I'm honestly going to say tech
without hesitation if you're including coding/software as IT.
Before I got into tech (software engineer) I was going into trades as a carpenter/construction (this was around 2011).
I'll tell you straight up with trades when the market goes bad it's an olympic task to get work or get your foot into the door. You go to job site after job site early af in the morning to prove yourself only for them to say there's no work and there are only limited job sites per each city. The pay at the start is also horrible. Now gas prices are worse than they've ever been, yet it doesn't sound like the salaries have changed that much.
Tech ain't limited in that aspect to location so that's a big plus as well. This is supposed to be a bad era in big tech yet folks getting jobs working remote from around the world and recruiters stay contacting people with legit job opportunities.
I used to be a carpenter. I now make twice a much money doing something else. There is something wrong with building houses all day and not being able to afford one yourself.
41 years old, been in the steel trades since I was 17. Started as a welder, and have advancing into nondestructive testing. Every year I read about a “ shortage of welders “, however, look on indeed and most jobs are sub $20 per hour. That was alright back in 99 when fast food paid $5.15, now they pay $15. Not much less. Its not a shortage of tradesmen, it’s a shortage of people willing to pay them.
A lot of trade related jobs have TOXIC work environments. Trades imo attract some of the nastiest people around. I worked many jobs where my co workers would literally only talk about drugs, alcohol, racism, degrading women etc. and they are so arrogant and don’t want to teach you anything. This happened to me plenty of times, I’d ask they needed help or ask for work and they’d fly me off and be like “oh go ask someone else” so I’d spend the day cleaning and not learning. It’s so hard to come across decent people and I don’t like all the negative people in the trades.
I am a residential HVAC Technician. The biggest issue I found, at least for my area, is that no one wants to pay for your skills. How are new guys, who are not teenagers living at home, supposed to just accept multiple years of low to mediocre wages, drop thousands of dollars on tools and night classes, AND provide for their family?
The short version of my experience was dropping 7k my first year between classes and tools, making mediocre to low wages for the first two years despite working my heart out off the clock to learn, being stabbed in the back by my first boss for respectfully informing him I would be looking elsewhere despite staying almost two months after to help him through a rough time in his company before I left, and being lowballed by every HVAC company I applied at.
I ended up pivoting into apartment maintenance because they paid a lot more for HVAC skills compared to actual HVAC companies. I love HVAC but I am having a hard time with the HVAC companies. I am just feeling discouraged, and I know I am not alone on this. Something needs to change, or these issues we see in the industry are only the tip of the iceberg.
The sad reality is. There's two classes in America these days. The fat lazy class who works from home on their computer in a trendy flat, making 5k a month, who are free to travel the world and save their whole lives and retain their health. VS. the poor tradesmen who run their bodies hard, take emotional and physical abuse day in and day out from their job in all types of weather many times risking their life, and at the end of the day- barely have enough money to support a 2 child family. It's like WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THIS shyt?
Maybe when food isn't getting to the grocery stores, and homes stop getting built, and cars stop running, and power lines stop going back up. Maybe then people will realize what the value of tradesmen actually is- not $15-30 dollars an hour, more like $50-70
Read the comments.
Now there's money in the trades, don't get me wrong but you have to be realistic if that's something you can do and will want to put in the extra amount of time into doing. It's good money when you start cooking. To get to that point though you'd probably need to be assertive.
Plus think about the physical aspect and trades aren't immune to automation/3D printing/robots/etc.
That said, you got to either love tech, be dedicated to it or be good at it to stay in it long enough in order to land a job (probably about 2-3 years of coding).
I think Medical/Nursing vs Tech is a better discussion. The former ain't easy but you'll practically always have a good paying job that automation won't be replacing.
These questions can’t be real.
