Before you decide to change jobs - the demand in electricians is caused by a temporary massive construction boom of data centers. Maintaining an already built data center doesn't require much personnel. It's a clickbait article.
Before you decide to change jobs - 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.
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
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.
> 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.
> Other than farming, what is there to do in North Dakota or South Dakota?
Services that support farming.
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.
> 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.
[dead]