America Is Trying to Electrify. There Aren’t Enough Electricians
wsj.com
wsj.com
You first have to do 6-12 months in a state-approved trade school (costs $15-20K on average in CA).
Then comes 4 years of apprenticeship. But good luck finding a licensed journeyman who is hiring or actually gives a shit. And if you're lucky, you will spend the entire time doing bitch work and get paid a whopping $12/hr. It also comes with requirements like bringing your own truck to the job. Want to join a union? Rejection rates for early career apprentices is >95%.
If you somehow make it through this you finally get a license and the honor of fixing people's light bulbs. Do this for a decade or two and gain experience and you'll be making like $80K/yr (https://faradaycareers.com/careers/electrician-salary).
No shit smart people are studying coding instead.
Software engineering could probably use a few barriers. There's some exceedingly shitty software out there getting pumped out by people who hop in to make quick money and get hired by companies who don't care and just want to pay people less.
The world needs to catch up to how critical software is and course correct away from it becoming a race to the bottom.
The moat worked a generation or two ago - you could make a good middle class living as a tradesperson. It doesn't work anymore, now we just have a shortage of tradespeople and nobody wants to jump through the hoops when there are easier ways to make higher wages.
That said, there should be stricter requirements for offering apprenticeships. If the law requires it to work, anyone that has achieved that status should be mandated to take on X apprentices over their career.
Unless you are playing the long game. With the advance of AI… 20 years from now he’ll have a stable job in a severe Electrician shortage, while the Silicon Valley teams will have replaced themselves and be out jobs.
I think that is closer than SV wants to admit. Outsourcing is getting higher quality, economic downturns are already hitting SV with layoffs, low-code is getting better… and ChatGPT, doing programming in 20 years? Seems pretty dang certain to me.
Automation doesn't replace automators (it makes their work more abstract and productibe, but that just increases the application space and quantity of output consumed.)
If China is going to squeeze the global semiconductor industry, they'd better do it soon.
Yup, just like FSD AI replaced truck and taxi drivers five years ago. Everyone now has a truck driver shortage.
A lot of high schools teach kids they must go to college. Kids feel like failures to consider the route of skilled trades. Many schools have removed the hands on classes that prep people to be comfortable working with tools and their hands. So, kids have less prep to go out there. There is a culture element to this.
> You first have to do 6-12 months in a state-approved trade school (costs $15-20K on average in CA).
This isn't everywhere. Many other states have a much simpler setup to get into trades. Sometimes there is a trade school (and sometimes the industry covers the cost). Sometimes you start a job and learn on the job. You take certification tests along the way. What you describe for CA isn't everywhere.
Let's say we do somehow make trades popular and everyone goes to trade school instead of college. What then? Is there magically going to be more state funding for apprenticeship programs? Will there be better union representation? Will states make better laws around workplace injuries? Will wages somehow get higher? (Quite the opposite in fact if more people are entering the profession).
You have to fix all this first, and that in turn will lead to better public perception of the profession. It can't be the other way around.
High schoolers don't make decisions on economic realities for themselves. Many will make decisions on economic ideas that often don't match reality. Ideas they are taught through the school systems and that their parents by into as well.
I know many people in the trades. Many places in the US are not like CA. Some places it's much cheaper and easier.
A lot of people who go through college and get a lot of debt hate their job and only make a median level salary. They did it because they thought that's how you make it. Many would be much happier and make better money in the trades.
These are somewhat individual-dependent. Onlyfans has a pretty big personal cost to subtract if you're a family oriented individual from a highly religious community that dislikes nudity, and you value continued social standing in that community. If you're an orphan who for whatever reason has little personal connection to mainstream society, it probably will come at a lower personal cost to you to be seen as a sex worker. So with sex workers, you're probably gonna disproportionately see people with weaker affiliation to mainstream society and/or connection to conventional family members and values.
Greater social acceptance of sex workers is the worst possible thing that can happen to the open-minded schoolteacher and others already in the game as it gives the out-group a less-worse comparative cost. Greater acceptance means lower personal cost / barriers to be seen as a sex worker, so wages depress. Eventually if it's seen as no different than working at McDonald's your stuck competing with literally anyone either attractive or charismatic and it becomes more profitable to at least pick something with a higher barrier to entry like teaching.
It is for electricians. I come from a family of electricians working in many states, including the so-called "red" states. This is the process. It was designed to impede entry into the skilled trades. That may have been a good strategy in another era, but it's not a good strategy now.
It's hard to come anywhere close to software money as a licensed EE designing the electrical things, let alone as the one building them.
Hey, that's good evidence that the supply isn't actually very constrained. (But yeah, apprenticeship terms are bullshit.)
It’s even worse than this in the UK. For the first year of your apprenticeship you get paid £4.81 per hour which works out at $5.78 an hour. Unless you’re living with parents who won’t charge you rent, the apprenticeship route is off limits unless you find a company that pay a proper wage. They do exist but competition for the places is extremely fierce.
The wage does go up in your second year to your age band’s minimum wage, so if you’re 23 you’ll get a whopping (/s) £9.50 an hour, but if you’re 18-20 you’re on £6.83 and if you’re still under 18 you’re stuck on the £4.81. Absolutely disgraceful.
If we want more electricians we need to embrace skilled trades as a positive path.
Some details for the US are at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric.... Note, the average income is higher than the average income per person in the US.
If so, are they so poorly structured that they discourage applicants?
For example: in the last years people have been pushed into college by being bombarded by messages of "you'll die poor if you don't". Wages are another.
There is some change for that now where some schools are starting to go the other way. But, these are in the minority.
It's a culture thing.
I know a number of younger people who had the impression it was better to toil in a low wage job (like a sandwich shop) and pine for a college degree than to choose a skilled trades career path. To them choosing skilled trades felt like failure. This is the culture they were raised in.
And usually, the classes are full, and they have to turn away many qualified applicants. While they talk about how desperately they need new people in the career.
The recurring points I remember were, "then why aren't wages rising to meet this demand"; and "you will feel more benefit from the electrification boom if you're IBEW."
OK, found the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/electricians/comments/11efewl/ameri...
There are lots of companies out there that pay low wages compared to others. And they do a lot to make their people feel like they only deserve that amount. Happens across so many fields. I'm sure it happens for electricians and other skilled trades.
Pretend we're talking about someone on the low end of programming knowledge, the kind of tech worker who might be made obsolete by AI.
No way you're making $200k doing residential work, even in large cities. Definitely not if you aren't on your own.
If you limit yourself to simple work like replacing outlets, switches, and hardwired lamps, that's most of the likely electrical work for an existing house. Call a profesional for new circuits and maybe for replacing breakers; IMHO, it's a scary box, but the work is straight forward, so I'll replace breakers, but I would (and have) definitely call out for a breaker box replacement.
If it's an interest you('re friend) has then why not take a couple evening classes to slowly get the foundational skills & ensure you have enough of savings to make that jump in the future if needed?
Fwiw, I live in the Bay Area and one of the best paid people I know is an electrician - he can pull in $1k a day on some jobs - so the upside is there too.
And yet, the HVAC and electrician industry remains understaffed. Maybe it's not such a great industry to work in?
One downside: they get pulled into more low voltage/systems work and they hate that part of the job as they wanted to get away from computers.
And some localities don’t consider low voltage to be electrical at all and you need no training/licensing.
Even then, the amount of credentialism is extremely high for anything besides the lowest rung of dev jobs. Look at how people on HN turn their noses up at bootcamps, or really anything less than a CS undergrad degree.
Biggest mistake I made was not going to school and buying into the “you don’t need a degree” stuff. While technically true, it feels extremely limiting when you want to venture outside that “lowest rung”.
And for a good reason.
Practical downsides: considerably lower pay right now compared to a job at FAANG, although certainly nothing to sneeze at. A profession regulated far more than necessary, similarly to many other blue collar fields - for example in California, you need 8,000 hours of apprenticeship to get a license. You are also technically required to deal with municipal bureaucracies and get sign-offs on almost every single thing you do, although most electricians follow these rules rather liberally, and there's a ton of unpermitted work in every older house.
You're less vulnerable to AI, but you sure are vulnerable to downturns in construction.
You serve at the pleasure of your clients. You're gonna be getting emergency calls at weird hours and you're gonna be spending a lot of time in your car.
It's physical labor - you're gonna be spending some time in crawl spaces or other uncomfortable positions, it's rough on your hands, etc.
Almost all jobs everywhere pay considerably less than FAANG.
I find it curious that HN so casually uses FAANG pay as the benchmark.
This is also a really weird point. If you work at FAANG, you are vulnerable to economic downturns. Just look at how so many tech companies have decimated their workforce.
This is just not the case if you're an electrician and construction is drying up.
And even more mysteriously, treat working at FAANG as a de-facto career goal.
On that board, it was honestly seen a failure if a person did not get into one of the Big 4 IBs or PE funds. It was like entering a twilight zone, no one could lower themselves into accepting anything less than working at one of 6 companies on the entire earth.
The trades are going to have to start paying more and reducing regulation.
This can be mitigated of course, just like how a desk worker can mitigate the risks of sitting for so many hours a day, but it may be harder to mitigate for a trades job.
Don't confuse owning a business that hires its electricians to customers with actually being an electrician. The former is very lucrative, the latter much less so. It takes many brutal years to get from the latter to the former.
[1] As opposed to QA, customer service, etc, which are more comparable hence the "tech worker" caveat
Do you have a source for this? How much of that derives from tech workers generally living in high COL areas and needing higher salaries, while electricians are distributed throughout the land at all COL?
I have no doubt that high-earning engineers outearn high-earning electricians, but the assumption about this disparity seems suspect to me, without a source to back it up.
In Indiana, seems 75th percentile electricians earn about the same as 25th percentile software engineers. In Nebraska, it's 90th electricians and ~35th software engineers. A lot to take into consideration, and a wider gap then I expected in non-tech hubs.
The same informal research suggests a pretty consistent 60K or so for journeyman electricians. The range is tighter because skilled trade wages are subject to more regulation. Based on my knowledge of the Oregon & Washington prevaling wage rates (my wife works in accounting and has several small business electricians as customers), 60K does sound about right. Though as an hourly worker, it is not uncommon for them to sign up for more hours to push their yearly compensation above 100K.
There's also a relevant bias. The BLS does not adjust their wage percentiles to local cost of living/taxes. Software development jobs tend to be concentrated in high cost, high tax, high wage regions. By contrast tradesmen the demand for tradesmen is the same (per capita) just about everywhere. This bias makes the numbers difficult to compare. Suffice to say trades earn more in real terms, and software engineers earn less in real terms.
Electrician - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472111.htm
Software Developer - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
How do you feel about standing on ladders and pulling wires with your hands for 8 hours a day? How about when it's -10F outside? (may not matter depending on where you live).
I think it has both pros and cons over software dev. For sure the success metric is clear (thing works and passes code and inspection? it's done). Vs the fuzzy software dev requirements. But it also can be a lot more physical.
As for electrician: universal demand, get paid to learn, and a really interesting skill on top of it all? I mean even if it doesn't end up being somebody's final career, it just sounds like a really interesting idea.
Unless you're contracted on commercial projects, that's a large part of the job.
It’s a good gig.
bing > consider joining a union or a professional group that can offer you guidance and support during your apprenticeship journey. Some examples are International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Independent Electrical Contractors (IEC), and Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC)
Anyway cant you(r friend) work both angles until something takes off? Apply to some unions / apprenticeships and dev jobs? Let the universe decide?
Personally I think its a great idea. I wish I'd thought of it during my last job search.
He pushed me into college when I worked with him as a youth. He straight up told me, "be an engineer, those guys make twice what I do for half the work."
Also, an often ignored fact of trades is that recessions hit them hard. My dad had nearly no work for all of 2009 and the company he worked for nearly went bankrupt.
Do you like dealing directly with customers? Customers who have unreasonable expectations of your trade? Other construction workers? Do you like working with your hands, at the cost of your long-term health? Do you like making a lot less money?
If so, yeah, it's a great option.
My first question would be -- how old are you? Skilled labor is still labor, and it is fairly normal for middle aged electricians, plumbers, etc, to have significant chronic injuries. A smart electrician, HVAC guy, plumber, etc, is moving into supervision or business management at that point and hiring new young technicians to do the physically hard work.
> tech worker who might be made obsolete by AI
My advice would be to level up and become an software engineer instead of a coder. Even then, I don't think coders are in any danger of being explicitly replaced by LLMs. Regurgitating plausible code, which sometimes even works, is useful but still definitely requires a human to decide how to leverage it. If you're not interested in software engineering (by that I mean all the non-coding parts, which really start to dominate the higher you go), and I can totally understand that, then maybe change your title to Prompt Engineer :).
As someone who hires people (and having graduated as engineer), it is already extremely difficult to hire people who have an "engineering mindset", who know how things work deeply and would be able to make new stuff from scratch if needed. For "coders", who only know how to put a few libraries together and are allergic to novel stuff, I got stacks and stacks of resumés. Yeah, those will get replaced.
When we need fewer electricians, we fire electricians and stop training new ones. This is bad for the electricians, and also means that when we need more electricians, we don't have a pool of electricians available to meet the need, and we don't have a pool of people available to train new ones. In fact, people will still be hesitant to become electricians, knowing that once the demand is fulfilled, we'll start firing them again and they won't have a great way to make a living.
We need idle slack in the system, and we need some form of guaranteed income so we can maintain availability of skilled labor of all sorts.
Also, technology has evolved in lots of trades making work a lot easier than it used to be: Wago connectors and a variety of push-fittings for electricians, PEX for plumbers and so on.
In Germany, you need a Meister (=Master) title (not the academic degree) to start your own electrician business. Usually, after the apprenticeship which is 3.5 years you need at least another 3 years... so Germany has even stricter requirements.
> Also, technology has evolved in lots of trades making work a lot easier than it used to be: Wago connectors and a variety of push-fittings for electricians, PEX for plumbers and so on.
Technology maybe, but it has also become way more complex. Smart lights, smart HVAC systems, smart plumbing, energy savings requirements... planning an energy-efficient home requires insane amounts of knowledge these days, and you need to plan energy-efficient because no one will buy a house without top notch efficiency.
Some combination of culture and regulatory capture keep the supply depressed, but only exploitation keeps the resulting surplus from accruing to the people doing the actual work.
Electricians have no such qualms.
The only question then is just how common are those kinds of salaries amongst readers here. I'll bet the distribution would be surprising. The only public forum I could see as having a higher percentage is Blind.
I do take issue with calling me a "temporary embarrassed millionaire" though. Because that refers to a certain mindset where people will vote for politicians who try to take away social welfare programs, and believe that poor people are lazy and unintelligent (despite being poor themselves). Simply wanting to be a millionaire isn't enough, and I'll fully admit to wanting to be a millionaire - who doesn't buy a lottery ticket every once in a while? Or, say, I don't know, spend a bunch of time writing out the math for becoming a millionaire, or what $10m in the bank means.
My comment didn't get into my politics. I don't believe we should get rid of social welfare programs, and I vote accordingly. And to be crystal clear, I don't believe poor people are lazy or unintelligent. In fact, I think lot of poor people work harder - longer hours, for shittier pay, in order to make rent, car payments, and buy food - than the rich, who don't even have to get out of bed or go to a job to get all three of those things.
I live frugally, drive a older car that I fully own, and aren't afraid to admit that I want financial independence and to retire early (FIRE). I still don't want to run the government like a business or get rid of welfare or EBT though. Whether or not I'll make it is another question entirely, but wanting to be a millionaire and hating poor people don't necessarily go hand in hand.
For fun, lets dig into the reality of having $10M in the bank. If you have 10M in the bank, with a 4% APY, which even 1-month t-bills are returning more right now, you'd make $23,802/month, without lifting a finger or getting out of bed. By January 19th, you've made more than the federal poverty level for the year ($14,580). By February 9th, you've already made more than the US median income for the whole year ($31,133). (Last one, I promise.) May 9th is the day that your passive income on $10M will exceed a blue collar's median wage for Wyoming, which is where it's the highest ($56,345; ziprecruiter.com). And there are still 7 more months in the year to go!
So I dare say with $10M in the bank, you would never have to work another day in your life, which, imo, would put you far closer to ruling/owning class than the median blue collar worker, who has a job that they really have to go to and put work into, that pays < $30/hr, probably not consistently (slow months are hell on people's savings), from which they have to make rent, pay car fees, and feed themselves from.
With $10M not-in-the-bank, you could definitely buy and own a small business or two, angel invest in companies, move to a low CoL area and own a bunch of real estate and several cars, and still have money left over to live off the income. I don't see how that's remotely close to the life of a blue collar worker, even if you don't want to call them part of the ruling/owning class. Personally, that sounds pretty ruling/owing class to me though.
These types of jobs require a long-term commitment that doesn't exist in other fields. If you go through the work to become an electrician, that's probably going to be what you do. You also need to moderately intelligent to do electrician work, and its hard on your body.
My personal opinion is that a lot of people with the aptitude for the trades look at white collar work, see that its easier on your body and has more career flexibility and choose the obvious choice.
I looked into a carpentry program when I was younger and went and got my Masters instead because I do semi-dangerous hobbies like skiing. If I break my leg skiing and I do carpentry, i don't work or make money. If I break my leg in my current career, I'd probably just take my computer upstairs.
If you consider that charging a couple vehicles while running electric AC/heat and using your 30A induction stove isn't even possible on millions of properties, you begin to see some of the issues. Consider it costs many thousands to upgrade a house and we have a problem. The biggest problem being just who is going to upgrade these homes.
And even if you can there's a greta chance they don't have space in their panel or that they will need a special circuit added to support things. This needs an electrician and costs significant money.
Solvable problem, but people who just say "make it all electric" don't even consider this.
My induction stove is never ever going to run at 11pm.
Your heat pump and AC are what, 30 amps?
So it's ok if it kicks on at 11.
I highly doubt a 100A system would pass code in the type of configuration you're suggesting. "Trust me, I'll run everything right" isn't good enough. I'd be shocked your 100A panel even has any space left for a new 30A+ circuit.
I don't understand where you are getting this multiple AC unit thing.
My house is 4,700 square feet above grade (2000 more below grade), and I have a single AC. Now it is the absolute biggest, baddest, mode insane residential AC unit my HVAC place makes (5 ton seer 27 I believe).. but it is a single unit. I think I know a single person who has 2 AC units, and their house is a bit smaller than mine (maybe 4500 square feet). If my house were built today it would have 2 ACs.. but again, I am very much on the extreme end of size. And this entire thing is on I believe a 40 amp circuit.
These types of homes often have 100A service and running 3t + 2t already stress it.
People also do it for efficiency reasons. Running hot/cold air long distances is a good way to waste money.
It’s also better design to have multiple units and therefore multiple zones. Why are you cooling your bedrooms all day and your living room all night? Installing multiple units is better design but cheap builders just try and keep prices/quotes low to customers that don’t understand it.
I don't think EV charging is a huge deal for many. 20-30A / 240 will usually charge you overnight. You can run it after you are done with the induction stove. I think 100A service can still work for quite a while. Heat pumps are maybe the most iffy thing.
So you have a couple of these units running at 30/40/50A each and a couple cars plugged in, possibly one of them needs super charging so it's using 50A and someone has 3 induction burners going and the electric dryer is running while your teenager blow dries their hair. Not to mention all the passive things likke the fridge/freezer, lights, charging devices, etc.
Point being, at any given time there's a combination of things that could need power and you have to be able to support that.
Edit - Also make sure you understand the difference between 120 and 240V circuits. Not entirely clear you do.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1999/03/art2full.pdf
The definition they settled on is "when the number of workers available (the supply) increases less rapidly than the number demanded at the salaries paid in the recent past".
According to this graph:
https://www.careerwatch.co/blog/electrician
Wages have gone up about 1.9% over the last 20 years which is just under inflation. That leads me to believe that there may not be a severe shortage. Are they just talking about this year? In which case I think every industry has claimed a shortage.
Whenever I manage to actually get an electrician in our home, I make sure they get a lot done because I know it's rare and I probably won't get them back.
We end up hiring "up-and-comers", and "almost retired" guys - everyone in the middle is too busy.
Personal interest and market will handle the rest. People will always go where the jobs are, and they will train themselves up if its something they believe they can do to improve their lives.
But I don’t know how successful they are or whether they are actually making a big impact.