41–50 of 436 posts
Before you decide to change jobs - the demand in electricians is caused by a temporary massive construction boom of data centers. Maintaining an already built data center doesn't require much personnel. It's a clickbait article.
I would have thought this would be about electricians and carpenters with camera's on their heads to train AI. Apparently not yet. Imagine robots (humanoids or something more specialized) building datacenters...
Those prefab factories may not exist though, and companies want to build out now before the market is mature, instead of a long-term play.
There are a few Data Centers going up within a couple hours of me, it has pulled all of the trades people away from us. I've called around to every electrician I can find online, or been recommended by neighbors, they are all out of town for the foreseeable future. Same with HVAC and to a lesser extent plumbers. I've had to learn a lot of skills this summer trying to get some repairs done on my house, and I've had to…
Quotes for other stuff like hardwood floor installation and finishing—a job I'd personally consider harder and requiring greater skill than installing a mini-split in a totally uncomplicated setting—was extremely cheap by comparison.
This is horrible. AI industry is sucking the economy dry of resources and labor, making everything more expensive who is not an AI company.
Things come to be only when there's demand for them. Nothing else makes the capitalist pay the worker or expand any business. AI providing the missing demand might be the thing that will push our infrastructure industries into XXI century. Because everywhere except China infrastructure seems to be stuck in the 70-ties of the previous one.
Before you decide to change jobs - the demand in electricians is caused by a temporary massive construction boom of data centers. Maintaining an already built data center doesn't require much personnel. It's a clickbait article.
> Before you decide to change jobs Trades work is hard. Traveling to a far away job site every day and doing physical labor in a building that isn’t heated or cooled yet is the complete opposite of our comfortable office or remote tech jobs. If you’re dreaming about escaping meetings and annoying coworkers, imagine if most of the people you work around aren’t your coworkers at all. They’re other trades people from ot…
And lots of tradespeople do very well. Many of the bigger houses round here have work vans in the drives. Many of them are landlords too with significant assets. My street is slowly filling up with rentals, mostly by landlord tradespeople.
I was just chatting to a retired one yesterday at the station and he said he was going to have an extremely good retirement until he got divorced and she took half of everything.
Before you decide to change jobs - the demand in electricians is caused by a temporary massive construction boom of data centers. Maintaining an already built data center doesn't require much personnel. It's a clickbait article.
As a preface, in Texas, anyone in Texas can apprentice as an electrician if one is willing to pay $50 for a license. This requires one to work for a master electrician and generally as a helper for a journeyman. After 8000 hours (4 years), one can take a journeyman exam. As as a journeyman, one can work solo day to day, but still must work under a master electrician. After 4000 additional hours (2 years) and passing the master electrician exam, one can become a master and work fully independently. Most states are similar, but they are licensed independently.
A few guys dropped out of the program to apprentice. They were getting paid $16/hour to haul parts for home generator installs. Journeyman pay was around $30-40/hr depending. We were told that journeyman union pay in large metros like Chicago was about $50/hr. I'm not sure if any pay differential exists for master electricians if they are doing solo work. The real money in electrical work was by becoming a master electrician because then you could hire journeyman and apprentices to work for you and tax their labor. As with any job, the technical training does not prepare one to run a business and some people are good at it and some aren't. However, at the end of the day, it's capitalism. One generally becomes wealthy by having other people do work for you and you keeping a portion of that labor. It doesn't matter if it's electrical work, yard work, or computing.
Anyway, if one wants to become an electrician, great! However, you're almost certainly not going to get rich from it. I met some guys who followed some of the disaster/building booms running communication wires and they all got stiffed on their promised pay. That doesn't mean you will, but please don't think it's guaranteed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's good. It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor. Projects I work on have seen prices soar. I don't consider building the things everyone hates because they promise concentration of wealth and an attack on labor at the expense of building literally anything else to be somehow a big W for labor because a few people get a slightly higher temporary paycheck. Ask the Wagyu cows how they fee…
There's sort of no winning here! AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class! AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
> AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
Come on, you've got to know it's not going to employ those "unionized middle-class workers" for long. Their jobs are sort of like these jobs: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-... ("people participat[ing] in feeding their own careers into the A.I. wood chipper...Many people who contract for these companies understand that this is a short-term opportunity...before they themselves are automated out of the job").
And yeah, there's "sort of no winning" when you're gobbling up resources to build stuff people don't like.
It's nice to hear tradespeople getting paid well with lots of work. I'm happy for them :-)
Yes, that's good. It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor. Projects I work on have seen prices soar. I don't consider building the things everyone hates because they promise concentration of wealth and an attack on labor at the expense of building literally anything else to be somehow a big W for labor because a few people get a slightly higher temporary paycheck. Ask the Wagyu cows how they fee…
Could you be more specific? Things are still competitive in the large commercial electrical market I am bidding in, if you’re bidding to make more than 10-15% you’ll get underbid by someone willing to accept a lower profit margin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's good. It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor. Projects I work on have seen prices soar. I don't consider building the things everyone hates because they promise concentration of wealth and an attack on labor at the expense of building literally anything else to be somehow a big W for labor because a few people get a slightly higher temporary paycheck. Ask the Wagyu cows how they fee…
There's sort of no winning here! AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class! AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
What cheap labour? Tradespeople are not cheap (especially if you factor in the quality of the work). This just makes them even more expensive. Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive. Pretty important