Off-Topic Alert!End of rant by a grumpy old man.
It's worse than you think. I hold two formal journeyman's ratings (luthier and machinist) as well as my license as a Registered Professional (Mechanical) Engineer. Companies today are expecting to pay
less in total dollars/hour here in the U.S. for skilled labor than they paid in 1986! They want you to sign up for contracts that have
insane delivery schedules. (I spent more than a year telling Boeing that the "contract" they wanted me to sign would be "sporty" as a nine month schedule (with a
year being realistic) -- and they wanted me to sign a contract promising delivery in
eight weeks! And, as I said, they spent a
year trying to get me to sign the eight-week delivery terms.) I can tell you as a
fact that Boeing was paying Accounting graduates more than twice what they would pay mechanical or aeronautical engineering graduates in
1986. I have been "told" (but do not know directly for myself), that this has gotten
worse in the intervening years.
As an apprentice machinist in a German-run tool & die shop in the 1960's I studied iron/steel and aluminum metallurgy. I then studied more general metallurgy in college. I have "passed" as a metallurgist at several companies (not, mind you, that I ever
billed myself as a metallurgist). I am
still good enough at
spark testing steel to tell you its carbon content within 0.5% that way. I was doing work for Microsoft a few years back when their Chinese suppliers had "substituted" 1045-1050 sheet steel for the (requested) 1015-1018 material -- and nobody there could figure out why it was constantly fracturing at bends! They (Microsoft) spent more than $5000 running tests to confirm what I told them for $1's worth of time (which explains a lot).
I spent most of yesterday working with a "machinist" who
did not know that there are standard sizes for a counterbore for a socket head cap screw! He
does not own a copy of
Machinery's Handbook,
The American Machinist's Handbook, or
any of the other standard handbooks on the subject. If it was not
pre-programmed into MasterCAM, it was a complete mystery to him!
Now, having said that, there
are hundreds of "kids" out there who are
hungry for real apprenticeships who
want to master their craft. I run into several every month in my work as a
consultant (though
I prefer the term
insultant). Small companies generally encourage such people. Large companies just about actively discourage such people. At least that is
my observation.