[AngryData]

Its a race to the bottom in a lot of trade jobs and why a lot of people who are skilled and attention detailed left trades if they can't get into a union. It is hard to compete doing a good job when they guys who do a crappy job out number them and will bid on the same jobs making the same claims that they are skilled and good. But only after the money is spent do people find out whether the guy they hired can back those claims up. And even if they do more have money to fix it later with a different guy, the botch job made the fix even harder and they usually have less money to spend to fix it.

[codelikeawolf]

Yeah this is a totally fair point. I suppose it's indicative of a greater trend I've been noticing as the years have gone by: standards have lowered because the highest quality work has become prohibitively expensive. But the thing that bothers me with the trades is that it doesn't actually _cost_ that much more to do a better job. I don't really know what the solution is, because it seems like this is societal. When I was an industrial electrician, the quality of my work was unaffected by my hourly rate. I took pride in what I did, I wanted to be good at it, and I strived for quality because it made me feel good to do a good job. I still feel that way about what I do. I guess I'm a little bummed out that it's hard to find people like that, especially since I'm willing to compensate them appropriately.

[raincom]

It is like consulting/offshoring business: one competent person, with 10 underlings who can add 80 billable hours a day. That's what happened to trades too: one really competent with many underlings.