Warning: Read this before leaving a job these days

In reply to Peabody :

Starting pay $35K. Almost 6 figures within a few years isn't uncommon. 

In reply to Peabody :

When I was shop foreman 3 years ago, I was at $45/hr. That's in a suburb of Vancouver.

I've looked at local job listings here in Sask to see what it's like. Welder/fabricator jobs seem to be starting at $30 - $35 / hr depending on skill and certification. Same goes for mechanics.

Not sure where others are.

My shop rate that I charge is 100/hour if it's in my shop. $125 if I make a house call plus $2 per km travel. 

If I haul your junk to me, it's $2 per km, loaded.

That covers my overhead, wear and tear on vehicles, tools and equipment and pays me enough that I can keep getting out of bed in the morning. 

I'm $25 / hour less than the powersports dealers around here but $10 more than the other non-dealer shops. I'll actually work on machines older than ten years and I'm really fast.

I got my Polaris certification through their online learning. I still have to finish the Slingshot and Indian motorcycle training when I have the time.

Peabody said:

Lots of talk about the trades, what kind of money can a tradesman make these days?

There is an ad on the radio here from an HVAC company, looking for people that want to get into the trade. The ad states a $5000 sign up bonus, They will pay for the schooling, And you start at $21 an hour. 

The requirements are high school diploma or equivalent, good driving record, and dependable transportation.

In reply to Steve_Jones :

Most trades are so desperate for people that the job requirements are "show up" and occasionally "pee clean".

Talking with the Director of Maintenance at the aircraft shop I worked at 20+ years ago, he says he could put three guys to work tomorrow. 

A guy I know who owns a vintage race shop in the USA is looking for people. Same goes for a hotrod fabrication shop in B.C. He just had a new hire quit after three months because he wasn't going to get 4 weeks paid holiday in the first year.

ShawnG said:

In reply to Steve_Jones :

He just had a new hire quit after three months because he wasn't going to get 4 weeks paid holiday in the first year.

And that is exactly why job hoppers have a harder time getting an interview. Most people would rather just not hire anybody versus training somebody that's gonna be there for short term. 

Steve_Jones said:

ShawnG said:

In reply to Steve_Jones :

He just had a new hire quit after three months because he wasn't going to get 4 weeks paid holiday in the first year.

And that is exactly why job hoppers have a harder time getting an interview. Most people would rather just not hire anybody versus training somebody that's gonna be there for short term. 

I mostly agree with this, but as a counterpoint, many of the lower-skilled and some mid-skilled jobs don't really need much training, especially if it's in the same field that they've been in. If you need a warm body to fill a position and not screw up too badly, hiring someone for 8 months gives you at least 7.5 months of work provided. There are some industries where employee turnover times are so abysmal, that it doesn't really matter. I worked at a site like that for 8 months. Within a 12 month period, every single one of the 8 salaried manager positions had turned over at least once during that time, some of them twice. These were jobs paying between 50K and 95K per year plus bonuses, 3 yrs ago.

Peabody said:

Lots of talk about the trades, what kind of money can a tradesman make these days?

The project I  currently lead burns through about 25,000 craft hours a day. It's a multibillion program. I can easily name another 6-8 billion within 60 miles of active or about to go after construction projects in just my industrial sector not counting battery and EV projects which are all multi-billion within 100 miles. 
 

There is no better time to go into the trades. If you are willing to work, can pass a drug test, work some OT $100k a year should be doable. Everyone is paying per diem regardless whether or not you are local. Incentives are common. There is so much work, labor is in the drivers seat. The project up the road is paying $5 / hr more for one particular craft so you have to compete and then it just cycles. It's a sellers market.

50s a week is a minimum to stand any chance to recruit craft labor.  With the number of new craft workers, promotions can be had quickly to get off your tools if that is your preference as well. 
 

As someone who has spent my career in tech on the customer side early, and on the OEM side for the majority of my career, I have some thoughts.  'Insert tech here' admin jobs are decreasing as companies are asking IT to do more with less.  The tech is better and managing more assets with fewer people is increasingly possible.  Companies are looking for broader skillsets as they plan to build teams that cover multiple disciplines.  Automation is, and has been, huge for years now as the very large companies that coincidentally pay well, struggle to manage the scale they have achieved. Frankly, LAMP and Linux admin skills don't set the world on fire right now.  I suspect Gameboy has scripting skills and could rewrite the resume to feature python, Ansible, rest APIs etc as well as virtualization beyond Broadcom VMware could be helpful.  In addition, AI is super hot, and anyone that doesn't maximize their skills and resume in that direction is missing the boat.  

No more excuses, invest in networking opportunities and not cars.  Stop imagining that the corporations are against you, they aren't.  Hire a resume coach if needed and expand your skills for AI.  Consider sales engineering if you are good in front of people as there is a significant amount of money available to those who can gain the trust of a customer through their technical skills.  DM me if you are interested in learning what I am seeing in the Canadian market today.
 

Peabody said:

Lots of talk about the trades, what kind of money can a tradesman make these days?

This was a trick question.

I've been a tradesman most of my life but I really wanted to see what the perception of trades pay was. On this forum we're not far removed from the, if you go in to the trades, you'll be a cripple by the time you're 50, nonsense, and was just curious what people's thoughts were on pay. There's a lot more awareness of the trades lately, but in the past people have way underestimated what kind of money we make.

Just me personally, I would look at building automation and LV cabling. It's something that requires a little bit more of a brain to get into and has a great upside. Honestly if I would have known this 20 years ago, that would have been my career choice. Solid 6 digit job that isn't mindless and can't be outsourced. 

AI is over hyped and will be over-indexed. We go through this cycle every 5-10 years. Big Data was the last one. They all sound great but are really hard to make money at and to be honest, it becomes a bit of a predicable cycle.  

In reply to Peabody :

Some of the wealthiest people are know are tradesmen.  Learned the job, started their own business, put down their tools and manage the business and make at least 10X my income...

docwyte said:

In reply to Peabody :

Some of the wealthiest people are know are tradesmen.  Learned the job, started their own business, put down their tools and manage the business and make at least 10X my income...

Realistically, that path can be taken by many career paths.  More than one co-worker of mine left F and started a consulting firm doing the exact same thing- and made a lot of money doing it.  Or a fab shop, depending on their skills.  

Just pointing that out.

Skill trades were not for me, but I totally support anyone who wants to do that.  And while I have my preceptions have the most potential for less work for more money, I doubt I'm right.

"Trades are for the dumb kids. You need a job 'in computers' if you want to get anywhere in the future". My high-school guidance counselor.

Guess she didn't realize the two are not mutually exclusive.

My PC is one of the most used tools in my shop. It gets used for parts lookup, diagnostic, invoicing, communicating with customers, tax filing, etc.

In reply to mattm :

I've seen the same trends. I find that over the last decade or so, due to the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections IT is becoming more like it was in the '70s, highly centralized with fewer people. Instead of mainframes and dumb terminals, it's containerized cloud services and PCs being used almost as dedicated web browsing devices now.

I do have scripting skills including Python and working with REST APIs, and I've played around with lots of non-VMware virtualization, but one of the things I don't like about how things have changed is that modern IT work involves doing things increasingly irrelevant to personal computing, and the the less relevant the technology could be to an individual, the less interest I have in it. I could totally do Ansible with cloud-hosted container clusters, but they are useless to anything but a megacorporation or perhaps a government that's very hands-on with technology, and thus they bore me to tears. I've considered setting up Ansible to make managing my small handful of Linux computers easier but I haven't been convinced it's worthwhile for a small number yet. Mostly I only think about it when a patch for a severe vulnerability comes out and I'm running roughly the same apt-get commands on several computers back-to-back.

What I used to like about IT is that you could learn things that could be useful to you personally, and in turn your personal tinkering could feed back in to your job skills. If I wanted to do a job where I was guaranteed to only work on things that could put me to sleep and were useless to me I could just be a corporate tax accountant. To use a boating analogy, if you're a boat enthusiast who cobbles together watercraft and takes a hobie cat out on the weekends you might like working on a smallish sailboat, and you might lose interest if more and more jobs would have you working on an aircraft carrier's catapult or a giant cruise ship's sewage treatment plant all day. (Edit: Or sewage tank? I think cruise ships are more like giant RVs in terms of water & sewage systems. Anyway, let's just say a huge system with zero relevance to a sailing enthusiast).

AI I'm quite sure is a bubble, it's massively overvalued right now, all the AI companies are in a Groupon-like state of running entirely on investor funds, and we're in for another phase of "AI winter" within a few years. The last one lasted decades and I wouldn't be surprised if the next is just as long. Once executives realize that we aren't just a matter of months away from transitioning to an Advantageous/Elysium economy I expect a lot of jobs will come back too. I haven't found AI to be generally very useful for doing tech work so far. At my last tech job management had a massive boner for AI, asked all the tech workers in the company who was using it, everyone's response was "meh." When these topics came up I'd often point out the dangers of a potential Samsung-like incident of AI absorbing and potentially regurgitating sensitive information, especially at a healthcare company. One guy used ChatGPT to generate an SQL query that worked, it didn't really save any time, everyone thought that was kinda neat and went right back to not using it at all. Personally the only things I've thought AI might help me with is searching through images/video/audio by content and summarizing video content into text. I'd like to get a local LLM on my phone that can list image files when I search for, say, a picture of a red car (ideally, say, a picture of a red Camaro), but it hasn't been compelling enough for me to get around to it yet. I don't think those are very marketable AI skills. AFAIK the only AI skills that are marketable would be AI development (something I could dabble in at a hobbyist level, but it doesn't seem terribly interesting) or being able to sell yourself as a "prompt engineer."

Right now I'm really hoping I'll get a job at a local electronics repair shop I've applied to, it pays like my last tech job and it's a small company that could have a lot of use for my not-so-hot-right-now tech skills that megacorporations have outgrown.

In reply to wake74 :

Dang, Wake. What is your project? Multiple thousand head is a remarkable scale. 

93gsxturbo said:

mtn said:

In reply to Steve_Jones :

I dunno... Something is different nowadays. My experience: 
 

• 2012 - graduated college and immediately started a job. A little different as I had 2 college jobs and was looking for a year, but couldn't start until I graduated. Got the job in April.
• 2014/2015. Looking for more money, moved to get a new job. Search took 3 weeks to the offer.
• 2017 - wasn't really looking but applied to some. 4 weeks between start of applications and a new offer. 
• 2018 - laid off, first offer in 3 weeks, 2nd and 3rd offer in 5 weeks.
• 2021, looking for more money, offer in 4 weeks - I didn't take it, benefits sucked and netted me less money overall despite paying 15% more.
• 2023, laid off. 4 offers within 6 weeks
• 2024, I had to resign for personal reasons. I've now been job hunting in earnest for 12 weeks with nothing to show for it, not even an interview. 
   

Something is different this time around. Part of it is that I have been looking for more senior positions, which take longer to fill - harder for both parties to find the right fit... but these are not any more Senior than my last 2 positions.

 

Is that 6 jobs in 12 years?  Not to say I would round file your resume, but it would at least send up a flag that this person is one of a few options:

• Someone who isn't invested in continuous growth within the company, just looking for the pay and title bump
• Someone who oversells their abilities significantly
• Someone who is really tough to work with
• Someone who has other underlying issues that make them a prime candidate for first on the chopping block

 

If companies would actually give raises, people wouldn't look to leave. 

For example, we had a Q&A with three Senior VPs in our GBU last week. Nearly half of the 50 questions submitted were "If we are seeing double digit revenue and profit growth every year for the last 4 years............why is no one getting raises or RSUs?" We just got a bunch of corporate double-speak.

I haven't received a raise in two years or RSU's in 3, despite good performance reviews and constantly taking on special projects. 

In reply to z31maniac :

I worked at a hose shop that gave the shop guys a $1/hour raise every year.  

A new manager came in and figured he didn't have to give ANY raises so he made people fight to get a raise.  Take on more responsibility and you might get a raise.  If we had a good year the guys might get a $1000 bonus.  Maybe why the people didn't last?

Tool store I used to work at gave profit sharing. We all busted ass and more than a few times, my profit sharing cheque was bigger than my paycheck. 

Nepotism reared it's head and the owner's son-in-law was made the new general manager.

First thing he did was cut profit sharing and not bump anyone's salary up to compensate for it.

Ever seen an entire sales force decide to work just hard enough to not get fired?

Then the boy wonder decided that, since sales had dropped so sharply, we didn't need as many sales guys so he cut staffing.

Sales numbers kept dropping.

Boy wonder doesn't work there anymore.

I followed my old manager to the restoration shop he moved to since we were both into traditional hot rods at the time. 

ShawnG said:

Ever seen an entire sales force decide to work just hard enough to not get fired?

Just like Office Space. If you bust your ass to get more work done, take on special projects, mentor new writers..............and you aren't rewarded, then what is the motivation to keep doing so?