The basic play here is to get companies to fire people and adapt internal processes to the current heavily subsidized AI farms, and then jack the rates once the switching costs become untenable ... particularly if they can get a huge percentage of human programmers to quit the industry.

This is effectively "dumping" in the economic sense.

Some states don't need a license for low-voltage work, so you might be able to do data wiring.

There's a variety of roles. Security, electricians, HVAC engineers, generally some type of site foreman-ask role, logistics (depending on the size of the place), and technicians (for a lack of a better word, feels like every place calls them something different). There's a variety of roles that often float between sites or oversee many sites, depending again on the scale of the place. AWS is huge. Bigger than you're imagining, so there's quite a few levels deep and include real estate folks as well as construction roles. If you go and look at job postings, you'll even see roles for nuclear engineers at some companies.

But generally what you're talking about here are what I'm calling the technicians. They're responsible for wheeling racks into place (depending on the company they may also be responsible for unloading the trucks). Cabling is nearly always outsourced these days (though not the design of the cables), so rolling a rack into place generally involves securing it to the floor and connecting power, data, and more often than not now-a-days liquid cooling.

The other part of their job is "troubleshooting" failed hardware. Again, really depends on the company. Big big shops have "dumbed down" troubleshooting as much as they can - for a lot of reasons. You don't have to pay folks as much because they're thinking and doing less, the more time they spend troubleshooting the longer the server is offline, and if there's no troubleshooting there's not much for them to screw up. I'm sure there are some great places to be a tech where you get to rip apart servers and bust out the multimeter, that to my understanding is not how the hyperscalers who actually hyper-scale do it.

There's some cleaning, parts management, destroying broken hard drives, shoveling snow off the roof (no lie), and a variety of other odd tasks.

If you ever have the opportunity to check out one of those places it can be a riot and a real eye opener. Depends again on the company though, some of those places have insane security (metal detectors, badge+pin, turnstile door procedures) which make visits super un-fun if they're even allowed outside of legit business reasons. Other companies... well I'm glad that's not where I store my data.

Back "in the day" (2005 give or take a handful of years) techs would often write their own automation and even build some simple services.

And yes, the jobs don't pay particularly well depending upon what it is. Electricians and such command decent wages, but the security guards and techs don't make crazy amounts. I think folks doing contract cabling can come out ahead.

Anyhow, SWEs are wildly insulated from the realities of what things look like on the ground. Maybe that's a good thing, IDK.

I used to do SWE. Early in my career I realized that DCO/DCE was not only an entire discipline unto itself, but that the rest of the "team" looked down on it because it required physical labor. Perfect, I don't feel like I've done Real Work unless I do something in the physical world. Hence my DCE jobs. I would not be able to do SWE today.

But I'll tell you this: way more than once I've had a cocky new hire from the HFT I work at wither under simple tasks: Please re-balance the load across all phases of these PDUs. Please groom & remove dead cables from wherever. But you don't have time to figure it out on the fly. You have an hour to have it DONE.

Anyway, I think your intuition serves you well. :)

Outside of construction I don't believe datacenters employ many people locally.

There are little to no SWEs in a large AWS datacenter.

(from Les Misérables)

For 6–10 gigawatt data centers I consider what else that amount of power could support. At current desalination efficiencies, 6 gigawatts of continuous power could produce roughly 11–14 million acre-feet of freshwater per year, comparable to the historical annual flow of the Colorado River.

So a single 6 GW power supply could theoretically generate enough freshwater to replace most or all of the Colorado River's annual flow. The famous river that is stretched thin but supports up to around 45 million people from Denver all the way to San Diego and even Mexico. So the comparison is we can have a single AI datacenter or a drought-proof water supply for a region constantly under drought restrictions.

I'm not saying don't build the other dozen or so 6 to 10 gigawatt data centers everybody keeps talking about. I'm just saying maybe we can do one less of those and use some of that power to support ocean water desalination instead.

Noise pollution is a serious issue and is second behind air pollution among environmental health risks.

Because it’s easy. It’s free to post internet comments. The doomers have the lowest effort take so they’re very prominent. People doing things are too busy doing things to post doomer comments.

It is extremely hard to imagine that the world where this amount of money going into actual research tools and researchers wouldn’t give vastly better results.

Building a nuclear powered shovel to dig a grave would work but it doesn’t mean it is a sensible thing to do

Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ...

And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!

We have already long since had a solution for low income people getting access to paid content, libraries provided access to paid books and newspapers for free. People with higher income would still buy copies themselves for convenience but there was a free option. We also have public funded news orgs providing ad free news and reporting.