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
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.
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.
Useful to keep in mind when choosing a new career.
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.
not commercially, but i worked as a residential electrician and contractor for half a decade, if we are doing ad hominems
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.
If datacenter demand doesn't evaporate, mega scale datacenters sound like the most probable candidates for this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This cry of "OMG dues suck" is so stupid for what you get in return. But go ahead and buy more into republican propaganda.
Don't listen to this corporate, middle-class hating, shill.
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.
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.
I'm thinking learning something in that field might be an option.
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.
That averages to 150k per annum, which is more than double the median salary in the US.
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
But if not...
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.