People telling all the software devs to learn a trade:
Oh, you really, really don't know how hard the boomers have actually made it to do that, at least in the US, probably elsewhere.
Almost none of them want to hire apprentices without schooling (which is expensive as fuck, and arguably unnecessary, given the entire trades system is SUPPOSED to be an alternative), and even WITH school people come up against walls like "$12/hr starting pay" and/or "need 5 years experience." Because these places are run by Boomers so wildly divorced from the cost of living they truly don't get it. They are like fully incapable of understanding.
Boomers genuinely, honest to god, do not want to train anyone. They will sooner die with a pipe wrench in their hand than train new people. They just want experience to fall into their lap like magic and make it "someone else's problem."
Elizabeth
in reply to Elizabeth • • •I considered becoming an apprentice machinist.
Everyone wanted 2-5 years of experience, FOR A FUCKING APPRENTICE. The starting pay was basically $20 an hour, which in Seattle is "we would pay you less but we legally cannot do so" wages.
I did find a place willing to do $29/hr and train from scratch, but they wanted 80+ hours a week of work. Plus looking online I found accusations of wage theft. Plus non-union. Hard pass.
Every shop pays women and trans people like dogshit compared to the cis men. Every single trans person and every single woman I know who's worked in the trades here has complained of a MASSIVE pay gap between the cis men in the shop even BELOW them and their own position.
Riley S. Faelan
in reply to Elizabeth • • •FWIW, the psychology behind wage discrimination is pretty weird.
A lot of people believe wage-paying to not be a side of a commercial transaction, as the capitalism's official doctrine says, but funding of a lifestyle "appropriate" to the labourer's social standing. And at that point, all the sexist and classist ideas about what kind of people "deserve" what levels of living come in. Oftentimes, #WageTheft is "justified" by the same mechanism: since laws require paying a Designated Poverty-Deserving Person(tm) more than poverty wage, a manager believes the laws to be wrong and deserving to be ignored. You never see a major company's CEO's wage being thieved: #Patriarchy's ideas about a CEO's expected lifestyle say that he [sic] deserves everything that he can get.
Authoritarian ideologies don't just do "It's impossible to do X, therefore it's very important to harshly punish everybody who does X", they also go "Inequity happens naturally, theferore we must work hard to ensure that inequity happens".
#RWA #SDO #DoubleHigh