alt Hacker News> 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.