Canada

I'm always amazed at how rarely the "go to uni and get a good job" angle is brought up in relation to our failing foundational industries in the west. We've been incentivizing people to focus on "escaping" the working class, rather than trying to find ways to make those jobs more appealing.

I work in healthcare. Treating student practitioners badly is the norm in a ton of places in this field. 60 hour work weeks are normalized, and wanting a good work-life balance gets you ostracized.

The worst part is that I had to compete to get into this job that treats me badly. My program only takes the top 20 applicants out of hundreds per year. The schooling is brutal, with midterm or final exams 2-3 times a week. This is possible because you are blowing through courses consecutively rather than in a semesterized system. Once you get to practical placement, you are treated like the workplace bitch, and you're expected to do 2-3x the work of a paid worker for free. Actually, you're paying tuition to be there, so it's even worse.

Don't get me wrong, some of the brutality is necessary. The rapid pace of learning makes it hard to forget anything. It's a great way to pack knowledge into the brain. But I would never recommend my program to anyone. It was a horrible experience overall. My job is pretty great minus the ridiculous hours, so I'm glad I went. But if I could go back and tell my younger self to do something else, I would.

Great summary of the industry. My family ran a small time contracting business, nothing major and our budgets was in the thousands rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands.

I learned a little bit of every trade and over the years we got connected with bigger companies and we could see just how terrible it was to work for them. They workers there always bragged about the money they made .... but if you spent time with them, you quickly figured out that their high paying job was temporary and they would go into long periods of low pay or no pay at all.

A saying I learned from one of the old timers is ...

'They hire us from the neck down' ... they don't want thinking workers or anyone to talk back, just put your head down, don't disagree and do the work. If you don't, they'll make your life miserable .... if you complain some more, they'll you let go, taken off, no longer needed or just fired.

I decided never to join any of these companies. I just did small time work for myself, small projects and made money only for myself. Keeping a low profile for almost 30 years and now I own multiple small properties and I have no debt. I'm not wealthy but I own everything I have.