Get a trade, son

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, work, philosophy

From time to time I have the chance either to address a group of young people (grades 7-12), or to chat with a few who are wondering about "careers". I can summarize my remarks in two points:

• Learn both a trade and a profession. One of them will pay off.
• Make sure both are something you like doing; you'll be doing it for decades.
  

This is advice I gave myself, after developing it over quite a long time. I aimed twice at a career as a professional Geologist, and washed out both times. Fortunately, my trade of computer programming has usually paid the bills since 1968. So computer work is my "paying hobby" and Geology—really rockhounding—is my "real" hobby. I marvel at my good fortune sometimes.

My "next brother" (son #2 of 4; I am #1) went to a college that allowed one to design one's own curriculum, and finished with a BS degree in "Physics and Art History". Sometimes Physics paid the bills, but he was the proverbial struggling artist for 20+ years, then got a PhD and became an Archaeologist. He still makes a fair bit of cash illustrating books. Bro #3 is actually working his profession of Mechanical Engineer, while Bro #4 sometimes works gainfully as a Management Consultant, but usually can make a better living as a handyman and odd-job Carpenter.

I think I can say with some confidence that if computers had never been invented I'd be the poorest of the four. I don't have good mechanical or laboratory skills, so I'd probably be on some geological field team, logging mud or core for an oil drilling crew, living in a tent about half the time. Maybe I could be happy doing that, and I know folks who are. But I know I am delighted with my current trade/profession.

The computer business is a funny one. It is the youngest profession, but I've learned that much of it is not really a profession at all, in the sense that being a Physician or Lawyer are professions. Writing programs is a lot like carpentry: there is a limited set of "shapes" you can put together in a great number of ways. Two academics who consider programming as a craft or trade are Donald E. Knuth and John C. Reynolds.

Matthew B. Crawford is one who takes a broad view that coincides with my own. As he relates in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry into the Value of Work, his PhD in Political Philosophy was not so helpful at first, in gaining him a profession that he could stomach. He worked at a "think tank" for a few months before opening a motorcycle maintenance shop.

The philosopher at his workplace. In the absence of an author photo in the book, I found this image at his website.

Though his tone and voice are quite different, I have a gut reaction to his writing that I had upon reading Eric Hoffer's writing. Hoffer, the longshoreman-philosopher now a quarter century dead, chose gainful employment just a bit more strenuous even than wrestling with balky 'cycles. But I have the same reaction: "Here is a guy who knows what he is about."

As I wrote a few days ago, I had a stressful day repairing my oven. But I am gratified that it is working again (and quite well), and that I know a lot more about what makes it tick. I have to admit I am not a highly skilled home maintenance man, but I am at least persistent enough to do quite a lot of home fixing.

Surprisingly, after an opening chapter that dwells a bit on the rapidly shrinking number of "Shop" classes being offered in Secondary schools, Dr. Crawford's book doesn't mention the subject again. Instead it covers, at length, the relationship between white- and blue-collar work. Both "classes" are continually being dumbed down into routine task-mongering. But you can't dumb down the repair of a carburetor, the replacement of a faucet, or the exact diameter of a machined part.

One of the radio telescopes pictured here has my name on it…or rather in it. After getting my first degree in Geology, I was in the midst of a recession and poor job market, but managed to land a job as a trainee in the machine shop at Cal Tech. I made parts for a prototype of a high-precision radio telescope, which is in use as part of this array at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. I scratched my initials into one of the aluminum panels before it was glued (scratched side down) into place as part of the curved reflecting surface.

Crawford writes of the satisfaction of getting a motorcycle that arrived on a truck back into working order, and firing it up. When we first assembled the prototype radio telescope and got it working, the satisfaction was immense. And when a computer program one has slaved at for some days, weeks or months "goes" for the first time, the high is the same.

Shop Class ends with a survey, a plea really, for a more ideal society in which jobs that have to be done "where you are" are seen as intrinsically valuable, where the genuine intellectual gifts of the skilled mechanician are not slighted in favor of those of the smooth-handed academic. In other words, it is a plea for a genuine meritocracy.