Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 436 posts

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#301

Post by danny_codes »

WarmWash wrote: post #141
jsrozner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things come to be only when the people with MONEY demand them. If you have no money your demand doesn't exist. A society this unequal serves only the rich (whether that's people or companies).

The 50-99% has twice the money of the 1%, and spends orders of magnitude more. If you want to know what is in demand, look at what nice neighborhood suburbanites are doing.

Are you including corporate spending and government spending, or just private spending? Because private spending for the 1% is largely irrelevant in this context.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#302

Post by someothherguyy »

HDBaseT wrote: post #295
kristov wrote: post #11

It's nice to hear tradespeople getting paid well with lots of work. I'm happy for them :-)

Tradespeople have always been getting paid well with lots of work. Most electricians will make more than the average sysadmin, senior developer or network engineer here. The amount of people getting into trades over the past decade has dropped drastically. There is no reason a fully qualified, even residential electrician cannot make 200k a year. Electricians aren't even the highest paid trade, plumbers are.

> There is no reason a fully qualified, even residential electrician cannot make 200k a year

Where?

BLS Data

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric...

"The median annual wage for electricians was $62,350 in May 2024. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $39,430, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $106,030."

Seems like there is overwhelming reason for one to not make $200k/year.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#303

Post by Johanx64 »

arkey wrote: post #259
krapp wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's in the context of describing false prophets? It makes sense. I see no evidence from the text that false prophets are being described. False prophets don't cast out demons and do miracles. I know the prior verse talks about false prophets (and do please give me a definition for that which doesn't encompass most Christians) but it's just an assumption on your part that this verse is exclusively talking about fals…

> These are people who seem to put in more effort than most, and are sincere in their belief. No, check this out: "have WE not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?" They are not sincere in their belief. Real Christians believe and rely in Christ and His work alone. The people this verse refers to are to the end clinging to their own merit and trying…

> Real Christians believe and rely in Christ and His work alone. The people this verse refers to are to the end *clinging to their own merit and trying to earn their salvation through their own works* rather than rely on Christ's perfect work on the cross.

Man, this is bloody convenient innit.

"Yo, amma big piece of shit, but lets be real here, ain't gonna self correct that shit by my own merit and by doing good work!

Hell nah!

All I have to do is nothing, uh, i mean, believe in Santa for he died on the cross. That's all!"

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#304

Post by throwitaway222 »

kvisner wrote: post #89

I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.

Yeah, because having Meta or OpenAI or Microsoft on your resume as an Electrician is basically blackballing yourself. /s

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#305

Post by nik282000 »

someothherguyy wrote: post #296
Mawr wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's at least two. Driving a car is fairly straightforward, the problems are all tractable. Can't imagine where I'd even start with automating the work of an electrician. Even something as basic as robots grabbing regular objects is intractable right now, much less handling wire. You'd have to have a project of massive scale that's designed specifically to aid automation and then have a fairly straightforward…

there are many levels of automation. electricians already use a lot of "automation" already: wire pullers, electric drivers, test equipment, soldering and crimping tools, conduit benders, pipe threaders, and so on. installation systems are currently made for humans, so one has to do some fantasizing to see a future where installs can be done completely by non-human agents or by automated orchestration of low skill hu…

While a lot of my tools are faster I would never call them automated. You stil have to put the wire in the crimp, you still have to measure the pipe and make the cut, you still need to put the head of the driver in the screw. The 'hard' part is still 100% on the human.

The only way to really automate electrical installation is at the source (ha), when the construction materials are manufactured. I can imagine some god awful system of snap-together conduit prefilled with conductor, and junction boxes with monster dip switches to replace manual connections. It will cost 10x the price of standard materials, and it will be horribly wastful, but the labour costs will be negligible if it can be done by a robot or unskilled labourer.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#306

Post by Johanx64 »

michaelfm1211 wrote: post #147
krapp wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>however, it is never explained as to how he waves a magic wand and fixes the many, many entirely man-made problems we have. It's explained in the Book of Revelations - Jesus comes back and kills everyone who isn't Christian (and actually most Christians too) with plagues and fire and violence and burns the world down to ashes. And then (something something multi-headed dragon something something Whore of Babylon) a…

An overwhelming number of Christians do not believe this and do not interpret Revelation in this way. The belief that "Jesus will come back and solve everything instantly" is only held by a minority of small 2nd Great Awakening groups and a few outspoken Evangelical groups, and is unique to theological traditions that arose in the United States. The official teachings of the Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, Anglic…

> An overwhelming number of Christians do not believe this and do not interpret Revelation in this way.

It's actually not that particularly relevant what Christians believe exactly (and they do believe that the world will be destroyed as-is), what's relevant is what the actual crazy book says.

And if you believe the book that says crazy things, or perhaps you cherry pick and interpret the crazy things to your liking and convenience - his point stands.

And the crazy book days say that the non Christians will burn (for eternity?) in flames of hell and that great many Christians won't be able to get through the narrow gate (and also be tortured to death in hot lava).

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#307

Post by throwitaway222 »

8note wrote: post #267
bluGill wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both have boom and bust cycles. They are different cycles, but they are still cycles. I wouldn't call either more stable than the other.

the real question is what booms when electrician work busts

oil

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#308

Post by notyourwork »

kvisner wrote: post #89

I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.

Stating the obvious to to an audience not here.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#309

Post by someothherguyy »

paul7986 wrote: post #219
Shitty-kitty wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen. What will happen is moving to higher and higher code representations. A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.

I am a UX Researcher, UX Design and Developer by trade since 2009. I don't know iphone development, python, any back end stuff and or in depth JS stuff. But, Codex does and just by typing I just published a startup in python in two weeks using Codex and it's iPhone app will be available soon. How do you not think AI will not destroy programming jobs if anyone can type to create anything they want or share your screen…

> How do you not think AI will not destroy programming jobs if anyone can type to create anything they want or share your screen with Codex and have it guide you via voice?

Extrapolate that to any other engineering or even medical discipline and you will understand that your conclusion has some flaws.

Re: A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

#310

Post by dismalaf »

kvisner wrote: post #89

I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.

The construction business is all boom and bust and always has been...
Post reply on HN