A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands
nytimes.comI 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.
Scroll down to this comment for a better discussion than I could give: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098874
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.
My understanding is the union members can move to another local and sign up for work there. Not an easy lifestyle, chasing work around the country.
over before things even started if that's the point at which one's aware
On the other hand, the economy is going to be increasingly electrified. Demand is going to be there in some form.
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.
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.
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.
Good intrpduction are Veritasium videos:
"How Electricity Actually Works"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI_X2cMHNe0
"The Biggest Misconception About Electricity"
One cannot simply bring up Veritasium without also honouring his arch nemesis ElectroBOOM.
https://youtube.com/@electroboom?si=HqjCoJtrn6ci41uw
Others that deserve a mention:
styropyro
https://youtube.com/@styropyro?si=aPBPXdj42Oo0UzC2
The Angry Pixie herder, Uncle Bumblefuck aka AvE:
https://youtube.com/@arduinoversusevil2025?si=f1LHLwVdQTn0O8...
And that guy with the multi gigawatt 150,000 volt Lorentz Cannon:
https://youtu.be/lix-vr_AF38?si=P_WLCJFAUOD01pEF
I’m sure I forgot someone?
AlphaPhoenix’s response to Veritasium:
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.
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.
You'll always have manufacturing and construction. I've never heard of an electrician boom bust cycle. It's infrastructure. It's always in demand.
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.
the real question is what booms when electrician work busts
Social workers. Unemployment agency workers.
oil
Not for long. 1-2 economic cycles and oil and gas will probably be 20-40% of what they are now.
Useful to keep in mind when choosing a new career.
> 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.
> It doesn't sound to me like you've pulled much wire.
not commercially, but i worked as a residential electrician and contractor for half a decade, if we are doing ad hominems
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.
>> have a project of massive scale
If datacenter demand doesn't evaporate, mega scale datacenters sound like the most probable candidates for this.
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.
Isn’t the whole SpaceX fantasy to just launch data centers into space?
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
Also, an electrician just doesn't pop into existence. You have to go through years of apprenticeship and union dues payments.
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.
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.
this is a bizarre timeline of reality where an ME degree gets you waitlisted for an electrician apprenticeship
"A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment..."
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.
mechanical is pretty famously bad at things that dont include gears
yeah. it's like a guild. hired someone to install my ev charger on an app who had lots of horror stories about apprenticeship.
I mean, go to an IBEW hall in a busy area and talk to the shop steward; he can probably start you tomorrow
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).
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.
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.
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.
I think that age started over 100 years ago.
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)
It's accelerating. Electrification of infrastructure and buildings is a huge growth area with big delays in projects due to lack of capacity.
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.
Didn't the US administration just pay Total $1bn to NOT build an offshore wind farm?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Doesn't that average out to 165K / year? That's not so bad IMO!
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.
Oooof. I pity the poor fool who has to pay taxes on their 300k annual salary.
It’s 1099 income, not w2 income. You often need to buy your own non-group health insurance, in addition to employer payroll tax contributions.
300k per year for a few years is just not that much money. It's a nice boost but let's not pretend it's rich or wealthy.
IMO taxes should be on the rolling average of your income so two good years does not mean you get taxed as if that's your steady state
If it was a predictable & reliable 300k, 30k, 300k, 30k, 300k, 30k pattern, then yes.
But if not...
I imagine a Bernoulli pattern would work too
Yeah, if not, it could be even more!
It can also be less
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.
Construction is always boom and bust by nature. Anyone in the trades, if they have an opportunity the should just take it while it's there.
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...
The problem with a gold rush is by the time you hear about it, so has everyone else and all the gold is gone once you get there.
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.
Probably better off than investing in any field where our output is bits.
Stating the obvious to to an audience not here.
The construction business is all boom and bust and always has been...
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.
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.
Is the Anthropoc data center buildout union ceritifed?
Isn’t the same with software?
Yeah, because having Meta or OpenAI or Microsoft on your resume as an Electrician is basically blackballing yourself. /s
The next demand for those trades will be for war plants.
For those who haven't noticed, the US/Israel/Iran war and the Ukraine/Russia war just merged. Countries currently shooting at each other: Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Israel, US, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait... See the lead story in the New York Times for the past two days.
This war has crossed an important threshold. No pair of countries, one on each side, can stop the war now. The US and Iran can no longer stop it alone. Ukraine and Russia can no longer stop it alone. This is very like WWI - too many combatants with differing motivations. This much isn't a projection. This is the current reality.
It looks like a long war. Expect a very large, expensive military buildup. That's going to need war plants, built in a hurry. Ammunition. Weapons. Drones by the millions.
Most of these countries have been participating in bombing or getting bombed on and off for the last decade (and longer).
You are reading too much into the current media hype cycle, and not really reading the geopolitics in place, which puts a lot of pressure internally on these countries to not escalate further. This includes both Ukraine / Russia and the middle east which you are so eager to tie together on the slightest connection.
While i agree that the poster is reading way too much into this, i'm not sure about the geopolitics.
Iran is friends with Russia and has helped them with their weapons program in the past. None of the countries allied with Ukraine like Iran. Iran (and its allies) have almost no ability to counter strike Ukraine.
Ukraine picking a fight with Iran, or at least stopping their boats from visiting Russian ports, seems like a strategy Ukraine could plausibly persue without too much downside.
yeah I assume they've done the cost-benefit and figured that if Russia gets the supplies they'll be hurt more than however much Iran can possibly retaliate - Iran does have missiles that can hit Israel so I do have to question whether they can hit Ukraine - it's not that much further - but may very well be worth it to the Ukrainians to take whatever Iran can dish than what Russia could do with the shipments. And with Iran already at war, I doubt Iran wants to spend the effort to retaliate more than whatever they consider the necessary token amount.
> Iran does have missiles that can hit Israel so I do have to question whether they can hit Ukraine
True, but those are probably in relatively short supply for them at this point. I'd imagine they would want to save them for Israel.
Ukraine fighting Iran has a benefit for Ukraine as well in terms of US perception ... the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Makes it harder for MAGA types like Tucker Carlson to sell the idea that actually Russia is the US's friend.
Would you be able to recommend any articles or videos that do a deeper more honest analysis than the current media hype cycle?
I'm not the poster, but personally i have found William Spaniel's youtube channel to be good.
> For those who haven't noticed, the US/Israel/Iran war and the Ukraine/Russia war just merged.
In what way?
> No pair of countries, one on each side, can stop the war now. The US and Iran can no longer stop it alone. Ukraine and Russia can no longer stop it alone.
It seems to me like you’re undermining your point here. No two sides can stop it alone because they are separate conflicts. The US and Iran can agree to stop fighting. Ukraine and Russia can do the same. The reason they don’t affect each other is because they’re separate conflicts.
> > For those who haven't noticed, the US/Israel/Iran war and the Ukraine/Russia war just merged.
> In what way?
Presumably they are referencing Ukraine recently shooting an Iranian (i believe) merchant ship.
However its kind of silly to say the wars have merged based on a single incident. We dont even know if it was intentional.
Well, no, because those aren't the actual parties of the conflicts.
In the case of USA/Iran the US is essentially Israel's proxy. It's up to Israel to decide when the fighting stops. OK, fine, Iran could capitulate and essentially stop being a country. They'll get right on that.
In the case of Ukraine/Russia Ukraine is a US+EU proxy. It is up to the EU leadership to decide when the fighting stops. OK, fine, Russia could capitulate and stop being a country. They'll get right on that.
Wait who is Egpyt, Bahrain and Kuwait shooting at?
Also why would you not include Afghanistan and its war with Pakistan or China's various diplomatic issues with its neighbors?
Why would you ignore all the wars and conflict going on in rest of the African continent?
Your comment come across trying to piece together a particular vision of world conflicts that maps neatly into suiting a narrative. You say its the current reality but its only a slice of the current reality and a lot of it is factually wrong.
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 feel about the hand they are dealt.
"It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor...."
"Projects I work on..."
Considering we are in a gigantic housing shortage, it would be great if a house didn't have to compete for talent with a data center.
The housing shortage has nothing to do with a lack of electrical engineers or plumbers. It’s entirely self inflicted and cheaper electricians will not change that.
More directly: I doubt there will be a meaningful increase in housing in states that have banned construction of new data centers (NY, Maine) than those where data centers are allowed to be built.
You don't work in construction do you?
Lack of skilled tradesmen is a widespread problem and a major source of project delay (on top of massively higher housing production costs).
I assume next comes the zoning-causes-all-shortages and if only we could fix zoning then we'd solve housing – a thesis for which there's zero evidence.
That "lack" of labor is the norm because construction is a boom-bust business and nobody wants to pay to retain talent and skills they aren't actively profiting off. And very few want to spend time training new people when they are currently earning 3x their normal rate working a boom cycle.
If the AI boom crashes, how many of these people will get laid off and unable to find comparable paying work for years afterward? Even if it picks up again 5 years later, many of those people have moved on to new careers. And the only way to get them back, even temporarily, is pay them way more than their current career to pay for their losses and hardships of quiting their current career path. So ultimately boils down to "pay people more" because you aren't just incentivizing people to work for you specifically during a boom cycle, you are also trying to poach workers out of other industries for a job they know is temporary.
Yes, the labor supply for skilled tradesmen is very inelastic. Which is one reason it sucks to have so much of it drawn into a probably-speculative boom.
There is almost zero overlap between residential and commercial electricians. There is a shortage of residential electricians because the customers are a nightmare to deal with (both builders and homeowners, homeowners are incredibly entitled and I refuse to deal with them, lol) and the pay sucks.
> and the pay sucks.
This is baffling to me from the homeowner's perspective.
I just checked the last invoice I had for electrical work - $300 for something that took <30 minutes and <$20 of supplies.
(And like, he did good work and I'd hire him again... but at those rates it's worth me doing anything I can myself even if it takes me 5x longer.)
Are you including travel time in the 30 minutes? Time to travel and provide free estimates? Sick/vacation time?
> Sick/vacation time?
Don't forget health insurance for when they have to use that sick time to get treatment - so they can get back to work ASAP. Plus, during a bust if they get laid off, we don't have universal health insurance, so they have to factor that in as well.
I mean, obviously not. (Though no travel for free estimates, estimates are just done by phone.)
Obviously my electrician isn't making anywhere close to $30040 hours52 weeks = $600k+/year - and I don't begrudge my electrician making a good living.
But from my perspective as a homeowner, skilled trades are punishingly expensive, and my response was to a post specifically claiming that the pay sucks.
What do those residential electricians do then? Become baristas?
tbf, I don't think Wagyu cows were that thrilled about their lot in life before Wagyu became a thing, either.
You may have a unique perspective on that, though...
wouldn't the analogy be Wagyu farmers?
> Projects I work on have seen prices soar.
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.
resi has been drained pretty hard in the last 10 years, this just adds more fuel to the fire.
I am, exactly right this minuit, trying to explain that I am not able to quote competitivly for certain types of specialised metal work as there are specialists for that, but am facing insistent inquirys anyway.I do clean sheet custom one of a kind projects as a rule, for which, due to AI recomending my company through some imaculate process, I am exploring how much I can charge for helping the singuarity along, though all in all I am glad I have other skill sets to deploy should we run the whole thing into the ground.
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!
The employment is temporary, what follows a net negative, is the idea.
And "AI" as a concept has has no agency. This is all about humans who seek to further concentrate wealth.
> 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
>Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive.
Maybe those people should pay their tradespeople better then. Everybody's all "workers should be paid more" until they're the one paying the worker.
"Those people" who? Homebuilders? You're saying you think the cost of homebuilding should be much higher? When I listen to some of you guys it's not hard for me to see why these DCs are so unpopular
Everyone should just compete with the trillions of dollars of capital floating around for AI? And it's their fault for suddenly being 'poor'?
Sounds like you're assuming people are paying pennies for labour. I don't think that's true at all
While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?
That small bathroom job is literally the worst case scenario for a tradesman. They have to work nearly as hard to line that up as better paying longer term commercial work.
The residential buyer is the source of much less repeat work, is harder to deal with, more price conscious and harder to collect from than the commercial buyer they could be working for.
Anyone that can competently market, manage, and execute that small job can do the same for better customers.
The residential buyer has one advantage though: they do not demand as much from those working. You can start this business today, and likely find enough friends and family willing to take a chance on you that you can get started and from there you have references. Commercial projects tend to be big enough that you cannot get into them without experience (which in turn you cannot get).
The crew that can build a driveway cannot build a parking lot, and they will never be able to break into that market because it requires experience that a driveway cannot give. From a parking lot there is then road building - the previous companies cannot break into them. Again there are just not enough projects of the size that sits in between to build experience.
>The crew that can build a driveway cannot build a parking lot, and they will never be able to break into that market because it requires experience that a driveway cannot give. From a parking lot there is then road building - the previous companies cannot break into them. Again there are just not enough projects of the size that sits in between to build experience.
This is not true at all! Parking lots are not particularly complicated, with the main obstacle being machinery and logistics. I know folks that started off residential and moved to commercial once they accumulated enough capital to buy the necessary machines to take on bigger commercial work.
>You can start this business today, and likely find enough friends and family willing to take a chance on you that you can get started and from there you have references.
Highly questionable premise. I bet very few people are going to gamble their most valuable asset on a newbie trying to learn the ropes. I’ll pay someone experienced multiples more for my once in a decade or two capital projects on my home.
And even in residential, building million-dollar houses is easier (or at least not harder) and more profitable than building "affordable" starter homes.
> While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?
Obviously much more than 2 weeks worth of work at a commercial job, since that's the worst possible kind of work you could ever offer any tradesman. Maybe 8x the hourly rate would be fair since it's intermittent work with generally horrible customers?
It's been interesting to watch the IT/engineering classes all of a sudden pretend to care about labor costs and outsourcing/job loss. As an industry they have been by far the most impactful in reducing wages, enabling outsourcing, and "gaining efficiency" via automation while as a class being paid top-tier wages for doing so. There is not another industry more directly culpable for blue collar job loss except perhaps finance and banking.
Only now when the shoe is on the other foot do such folks seem to care at all.
Learn to code indeed.
For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating. At least this time around the bubble is sharing a bit of that tech wealth.
> For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating.
yeah instead they did the smart thing and they got together and passed protectionist policy to artificially inflate the value of their labor. Let's see how union tough you are when the administration changes and you have to compete with a global labor pool again.
>compete with a global labor pool again
I don't really think electricians have to worry about that. There may be the some shops that employ immigrants as helpers, but most electricians have spent at least several years getting their hours, building their kit and learning the NEC + local codes. It's hard to picture companies importing labor and training them for so long.
That's a nice story and barely a reply to my comment, not engaging at all.
And in time AI robots will reduce the need for these blue collar workers who are presently helping replace the white collar workers.
Just learned of a new acronym today "NILF," not in the labor force with over one million supposed NILFs out there -- dropped out and gave up.
Good luck with robots traing to lay up bricks, or doing plumbing in a home.
Making a brick laying robot is easy. I'm happy to do that if you want to fund my mid-life crisis... Note that I did not promise my brick laying robot can effectively compete with human break layers on cost. I fully expect my robot to be at least double the cost of humans doing the same work, and it will be less flexible than humans as well (meaning you need a different robot for different buildings)
How would it be double the cost if it can work day and night and on holidays and during bad weather and not have strikes?
Double is probably a low estimate. There is a lot of engineering required in the robot. Much of the effort is setup, someone still needs to bring it to the site, and feed the blueprints in. Cleanup is also a lot of the cost. Not to mention mortar is made of sand which is abrasive and will wear it out fast meaning lots of maintenance work.
Working day and night isn't helpful as the limit to speed is waiting for the mortar to cure before doing the next row. (Generally you do about 5 rows and then wait a day)
Ummmm in time it's inevitable as in 2026 you do not need any skill to be a computer programmer. AI has replaced that once valuable skill and will continue it's way through ever white collar job til the robots (5 to 10 years) start taking the blue collar jobs away.
The blue collar job boom is great present day, but what they are helping build is their machine driven replacement.
Maybe this all sounds hyperbolic, but it's what Musk and all the AI overlords have said as far back as a 2013 or prior. Musk and Altman have noted the need for everyone to be on welfare (Universal Basic Income) since then. And no doubt we see this taking shape now within white collar jobs that once we held in high regard like programming being replaced by AI. I just created a whole startup web design, front-end, back-end development, native iPhone app, Android app and more using Codex (previously i hired others to help me a UI Design Front End guy).
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.
People are already doing it to some extent, especially the sort of technical non-programmer crowd. A member of my family was even having a (now pretty out of date) version of chatGPT spit out VBA macros for them with precisely no idea what they were doing, but the result worked well enough for them. Now I know lots of programmers will scoff at that but when you see what the big models can do today in terms of breaking down a fairly large task and executing on all the steps with minimal need to stop it, including going to existing docs/web pages etc. to gather info, correcting itself, even troubleshooting issues and correcting them, it strikes me as hard to see a future where programming skill as such remains considered scarce in the market.
> Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen
Hate to break it to you but it is happening, increasingly at the business stakeholder interface later.
> A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.
Most of the value in the software engineering process isn't in the compiler, it's in deducing the requirements and weighing tradeoffs for various solution paths. LLMs have now automated the next step: translating human language requirements and specifications to code.
The compiler is just the last deterministic step, which while essential, is entirely commoditized in the value chain. When was the last time you paid for a compiler?
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 with Codex and have it guide you via voice? I just feed screenshot after screenshot to Codex to understand what I need to do next. Look forward to being able to share my screen and have it guide me via a voice conversation.
> 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.
Well i guess there are two sides of table / arguement. Im on the side of believing the hype of the AI overlords who promote UBI not cause I don't want to work because I personally experience and see it slowly playing out now.
What is you opinion of U.I "designed" by someone without UX experience, thru prompting. Most likely you cringe at how bad they are, as do the reset of us.
Similarly, programmers have a name for code generated without a coder guiding and reviewing, A.I slop.
Users don't care if they hear amazing song and don't know its AI Music slop or their favorite new iPhone game is powered by slop. The entrepreneurs pumping out said slop and making some to a lot of money don't care what old time programmers think of their slop. They are making money!
Things change and this change is hard for sure ... i'm living it and embracing the change by becoming a vibe coder and starting up businesses.
As for UI Gemini created the same type of UI I would've yet I did tell it what was needed following my years/years of design experience (less is always more).
Getting an idea out there quickly and cheaply is definitely a good use for AI. In the context of the original op, this is not putting any developers out of work. Quite the contrary, if the idea takes off then you will probably want to make a proper implementation with a carefully thought out UX.
That's correct! AI is a negative for society no matter how you look at it. That's the entire idea!
That's pretty disingenuous.
The people losing jobs to AI can't just pivot into the trades. When you think about it, companies announcing they're pivoting into some other area where they have no prior background is usually a bit of a desperation move, aided by the fact that companies don't need to be licensed in any way to offer particular services, other than maybe in the military/national security sector.
As for the second point, it's true that this is just old-fashioned supply and demand. I predict the outcome is that there's a rush into the construction/contracting sector followed by a bust due to either the tech bubble popping and construction slowing way down, or the replacement of construction workers by humanoid robots, or perhaps some better form factor like robot spiders that can squeeze into small places - all the benefits of child labor but with double the appendages and double the productivity!
However, I'm not worried about the possibility of a robot takeover. The American people's final safeguard against a robot uprising is the irrationality of imperial weights and measures. Robots are digitals and can't do fractions like us higher beings. That's why I'm building my data centers measuring everything in cubits.
As an engineer in the US - we already do all the math in metric units. There are conversion functions in the UI layer to transform our units to whatever you want to see. (they also convert metric units if you don't like the units were are using internally)
> 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!
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.
I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
I'm not even sure it's as simple as "stuff people don't like." Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
I guess you could complain that robots will replace electricians and carpenters, but it's still going to be a decade before anyone trusts an LLM to wire a house.
> Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
Not more "revealed choice" BS. There's no free choice: even if someone doesn't want to use ChatGPT, they may not be allowed to avoid it. I'm literally forced to use it at work, for instance. Others may be forced to use it due to market or other pressures.
Personally, I wouldn't mind of someone dropped a couple cluster bombs on each of these AI data centers, after construction is complete, and LLMs just disappeared as a practical technology.
> I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
See my reply to the other guy who made the same point before you did.
> Not more "revealed choice" BS. There's no free choice
I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
> Personally, I wouldn't mind of someone dropped a couple cluster bombs on each of these AI data centers, after construction is complete, and LLMs just disappeared as a practical technology.
This would be great if your goal was limiting AI access to the rich, but I'm pretty sure that would be much worse than democratizing access.
> See my reply to the other guy who made the same point before you did.
Yeah, and I still don't get it. Do you think that qualified electricians struggle to find work? They generally don't, these skills are in high demand and have been for decades. You really haven't made the case for "after they gain more experience on a difficult and high-paying job, they're gonna be unemployed." Everyone in these comments is complaining about waiting lists and backlogs and you're acting like the opposite is true.
>I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
I don't think there's really a contradiction there. You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.
If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.
Datacenters are fine. They're better than most kinds of industrial buildings, by and large they don't illegally set up fields of gas turbines, and their water usage is really not that bad compared to other large users. They make for a few nice, high-paying jobs. Sure, they're ugly and large, but this is America and we have no shortage of ugly, large buildings.
> If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.
Something can have a great deal of utility to everyone while simultaneously causing damage to a subset of people. Electricity is universally useful, but anyone downwind of a coal plant is hurt by air pollution even if they benefit from electricity. It's not contradictory for those people to ask for stricter controls on pollutant emissions.
Likewise with LLMs, they can provide a lot of utility to enterprises and individuals, while simultaneously causing damage to those individuals.
Hordes of now-fragile white collar workers are currently trying to use AI to figure out how not to be rendered obsolete by AI.
People who live near proposed datacenter sites are using LLMs, while also facing spiking utility costs due to the AI datacenters, and maybe significant quality of life regressions.
Everyone is trying to figure out how to maximize their own benefit from LLMs while simultaneously trying to put the costs of this technological revolution on others, and everyone has different positioning in that race, depending on their skills, adaptability, and privilege. This situation will test all individuals, institutions, and societies.
>If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.
No, one does not follow from the other. I might campaign against the building of a road because I believe the funds could be better spent on something else. If the road is built, am I a hypocrite for using it? No. The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.
Something can be positive under a narrow lens, and a negative under a broader one. There's no hypocrisy in acknowledging both realities.
>Datacenters are fine.
Datacenters and AI are distinct things. Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction.
> Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction
Sure, great, but the two seem to be treated as one issue and opinions are rarely stated in clear and falsifiable terms. They stay vague because there really aren't that many good reasons to oppose them, and IMO sane discussion on the subject leads to "building these really doesn't change that much" or "AI slop is really not that different from any other kind of slop."
> The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.
If you then hear about someone building a new road and you go "I hate roads and I resent these guys for building a new road" and then you go and use the new road too, I'm gonna be suspicious of your motivations because clearly you don't hate roads that much. If you said "I think we should build fewer roads because adding more lanes doesn't really work that well to reduce traffic" then that would be different; you wouldn't be a hypocrite for saying that.
See my above statement. Opponents of AI and/or datacenters rarely seem to say what it is about them that they actually dislike. Yes, I suppose they could be thinking clearly on the topic and have internally consistent takes, but then why the hell can't they articulate complaints that make sense?
>Sure, great, but the two seem to be treated as one issue
I don't care. I'm responding on the topic of AI. I won't let you treat them as interchangeable just because you perceive them as treated that way.
>If you then hear about someone building a new road and you go "I hate roads and I resent these guys for building a new road" and then you go and use the new road too, I'm gonna be suspicious of your motivations because clearly you don't hate roads that much.
Cool, but you've specifically constructed a person that fits your narrative. What you said originally what the sheer number of users of AI means that some of them must be anti-AI. You went from a deduced existence of a broad kind of person to an asserted existence of a specific one, with no justification. I'm not sure your opponents are the only ones guilty of not thinking clearly.
>Yes, I suppose they could be thinking clearly on the topic and have internally consistent takes, but then why the hell can't they articulate complaints that make sense?
I don't know. Can't they? I don't even know who you're talking about because you're treating complaints about datacenters and about AI as equivalent. Myself, I don't think I've seen anyone be just anti-AI in the sense you said, of despising the existence and development of generative models, wholly and completely. Some people are concerned about the business practices of the AI industry; some resent the effect of AI on the hardware market; some are concerned about the labor market (even if they don't think they're in danger of being replaced); some look at it from the more physical aspect of it, as you've said the construction and operation of datacenters. If you treat these swaths of people as just one person, it's small wonder you'll think they flip-flop from one position to another.
>You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.
There's a word for that: hypocrisy.
That's when you say others shouldn't use it while you use it.
I don't like the parts of the city that are full of concrete and (edit: lacking) trees. I still walk or drive through there instead of making a huge detour, I still use them because that's what's there, currently. I know processed food sucks, sometimes it's easiest to grab something that's quick to make or can be eaten instantly because the supermarket is full of them.
And even assuming it means hypocrisy, so? You think you'd withstand examination? Face the arguments, instead of using some abstract fantasies about some average AI critic that doesn't exist as an excuse. At least they're only hypocritical like everyone else including you, instead of acting like a 3 yo, "yeah but you're stupid, so".
No. That's not what the word means.
> I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful.
Where is your data to back up such an assertion? I'm not even sure how you could determine "of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful," except maybe in a yes/no survey question, which is suspect.
It's also worth noting that AI is getting shoved down peoples throats. Want to do a Google Search? Congratulations, you're now using AI of your own "free will"!
> The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
Usually when people like you make points like that, they're trying to undermine the "anti" argument by implying hypocrisy. My point is "choice" can't actually reveal that, because the environment of that choice is too complex. The observation is a meaningless factoid.
But that's true of most carpentry and electrical jobs. In-house carpenters and electricians are a minority.
I was responding to the implied symmetry in the GP: the "employs" does not balance out the "unemploys", because the unemployment is likely permanent and the employment temporary.
And then there's the fucked up resource allocation: throwing around insane amounts of money, driving up the prices of things the people actually want, to build hated things for investors and billionaires, which is a separate issue.
The unemployment of electricians and carpenters is permanent? On a long-enough timescale, where we have much more advanced robotics, probably. Not in the near or medium-term.
The fucked up resource allocation is itself an indicator of wealth inequality. A generation ago growing companies had to go public to access funding. Now they can find all the capital they need in private markets.
>a lot of other better uses for their labor
Who on Earth are you to decide what is the "better" use for labor? And do you scrutinize every construction project or only AI?
Is it a waste when contractors build a temporary set for a trashy reality TV show? A factory that makes cosmetics for dogs?
Having someone the arbiter of what is the "right" use of labor is communism. In capitalism, people get to decide for themselves what they work on and what they buy.
Uhm, aren't we all allowed to have an opinion on what's best for mankind?
FWIW I am a high voltage test engineer.
I used to be an electrician.
I would prefer to build the substations that power machines for the benefit of all mankind, rather than data centers that feed the already wealthy.
For example, keep the lights on for schools.
You have a warped view of the world if you believe anything should be allowed to be built just because someone has the capital to build it.
These sort of moral grandstanding arguments are annoying.
There is no "moral grandstanding". I wish to live in a functional society.
You're framing it so you can't lose by making the argument seem like a moral choice between "have data centres" or "live in a functional society".
That's a fallacy, and it is moral grandstanding. It's a useful way to win internet arguments (and internet points), but it is just a debate ending strategy.
No, I’m fine with data centers, I’ve built one myself and I’ve maintained multiple.
I argued against “if you have capital, you can do what the fuck you want”.
If Meta decided to pivot to a brothel and meth lab building spree would you consider that to be a worse, equal, or better use of their capital and the labour in the regions where they are building out this infrastructure? Why?
I mean, at least some of us would consider it better with meth and hookers than them ruining the internet with their panopticon shit.
Yeah, I'm okay with that.
> Who on Earth are you to decide what is the "better" use for labor?
> In capitalism, people get to decide for themselves what they work on
Feels like there are some mixed signals here.
just don't forget these are temporary, eventually there will be "enough" data centers, and none of these jobs will exist, so if you are planning a 20 year + career, don't count on this being the norm.
Nah. If USA returns to its senses we are going to need tons of tradespeople to build all the stuff we need for the billion Americans.
It seems unlikely there will be a billion Americans. Population growth is 0.3% and will likely decline further as native FTR declines.
> If USA returns to its senses we are going to need tons of tradespeople to build all the stuff we need for the billion Americans
You're missing the /s?
The only thing that has been keeping the US population from declining is immigration, and the US isn't exactly the most welcoming country anymore.
Fairly sure last year was the first year of US population decline in a long time.
Yes. Because until now it was propped up by immigration — and mostly legal immigration — which has dropped precipitously.
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.
> 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.
Where are you getting this? The median plumber in the US makes just under $63k, which is below the ~$65k median pay for all jobs in the US. The median sysadmin makes over $96k - a more than 50% higher median. The top 10% bracket for sysadmins is also 50% higher than plumbers. Why are people claiming that plumbers and tradespeople are raking it in when they’re clearly not?
> The amount of people getting into trades over the past decade has dropped drastically
The BLS projections for the next decade have plumbers at 4% growth and sysadmins at -4% - in decline.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers...
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Allegedly many an American 'believes' that Jesus will be back some time right about now. They are serious about this belief, however, it is never explained as to how he waves a magic wand and fixes the many, many entirely man-made problems we have.
But now I see the light. Jesus was a carpenter, right?
I am imagining that Jesus, with his carpentry skills, is driving right now in his Chevy truck to the job site, to help erect that data centre for one of our billionaire overlords.
Just saying, it could happen, and is probably needed to happen, if this data centre build out is to get anywhere near completion.
>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 giant cube-shaped crystal city drops down from space lit by God's radiance and all of the dead Christians come back wearing white robes to live there and eat and drink and praise Jesus forever and never leave because why would you?
And belief in this is legitimately a big part of why we will never take climate change seriously.
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, Anglican and Episcopal communions, Presbyterian denominations, etc and other mainline Christians don't believe this. Before you blame a group for ruining the world or rejecting climate change please actually talk to a representative sample of real people in the group you are making claims about.
Due to the southern strategy that has been cemented into 1/2 of the available political parties for the better part of the last 50 years, outspoken evangelical groups hold an outsized influence on policy at large. Evangelicals are also the largest donors to AIPAC, which heavily influences our society.
It doesn't matter that most Christians don't believe it. Most Muslims don't do violent attacks on civilians, yet they all seem to pay the price either in their home countries or in the US.
It seems world-wide, a hard-right extremist subset of religious believers are ruining things for everyone else.
> 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).
An overwhelming number of Christians with relevant political and economic power believe this. Orthodox, Anglicans, Episcopalians etc. might as well be a rounding error compared to the influence of American Evangelical and Conservative Christians. Might as well bring up the Amish while you're at it.
You might have a point about Catholics in terms of sheer numbers, but... the only people still listening to Catholics are right wing chuds and Warhammer fans - and even the former aren't listening anymore because the Pope is too "woke" for them. The days when the Pope's word mattered are long, long gone. What happened when he gave his encyclical on AI? It made headlines for a day or two then the world proceeded to ignore the silly hat man as usual.
So I stand by my point. The Christians who matter as far as climate change policy is concerned don't care because as far as they're concerned this world just exists for God to burn anyway.
>Jesus comes back and kills everyone who isn't Christian (and actually most Christians too)
I don't recall this part what's the reference
Are you under the impression that after the seven seals and seven trumpets and four horsemen and oceans turning to blood and earthquakes and famines and everything leading to a new Heaven and new Earth that most people will survive unscathed?
The entire thesis of Christian eschatology is that everyone who isn't Christian burns in hell. And Matthew says regarding the end times "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
Maybe you should read your Bible again, it's pretty clear that Heaven is meant to be a very exclusive club that even most Christians won't get into.
>"Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
It's in the context of describing false prophets? It makes sense.
>Heaven is meant to be a very exclusive club that even most Christians won't get into
This is just false. At least be accurate if you have a major problem with the bible? I'm not really sure this is a great context to discuss further.
I was just looking for your reference about Jesus coming back to kill all the christians. Unfair to spout these types of things without some sort of basis right?
>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 false prophets. False prophets don't tend to do miracles, cast out demons, and witness. These are people who seem to put in more effort than most, and are sincere in their belief.
>I was just looking for your reference about Jesus coming back to kill all the christians. Unfair to spout these types of things without some sort of basis right?
I never said Jesus was coming back to kill all the Christians, I said Jesus was coming back to kill most Christians and all of everyone else.
And that is simply and unambiguously the canon. The only point that can be argued is how many Christians are a part of the body count. It certainly isn't zero.
> 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 to earn their salvation through their own works rather than rely on Christ's perfect work on the cross.
Saved by Grace alone through Faith alone.
> 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!"
I understand the point you're making, but the criticism underlying this childish caricature of the Christian faith is discussed extensively in the Bible in books such as Romans and James.
As someone else mentioned, you can read the book of Romans or the epistle of James to find out by yourself why this idea is absurd.
But simplified, say you have a spouse who you dearly love. And say you found out that said spouse would forgive and get over any nasty thing you did to them.
Would that mean that you'd start being evil to them just because you can?
Or would that be yet another reason to try to live up to what such a spouse deserves?
edit: Actually, I think I misunderstood your issue with what I said. To clarify, a Christian will strive to do good and be better, but knowing that we'd never be able to be good enough, and that we can only be/do good through Christ, so we never deserve or earn our salvation (hence Grace), but we put our hope in Christ (hence Faith).
Yes, yes, Christians will "strive" to do better, but never really have try that hard, because you know, it's never gonna be "good enough" anyway, therefore accept that you will do "sometimes-woops" fucked up things, and then just ask for forgiveness (but never actually do anything).
The incentive structure is set up to produce bad people.
Kind of reminds of the sight where MMA fighters brutally mash some dudes head in, and then afterwards starts praising the Lord and that only through Lord he has gotten where he is. Weirdest shit ever, and yet it's not uncommon to see it.
Imagine you have two neighboors - neighboor A and neighboor B. As they walk past you, they say hello and smile. But other than that they don't leave their house very much.
One of the neighboors prays for the humanity and wishes the best to everyone all the time.
The other neighboor fantasizes about torturing people and animals.
Now tell me, which one is neighboor A and which one is neighboor B?
That's right, you can't tell, because from any observable thing in the world, they are virtually equivalent, A is as good and as bad as B. Their inaction in the real world are virtually equivalent.
The only way you can tell who's "good" and "bad" is only and only through actions and results of their actions. Not their thoughts, best intentions or prayers. Only through their actions and results of said actions.
If they represent themselves through inaction, they are virtually equivalent - equally as bad.
Like if somebody steals your bike? Do you want (a) their forgiveness ("i wont steal again I promise") or (b) your bike back + due compensation for caused distress?
Thus - if you do and have done bad things - and you don't make up for them via direct sustained remedial action, but mere prayer and "asking for forgiveness", you're a piece of shit that deserves to burn in the deepest depths of hell.
For better or worse, this applies to so many so called "Christians".
You're right in plenty of what you're saying, that's why I'd recommend you reading Romans and James in the Bible.
But stuff like "but never really have try that hard" and "(but never actually do anything)" are your own assumptions and silly ones at that, you're putting too many people in the same bucket.
> If they represent themselves through inaction, they are virtually equivalent - equally as bad.
In regards to Neighbours A nd B, you're also right, but that's a bad scenario. Christians should thrive to lead a life that reflects the goodness of God and the grace they have received.
Some are rubbish at it, some are better and do amazing things. Same for non-Christian people, mind you.
But ultimately it comes down to: Christ died on the cross to pay for your sins. Are you going to accept that, repent, and follow Him? or are you going to disregard it?
The first option, if done from the heart, WILL bear good fruit.
As one miracle is solved, another is opened.
I had the guy rocking up in his truck to spend a day doing carpentry for our AI overlords, and could not see the magic wand.
So now we have him solving the world's problems by killing everyone, apart from a few good people, so have we moved on from a magic wand to a magic wonder weapon?
We should be scared of this man coming back, not waiting patiently for thousands of years. Honestly, I try my hardest to understand it, but I see a greater chance of vast AI data centers in space due to a shortage of resources on earth.It is not going to happen.
supply side jesus
For the next 6 months until they get all replaced by robots
What passes for "AI" these days hasn't successfully replaced workers doing even the most menial jobs. Several efforts have been made by massive corporations to get "AI" to take fast food orders at the drive thru and so far they've failed. While I think there are still some trials out there, "AI" hasn't managed to take humans out of that workforce and that job is so simple that literal children often do it successfully.
I don't think we have to worry about "AI" being capable of replacing electricians and carpenters any time soon and that's ignoring all the unsolved problems with the robotics.
It's nice to have sci-fi fantasies and everything, but in the real world tradespeople are going to be around for a very very long time. They won't be building data centers for that long though. This is a short term hike in demand that just isn't going to last.
Sounds like Elon months, that means a decade of safe employment at least..
Doubt we'll see electricians, plumbers or carpenters being replaced anytime soon.
Factory workers maybe but all processes have to be redesigned with design for robotic automation in mind. That will displace a lot of people and they will naturally go into the trades since the skills translate more easily so while I agree they wont be replaced there may be downward pricing pressure.
I hear China is doing a lot of this already to stave off their upcoming demographic collapse. I haven't seen raw details or videos though other than demonstration stuff (anyone have anything to share?)
“Every time you ask for another dollar in wages, a thousand more robots start looking more practical.” -Roger B. Smith (GM CEO in the 1980s).
Factories have been automating for decades. Last factory tour I took they said in 1950 this plant had over 2000 employees working, now (2019) about 200. Then he pointed to the laser cutter which alone replaced 150 workers with just 2. This factory is not considered very automated by modern standards either.
Yes I am very familiar with auto automation. They are amazing. Tesla went so overboard that maybe the ROI isn't even there for some processes (installing wheels on a car by industrial robot? They repeated the mistakes GM made in the 70s and 80s with being too early and robots being ripped out and left in the parking lots.
Already products are designed for robotic automation: reduce fasteners, make a single piece do more, make sure a blind one armed dumb person can put the thing together(thats basically the industrial single arm robots you have in factories today).
Still maybe this time is different...but to be fair I put the caveat that you must design the product from the ground up for this new kind of potential automation. (I was talking about the new bipedal vision robots not the old school industrial robot arms) What that looks like? Well the Chinese are probably cooking something up for sure and hopefully somewhere in the US its happening as well.
I think you'll be surprised about that. I'm not in the robotics field (though perhaps I should be) but at an earlier stage in life I spent several years on remodelling and building houses - as in swinging a hammer, not singing deeds and checks.
Repair/remodeling is challenging because you need (approximate) knowledge of construction techniques from across a 150 year timespan, buildings settle and change shape over time, and generally owners don't usually want the building completely gutted and rebuilt from scratch. But it's not that hard. New construction is relatively straightforward. The biggest challenges for construction robots will be handling dust/debris (25% of construction work is cleaning things up) and maintaining health and safety (of the robots themselves; self-preservation is a skill that has to be learned).
That said I don't think you'll see this with the current generation of humanoid robots. A lot of the design assumptions seem almost comically wrong to me.
Knowledge is irrelevant. Idk why you'd think dust would be a problem too, that's also comparatively trivial. Health and safety is also a good one, lol.
It all comes down to robots being unable to hold and operate anything in 3d space, much less precision tooling in arbitrary environments, which is basically what construction is. Everything in construction needs extensive planning, then to be done in the exact right order, with almost perfect precision.
The idea that you could tell a robot how you want a house remodeled and that it'd be able to go from there to actually do it is frankly asinine.
We don't have robots at all, much less humanoid ones, not even doing comparatively trivial, fixed tasks like laundry or the dishes, and you think we're going to have them manage the infinitely complex task of remodeling a house? Your mental model of robotics is completely wrong.
More like 6 years than 6 months.
Next, plumbers. The future of data centers seems to be more liquid cooling and less ductwork. Take a look at this new 1 megawatt server rack.[1] It has more pipes than cables. All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded space is scary.
Listen to the video again, he clarifies early on that this is supporting multiple racks. A megawatt is 1000kW. If you took 5 B300 systems (10 rack units each), you'd still only be at 75kW, which if you're doing redundancy properly, means you have wired 150kW to the rack, but you're not generating a megawatt of heat.
NVidia has been talking about 800VDC 1MW racks for about a year now.[1] They're trying to get others to solve the power and cooling problems. The Schneider Electric view: [2] The view from Flex.[3]
This was being talked about more in 2025 than it is now. Nobody seems to have deployed a 1MW rack yet. There are major problems to be solved for that level of power density. The fire protection people want racks in fireproof enclosures with a built in inert gas extinguishing system and smoke detectors that pull in air from many points for very fast detection. The cooling people talk about 400 gallons per minute of chilled glycol. The power people talk about arc flash protection and worker safety.
This is a scary level of energy density. Not hopeless; the switchgear and semiconductor inside locomotives are at comparable levels.
[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...
[2] https://blog.se.com/datacenter/2025/10/16/the-1-mw-ai-it-rac...
[3] https://flex.com/resources/megawatt-racks-are-coming-how-800...
> The power people talk about arc flash protection and worker safety.
800VDC is insanely scary stuff.
> At present, no consensus standard provides a validated methodology for calculating direct current (dc) arc-flash incident energy.
This means that establishing proper PPE for DC arc flashes is not possible right now. If I was asked to provide electricians to work on these racks, I would only allow my electricians to approach them, let alone do any work, if they were de-energized, full stop. Even inspecting anything while they’re energized (without doing any work) would be insane, in my opinion. Nobody’s life is worth losing over a rack of servers, and the incident energy for a 480V AC circuit that can power a 1 MW rack (1503 amps) can exceed 40 cal per cm^2 depending on the electrical system already, and there is no PPE that protects you above that incident energy level.
800VDC at (merely) hundreds of amps is a high-end electric car charger. (Those are a lot easier to shut down individually, though.)
> All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded space is scary.
Maybe it's a non-conductive oil? I recall seeing someone who overclocked their PC (circa 2005) to 5GHz, and ran the motherboard completely submerged in an oil bath.
expensive and leaks become more problematic.
Each rack has a water (and glycol?) loop and water blocks mounted to the chips with a liquid-liquid heat exchanger that interfaces with the building chilled water loop (glycol and water), there’s no immersion.
It works like a nuclear power plant cooling system if you want to look an a diagram that is easily available. The radiated core water loop is equivalent to the rack water loop and the cooling water piping is equivalent to the chilled water loop, the difference being that data centers recirculate their chilled water loop water while nuclear plants generally discharge the water after it has passed through cooling towers.
I wouldn't bet on it. Process plumbing is substantially more exempt (varies by state and situation, obviously) from the various licensing cartels and rackets that make supply inelastic and drive up labor costs. So they probably won't be paying out the nose for licensed trades on that stuff.
Why should software companies hire electricians and carpenters by the thousands?
Because these are not AI companies, these are infrastructure companies as their main source of revenue and cost is renting and building infrastructure.
Which has been a general point about AI - it's expensive to build and expensive to run, and requires a lot of infrastructure. Which is increasingly making it look like software might turn into a limited margin business, like making cars.
As long as Nvidia pays you to buy Nvidia, which the stock market increasingly does not like.
RAM manufacturers are falling, and today after the MSFT numbers are out we'll see additional CapEx worries.
My next door neighbors’ tiny (>50 people) electrical company has been booking millions in lighting protection installation work across the east coast. Theyve made more from dc work in the last three years than the previous 20.
It was a pain in my butt trying to find an electrician that would do my house rewire. thanks, AI.
Get it now, while the getting is good. Chip maker valuation in Korea is going down[1]. The bubble may be coming to an end sooner than we would like.
1. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-kosp...
“The bubble ending” is possible the biggest meme of 2026 (and onwards).
Thanks to the South Korean President pumping the KOSPI with leverage and then shortly tightening the rules once things looked unsustainable.
Electricians, sure, but carpenters? I figured these buildings always had steel frames.
Framing, whether in wood or metal studs, is done by the carpenters.
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 pay some extreme "fuck off" prices for work that I couldn't do myself.
My father-in-law is a construction manager for a large power company, and they've been expanding their footprint as well for these datacenters, and hiring like crazy to speed up their construction.
He said it will be a few years before the independent trades people become more available.
I assume this kind of thing is why every quote we got for dead-simple mini-split heat pump installation last year had an effective person-day labor rate of like $2.5k or more (we didn't end up paying, I mean my god, I'll just fucking do it at those prices, it'll take me twice as long as someone who does it every day, but that's insane). Electricians and HVAC workers with certs in crazy-high demand, I guess.
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.
So we had our central HVAC burn up, and I bought a mini-split heat pump to replace it, because the HVAC companies around me don't do mini-splits. Apparently they also don't just remove old systems unless they are replacing them. So for 30 minutes of demo work, they charged me $2900 to just remove the old system. I need to install the mini-split myself still, but for now, to get me through the summer and fall, I have a couple window units.
The electrical work I need done is because the previous owner (my grandfather-in-law) built the house and did absolutely NOTHING to code, and inspection found none of this. There are splices in the walls, there is yellow romex being used as power lines to sub panels across the lawn, strung from tree to tree to keep it off the ground. The electrical panel is installed 5-inches from the washing machine... where there is water, and lots of it. There are 4 sub panels strewn throughout the house - it is 1300 square feet. There are random nutted romex wires just poking out of holes in the walls. Basically we need the entire house to be rewired.
Same with plumbing, there isn't a single valve in this house. Everything is plumbed directly from the cold or hot lines. So when the shower sprung a leak, we had to turn the mains water off, rip out the shower to fix it, then re-install it. And that is all over the house, as well.
Don't buy a house built by a family member, even if that family member is a GC that builds houses for a living, because they aren't getting paid to build their own house, and will 1000% cut every corner known to man.
If an "inspector" didn't find issues like that you had a bad inspector. Which many of them are. And they have escape clauses in their contracts disclaiming any liability for things they miss.
That's not to say a good inspector will find every fault either. They don't tear walls open, and they don't have x-ray vision. They only inspect what they can see.
Eh every house has elements of this and everyone learns the hard way. After struggling to install a new bathroom exhaust fan a few years ago in a house that was half built by someone 80 years ago and half completely redone by my late father (who did contracting work early on before he became an engineer), I learned that Carpenters/contractors real skill is the experience they have on the job improvising and adapting to the uniqueness of every project they take on because there is no other way around it. The real world does not have perfect APIs/abstractions and in reality neither do most computing systems so improvisation and solving for the problem is the thought process both in home building and coding.
Its very much like an experienced coder going into established codebases and being able to more quickly make changes and improvements. No codebase is perfect and they all seem to have their own uniqueness just like no house is perfect and all have their own quirks. How good or bad it is can be determined by the experience and foresight of the person doing the work but there will still always be uniqueness and quirks.
Once I finally internalized it, I really appreciated the history of my home and the things people did to solve problems as time went on just like a mature codebase. I would argue as long as the property is generally good, its just a fact of life to have to deal with the rest.
> Don't buy a house built by a family member, even if that family member is a GC that builds houses for a living, because they aren't getting paid to build their own house, and will 1000% cut every corner known to man.
As the saying goes... shoemaker's son goes barefoot.
> it'll take me twice as long
Guys, take a look at Mr. Handyman over here, able to do the work of professional HVAC workers in only double the time.
>I mean my god, I'll just fucking do it at those prices, it'll take me twice as long as someone who does it every day, but that's insane).
You'll be enraged by how easy it is. And you'll be enraged not at the licensed trades for milking the system, but the white collar office types who act as if all this stuff is some temperamental voodoo that will melt down a nuclear power plant if you breath on it wrong.
If you go to any large DC construction site the lot will be filled with out of state plates - and not just adjacent states, but folks from across the country.
You will get downvoted by the folks here. They are blind to the fact that AI is sucking the economy dry and making life miserable for everyone who's not getting paid by free AI money. Something is gonna crack eventually, they'll all be dumbfounded.
Right the entire concept of a bubble is utterly alien to software people because none of them ever get laid off.
This is the same cohort that don't realize they are working for oligarchic fascists and have zero sense of solidarity with their fellow humans, anything is possible.
I'm sure that you believe the same thing about Walmart employees, too, and really thought deeply before typing that out.
i don't understand why this was downvoted
So - when the slump comes it will be possible to get an electrician for your house or to fit solar panes, but the chance of having money to pay for it is another thing.
I'd want to get those payments up front ... if you do, good deal for now.
Smells like MCSE of the early oughts. Fun times.
The data centre build out is one thing but I'd be surprised if they weren't having a few generate training data for robots as well at this point.
Additionally, that gives you a large sample of people whose body movements you can track to train a world model.
I kind of wonder how much this is also going to fuel humanoid robots.
Just like IT during COVID, everybody wanted to work in IT, companies were hiring by the hundreds. Look what is happening now, companies firing by the thousands.
AI bubble is already here, watch people becoming electrician/carpenters only for the AI to go sideways, then more hundreds of such workers unemployed.
Don't follow trend, look at what happened with IT and folks leaving university now can not even land job interview. Do what you love, not what it is trending.
Gotta spend all those revenues while they're still worth something!
This is part of why housing prices are going up.
That's quite a spin on AI coming for your job if I do say so. ;) Hope they get their money's worth.
It hasn't ever been "A.I.". N.Y.Times looks sooo ancient.
So AI still needs human hands to do its bidding? I thought they are going to put everyone out of work?
i've been building Camera Search for two years now to help tradesmen build and fix things better.
kind of meta that the models running in data centers can now help the tradesmen building the next data centers. full loop.
Oh, I thought it's about AI companies asking people to wear those little head-mounted cameras, in hopes of gathering data to train future robot-electricians.
The same thing happened with the oil sands boom 15 years ago. Industrial sites were losing skilled trades people left and right as they went up north to make 2-3x their salary. Then that bubble popped and these folks were tossed onto the street before they could blink.
By all means go make money if the opportunity presents itself. I love to see well compensated trades. But be under no illusions that when the bubble pops (and it will) you’ll be tossed aside before you know what happened. So make money now, and milk these AI players for everything they’ve got, but just have a clear plan on what comes next.
The clear plan for electricians and carpenters is to eh continue to do electrical and wood works. Or do you think they would be out of work if there are no more AI-related jobs?
They might if many of the white collar people that pay them can't afford to pay them anymore.
Same as always, got it.
What will happen if the bubble bursts? It’s not like homes and businesses won’t need plumbers and electricians anymore. If you have the opportunity to make a lot more money for the next few years (maybe indefinitely) and in the worst case go back to what you were doing before, why wouldn’t you take it?
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.
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.
Money is a mechanism for keeping tabs on how much the human civilization owes to any particular person or entity. It's imperfect, sure. But it's what we decided to go with. If you don't have money, society just decided (using its mechanisms) it pretty much owes you nothing. So your demands are disregarded.
Who is the "we" who decided to go with it?
Sum of all homo sapiens.
I can't remember taking a worldwide vote on the subject.
And tech companies are firing developers and tech staff by the thousands
I think that by the time AI can fully automate software engineering, it will be able to fully automate physical electrical work.
The challenge in both cases is all the invisible, hard-to-describe stuff that people are doing which business people take for granted.
Business people don't consider "minimizing complexity" to be something software engineers do, but it's literally the most important part of the job for any large complex project and it's almost impossible to measure. Even humans are pretty bad at it but at least there is a limit. With AI, there is no awareness of this and more complexity means more tokens to sell today and in the future to maintain so there is a perverse incentive and no guardrails.
Also, software engineers make a lot of decisions based on human factors and factors that are unique to the company/project.
For electricians, the part which AI struggles to automate is robotics and stuff like travelling to the job location, ensuring the right cables are available, identifying the right port to plug the cables into, drilling holes if necessary, climbing into the ceiling, pulling rolls of cables along the ceiling or wall with appropriate attachments, setting up the electrical boxes.
I think in the near future, all manual jobs will be replaced by a combination of specialist robots and generalist "human minders"; a minder will be transferrable across any industry and the entire job will be exception handling any unexpected issues which the engineers didn't yet train or program into the specialist robots.
Yeh i see you never went to a location to be surprised by reality.
Dream on.
Before reading the article, I assumed AI companies were recruiting electricians and carpenters to capture their expertise to train robots or AI models on how to plan an entire project from start to finish: "Guide me through building a complete house".
I think this will cause the same effect as energy bills going up - other people are going to pay for the increased wages of carpenters.
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.
If you get into any construction job you need to expect to move job sites regularly. If it is a single family house that might be as much as twice a day. If it is a large industrial site it might be every few years. However it is unusual to work at the same location for much longer.
You are also subject to the economy more than most jobs. When things start going bad you are the first one cut.
It can still be a good career overall, but it does have downsides and isn't for everyone. I'm not leaving my job even though I know how to do construction.
It’s a good career if your unionize ie electrician, plumber, HVAC, fire protection, steel, concrete, and it also helps if you’re operating within the radius of a large city and all the suburbs around it, ie Santa Barbara to San Diego, Los Angeles to Palm Springs within that radius, very good opportunities, and very good living if your unionized.
I have friends on both sides of the union debate in construction. There are pros and cons. the unions try to tell you that they are much better, but in reality there are pros and cons and you need to figure out what is best for you.
If the demand is great enough, they can fly trades to site and put them up in a hotel, just like any consultant.
That is done, but it is more expensive so it isn't common. In most cases the trade is needed and busy in their local city so why would they leave to a different place. Trades that have niche skills fly all over, but electricians are something that you need all over and so most can stay busy working close enough to their house to see their kids every night.
This is rare. Some times they'll have people drive in from a couple hours away and put them up in a hotel for some nights.
If you're unlucky, the job will be far away but below the cutoff for a hotel, so you have to choose between driving home every night or paying for your own hotel. Younger people sleep in their car some times.
Any long distance site starts excluding more and more of the older workers and those with families. It's a younger workers game for the most part
> put them up in a hotel
the hotel rates in Abilene TX are comically high and all the RV parks are filled up too. I have friends/roots there so make the drive from Dallas every so often. The stargate datacenter is certainly a popular topic of discussion both good and bad.
Yeah, it's exactly like that oil boom in North Dakota. There was a brief, massive increase in demand for construction labor to build oil rigs, and you had "man camps" an the like. Then once the rigs were built, the employment dropped massively because it takes a lot fewer guys to run an oil well than build one.
Yeah I remember the excitement about oil field jobs... was it about 10 years ago already?
North Dakota's unemployment rate is 2.3%
Other than farming, what is there to do in North Dakota or South Dakota? Most of the people who live there if they want to do anything else they have to go someplace else.
Most of those data centers built in relatively remote areas. will have just a few people working at that data center. It’s not going to bring lasting prosperity to that midsize or small town.
There are a lot of little towns that have a small factory making some weird widget that you don't think about but society would fall about without it.
> Other than farming, what is there to do in North Dakota or South Dakota?
Services that support farming.
> North Dakota's unemployment rate is 2.3%
So? What's your point? During the boom, laborers from all over went to North Dakota to work in the oil fields, and for the unemployment to say low there, most of them had to leave. And, IIRC, North Dakota wisely refused to build too much permanent infrastructure to support that population, because they knew it would be transient. If there was much effect on unemployment statistics, it was probably in other states (though I would guess the effect was more on wages than binary employment).
My point is boom jobs evaporate, and give a recent example.
I'll second this with the following anecdote. A few years ago, I completed an electrician certificate program at a community college in Texas. I wasn't exactly looking to switch careers, but I wanted to learn how to work on electric motors safely. As part of that program, they talked to us about the job and pay.
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.
> 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
Journeyman union pay is over $60 an hour in Minneapolis and St Paul, $110 an hour if you include fringes. I feel bad for electricians in Texas.
Master electricians don’t earn any more than a journeyman, as an electrical PM I don’t care if you passed a test that lets you sign plans and open a shop. Union electricians have multiple levels, our locals use Journeyman, Foreman, General Foreman, and General Foreman in Charge. Each step up is $4-5/hr extra. The classifications are based on how many people they are supervising, but if you’re a good electrician, you’ll have no problem getting foreman or general foreman pay for solo work. Employers are only obligated to pay you foreman etc if you’re supervising but if you’re productive, they’ll pay you more to keep you happy since the company can make way more than $10/hr extra from a very productive electrician.
That's good to hear about MN. And, yes, pay is terrible in TX especially for how hot some of these jobs are. IBEW does exist there, but my experience is that most people in TX just start as an apprentice doing grunt work without any training program and my guess is that hurts their pay. Our program centered more around residential and commercial, so I'm not sure what guys at the refineries were making. There was a rumor that guys working on wind turbines were making good money as long as one is fine with heights, but this was before the administration change over, which was hostile to new wind farms.
This is the case with all construction jobs. Its not unique to a data center.
When PE has taken over trades, it still is a good option to become a quality tradesman, who can start his own business. Quality = higher premium, high end.
Sure, but in 4 years you'll have the skills to go on your own.
> 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 other companies who run the range of being understanding and kind to total DGAF about you or your job requirements because they know you being upset has no connection back to their job safety. This varies based on the site and who’s running it, but that also changes from month to month or day to day.
I say this as someone who spent very little time in trades related work before graduating college and who has career electrician family members. Trades work is hard. If you work on computers in an office, we have it so very easy.
> Trades work is hard.
most of my extended family was hardcore blue collar (ranchers, welders, oil hands, etc). When they got older their bodies were pretty broken, most couldn't walk from one end of their house to the other after about age 70. That work is hard on your body year after year and it eventually just wears out. For comparison, my father was the typical white collar worker. He's a minor pickleball celebrity in Florida at 80.
> Trades work is hard
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.
My company still has somebody working for them who is in his 80s. When he retires his ex gets half is pension - but he isn't retired....
There was a high demand for trade jobs even before. Because people have been told to take a loans and go to college to make more $$$ for decades, there's been a labor shortage in trade jobs for quite a while now.
If you don’t know anyone have family in the trades, generally most people outside don’t even know these jobs exist particularly fire protection, fire sprinkler pipe fitters (unionized), and fire sprinkler design/engineering no one outside, even knows.
If you know someone and you get into it, you can have a pretty good career I would not recommend being a non-union pipe fitter or even working for a non-union company in any trade (except a family business) not if you want to learn and do it right and have longevity and financial security, most of the unionized construction trades usually have educational training facilities thru the union or junior college for their apprentices coming up, non Union fire sprinkler companies are basically like picking people up from Home Depot.
Note: many junior colleges across the country have programs for the HVAC trade as part of their curriculum.
This is a good reminder that every software revolution eventually becomes a hardware and infrastructure problem. Someone still has to build the buildings, wire them, and keep them running
Quick, before the bubble bursts and everybody gets fired.
The graphs and data included in the article look legitimate but it's just embarrassingly misleading. For one, correlation does not equal causation, and by displaying a trend for nonresidential construction you imply AI data center is the cause of it. Second, the trend looks convincing only from the specific window in time and ignores the many years the government tracks this data.
I didn't expect anything more from the New York Times who wrote this suspiciously favorable article about Big Tech.
My take is that electricians and carpenters are a great profession. I have great respect for them. I would have also mentioned NVIDIA's worker programs to setup AI infrastructure but this article was too biased in favor of Meta.
Carpenters? Are we making the data centers out of wood?
Carpentry tends to span beyond direct woodworking. Installing Drywall over steel studs is one example that might apply to DC construction.
>Carpentry is a skilled trade and a craft in which the primary work performed is the cutting, shaping and installation of building materials during the construction of buildings, ships, timber bridges, concrete formwork, etc.
I'm not sure carpenters do drywall, that's usually a specialized crew. But they might do the framing/assembly of the steel studs. And hanging doors, fitting the raised flooring, installing shelving/cabinets, etc.
There is frequently wood in buildings yes
Homes, not these buildings. Wood's a liability when it comes to fire suppression.
> Homes, not these buildings.
I would bet that there is a ton of wood in these buildings that they are hiring thousands of carpenters for. They are not hiring carpenters to entertain the electricians.
Everything I'm finding is showing the opposite with the exception of Microsoft experimenting with timber datacenters. Just looking at photos of DCs under construction shows they're all steel and concrete.
My grandpa was a card-carrying union carpenter. But all I remember is him doing general labor... all the actual carpentry jobs were gone before I was born, and I hit the half-century mark myself a few years ago. He worked with concrete and steel alot. I'd seen him put up cinder block too, picked that up somewhere I guess. And this was in the 1980s.
I'd take your bet, while trying to hustle you to raise the wager.
There is zero wood in a data center (or commercial building in general) excluding doors, millwork, and fire-rated plywood for mounting equipment on. It’s simply not allowed.
Data center are tip-up warehouses with walls made of reinforced concrete, metal bar joists, metal columns, and metal roofs. Any interior wall framing is made of steel.
I don't know anything about this so I am curious: that doesn't sound like a lot of wood work so why are the AI companies recruiting so many carpenters?
Steel stud framing is done by carpenters, any interior partition wall framing is done by carpenters. Also any soffits, front for gypsum ceiling clouds in offices, etc will be framed by carpenters. Maybe Meta has them install doors as well?
The forms needed to pour concrete is my guess.
>There is zero wood in a data center.
Pretty broad generalisation.
Theres no wood on the data floor of a Tier 4 datacenter.
I am not convinced that every DC being built as a result of AI demand is going to be a brilliant T4 datacenter. In fact I wouldnt be surprised if theres a lot of shit going on in the US, which from my admittedly limited experience has some really shithouse datacenters as it is.
Theres a small DC operator near me, 10-20 racks, bit of a joke really other than their position makes them high demand by telcos. Last time I was there <10 years ago had MDF floors above their cable paths. Might have been a wooden partition too.
But to be a pain in the ass, my local T4 DC has a significant amount of timber in the foyer and break rooms. The meeting rooms too. My guess is, theres tons in the office area.
Theres also a ton of temporary construction hacks going on there are they expand. They had some temporary walls built across the common room for instance.
I wouldnt be surprised if carpenters were useful for things like, drop ceilings, liftable floor tiles, general dogsbody stuff.
So there is wood.
Zero wood except all the things that are made of wood, got it.
All of that stuff is probably 0.01% of the building, by volume/weight/cost/labor or any metric you care to choose. The structure itself has zero wood in it.
Trim, cabinets, and doors can all be removed from a building and it will remain standing. If you remove all of the wood from a stick-built house there is virtually nothing left.
Not usually, but the same standard framing and drywall techniques work using the more modern steel stud systems. Here are a few that came up at the top of a DDG search you can peruse to update yourself.
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...
I would think that data centers would be using as much prefab / modular construction as possible and on-site work would be as limited as possible.
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.
They likely are. However you still need someone to connect the wires to each prefab section.
It's coming...
might take a while I expect there's a lot of regulation around using a licensed electrician, that kind of thing needs more legislation to allow a robot to replace it, I am speculating
Carpenters? As in carrying around a framing hammer and nails? I'm not sure they have the right term here. I'm not familiar with these wooden datacenters.
This is generally the right term. Carpenters also refers to the guys who put up metal studs, doors and things of that nature. But they might be referring to the people who put up their framing for the concrete structures and molds.
"Aluminium carpentry" is a thing around here: people that build and install window frames, metal gazebos, conference stalls, custom sheds and so on. These huge data centers probably aren't using the quaint standard data center server cabinets.
A mason would be doing the concrete work. Metal studs and doors is usually done by the drywall and framer subcontractors - which could also be a carpenter - but drywall at datacenter or any commercial scale is almost always done by a framer and drywall specialist. They headline is using the wrong term.
It's plausible quite a few smaller datacenters have modern engineered wood frames. Wood is pretty high-tech these days. Engineered wood is cheap, lightweight, preserves as well as reinforced concrete, and increasingly for new residential buildings under 5 stories. It would be competitive in a bidding process considering the investors clearly have an appetite for risk.
But even for a steel and concrete datacenter you would want a few carpenters for the interior where humans (at least occasionally) work, more to help with scaffolding and other temporary buildings (e..g housing) during construction, and building framing for drainage ditches and other landscaping. I imagine wood-and-nails carpenters are quite in-demand for most datacenter projects.