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.
Industrial electricians have always been in the boom-bust cycle.
IBEW (Union electricians) have been doing really well this decade. Another option if you don't want to be a contractor or an Anthropic employee. But they've also gone years without enough work to go around.
At least in NYC IBEW has mandatory furlough, months without work, etc.
And the members are stuck because they will get fined if they work for a non union place.
Especially since most of our automotive electrification is still ahead of us in most developed countries so there will be plenty of work that requires work across residential, commercial, and infrastructure.
That doesn’t mean your specific local market won’t be cyclical though. As usual the electricians in higher densities metros will probably do better with aggregate demand.
On a third hand, electricity is just movement of electrons.
While DC is driving electrons down the line, AC is basically just when you vibrate them around.
Anyway my point is the field (no pun intended) may change drastically in the increasingly electrified future. I'm personally excited for more wireless power in areas, and the concept of ambient energy - harvesting power out of the already vibrating electrons in the static in the air.
DC is super weird that way... The actual velocity of an electron down that line is, offhand, extremely slow compared to the speed of light.
Think of DC more like you're trying to pump a frozen ice mixture drink (trying to avoid any of the major brand names) down a straw. If you melt it, that's loss to heat. If the pressure gets there that's DC current.
The AC vibrations are the same thing except it's like the lever action on a steam locomotive. Translating the motor's spin into a back and forth wave in the line.
This is why AC is rather useful for making other things spin or vibrate to the point of being emissive.
Wireless power and ""ambient energy"" are incompatible with real physics.
Sure, they're real phenomena that actually do exist, but the physics are such that they're almost entirely useless beyond extremely specific and very limited applications.
These things have been known and studied for decades now, and the best use we have is charging your phone when you set it down on a special pad. Energy harvesting applications are good for sending a single radio packet once a week. It's just fundamental limitations of the universe.
Anyone excited about wireless power or energy harvesting hasn't read any further than "wireless power and energy harvesting". They aren't what you think they are.
> the best use we have is charging your phone when you set it down on a special pad
Wouldn't sell that short
> It's just fundamental limitations of the universe
You don't know what's possible and what isn't - who's to say they cannot figure out a way to tap into adjacent ambient energy, and so-on?? You might tap into a connection that is miles long, or mere feet long. It depends on how much you need.
Sure, but these also aren't professions that will disappear when data center demand goes down or will get automated away in the long term.
I’d go as far as to say that for someone in their teens electrician (or trades in general) is a more stable long term career path than software engineer.
I know several electricians and they all have been through cycles if they have been around for more than a decade. Things never drop down to zero though, so sometimes they see their buddies without a job while they are still working.
> these also aren't professions that ... will get automated away in the long term
sure they will, all it takes is automating running wire and making connections. when the cost is low enough to do so, it will happen.
drones are already used to somewhat automate line inspection, etc.
imo, there are plenty of companies attempting to automate traditional trade jobs, and increasing automation for knowledge roles in those companies will accelerate those initiatives.
It doesn't sound to me like you've pulled much wire. I'm sure there will be a point in time when that sort of thing can be automated, but it's at least an order of magnitude more difficult a problem than driving a car.
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 robot doing the work.
"Send a robot to arbitrary location X and do arbitrary electrician job Z" is fantasy land.
the datacenter demand wouldn't evaporate, it will probably change instead - i expect that the datacenters will soon be built like pre-fab homes or like the Liberty ships - the fastest ship was built in less than 5 days.
In such a module-based construction you can optimize layout and the fabrication sequence so that the labor is minimized and simplified - like for example you'd be simply laying down wire instead of running it.
Thus the modules can be fabricated where the labor is cheap and plentiful and with high degree of robots usage while only final assembly would require high cost labor at the target location.
They are going to have the necessary launch capability. The rest are bound to the surface.
Anyway, that demonstrates another way of datacenters getting modularized. The point is that the actual volume of datacenters to be produced calls for the mass production assembly line style. The one-off custom built approach becomes unsustainable.
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 human agents.
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.
Given enough motivation (cash) and temporary tools (WD-40 and tape) there is nothing stopping bigtech from doing just that to kill local trade and then 10x prices
I was in the IBEW when I was doing basic tech support for HawaiianTel 15 years ago... making $15/hr, union dues were nothing even at that wage and they rarely ever go up.
This cry of "OMG dues suck" is so stupid for what you get in return. But go ahead and buy more into republican propaganda.
Lol. IBEW is the best union. THE BEST. My gf worked at macys making $15 an hour and had to pay to a union too. They laid her off, but the union still wanted dues on her way out. No, they are not worth it. If you are making $15 an hour no, no the union is not good for you.
I bet someone can hack up a browser addon to generate predictable comments to circumvent this. e.g. "this", "I also choose this guy's wife", movie quote chains, etc. Extend to Youtube with fake sob stories and born in the wrong generation comments.
Very true, it is difficult to even find an opening for the training to start the process, the schools are limited and have short enrollment windows that are fiercely competitive (at least in California).
I applied for an apprenticeship several years ago when I was testing the waters to rotate out of tech after covid. Tested into the highest percentile, had previous high voltage experience with OEMs, a mech eng degree, still ended up like 200 people deep in the queue. That was the end of that interest. You basically have to be friends or family with someone to get into IBEW.
In the end I'm happy it turned out the way it did. I've had some great experiences since and stayed in tech. Plus that freed up a slot for one of the many early 20s kids that were trying to get in.
When my (very smart) brother applied to be an apprentice electrician the waiting list was more than a decade long, lol. He ended up going to college instead (this was like ~15 years ago).
It's not a matter of practical experience, it's a matter of gatekeeping.
The way an apprenticeship works is that the apprentice does the work, then the contractor signs off on it, then the government inspector signs off on it.
This obviously makes no sense, right? If the apprentice does work that won't pass inspection then it won't pass inspection regardless of whether an existing contractor looks at it first, so no one is being protected from anything by that. If they do work that will pass inspection then what non-protectionist purpose is there in forcing them to have a competing existing contractor sign off on it before they can have it inspected for real?
In theory the competing contractor could be supervising the apprentice while they're doing the work instead of giving them some work to do and then leaving them to it while they do some other work themselves or take a long lunch, but there is nothing to enforce that happening and therefore the expectation that it reliably does is a fictional academic reality inconsistent with real incentives.
Precisely. As someone who has done work in my home that has passed inspection, there’s a lot more to it than just taking a test. It’s the “how things are supposed to work” meets “how am I going to actually make this work” X factor that takes time and ultimately what people pay for.
>I can see exactly where the practical experience would be invaluable.
Who do you think has more practical experience that will be relevant to spotting an error in a plan for some circuits that will bring power to some chillers?
Some guy who's spent 5yr installing outlets and light fixtures in luxury 5-over-1 apartment buildings for FANNG-twats and has the license to go with or some guy who's spent 5yr doing the machinery wiring and controls (i.e. "after the outlet" stuff you don't need a license for) in an cardboard manufacturing facility?
I'm not saying these people should be unlicensed. Frankly I don't care. If they're gonna be licensed though then the license should be accessible to those with the relevant skill and knowledge and not be a protectionist gate keeping exercise at the expense of everyone in society that needs access to this kind of labor.
The comments in here speak volumes. Talk about being blinded by ideology.
I'm reminded of the phrase "regulations are written in blood".
I'm also tempted to point out that anybody can give high-voltage work a whirl.... once.
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But what do I know, I'm not a sparky, I'm one of them snot-nosed software engineering types. Y'know, the one engineering field that's too free and clever to get licensed, bonded, insured, or unionized. /s
Who needs regulation, anyways? I bet Matthew Broderick's Wargames was pure science fiction, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was just an exaggeration. Let's go burn some OSHA manuals and start up an Ayn Rand bookclub! /s
I cannot over-stress the gulf between residential and industrial here.
The guy who's day job includes dealing with "after the outlet" electrical stuff in an industrial setting is gonna be just as if not more qualified to hop on over into a data center or other industrial setting and to the actual "affixed to the building" wiring than some guy who's been doing residential houses and apartments for most of his career but holds the magic piece of paper that the ignorant think is more valuable than it is. He should be allowed to pay money, take whatever education to fill in gaps and take the tests and get the license without wasting years.
Yeah, but you might still want to enter the field based on the aging of the current workforce. Seems likely to be a shortage of electricians over the next while.
I feel like we're entering an age of electrification so having training/education in a field related to electrics/electronics seems like a reasonable path for someone to take.
The conversion to all-electric homes is more recent, and hasn't even started in some places. Here in Canada, some jurisdictions require newly constructed houses and apartments to have electric heat and cooling (heat pump, with resistive heat as a backup), an electric dryer and stove, and an electric water heater (tank or tankless). Others jurisdictions are still using gas furnaces and gas-fired hot water tanks.
I live in one of those all electric homes too, made in the 2000s. Doesn't change that a bust will dry up the work and homeowners won't fork over the money for something that has few benefits for their daily life and requires expensive changes to the house.
To add to this there are jurisdictions that will require you to still pay a small monthly fee to support the gas pipes if you cut off gas service.
It is really nice not having a gas bill and not requiring maintenance for gas appliances, but most people won't care if they lived with it for long enough.
The only case I see it working is in a disaster area or blighted areas where the builder decided to bulldoze and rebuild the houses. The southern California fires for example; the city gave priority to permits to houses that went all electric since the gas pipes were destroyed. Permitting and inspection is so much simpler with all electric.
All electric homes existed as far back as the 1960s. Gas heat was generally cheaper back then (heat pump? nobody has air conditioning then) so they were not common where it got cold. Even at that though, the difference in labor for an all electric house today vs the same house with gas appliances is minimal - you get larger wires to the stove, furnace and dryer, everything else is the same. (in the near future I expect to see wires for the EV as well, but not yet and in any case this is the same even if your other appliances are gas)
That's what I don't understand about the lack of building more power plants. Of all types.
Yes, people should make efforts to not waste electricity (use more effective lights, etc). However the demand is _never_ going to go down. Progress utilizes more energy. Make stuff more efficient, or less expensive, and people will do more things, or more people will do things. That's how quality of live goes up.
Isn't the current US administration notoriously incoherent? They can have quixotic opinions about windmills without being wrong on the broader point that we should be increasing generation capacity. It just makes them ridiculous, not wrong on the second point.
On top of that, direct electrification, what I'm thinking of for example is the electrification of how work is performed. A lot of oil and gas is used to spin a machine. Those use cases have to be electrified. That involves industry, commercial, infrastructure. That's where a lot of the energy savings will come from. From not having losses due to combustion.
I'm thinking learning something in that field might be an option.
Being over reactive to anything you hear in the news is generally a bad idea. It’s always a view so zoomed in to a single blip on the chart that ignores the wider landscape.
> The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in.
HVAC and electrical (e.g. UPSes) need somewhat regular maintenance, so once build-out is done, if you're with one of the OEMs, you'll probably have regular work babysitting the gear.
> 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.
That averages to 150k per annum, which is more than double the median salary in the US.
I'd imagine those 300K years they're not just working 40 hours a week, more like 70+ hours. Add higher taxes on those years and it becomes less attractive.
Not likely. When the price goes down, some people take jobs doing other things pretty quickly. When it goes back up, they don't all come back immediately. The result is that the price tends to stay high longer than it stays low.
I mean, no career is ever perfectly secure against future uncertainty (a few years ago I would've joked "... except prostitution", but even that seems threatened by AI these days). The question is a relative one: how stable is it compared to feasible alternatives? I could certainly see job losses and wage stagnation in software engineering being worse than those of electricians over the next 15 years.
There's a bigger trend that isn't going away any time soon. Basically we are at the beginning of what will be a decades long s-curve in terms of electrifying absolutely everything that we possibly can across essentially every sector.
This is being driven by the plummeting cost of electricity. Mostly our inefficient and obsolete grids somewhat hide this trend. But those that have been experimenting with off grid installations or are playing early adopters by putting a lot of solar panels and batteries in/on their houses are starting to figure out that once you have these in place, the marginal cost of power is basically zero. The hardware isn't that expensive. The process of getting it installed currently is. Mainly because of the scarcity of skilled labor and the amount of bureaucratic overhead needed for permitting, certification, and the cost of the people doing that work.
But the big picture here is enormous amounts of industrial processes, domestic heating, charging infrastructure, grid infrastructure, etc. related hardware will need installing over the next decades. And most of that will involve electricians. Data centers might be a bit of a bubble. But I don't think that will go away completely and there's going to be no shortage of other stuff that also needs to be installing.
And isn't this all dependent on todays modern expensive transformers based inference demands? If the next gen of inference is much more kwh efficient what happens to all these data centers and jobs?
That's assuming that causing the things to give you more stuff per watt will cause people to want fewer watts rather than more stuff. Compare Jevons paradox.
Except that gold-rush-like booms tend to attract individuals who are more risk-taking and entrepreneurial. So of course there will still be losses in a downturn, but this is a self-selected group with greater adaptability, more likely to mix and match skills and still end up better off than if they had not participated at all...
That's assuming it takes longer for you to hear about it than for everyone else to extract all the gold. Now suppose there is a data center boom and a massive housing shortage and a transition from fossil fuels to electric cars and heating systems and at least two of those things are likely to continue for a good while.
