[carlosjobim]

Blue collar means spending your youth with tough physical labour surrounded by grumpy men to make some even angrier old man richer - while your friends are in college partying with fun girls and making contacts for easy jobs. Some people can be successful in a blue collar career, but the odds are you'll be abused, dogged and low paid. For that experience, you are better off spending your youth in the hospitality business, where you'll at least have fun workmates.

Blue collar work is the back bone of our material world, but I just cannot see it as a smart choice for a 16 year old. There is a lot of crap attitude among blue collar workers, and if you don't fit in culturally you'll be miserable, even if you're good at your job. Maybe things will have changed in a couple of years, who knows? But the skills are great to learn and know!

Starting a business is very sound advice for those who have it in them. Learning skills by working for yourself gives you a better paying business, while learning skills by working for somebody else gives them a better paying business. But you need to know at least something if you want to have a real business.

[antibasilisk]

>while your friends are in college partying with fun girls and making contacts for easy jobs

Most of those people are making extremely bad life decisions and you will be significantly more wealthy before they've even left college. The best way to make money is to have money, you have a massive edge if you literally just start working early, live with your parents and stay the hell away from debt. It's a simple formula, and it's how I managed to climb my way into the middle-class.

A good thing about blue-collar is that it will make you tough and keep you fit, and you will also learn to socialize properly with people from different generations, as well as being able to absorb whatever experience they might have gained over the decades they've lived.

[mythrwy]

But I know so many grumpy old engineers and IT people!

Every job has it's hazards. I say try a number of them myself. Manual work is good for people, especially young people (in my opinion). I don't know about 30 years of back breaking labor though.

[carlosjobim]

> Manual work is good for people, especially young people (in my opinion).

I complete agree! Manual work is great for the mind and spirit. That's why gyms and sports became so popular in the 80s and forward. But getting a job in manual labour, odds are much higher that you will be doing the back breaking stuff - or working for an asshole boss. That inverts the situation and the work becomes bad for the mind and spirit.

Manual work is best done for yourself, or being the boss, or for a good company with decent pay if you're extremely lucky to find it. I'd switch IT to manual work in a heartbeat if it came with competitive pay and some decency and respect in the workplace.