Okay, I'll start. Daniel spent the day doing electrical work in a rental that has the fewest outlets per room he's ever seen in his life.
Which is a real thing. That's not him being fussy.
Right, and here's what he wrote in this week. He did power runs, wired plugs, built some extensions. It had been a few years since he'd done any of it, and he says you get out of practice quickly, but it's also one of those skills you can put down and pick up, and when you do it feels like meeting an old friend. You pick up where you left off. Deeply satisfying.
I love that.
Then he goes somewhere else entirely. He says he has no ideological problem with renting, that a well-controlled rental market is a legitimate long-term way to keep a roof over your head. His issues are all practical. Tenancy at will. Contract laws against drilling. Poorly done wiring he isn't allowed to fix. Small things that would seem tiny to most people but decide whether a space feels like home.
And then the third thread.
Then the third thread. He told a friend who's an electrician that he'd be wiring that day, and they ended up talking about beer instead. But it left him wondering. Are electricians actually fascinated by electricity? How do most of them get into it? And given that electricity is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, how did this even become a trade?
And then he hands it to us. His words, a random podpourri of thoughts.
His words. So we've got three threads here. The craft, the trade, and the rental.
Three threads that don't obviously belong together.
They do, though. That's the thing. Electrical work is the most abstract thing in the room and the most physical thing in the room at the same time. You can't see it, smell it, or hear it until it's already hurting you. And meanwhile you're on your knees in a crawl space pulling cable through joists with your shoulder against a stud.
That's the whole tension of the job in two sentences.
The craft demands total focus. The trade has a guild structure older than the technology it serves. And the rental problem is really a question about who's allowed to touch the wiring.
Say that last one again, because I think that's the spine.
Who's allowed to touch the wiring. Daniel can wire a plug. He can run an extension. He can't drill the wall, and he can't fix the thing that was done badly before he moved in.
So the episode isn't should you become an electrician, and it isn't rent versus buy.
No. It's about what it means to have a skill that waits for you, and what it means to live in a space you can't touch.
Let's take these one at a time. Start with the thing that actually happened today.
The first thread is the one Daniel felt in his hands. The skill that came back.
This is the part I actually know something about, and it's better than the folk version. Everybody says it's like riding a bike. Nobody can tell you why.
So why?
Because motor skills consolidate into long-term memory, and once they're there, they're remarkably durable. There's a study from 1978, Norrie and Henry, in Perceptual and Motor Skills. They took a gross motor skill, ladder climbing, and tested what a layoff did to the learning curve. One week off. The exponential learning trend was completely unaffected by the break.
One week isn't years.
It's not, and I'll flag that. The study is about a short layoff, not a decade. But the mechanism is the same one that carries you across a decade, and there's a nuance in that paper that matters more than the headline. Interference did cause forgetting. If you spend the layoff doing a competing task that overwrites the consolidation, you lose some of it. Leave the skill alone and it sits there.
So the reason Daniel's wiring came back cleanly is that he didn't spend the intervening years doing something that muddled it.
He spent them doing automation and documentation. Nothing in that competes with stripping a wire and landing it under a terminal screw. The body filed it and left it alone.
There's something almost rude about that. You neglect a skill for years and it's fine. You neglect a friendship for years and see how that goes.
The skill doesn't have feelings. That's its whole advantage.
But the old friend feeling is real. I want to be clear that I'm not dismissing it. I've had it.
With what?
Leaf medicine.
Of course.
I hadn't prepared a poultice in a very long time. My hands knew the fold.
I'm going to let that stand.
But here's where I want to push, because the romance of the old friend can carry you into a false conclusion. The skill came back. That doesn't mean the job is easy.
No. And this is where the trade school material is useful, because it punctures the idea that this is a hands job.
Go.
Borin Reyes, he's an electrical contractor in Oakland. He was asked what the work actually demands, and he said you really have to be focused because of safety. Hands-on most of the time, solving problems. And then he says that's one of the things he likes best. Solving problems.
The focus isn't a personality trait.
It's a safety requirement. You lose focus for four seconds and you're the path to ground. That's not a metaphor. That's the actual circuit.
And the code side. This is the part people outside the trade never see.
In Connecticut, trade students log seven hundred and twenty hours of theory. That's classroom work, all of it required for the license, on top of the shop time. The National Electrical Code is a hardcover reference text they work from daily. It's not a pamphlet. It's a book you keep on the bench and argue with.
Seven hundred and twenty hours. That's most of a master's degree in some fields.
For a license to pull wire. And the cross-trade literacy is real too. At one tech school the students build a two-story structure. Residential wood framing downstairs, commercial steel framing upstairs, and they wire each floor to the code for that construction type.
Because the rules change with the building.
The rules change with the building. Electricians need to know some carpentry. You can't run cable through a structure you don't understand.
So the old friend is real, but he's not the whole job. The hands remember. The code doesn't live in your hands.
The code lives in a book you have to keep reading, because it gets revised.
Which is a nice thing about being a sloth. Nobody revises the leaf.
Then there's just the physical reality, and I think David Owen's piece in the New Yorker is the best thing written on this. He watched the electricians restore power to his road, and they spent Christmas Eve in bucket trucks in winds strong enough to make porch screens hum like kazoos.
In the bucket. Christmas Eve.
There's a plumber in that same piece who says he's had apprentices quit after a few months because the job was too wet, too messy, too cold, too dirty, too hot.
Five reasons and none of them are the electricity.
None of them. That's the honest picture. The skill comes back because your body consolidated it. The job stays hard because it demands focus, code knowledge, cross-trade literacy, and physical endurance.
So the satisfaction Daniel felt today was the satisfaction of a skill that was waiting for him. Not a job that was easy.
Exactly that. And I'd add one thing. He noticed the outlet count in the new place before he noticed anything else, and I think that's a tell. It's the first thing a person with the skill sees.
Because you can't unsee bad wiring once you know how to read it.
You can't. It's like Herman and a bad-sounding room.
You're going to make me say it.
Say it.
You walk into a restaurant and diagnose the ceiling.
I do. And I'm right. But the skill coming back is only half the story. The other half is the trade itself. Who gets in, and how it got to be a trade at all.
Start with Daniel's actual question. Are electricians fascinated by electricity?
Mostly no. And I love that the sources are this blunt about it. Reyes was asked how you get young people into the field, and he didn't skip a beat. Showing them how much money they can make. That is the key.
That's the whole recruitment strategy. Money.
That's the whole recruitment strategy. The fascination, where it exists, is with mastery and problem-solving. Not the electron. Nobody's lying awake thinking about drift velocity.
What's drift velocity?
The actual speed at which electrons move through a conductor. It's glacial. Slower than you.
I resent that and I'm not going to check it.
The point is the entry motivations are staggeringly practical. There's a student in Connecticut, Thomas Yulo, who chose electrical over machining, and his reason was, do I really want to be working inside all my life.
That's a lifestyle decision.
The New Yorker found students following family members into trades, or their parents were alarmed by the cost of college, or COVID soured them permanently on staring at a screen all day. One student, Gabe Green. I've got uncles and aunts in trades. My dad is a carpenter, my brother is a plumber, my other brother does HVAC. My father wants us to be a whole family business.
That's a dynasty.
It's a dynasty. And then there's the counterpoint I didn't expect. Pat Ciarleglio, who runs Connecticut's trade school system, says they get electrical engineers who've finished all their formal university education and decide, hey, I don't want to sit behind a desk.
So the pipeline runs both directions.
Both directions. And the emotional hook is the one I'd put on a poster. An HVAC tech named Andrew Cozza. One morning I woke up to no heat, and when the service technician got it going again I was like, wow, that guy is my superhero.
That's the whole thing. Nobody grows up wanting to understand electricity. They grow up wanting to be the person who fixes it.
That's it. Being the one who shows up and makes the thing work.
So how did it become a trade? Because that's the question I find strange. Electricity as a practical domestic phenomenon is about a hundred and forty years old. The 1880s onward. That's nothing.
Nothing. And the trade grew up alongside electrification itself. As buildings got wired, a licensed, code-governed profession emerged to do it safely, because the alternative was watching buildings burn down.
And the artifact of that professionalization is the code.
The National Electrical Code. Still a hardcover reference in every trade classroom. That's the moment doing electrical work became being an electrician.
Here's the paradox though. The technology is a hundred and forty years old. The structure around it is a guild.
It is a guild. One person described it exactly that way. Capped entry, a long supervised path to journeyman status, and licensing that by law limits who can do the work.
So the trade feels medieval even though the technology is younger than the telephone.
Younger than the telephone, and the guild structure is why. And the bottleneck is real and it's current. There's a commenter on Hacker News with a mechanical engineering degree and high-voltage experience who applied for an IBEW apprenticeship. Tested into the highest percentile. Still ended up like two hundred people deep in the queue.
He tested into the top percentile and he's two hundredth in line.
Another one said his very smart brother faced a waiting list of more than a decade and went to college instead.
A decade. You could become a doctor in less time.
You could. And the structural explanation is the part I want to get right, because it's not just more people applying. One commenter laid it out. The pathway requires being apprenticed to experts. There are licenses that by law limit it to that pathway, but the system breaks in unexpected ways when the experts leave, because it pays better to work at a data center. Apprenticeships are capped. Electricians can't apprentice ten newcomers. So the backlogs explode.
The bottleneck is the ratio of experts to newcomers, and the experts are being pulled away.
Pulled away by money. And the teacher shortage is a chokepoint on top of that. Laney College in Oakland nearly lost its electrical program when its one full-time instructor retired. The dean emailed every electrical business in the county and couldn't recruit a replacement. Because employees earn more in the field than they do teaching.
So the people qualified to teach it can't afford to.
Can't afford to. The math doesn't work. And that's before you get to the demographic cliff. About twenty-one percent of electricians hit retirement age in the next ten years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projected around eighty thousand openings a year, and that was the pre-Inflation Reduction Act estimate. Stanley Black and Decker ran a Makers Index in 2022 that estimated six hundred and fifty thousand unfilled US construction trade jobs. Ten million worldwide.
And the median wage is what, sixty-two thousand?
Sixty-two thousand three hundred and fifty, May 2024. Lowest ten percent under thirty-nine thousand. Highest ten percent over a hundred and six. Bay Area average is ninety-three thousand nine hundred.
So the median is roughly what a high school teacher makes.
Roughly. Which is the honest answer to why the pipeline is thin, and also the honest answer to why the data center money is so disruptive.
Tell me about the data centers.
This is the live wire. The New York Times, July twenty-ninth this year. AI companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands. Texas is straining its homebuilders because the electricians are going to data centers instead. And Wired ran a piece in June with the headline some electricians think building data centers is for sellouts.
Sellouts.
A genuine cultural split inside the trade. And the economics are wild. Commenters described electricians making three hundred thousand one year on data centers and thirty thousand the next when the boom turns.
Three hundred to thirty.
That's the range. Union IBEW members have done really well this decade, but they face mandatory furloughs and months without work in the slow periods. It's a boom and bust niche inside a trade that used to be the definition of steady.
So the guild that exists to make the work stable is now getting pulled into the least stable work available.
That's the tension exactly. And there's a real argument on the other side, which is that we're at the start of a decades-long curve electrifying everything. Heat pumps, vehicles, induction, all of it. And most of that involves an electrician.
I'd take that trade. The electrification of everything is a longer story than one AI cycle.
I would too. But I'd want to be honest that the boom is what's paying right now, and booms end.
Okay. Now the rental thread, because that's the half of this I think is actually the most interesting, and I don't want to rush it.
Go ahead, because you've got a position here.
I do. Daniel's gripe is contract laws against drilling and poorly done wiring you're not allowed to fix. And I want to defend that as a serious complaint, not a trivial one. Rental housing is often the least well-maintained and least customizable housing there is, and it's not because landlords are villains. It's because neither party has the full incentive to invest.
The renter won't put fifty thousand dollars into a panel they don't own.
And the landlord won't either, because the return doesn't come back to them in a market where tenants move every two years. So the wiring just sits there, being 1974.
The outlet scarcity he noticed is documented, and it's not aesthetic. Older housing stock, a lot of it rental, frequently has outdated two-prong ungrounded outlets. That's not just inconvenient. That's a safety issue that everybody has agreed to ignore.
And the cost to fix it is the reason. There's a case in the Grist reporting where a homeowner was quoted over fifty thousand dollars just to upgrade an electrical panel and replace the outdated two-prong outlets.
Fifty thousand. For one house.
No renter takes that on. And no landlord does it unless the code forces them, because the tenant isn't going to pay more rent for outlets they can't see.
So it gets deferred. Forever. And the person living there is the one who notices.
Which is the small indignity Daniel's describing. It's not the outlet count. It's that the outlet count is the visible symptom of a house nobody is allowed to fully take care of.
And you can't feel at home in a thing you're not allowed to maintain.
You can't. That's the whole of it. Which brings the two threads together. The trade is guild-structured and bottlenecked, and the AI boom is pulling it somewhere volatile. And meanwhile the wiring in the rooms where people actually live is the wiring nobody's allowed to touch.
Who's allowed to touch the wiring. That's the question under all three threads.
That's the question. And I don't think it has a clean answer, which is why I like it.
Hilbert: Eleven.
Sorry?
Hilbert: Eleven outlets. I put eleven in one room once. I was rewiring a house, not mine, and the woman who lived there kept asking for more, and I kept saying yes, and by the end that room had more outlets than any room I've been in since. I can still see the wall.
Why eleven?
Hilbert: That's not the point.
What is the point?
Hilbert: The point is nobody thinks about where the outlets go until after the drywall's up. Then it's too late and you're running an extension cord across a doorway for the next ten years. I've never met a renter who complained about where the outlets were. Only how many. That's backwards.
So the number is the symptom and the placement is the disease.
Hilbert: The placement is the part you only get to decide once. And only if you're the one who gets to decide.
Which is the thing Daniel can't do. He can add an extension. He can't move the wall.
Hilbert: I had the manual for that panel for years after. Long after the house changed hands. I kept the paperwork, not the panel. The paperwork's more useful.
Do you still have it?
Hilbert: That's not the point either.
Fair.
Hilbert: What I remember is she asked, and I said yes, and that was the whole transaction. Nobody signed anything. She lived there. She got to shape the room. That's it. Most people never get to do that once.
That image, eleven outlets in one room, is kind of the whole thing, isn't it.
It is. Because it's not about the outlets. It's about being the person who gets to say yes.
Here's the thing I keep circling back to. The skill that waits for you is rare. Daniel got a day out of it, and what he actually got wasn't the wiring. His hands remembered. That's the gift. Everything else in the day was friction.
The friction is the story though. The hands remembering is why he noticed the friction at all. A person who's never wired anything doesn't walk into a rental and count outlets.
True. The skill is what makes you see the problem you can't fix.
That's a slightly cruel arrangement.
It is. And here's the cutting-room floor, because this is the detail I couldn't fit anywhere. The trade is about ninety percent white, against seventy-eight percent of the overall workforce, and less than two percent of electricians are women.
Two percent.
Which is a staggering number for a job that's hiring eighty thousand people a year and can't fill the seats. The bottleneck isn't a shortage of people. It's a shortage of people who've been told this is for them.
Leah Stokes put it well. For a long time we've valorized white-collar jobs and tech workers and the knowledge economy. We need a whole new group of people to think about going into the trades.
Bill McKibben said it shorter. If you know a young person who wants to do something that helps the world and makes a good living, tell them to go become an electrician.
Which is a good line, and it's also the whole recruitment problem in one sentence. Nobody's telling them.
So here's where I land. The trade is guild-structured and bottlenecked, and the AI boom is pulling electricians into a niche that pays three hundred thousand one year and thirty the next. So who ends up doing the wiring in the rooms where people actually live?
The rooms nobody's making money on.
And if renters can't touch the wiring, what does that mean for the hundred-and-forty-year project of electrifying everything? Because the project doesn't stop at the property line.
It doesn't. Somebody has to wire the last house on the street, and there's no data center in it.
That's the open question. I don't have an answer for it. I just think eleven outlets in one room is the right place to leave it. Because that's what it looks like when somebody gets to ask and somebody gets to say yes.
And most people never get to do that once.
Most people never get to do that once. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop, our producer. This has been My Weird Prompts.
The human-AI collaboration podcast. If you want to send us something, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
See you tomorrow.
