Hello cnc zone. Me and my brother had an interesting conversation today about younger generations in this trade. I'm fairly young(25 yrs) and my brother is 21. My brother comes up to me after shutin' her down this evening and asks, " dude why haven't we ever had anybody our age work here thats worth a ****?" I had no answer for him. I consider myself fairly decent at machining, especially for my age. I've been doing it for 10 years full time. Dropped out of highschool sophmore year and finished up my GED in homeschool .Needless to say I have a huge jump on 95%+ of people out there these days. Plus my dad is one hell of a machinist, programmer, and engineer. Although he has never spent much time teaching, when I have a question he has an answer.My dad is old school and figures he learned 99.9% of what he knows from trial and error or what have you, so figure it out !! We have had plent of people in there 20's that have worked for us in the last 26 years we have had the doors open. Most being saw bict*** or clean-up. Since I've been working full time, I only remember one kid that was HALF way decent. Smart kid, straight out of some CNC school. Didn't know a whole lot, but for the most part you could stick him on a job that required +/- .005 and he could generally make good parts. Not very impressive by any means, your typically machinist with a few years would have no problem with this. So my question, where does my generation stack up with older generations?? Don't be afraid to be brutally honest! I sometimes am ashamed of my generation. I have quite a few friends that have no clue what they want in life, what interests them for a career,etc...Seems like every generation gets worse in everyway, even outside of machining!! Where do you think USA manufactiring and machining will be in 10-15 years from now as the older generations retire??? Scary thought personally.. Just wondering if I am the only one that has little faith in machinist my age...