I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.
Industrial electricians have always been in the boom-bust cycle.
IBEW (Union electricians) have been doing really well this decade. Another option if you don't want to be a contractor or an Anthropic employee. But they've also gone years without enough work to go around.
Scroll down to this comment for a better discussion than I could give: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098874
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.
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.
Yeah, working people should never sit across each other at a table and discuss mutually beneficial things. For the Epsteinth time, class unity is only for the upper classes.
I wish I could follow people on HN. Because this is worth a follow:
"For the Epsteinth time, class unity is only for the upper classes"
You're in luck <https://hnrss.org/threads?id=SirHackalot>
I wish I could block people on HN so I could stop seeing this armchair-reddit-activism.
Harrumph
I haven’t been on Reddit in ages, if that helps :)
Reddit: Come because we made sure you can't see the comments without logging in, leave because it sucks.
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..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487885
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.
yeah. it's like a guild. hired someone to install my ev charger on an app who had lots of horror stories about apprenticeship.
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.
Yeah, but you might still want to enter the field based on the aging of the current workforce. Seems likely to be a shortage of electricians over the next while.
I feel like we're entering an age of electrification so having training/education in a field related to electrics/electronics seems like a reasonable path for someone to take.
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.
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)
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.
It's accelerating. Electrification of infrastructure and buildings is a huge growth area with big delays in projects due to lack of capacity.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Probably better off than investing in any field where our output is bits.
Isn’t the same with software?
Is the Anthropoc data center buildout union ceritifed?
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.