America Is Trying to Electrify. There Aren’t Enough Electricians

Anyway, hi, I'm bityard, please enjoy my rant.

The real story is that _all_ trades are suffering to find enough workers. Well, let me rephrase that. They are suffering to find enough _quality_ workers. In talking with friends in the industry, their main challenges are 1) An ever-shrinking pool of people interested in doing manual labor 2) Many of those that are interested, are "low-quality" employees with emotional, mental, or substance abuse problems, which disqualified them from white-collar or more prestigious blue-collar work. 3) Lots of people on HN will probably say, "Just pay them more! Problem solved!" Well, it's not that simple. First, _Good_ contractors _are_ paid decently. Second, if that's really your best solution, then I hope you are also ready to pony up $50,000 for a bathroom refresh that used to cost a mere $30,000.

I'm remodeling a house right now and in my area at least, the whole contracting industry here is a dumpster fire. I will place calls to 10 different companies, 5 will pick up the phone or return my call, 3 will come out for a quote, and 1 will actually set a date to come out and do the work. The days are gone where you have the luxury of interviewing 3 different contractors, checking their references, etc. You pretty much have no choice but to accept anyone who will actually _do_ the work, and pay whatever they ask, and hope they don't cut corners or welch out of the last 10-20% of the job (my biggest issue currently).

I actually looked into becoming an electrician once my tech career winds down, figuring I could capitalize on the solar boom plus my decent understanding of electrical work, wiring, and transmission. (Once you hit a certain age, the prospect of spending 40+ hours a week staring at a computer screen gets less and less appealing.) The problem is that unlike a tech job, you don't just go through some training, get a little work experience, and "become" an electrician. After your trade school training, there is a whole apprenticeship and licensing process you have to go through before you are even qualified. All told, you are in for just shy of a decade before you start earning anything decent and that's working 40 hours a week the whole time.

To put it simply: the path to being an electrician is so arduous that the only people who can make it work are those who are effectively starting their life (or starting it over) and commit the rest of their lives to the career. There's no room for those who are technically apt but want a change of scenery from another trade.

(Someone will probably say the path to becoming an electrician is hard on purpose, because when they screw up, people die. Let me just say that I've run into many fully-licensed electricians who had no business touching so much as a light switch in someone else's home, and have seen many dangerous and bone-headed things done by supposed professionals. For better or worse, the high temporal cost of the career seems to be mostly orthogonal to the quality of work produced.)

I have a dumb question but could you just find like a bone-headed unsavory character like an unemployed chronic-alcoholic felon that has a license but no work and just like work 'under their direction' and give them a 10% cut or something?