Where are all the younger folks?

Duke said:

STM317 said:

If you can't fill the job, you're not paying enough.

While that's true on the face of it, money is not necessarily the prime motivator it once was.

There are more people willing to accept a lower income for a better work / life balance these days.  And 'quality of life' is not as financially based any more.  It may not be feasible to pay enough to overcome that.

Not a better or worse thing; just a new reality that the economy must adapt to.

 

Yea, it's very much people are all lazy, it's that they value their effort and time off differently. Someday that may change, but clearly people are willing to live "less" as a trade off for a good life. 

In reply to alfadriver :

At my last job I would've much preferred more vacation time over a raise. Bumping my pay $100k, on the other hand, wouldn't have made me hate the job one iota less.

Duke said:

STM317 said:

If you can't fill the job, you're not paying enough.

While that's true on the face of it, money is not necessarily the prime motivator it once was.

There are more people willing to accept a lower income for a better work / life balance these days.  And 'quality of life' is not as financially based any more.  It may not be feasible to pay enough to overcome that.

Not a better or worse thing; just a new reality that the economy must adapt to.

 

If quality of life is the motivator over money, no problem. Just don't bitch that you can't buy a house, car, etc because they're too expensive. Choices have consequences, less money means you lose out on some things that others can afford. Don't blame them for your choice. 

I would take a 20% pay cut if I could work from home 95% of the time and only come in to the office when it's really needed.

Economic nihilism is a real thing, especially for the under 40 crowd.

If you're:

A) Loaded with college debt, that you feel like you'll never get out from under.

B) Watching housing prices go into the stratosphere and not react to interest rate hikes (we can argue that cheap money for as long as we had it was a bad thing but that's a different conversation).

C) Watching food, rent, insurance, and healthcare go through the roof at the same time.

It's super easy just to check out, decide that puritanical work ethic is bullE36 M3, and figure you'll just enjoy what little luxury you can afford instead of feeling like you're being squeezed for more and more productivity by a system that would happily grind you into a Soylent if it meant the line went up.

In reply to The0retical :

I agree. 
 

I felt the same way in the 1980's. 

I'm up to 5 tries in the past 3 years to hire another person. Essentially the pay is good, but most would rather make  25 percent of the money for 10 percent of the work.

I can't say I 100 percent blame them since money is #3 on my list of reasons why I do this but......these are people that are going nowhere in life. 3-4 roommates, unreliable cars and no future.

There's a happy median between balls-out working and part time, I'm trying to straddle that line and mostly achieve it.

Also I read that 62 is the median age of a construction worker now across all fields. That's kinda scary

In reply to Antihero :

That's terrifying 

I'm "Senior Supernintendo" for a CM company over a multi-phase, multi-building industrial/commercial project that I'm on my 6th year running. I have no idea what the average age of worker is on my sites, but I do feel that there's a shift in attitude in the [only] 18ish years I've been in the Commercial Construction world, that I'd best describe as a loss of pride in their work on the part of a lot of the trades. There are young people coming into the trades, but they seem to generally care a lot less about the quality or pace of the work they're doing. Meanwhile the old hands just bitch and moan about having to follow all the safety rules and adhere to schedules that are twice as tight as what they had 20 years ago, so it's not like they're making it sound appealing as a career.

I could go on for pages about why construction, specifically, isn't hiring the best and brightest, but broadly it's all been said already in this thread. No work from home flexibility, not at all "easy" and a general lack of "time off" whether in the form of PTO, or just not getting the "minor" holidays off. You know how many times my buddies in finance or who work for a govt/municipality ask "what are you up to Monday?" and then get confused when I say "working" because it's some holiday that they can't even fathom working on? Meanwhile, I didn't even realize it was a holiday. 

The trend we (CM firm) are seeing across a lot of our trades, and a lot of our projects is the work day/work week is getting shorter and shorter. When I started, (4) 10's and an 8 were fairly standard in the "busy" part of a project. Now we have critical path trades, behind schedule, barely working (5) 8's. And by barely, I mean they're really not. And it seems a lot of them border on mutiny from the crews if they start forcing any overtime. 

In reply to Antihero :

Yeah it will take a special kind of person to want to do 10x the work for 4x the money. Maybe post up some job ads inside casinos?

SV reX said:

In reply to Antihero :

That's terrifying 

The 62 part, or the rest?

To me it's all of it. If I had my way we'd work 6-7 hour days all the time too, as long as we finish the task for the day I don't care how long we work. I also in these cases pay by the day.

One complained that 6 hours was too much

Another complained that working 6 hours and making half of what their last jobs 2 week paycheck was, " not really working hard enough"

Another said that their wife really needed to make sure he was out of the house every day and since we don't like to work in the rain he couldn't schedule such a life. He took a job that pays him half of what he made with me, but " he can work all the overtime he wanted"

Another would not stop drinking and driving , then going to jail.

Another was super pissy that my wife works with us at times " women shouldn't be on the job site".

So yeah .....

GameboyRMH said:

In reply to Antihero :

Yeah it will take a special kind of person to want to do 10x the work for 4x the money. Maybe post up some job ads inside casinos?

Lol, I don't think I'm explaining it well

Instead of $40 an hour for 30 hours outside, he wanted to sit inside with a/c for $10 an hour for 40 hours doing basically nothing

" Because no one can do construction for more than 5 years without dying"

Antihero said:

GameboyRMH said:

In reply to Antihero :

Yeah it will take a special kind of person to want to do 10x the work for 4x the money. Maybe post up some job ads inside casinos?

Lol, I don't think I'm explaining it well

 

Instead of $40 an hour for 30 hours outside, he wanted to sit inside with a/c for $10 an hour for 40 hours doing basically nothing

" Because no one can do construction for more than 5 years without dying inside"

I fixed it for you (him). He's right. I'm totally dead inside, at this point. 

In reply to Spearfishin :

Then you aren't working at the right place lol

Going to work is fun for us, that's one of the prerequisites for me for doing my own stuff

In reply to Spearfishin :

That is very much my observation as well.

Used to be that almost everybody in the trades busted ass when they could work, to bank against when they couldn't.  Weather, job delays, whatever.  If you can lay block this week you put in 60 hours, because next week it's supposed to rain and you don't get paid unless you're laying block.

I'm sure that's still the case, but it doesn't seem as commonplace as it used to be.

Hey everybody, I found the outrage of the week!

Antihero said:

In reply to Spearfishin :

Then you aren't working at the right place lol

Going to work is fun for us, that's one of the prerequisites for me for doing my own stuff

It was half tongue-in-cheek. But some days, some projects, some owners, some trades foremen, even coworkers, etc; they each have a way of sometimes taking a toll. And sometimes they all line up and kick you right in the nuts all on the same day. 

In reply to Antihero :

The 62 part (but I also think it's not quite accurate)

Yesterday I stopped at a convenience store and two young kids on their bike exclaim: Nice Porsche man! We like it.

I replied: Thanks, and thanks for knowing what one is, not many kids are into cars now a days.

They asked if they could take a picture and I showed them the clear engine cover. They loved it.

Today, two kids on bikes hooted and hollered when I drove by them. I gave them 7k rpm rev as I could not give more because I was in a 20mph zone. The sweet banshee sound from the SPP exhaust made them cheer.

Not all kids are lost.

Appleseed said:

Hey everybody, I found the outrage of the week!

This is actually a discussion, not just an outrage.

Spearfishin said:

Antihero said:

In reply to Spearfishin :

Then you aren't working at the right place lol

Going to work is fun for us, that's one of the prerequisites for me for doing my own stuff

It was half tongue-in-cheek. But some days, some projects, some owners, some trades foremen, even coworkers, etc; they each have a way of sometimes taking a toll. And sometimes they all line up and kick you right in the nuts all on the same day. 

Oh I get it, you might have seen my rants fairly recently in the Minor Rants thread.

If there's one thing that will make me stop doing construction, it's the homeowners that I have to deal with at times. Usually I'm good at sniffing out the douchebaggery before I take the job but sometimes I miss it.

SV reX said:

In reply to Antihero :

The 62 part (but I also think it's not quite accurate)

It could be not accurate, I can say up here it's definitely plausible.

I met a guy that's still finishing concrete at 80 recently.

berkeley me, I'm not doing that

In reply to Duke :

Give it time.

SV reX said:

dclafleur said:

Wayslow said:

I teach electrical theory and industrial electronics to electrical apprentices at a community college a couple of evenings a week. There's been a major uptick in the interest in getting into the trades in the last few years. We still have a hard time finding drywallers, tapers, masons, concrete workers and any of the other so called mud trades. These are still good paying jobs that are either going wanting or being filled by temporary foreign workers.

It's easy to say "good paying jobs" what's the dollar amount? First Year, how much does one expect to earn?  I find a lot of these jobs are long on promise, short on payout, especially given how physically demanding they are. I'll add that if it isn't enough to get by on and live well you're going to have a hard time recruiting people who can get an easy job that they can't get by on vs a hard job they can't get by on.

I answered this one earlier.
 

The average starting wage in construction in my state is 3X the average starting wage in the state.  

Within this thread, I haven't seen you list an actual dollar per hour wage. I'm familiar with the Columbus/Phoenix city area so curious what that $ value is vs say the salary of a kid who graduates from Auburn. 

I was talking to a freelance photographer younger guy that told me he does just enough to get by.  He moves his hand across the air in a horizontal fashion telling me that's it.  No more. 

Just enough to get by - some folks have no ambitions I guess.