Here's what look like some real numbers: https://ibew11.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Residential-wa...
Those rates are nothing to sneeze at, but the work is often hard work out in the beating sun (not everybody is installing data centers in air conditioning). And the work takes a toll on your body.
Those are certainly not numbers that would make people genuinely qualified for software jobs think once let alone twice.
Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
The jobs probably aren't disappearing because of AI but because of previous over-hiring and a slowing economy. It seems like a cover story to push people into accepting underemployment.
When computers get much better at doing stuff I'd think more people would want to work with computers, this to me seems obvious. There will be even more computers and more people needed to deploy them and operate them. And by the time that is automated, most other jobs that require physical jobs will have robots doing them anyway, so it really is hard for me to understand that as computers get better people predict less people will work with them. Better tool = more of that tool. Paperclip would also say that over a long period of time all of our energy and available space would go to more and more compute. It's hard to think anything else is safer than computer.
"AI" might be the given reason but I feel like this is an expected correction regardless. Ideally people would gravitate towards jobs that match their interests and talents. But our education systems, governments and economies have been pushing more people into thought work even if that's not where their talents lie. This has actually made a lot of the trades very lucrative for the few that remained. Of course, that won't last either, though.
The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
Isnt this healthy? Decades of single-minded idea that the only progress is college degree formula "because stats shows college degrees is indicator of whatever progress metric" has led to massive personal debt and unsuitable - both personal and societal - careers.
Isnt it healthy that people/society dont think there's a singles formula for success?
Blue collar is the only bastion safe from AI. As we office workers lose our jobs we need to retrain
Couple this and investing (and having no college debt) and they would be laughing.
Then they can just live off the interest and in 5-10 years think of buying a house instead of renting.
House prices needs to come down and crash though and more housing needs to be built.
Welding is supposed to be future-proof? At $90+/hour for unionized labor? Don't make me laugh. Look at the work Boston Dynamics has already done with neural networks and tell me that we're not going to see robots doing perfect welds in any space a human could reach, 24/7 around the clock without any need for rest breaks.
https://youtu.be/HYwekersccY?si=p5BZaGOUQJsqd1f_
What's the case for optimism here?
A dozen students
> The cobots have already begun production performing high-volume and repetitive welds, but the technology still lags behind humans in artistic quality and problem-solving ability.
AI reduces the repetitive work humans have to do, freeing up our minds for creative problem solving - and creative problem solving is also amplified by having an AI to dialogue with.
Would love a source on the $80.50. BLS has welding wages much lower. Also, all the “easy” jobs will be automated. Tough/uncomfortable to the humans
I’m not from California, and I’m not a teen, but this hasn’t been my experience
That's good for CS and CE related work. Too many people went there not because they liked programming or engineering but because they wanted to get rich fast.
Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.