Hacker News Reader

Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Are they? Or just creating a demand shock and a monopsony?

Amazon has hired so many journeymen electricians from our area that apprenticeship waiting lists have exploded. If you can assume that happens where the demand is being bought up, jobs could fail to emerge even if wages go up for existing experts.

In any case, the externalities like power and water draw or pollution rain down on the locals permanently, even if trades enjoyed a brief period of demand. It's not like a city emerging. It's a big warehouse that's pretty sparsely employed relative to its size.

> Amazon has hired so many journeymen electricians from our area that apprenticeship waiting lists have exploded. If you can assume that happens where the demand is being bought up, jobs could fail to emerge even if wages go up for existing experts.

If there is more sustained demand for electricians why on earth wouldn't more people become electricians?

Right now there's a supply crunch, but unless you think the US will keep building datacenters at this rate forever the problem will eventually go away.

People would become electricians if it’s sustained, but trades tend to have boom and bust cycles. Additionally, you have significant hurdles to becoming one. You have to qualify to be an apprentice, be taken on under a journeyman or higher, and have documented hours to advance.

My point was that journeymen often at an electrical shop who have apprentices are recently at Amazon without apprentices because Amazon is bidding wages so high they (to some extent) abandon the apprenticeship system. The waitlist I was talking about doesn’t reflect new demand from entrants so much as a backlog that is no longer clearing as people rationally defect and go work for the data centers who have different priorities.

Overall, it will balance out but I don’t think the NYTimes should be let off for carrying water for capital trying to fix data centers PR by misleading people thinking this will create jobs in their communities or some nonsense.

> My point was that journeymen often at an electrical shop who have apprentices are recently at Amazon without apprentices because Amazon is bidding wages so high they (to some extent) abandon the apprenticeship system.

Why is this a bad thing? It sounds like giving folks more pathways to make money doing this work is only a good thing.

Well, the pathway requires being apprenticed to experts. There are licenses that by law limit to this pathway, but the system breaks in unexpected ways when the experts leave because it's paid better to work at a datacenter and from what I know, those journeymen are not apprenticing. Apprenticeships are capped, electricians can't apprentice 10 newcomers, so the backlogs explode.

Sure, better for the journeymen. But it leaves the newcomers behind. How is reducing pathways only a good thing?

The system isn't going to be "patched" to allow otherwise as law moves very slowly. Normally, shortages drive prices which correct the situation as people move to arbitrage - but with licensed labor (which is good, sure, things burn down otherwise) that isn't a realistic mechanism.

https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/apprentice...

It sounds like the journeymen win no matter what, and the number of apprentices is so limited that it doesn't materially change regardless of whether or not a datacenter is getting built.

I think the villains here are the journeymen, not the people with electrical needs.

"Royal Executioner" is a job. "Bioweapon engineer" is a job. "Baby seal clubber" is a job. I could go on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com