Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative, and they are certainly things that society needs.
I hear this kind of thing, but I have to say it is less than convincing when most of the people saying it don't seem to be sending their kids to trade school.
Based on my only social contact working in trades, the income follows a bathtub distribution - a lot of people taking below average, and a sizable minority getting upper middle class incomes, with almost nothing in between. This is the reason why we get the contradictory narratives of great fortunes in trades on one hand, and the statistics telling the opposite on the other hand.
Allegedly, the talent pool is really shallow - with a modicum of intelligence, passion and human skills, it's not that hard to make it. But most of the guys who end up studying trades are the bottom of the barrel who would do badly in any endeavor (or so I was told).
The caveat there is definitely whether the person then has the entrepreneurial drive to get the trade qualifications and start their own business with it. You're not going to be wealthy by any means of the definition by either becoming a plumber or an electrician working for another company. No way in hell, I know many of these people, as well as many carpenters both working their own business, or working for another company. I know one neighbor carpenter who owns his own carpentry/cabinetry business doing just well enough for himself, while another neighbor frames really nice houses and doesn't make nearly as much but does much harder work.
Then, I have a couple good examples of some guys with absolutely no education whatsoever who decided to start their own cleaning services by powerwashing restaurant kitchens, doing deep cleaning. These guys doing this cleaning gig the past few years are raking in $1k cash per night, 6-7 nights a week and making more cash hand over fist than a doctor makes. It's obvious to see what is the real underlying factor in all cases. Drive, motivation, and a go-getter attitude is what it takes. Plenty of people with degrees work at coffee shops and retail positions because after schooling, they expected a job to just drop in their laps but they have no go get it attitude from the start.
I have family in all of those professions. They're doing fine financially-- some of their kids went to college and some of them continued with the trade.
The biggest difference is the ebb and flow of available work. There were some months which were good, _really_ good, and others which were quite lean. Because of this, budgeting was an important skill to have.
Well, my logic is: if you go to university (ideally STEM) and have a modicum of practical skills, how hard really is it to become a plumber later in life? I'd imagine plumbing studies are shorter, some stuff you can probably transfer over from your university studies and you can probably apprentice reasonably easily somewhere.
Yes, and imagining is what is actually happening here, because you clearly do not understand plumbing (or any of the trades).
The studies aspect of it are the least part overall. Good plumbers (and electricians and builders) get good primarily through a delightful combination of attitude and experience. The experience comes from apprenticing early, and accumulating lots of "stories" along the way as a result of having to work in a large number of different contexts.
You will get none of this while working on your STEM career, and you will likely find that most plumbers (and electricians and builders) will be reluctant to take you on as an apprentice later in life without overwhelming evidence that you'd be remarkably good at it.
Yeah, this. The old guy on the job site knows more "tricks of the trade" than you will pick up in a trade school. Experience is paramount here.
It's easy to watch a youtube video on something and think that it looks easy -- until you try it. I can sweat pipes but I'd wager that 10% of them have a pinhole leak when pressurized for the first time. If it was something that I did on a daily basis, over years, I surely would get better at it. Now try doing one through a small opening in the sheetrock, and don't burn anything.
When I'm working on stuff in my house, that's when I call a professional because I recognize my limits.
The professionals have the same attitude about their trade as we do about (from your post) python. EG... no matter what required work is, I'm 99.9999% confident I can have it working in very little time. It's all that experience/confidence in the field that let's a good engineer give the warm-and-fuzzy feeling to a client. The client _knows_ you are going to knock it out of the park, because that's your level of familiarity and the confidence you project.
A professional tradesmen _knows_ he can show up to your home/business and fix your problem(s) with 99.999% certainty.
>no matter what required work is, I'm 99.9999% confident I can have it working in very little time.
If it is your first time it is going to take much, much longer. If the only way to learn is on the job then you must have an experienced plumber by your side, otherwise you're going to bill 4 hours for a 1 hour job because you are not fast enough. Your first year is going to suck or you only ever do the same few skills you have learned by taking a risk. A botched job may have a much higher impact than a bug in a CRUD app (there are always exceptions).
It means if you were doing 5 of these tasks a day, for 250 working days a year, you'd expect only a 50% chance of finding a task too curly to do easily in the first 550 years of your working life.
I feel like there's very few people, in any field, who've earned that level of confidence.
Working with your hands is a practical skill that takes significant time and effort to become good at. I, personally, am terrible at it. I am highly educated, though. There are what, maybe 2.5 school years of degree related work in a STEM degree? That’s pretty comparable to an apprenticeship.
Many trades and plumbing in particular have a large complement of contortionism. I do a small amount of home owner plumbing, but I wouldn't be likely to do it as a second career because pretzeling to get to the sink fasteners gives me aches for a week; and I'm not going to dig out underground pipes in easy soil, but around here it's all rocky stuff.
If I was apprenticing 20 years ago, the pretzel work would be fine, and I would probably be more willing to dig.
I hear this kind of thing, but I have to say it is less than convincing when most of the people saying it don't seem to be sending their kids to trade school.