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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.
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.
Also, an electrician just doesn't pop into existence. You have to go through years of apprenticeship and union dues payments.
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.
Being over reactive to anything you hear in the news is generally a bad idea. It’s always a view so zoomed in to a single blip on the chart that ignores the wider landscape.
> The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in.
HVAC and electrical (e.g. UPSes) need somewhat regular maintenance, so once build-out is done, if you're with one of the OEMs, you'll probably have regular work babysitting the gear.
> One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.
That averages to 150k per annum, which is more than double the median salary in the US.
It's nice to hear tradespeople getting paid well with lots of work. I'm happy for them :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Electricians, sure, but carpenters? I figured these buildings always had steel frames.
It was a pain in my butt trying to find an electrician that would do my house rewire. thanks, AI.
I'd want to get those payments up front ... if you do, good deal for now.
This is horrible. AI industry is sucking the economy dry of resources and labor, making everything more expensive who is not an AI company.
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".
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.
I kind of wonder how much this is also going to fuel humanoid robots.
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.
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.
This is part of why housing prices are going up.
Additionally, that gives you a large sample of people whose body movements you can track to train a world model.
So AI still needs human hands to do its bidding? I thought they are going to put everyone out of work?
That's quite a spin on AI coming for your job if I do say so. ;) Hope they get their money's worth.
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!
And tech companies are firing developers and tech staff by the thousands
Smells like MCSE of the early oughts. Fun times.
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.
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.
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.
Quick, before the bubble bursts and everybody gets fired.
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