Do you mean high education jobs? And it's because CEO/board compensation has skyrocketed
Do you mean high education jobs? And it's because CEO/board compensation has skyrocketed
I’ve got a degree and I have never made more than $30/hr from it, and that was only for a year. Currently earning half that.
Supply and demand my friend. More people getting college degree means they aren’t as valuable
That 18% going down is also a function of baby boomers retiring who most likely make over that amount and then leaving the market faster than jobs being replaced
Two classes: the elite, and the working class.
A lot of people here are mentioning bloated, irrelevant, or outsourced jobs. But even for jobs that are still very relevant the pay has stagnated. I work in a very busy, and imperative role in investment banking and even there pay has flatlined over the last few decades. I was discussing my bonus in private with one of my mentors. 40 years ago he received a bigger bonus than I did last year. Not adjusted for inflation, literally just higher. My friends in law and engineering are seeing the same thing. The pay In 2024 is not so different from what it was in 2004. This is the result of a corporate workforce that has received 1-2% raises year over year when inflation and COL overall has vastly outpaced.
I've noticed this too. I work in an engineering field that is absolutely essential and is impossible to outsource. Even in my field, people are making less than they did 30 years ago. This used to be an absolute home run of a job where you were set for life once you managed to break in. Now it's just another job where job hopping is the only way to get raises.
My wife does design at an architectures firm and the pay for Architects is horrible for what I would consider a professional degree. The thing that drives me crazy is I know people like to complain about certain liberal arts degrees being useless blah blah blah but even professional degrees are severely underpaid. Most have loans as well because of the extra years added to become an architect. It's crazy how everything has fallen off. The folks often work 60+ hour weeks since that's the culture.
True. I got a BA and then later a PhD in chemistry, not an irrelevant job at all. Ten years ago when I was first choosing chem a BA would earn you 55-60k starting. Ten years later a BA will earn a chemist 55-60k starting. Adjusted for inflation that's 45k.
More of the money is just being diverted to upper management.
Get a blue collar job. $25/hr Work really hard for years, get promoted, get to $35/hr. Get laid off after 10 years. Apply for jobs. $25/hr starting 😔
>Work really hard for years, get promoted, get to $35/hr. Not really anymore. You can only get wage increases by job hopping. And now you you'll never accrue vacation because it doesn't make sense to be loyal to a job that doesn't give raises.
That's not entirely true. You can work for a place with an EBA and fight for yearly wage increases. Long service leave here in Australia also incentivises staying with a company or industry. Ten years at my place can give you a 13 week block you can take off or have paid out
They're talking about blue collar jobs, your pay goes down a lot of times when job hopping since now you'll have to prove yourself all over again at a new company. Unless you get a degree
>They're talking about blue collar jobs, So am i. Welder in aero. I'm usually in the top of my department in whichever company I join but companies have been giving something like 2% raises but paying new hires more to match inflation. The only time they ever are willing to negotiate is when I got one foot out the door. By then, for me anyway, it's too late and I'm taking the better money at the next company regardless of location. They're preying off the fact that most people don't want to move and disrupt their families. A weld test is the only "proof" that I need to get established in this line of work. I'm always up front with what I get paid two other employees and I almost always start at a higher rate than people who have been working there for years.
I started my current job at 14.50 / hr and have gotten increases up to $28.50 over the course of 4.5 years so far.
Currently working at a job that doesn't give raises. The way they characterized it was "Raises need to be fair and equitable among all employees" Basically saying, you only get a raise if everyone does, and that's not happening.
Yeh IDK what job everybody on reddit has where they make MORE by job hopping. The only way I've ever seen this work in blue collar jobs is if you go from a worker at one company to a supervisor at another. Skilled labor has been stuck at yhe same pay scale for decades now. The only way to get more is to stay somewhere long enough to get raises and promotions. Job hopping just resets you back to zero in my field. Unless you are quitting within the first year or something, in which case you will quickly run out of jobs to hop to.
Blue collar jobs around my area are $17-$18 an hr starting. You'd be better off working at McDonald's at $16.50/hr and saving gas money than having to travel half hr to two hrs to work sites and making an extra $1.50 an hr.
Exactly what type of blue collar job are you talking about where it’s like that? My brother’s a plumber, step brother is a union electrician and I’ve been a CNC Machinist for 18 years. There’s plenty of work on a higher pay scale if you have the right skills/experience. If you’re forced to take that kind of a pay cut you either don’t know how to negotiate your wages or are living in an area that’s a job desert.
I work in health care. Something is about to give. At our doc level, no raises or anything has been given. Fees for services have gone up, entry level wages go up, everyone above us have gone up, but our wages have been stagnant. I make good money yes, but my relative value has dropped a lot. I have people under me that make very very comparable hour by hour money and way less stress or work
I’m a sleep technologist at a hospital and I make the same as an RN even though it’s a much less involved job. I also have a degree in neuroscience. I left academia because the pay was shit. I know several post docs in research who make less than I do. The job market is very strange right now.
After Covid, I started taking a day off during the week when I had to work weekends. The boss balked at first, but here we are, three years later..
I think it's a combination of over-saturation of workers and increases in technology that are disproportionately effecting white collar jobs. E.G. with the sharp rise in remote work companies have an easier time hiring overseas for jobs that just a few years ago were almost impossible to do without being on site.
That and it was only recently we started shipping every kid possible to college. Over saturation is going to be a huge problem. On the flip side you can now easily make $100k a year doing the right blue collar work.
I used to heavily advocate for blue collar work, but as I’m aging I realize how longevity and quality of a life is a real issue. Blue collar work can be a great path for many, but be wary to pick something that won’t leave your body absolutely destroyed after 15-20 years.
Yeah that’s why you don’t pick a job like roofing. Fields that are more STEM oriented pay better and require less work.
100% Leave the really difficult stuff for your local minority community, or immigrants who are just lucky to be here.
This is why financial intelligence is key. Lots of blue collar workers start relatively young and don't know how to properly handle the influx on cash. Nowadays they don't just spend it, they build up debt and accrue property on loans. If you're making 100k+ a year doing blue collar work you've gotta be smart about it. Save, budget, invest, and plan on an *early* retirement. I stopped doing manual labor that doesn't provide me with any sense of a retirement by 60. Idgaf what the feds say - blue collar workers need to be out of the game by like, 55.
I see this a lot. Trade workers who’ve blown out their back usually in their early 50’s who have basically nothing saved for retirement, applying for disability, not necessarily eligible and now asking how they’re supposed to afford to live. It’s a shame. Lots of workplace injuries too. I tell my boys not to go into labour for these reasons.
I see a lot of this in my job. You’re trading your body (usually your back) down the line for money here and now. Then you apply for disability at 50-60 with little to no retirement saved.
I have worked with so many people with four year degrees that have done nothing with them.
Remember there are restaurant servers making 2000 a week, and entry office workers making 13/hr. Its not so much about the pay anymore, rather the opportunity to work where you want
Yup. My wife used to be a four star hotel front desk manager, degree in hospitality management. $23/hr cap She now makes $200/day on a very slow lunch shift working 3-6 hrs at a mid upscale restaurant. $400+ during nights. Why tf would she go back to 40+hrs/wk for almost half the pay?
Meh, servers gouge customers with this stupid tipping system.
Especially since the back of the house making scraps for 5x the amount of work
Just because someone isn’t in the field they went to school for doesn’t mean the degree isn’t being used. I’ve worked outside my degree since graduating and it has gotten me every job offer AND a higher pay rate upon hiring. So it’s being utilized. So many of my peers think I did nothing with my degree cause I work in animal care and not English/history, because I’m not going around announcing every little thing in my career it’s helped with lol
THIS. A lot of ppl equate major choice to specific vocational training and that’s not the case. The knowledge you gain in xyz major gives you a set of knowledge that you then take and apply to different problems etc that life presents you. It colors the lens of whatever field you end up in. Also important— the attainment of knowledge for the sake of it is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself and idk how that gets lost in this convo. I think it’s about money and the value proposition of that degree, but that again goes back to the notion of which major/set of knowledge is determined to be valuable in the vocational sense. People seem to lose sight of the fact that we are people/humans whose lives have purpose outside of the confines of The Machine to which we are cogs. / /rant
It was never my plan to work in the field that I studied but I wouldn’t have got my first office job without a degree. It’s mostly older people who accuse me of having wasted 3 years of my life studying but what they don’t understand is that things are different now and “entry level” means you have a bachelors degree at the very least. Maybe back in their day they could walk straight out of high school into some office clerk type position but that just isn’t the case today.
I was one of those people for a while. I got a degree in sociology and it was not helpful. But then I got my CPA and it turned around.
We learned during covid that most of these jobs are either redundant or can be done from the Philippines or Bangalore for 1/5 the price.
It's funny you say that because a ton of tech jobs have tried moving to India or Mexico and are having problems with being able to put out work as efficiently
That’s because they’re only writing stories on the ones that failed. Look at the trends. US Tech jobs are still 25% below pre-pandemic levels and lay-off’s are continuing 4 years out. Most of those have either been outsourced, automated or redundant.
The tech sector in general is in a bear market rn almost all of them are having a down year
I can only speak to IT/ERP consulting, but you’re definitely not giving the customer the same experience if you just offload a bunch of your workforce to remote workers in India (which many firms are doing). The bottom line probably looks better, I don’t disagree, but I do wonder how sustainable it is. Don’t get me wrong, the Indian consultants are very smart people and they have good technical chops, but there are tremendous barriers in terms of language/accent, culture/norms/expectations, and especially business acumen…the Indian folks I deal with typically just don’t have a good understanding of the weird nuances of corporate America and how our companies operate. There is a big gap between the average offshore Indian consultant and an American/European consultant that was hired out of industry. I assume there is a similar story for other fields. The geographic and cultural gap is real.
I want to know where you're outsourcing, our company's been trying to outsource every since PE moved in, and they were able to ax jobs where the whole role was mapped out in a wiki easy enough, but for the teams where documentation just can't cover enough ground or a high degree of autonomy was needed, the outsourced staff assigned were worse than useless. The teams that got hit with layoffs and then dismissed their offshores are by far the worst off these days because the company is trying to force a "no more domestic, hire more offshores" strategy and it just doesn't work nearly as well as they expected. And I mean hell, I'm leaving this field for accounting(done with tech's instability) and even there, everyone I've talked to already in industry has been playing the same tune, "babysit the offshores, try to get as much work done as possible with the added burden".
"Babysitting" is the perfect description, IME. Generally speaking, you have to be overly specific about what you want and how it needs to be done, to the point where it's almost easier to do it yourself.
I'd just love to meet the masterminds that determined saving \~300K in our department through layoffs was going to be worth it when if we lose one, *one* of our big contracts, we stand to lose at *minimum* 500k. First week on the job the offshores interrupted access for 6 of those contracts, and after dismissing them we're now slowly but surely losing to our backlog so I can all but guarantee within the next year one of our clients is going to pull the contract and our SBU is going to have a worse bottom line than when they started, not that they'll ever realize it was their fault, they'll just use it to further justify gutting our department or divest the whole damn unit.
I have not once seen an outsourced tech group retain quality moving to India. It's always worse. It meets some level of competence, but always worse. If you want Indian guys with the exact same competence as the Americans they are in America already making US salaries. You get what you pay for.
It can be intensely frustrating when you have to make a call like this and there is a disconnect
so many people have a hard time accepting this
Crazy how on the one hand you have people posting about how they only have two hours of actual work a day and just fuck around for the rest their shift, but then you also have people complaining that they’re not getting paid enough for doing almost nothing
Those are also the stories you hear online. I don't think that's common, and anyone in that position should be concerned about being cut
those people with the two hours of actual work a day are living off old contracts lol i doubt anyone getting hired now is getting something like that
Because it’s genuinely not true. MANY businesses have found that outsourcing tech to those regions is as bad or worse than outsourcing manufacturing to low quality regions like China. Save on the (fabricated) quoted cost; then spend more than you did before having to fix the mistakes of an inept offshore team. It’s a weird part of the modern business cycle.
My only question is, at what drop in quality? I'm not knocking these people but there appears to be a real narrative that overseas workers do not have the quality that American or their western counterparts do.
They said the same thing about garment workers in the 1980s. That a single mom working a sewing machine in Scranton for $3.35/hr produces a finer quality product than a single mom working a sewing machine in Honduras for 27c/hr. If your white collar job requires interacting with clients in any way, of course an American worker will be better. That's obvious to anyone who has ever called a customer service number in the last 10 years. But if it is just shuffling paperwork around and doing excel spreadsheets or writing reports or whatever it is people in cubicles do, those jobs can be done just as well in Manila or Bangalore.
I feel like the only actual drop in quality will be caused by th3 language and cultural barrier, as demonstrated by Indian call centers. Its hard to outsource something properly if the service requires near native level English.
>1/5 the price For 1/10 of the quality
In other words the middle class is shrinking.
That’s because most white collar work is actually blue collar jobs in a modern environment.
Grey collar
I thought it was called Pink Collar
I thought it was called pink slips
No, you’re thinking of Pink Floyd
That sounds like a contagious illness
Thats an interesting thought. Can you provide a few examples? Outside of blue collar becoming management for their previous roles, i cant think of any examples
If we're going by pure definition - a lot of data entry and customer service would fall under white collar. And there's a lot of that out there.
Almost any white collar job that deals in movement of data. Another commenter said Grey Collar work. This term was coined for jobs that appeared to be white collar but were just data assembly lines. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became the new Henry Fords…so to speak. If your job is part of a giant purchasing process, like a T&C review and approval, you likely have a grey collar job. Edit: changed a word
I’ve seen grey collar defined as jobs that are skilled hands on work but not labor intensive. Most of the people who work in offices are not white collar anymore. The white collars are the ones being paid for applied knowledge. Filling out forms and having meetings about which forms need filled out is not white collar
lol this is just cope from people who dont want to acknowledge that sitting at a desk all day is in fact white collar. *you are aware that these labels are based on physical vs non-physical work right*? just because data entry pays low *does not* make it 'blue collar'. by the same token being in a high paying trade in no way makes you 'white collar', its based on physicality not pay rate.
I wonder where service industry jobs fall. I work in retail as a cashier jockey. It's fundamentally different from a trade like plumbing or auto mechanics or coal digging, but it sure as shit ain't white collar. I've always considered it modern blue collar work.
iv seen quite a few supply chain positions, like planner/buyer/ supply chain analyst, become more available. Having lower requirements akin to production assembly or operators. Even some more managerial ones here an there.
How? Like a mechanical engineer isn’t blue collar by any means
I think the best way to phrase it, is the decimation of the middle class. It’s a trend that western countries are working hard at for about 40 years. For about 100 years (until the 1980s) the middle class had been the engine for economic prosperity. The development of urban centers, extended commerce, etc. At some point the leadership (all parties) were duped into changing direction and taking different ways. The results are evident these days.
And it's a dangerous thing too, I think. There's this idea of [elite overproduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction), where you have more elite members in society than can fit into a society's power structure; this includes educated, middle class professionals. People who know how society works, how the elite class operates, and where the levers of power are can also inflict tremendous amounts of damage if they wanted. Intra-elite conflict usually precedes large-scale popular conflict.
Unless your definition of middle class extends up to around the 90th percentile, people who were making 100k in the recent past were not middle class. I'd argue they aren't middle class today either to be honest, even with inflation. They're in the top income quintile.
>A lot of professionals with at least several years of experience don’t make more than $100k per year these days. They never did. Even before all of the pandemic related inflation, $100k was not a common salary. Only something like 15-20% of full time workers make that. I think a lot of discussions on reddit give people the mistaken impression that $100k isn't that much. It absolutely still is a lot.
My life would literally change completely if I made 100k, which is still prob 5 years out for me, if not longer.
You’ll find the more you use Reddit the more you’ll realize Redditors are actually some of the most out of touch people on the internet.
Right, nobody in my family has ever seen $100k and I’ll probably be the first, it’d be life changing and I could certainly be comfortable. I feel like a lot of people on Reddit are out of touch and have developed expensive lifestyles and think everyone else has the same pay and lifestyle.
Like honestly I kinda don't care if people aren't making 100k. I'm trying to make 50k.
White collar jobs have been bloated AF these last decade. The bubble is popping due to oversaturation of workers, outsourcing, and ai. Tbf, most of my white collar friends tell me that they're just trying to look busy most of the time.
I wish this was me. Anymore I'm slaving away, barely able to keep up with my workload despite churning out projects every two months (while having 4 on my plate at any point that I'm juggling) that would've taken 10 guys a year to draft plans for a few decades ago. Meanwhile my wages are worse than what they were getting paid back then after adjusting for inflation despite doing the same work at 50-60x the pace they were.
Just like IT, the jobs have been outsourced to other countries for wayyyyy cheaper.
There are opinions and there are facts. While I understand the sentiment, math doesn’t agree with you. Low wage workers continue to see less wage growth than higher earners.
>Low wage workers continue to see less wage growth than higher earners. The lowest wage workers have seen the highest growth currently. It's 12% at the bottom ranks, adjusted for inflation mind.
Low wage workers are rather separate from white/blue collar, plenty of low wage workers in both.
Its cause a huge portion of white collar jobs and positions dont actually produce anything or do much. Less and less companies can afford to pay people to produce nothing.
Wages are being suppressed and withheld. It’s simple. The controllers of the money are taking it for themselves. Greed is destroying everything.
It’s all jobs what are you smoking? Blue collar, white collar, grey collar, working class, etc. Plenty of people are underpaid compared to inflation and the cost of living.
Because a lot of white collar work is no longer "skilled" labor. It's customer service jobs that require you to wear a collared shirt. We're a sales/service economy so a lot of jobs are retail jobs where the customer wants to believe they're being served or sold to by "professionals." It's a lie agreed upon to make the number go bigger.
The last comment you made I think sums this up. For generations kids were told to do well in school or “you’ll be a garbage man”. Our society treated blue collar careers as those reserved for people with low IQs or a criminal record. Couple that with many people in their 30’s and 40’s growing up during the massive technological boom/internet boom that created millionaires in wild numbers. Fast forward to today and there’s a market of people overwhelmingly chasing riches in the tech sector/white collar jobs, while those companies shifted from innovation to maintaining growth and pleasing shareholders. With a high number of candidates, you can reduce wages because if one candidate says no, there’s a line of others waiting to say yes. Meanwhile, the things that require skilled manual labor (you know, all the things that society depends on every second of every day), saw a dramatic drop in recruitment. This led to a shortage in supply for these skilled laborers, meaning the value of their skills skyrocketed. I know of multiple trades/blue collar careers that will pay you a good wage during your apprenticeship/training (60k range) and pay for your schooling to become a journeyman/certified in a field. Some even offer to buy your tools and/or give a signing bonus type deal. Once you’re a journeyman, your wages increase drastically and you get to pick the work you do. You can make a comfortable 6 figures, or you can grind and hustle your way into the upper class range of wages. Tach on the fact that almost all of these careers have strong unions that offer pensions, great benefits, negotiate better pay/working conditions regularly, and protect workers rights. Add it all up and you’re looking at easily the best way to earn a living that will provide for a family. Here’s the catch: you have to work for it. You’re going to be outside, you’re going to be on your feet, your hands will be calloused, and your back will be sore. You also have to learn an actual skill, one that people depend on and if done incorrectly can cause serious consequences. Sorry to say, but not everyone is willing to take that on. They want to do as little as possible (physically) and make the most because they got a piece of paper saying they passed enough tests and paid enough money to have one.
I have a master’s degree in an important healthcare field that supposedly has a massive worker shortage, yet I make $80k/year in a mid-high COL area
That would put you above even the median in HCOL areas like Boston, which is pretty solid pay for a median area. Reading this thread i feel like reddit doesn't grasp reality. They think everyone is cranking 200k/yr or some shit?
On average, people on this site think they’re more skilled and valuable than they are
I mean it’s not a competition though? Like companies are underpaying for all positions that aren’t executive positions; white collar, blue collar, are just terms used to foster division in the working class when the actual enemy is the ones who don’t provide anything of value to the world but parasitically leech money from those who do.
I'm a civil engineer working in the UK, I have a degree. My Grandad is also a civil engineer. When he was 25 he could buy a house and support a wife and two kids. Wife a SAHM. I at 25 couldnt afford to live alone. In the UK and USA, we have a unique problem as University educated individuals. In that we arent competing just against UK/USA trained educated people. We're also competing against the mass immigrant student population from the rest of the world. Last year in the UK we had 500,000 student visas granted. Our student population is approximately 3 million. In the UK and USA, we are now competing against the best educated from basically every part of the world. Supply has outstripped demand essentially. As well as the number of universities increasing offering the same/similar qualifications. I imagine when my grandad was 25, there might only be 30 universities in the country. Whereas now there are hundreds. All offering standard civil engineering qualifications. Supply has increased massively.
Ita all jobs man
Yea. I have a friend in DC with a degree in Political Science, working as a policy advocate. He's making $67k... which is about as much a bartender makes in DC. He can afford to either live in a 400sqft studio *or* with 4 roommates. Not particularly comfortable either way. I'm an EE making $87k in a MCOL area. It's not bad, I wouldn't complain about my salary. But it's definitely *not* as good as it was 5 years ago.
My father was an EE for Lockheed and I got a look at his paycheck in the early 90s when I was home from college, he was making $85k then. Heck I was making $36k as an IE in a low cost geo in 1996. That $36k might be $87k today.
EE?
Almost like too many people can fill those roles, and so the demand for them is lower, so they can give a lower salary and only the desperate but still equally qualified will apply and be happy with the job. The wage isn't for how valuable you are, but how in demand your qualifications are. If someone can and will do it cheaper, the company will hire them instead. So, because so many people wanted those jobs, specifically because the job paid well, the companies know they can pay less and sift out easily 80% of applications. And the 20% that still apply are just as qualified, but really need a job right now, so they sign the contract. We will see another job rise in wage due to people not doing it for whatever reason, and that will end up being a job people strive for.
This isn’t even an opinion. This is just factually right or wrong.
I know this is going to ruffle some feathers, but take my anecdote with a grain of salt. I have no college degree (not even associates) and am in the insurance industry. I did 3 years in the Army and then got hired as a customer service rep at my company. I have worked my way up the chain and now make over 100k. My wife, who does have a college degree, did the same and makes just a few grand more than I do. A lot of the people I’ve encountered in my line of work have multiple degrees and are the most pretentious, unintelligent and lazy people I have ever met. Based off my 12 years in the industry, I’ve come to the following conclusion: degrees are worthless and should not have been used as the golden ticket to escape poverty or even remain in the middle class. It was a scam. That being said, it took me 12 years to get to where I am and only took my wife 9, so her degree held some “value” but I don’t think it would have been worth the time and money spent to obtain.
What you don't realize you are dismissing is a "Bachelor's degree" is now the equivalent of what a High School education was 50+ years ago. Our secondary education is so poor now many people graduate High School and cannot even do basic arithmetic without a calculator.
I’m not dismissing that, though. I’m saying that’s the problem. People were fed nonsense, convinced it was the only way forward and then went into severe debt to do it, only to find out it was essentially worthless because the “higher” education wasn’t based on actual employable skills. The market is extremely saturated with degrees that are also worthless, because people didn’t realize you had to major in something useful as well.
Depending on your field. Most Corporations still mandate a Bachelor's degree for most jobs. You will not get into any type of Engineering, Finance/Accounting, Environmental sciences, or most medical fields without one at the minimum. Also, most professional licensing boards have phased out the people who can sit for exams without an approved amount of relevant coursework which often is a bachelor's degree. I work in the Civil Engineering field and have to listen to a bunch of Non-Degree people Bitch and moan all day because they do the same jobs as Degreed licensed Engineers without Pay and upward mobility. There are jobs to stay away from if you don't have a degree and anything related to Engineering is one of those you will go nowhere. Sure, maybe a Liberal Arts degree is a waste of money but to quote one of my College Professors “You are here to get an education not to make money, if you wanted to make money you should have just skipped college and found a trade”.
But they're a hell of a lot easier than those blue collar jobs. Especially the WFH jobs.
90% of blue collar workers I talk to say something along the lines of “i couldn’t stand sitting at a desk in an office all day , sounds awful”.
Perfect job would be white collar office BS Monday and Friday and real work get off your ass Tues to Thursday.
Yes. All the people hyping the trades need to understand it’s a life changing job, similar to joining the military. In bed at 8pm , up at 4am, tired as hell everyday.
Speak for yourself I could never sit at a desk and talk on the phone all day. Blue collar is definitely hard on the body but you also can end up pretty unhealthy from a sedentary lifestyle as well. I guess it depends what your doing though. I have an interest in the field I’m in so it’s not entirely soul sucking
We flooded the market with over educated people believing a degree was a licence to print money. Meanwhile blue collar jobs continue to pay big. This will continue till people wake up
I have three friends from highschool who all went into HVAC right out of highschool while myself and a few others did the college route. I never really used my degree, I was in debt and constantly trying to find a career that fit. These guys were making "buy a house, have a family and start investing" kind of money before they were 30. 15 years later and they actually have a retirement plan and I'm finally where they were in their early 30's. It was never offered to me as an option. I thought blue collar workers were settling because they couldn't cut it in college. This is the overall message I was taught in the 90's and it's flat out wrong. Everyone I know with a white collar job now is doing math in their head to figure out how long before they're replaced by AI. I know that's not the case for every job but robots aren't doing HVAC, at least for a good long while.
Bruh, most white collar professionals were never making 100k. Even post COVID, that's still a lot of money in most parts of the country
Employers love this 50k and 100k benchmarks. 100k in the 80s was great money. It’s a scam to keep wages low…
lmao "I'm slightly less dramatically more well off than other people now :("
"I did 4 extra years of school, and I only get twice as much as most other people" It's kind of hard to care when homelessness is still such a huge issue somehow.
A lot of white collar jobs had inflated salaries.
Me turn wrench and bang hammer. Me make more than lawyer sister.
Ooga booga college bad!
They are overpaid when less people are qualified. Now that more are qualified, wages go down. It’s just math
I'm a blue collar raised HS graduate who is looking at a DM position that pays 110k per year in a low cost of living city. Skipping college was one of the better decisions i made. I manage many college graduates who are hampered by debt while i have none and live pretty well as a SM
idk man, being able to work from home kicks so much ass. Honestly I’d take a pay cut if I was promised 100% remote. The perks are just better not to mention most white collar jobs are easier than blue collar jobs. You’re literally just in meetings for half the day not doing shit
Are they really needed and is AI replacing the
My colleagues range from age 20-55 some have masters, some have no degree. We all get paid the same with no room for growth. It’s a rat race
I make $100,000+ year and I'm a high school graduate. But I'm also an IBEW member. Union jobs in skilled labor are just about the last bastion of living wage jobs that don't require degrees. With OT and raises, I'm gaining on my friend who is a lawyer. I'm hoping to overtake him in the next year 🤞
My field has the same pay rate as it did in the 90s. Woooo
Depends. The pay for moderately skilled white collar jobs, the kind you could get with a random bachelor’s degree, has definitely gone down. Doctors, lawyers, mid to late career engineers, and software devs all make as much or more now than they did in the past. Blue collar factory jobs have mostly gone away due to factory closures and automation and the factory jobs that are still around are largely non-union. So pay has fallen a lot in manufacturing. On the other hand construction trades still pay well. So it’s complicated. White collar wages haven’t fallen more than blue collar wages. The job landscape has just shifted over time. Real wages have fallen a lot for mid-skill white collar jobs and manufacturing jobs but are as high as ever for high skill white collar jobs and union construction trades.
Good. These were the people that looked down on the rest of us that had blue collar jobs.
Funny, I make about 150k as a union electrician plus great benefits and retirement and I graduated high school in an institution. Looks like I turned out alright.