5 ms·

I don’t disagree with you generally. Luckily for the nuclear industry, the engineering capability still exists in the US to design a whole plant, and a lot of

by _n_b_ 6y ago

I don’t disagree with you generally. Luckily for the nuclear industry, the engineering capability still exists in the US to design a whole plant, and a lot of the manufacturing base still exists. Big US nuclear players have had a base load of domestic upgrades and international new plant jobs that have kept these capabilities alive. But for construction, we really are awfully thin on specialized trades. Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply.

gricardo99 6y ago
Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply. I've heard this time and again over the years, but it doesn't make sense to me. If welders made > 300k/year, surely they wouldn't be in short supply anymore. Why isn't there simply a wage/price signal to compensate for this? It's not like medicine that requires 6-8 years of school, and years more of practice to fill certain positions (where additional constraints are the schools and hospital residencies limited capacity). For welders, labor supply should be fairly easy and quick to remedy.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  I think there's an underestimated resistance to changing the labor rate. If a company quotes a typical job at 80 man-hours with $15/hr welders, and a year later you want to hire welders and can only find them at $20, they're more likely to complain there's a welder shortage and decline jobs because they don't have enough welders to complete them than increase their labor rate. Plus, if you increase the rate for a new guy, and your $12/hr hire from a decade ago hears the new hire is making $20, he's going to be pissed, so you'd have to increase costs across the board or suppress discussion of salaries.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    This explanation doesn't really hold water. Some company is going to eventually win the contract by bidding with $20/hr welders right? It's not like the client is just going to give up on their project.
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      > This explanation doesn't really hold water. During the 2010-2019 US recovery wage stickiness was noticed, even with everyone complaining about not being able to find qualified workers. Companies were very reticent about increasing wages, often preferring to go with signing bonuses. It is suggested that this reticence/stickiness was because after 2008-2009 GFC many places were stuck with high wages (from the previous boom), and getting people to cut their salaries was almost impossible. * https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sticky-wage-theory.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sticky-wage-theory.asp * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity
    - spenczar5 6y ago
      No, I think you do see clients give up. There are certainly more infrastructure maintenance projects in the US than governments are willing/able to pay for. I’m not sure the market can bear much higher costs for construction.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      There was a rather famous story about Aceribo being abandoned due to lack of upkeep and high cost of repairs.
  - Kye 6y ago
    I see this with those profiles of factory owners complaining about Those Dang Kids not wanting to work, while omitting the fact that they offer too little relative to other options. A lot of people running places like this don't want to accept they're also in competition with retail now. People look at the small difference between pay at the factory or mine (dangerous) and pay at Walmart (not quite as dangerous + employee discounts) and make the rational choice.
- jjk166 6y ago
  It takes many years to become a skilled welder, and nuclear is the hardest class of welding to get certified for. A few months at the local community college can get you to the point where you can do the most basic welding jobs, but these low skill jobs are the ones that either left the US or got automated, and the few such jobs that remain are mostly done by mediocre welders who should have retired years ago. If you want to do the high skilled welding that pays well, you need to essentially support yourself for years as you develop those skills on your own - and most people who have the means to do so have better opportunities in other fields. Realistically, employers need to eat the cost of training new people if they want the pipeline to open back up again, but it's more economical to poach a good welder after some other sucker puts their resources into them, so you get a classic tragedy of the commons.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  It takes literal years of daily practice for a welder to get good enough to do the high quality specialty materials pipe fitting welds that would make up so much of nuclear plant construction. I am not exaggerating. A good welder/fitter team can work pretty much wherever they want, they are in incredibly high demand. There aren't more of them because not that many people have the baseline talent to be able to achieve the ability, regardless of how much practice they put in. Source: used to weld at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    Could you expand on the "baseline talent"? This isn't the sort of hand-eye coordination that would be required to hit a major-league fastball, is it? (Somehow those employers are able to fulfill their skilled-labor needs.) How would an individual welder determine whether she has the talent that would make those years of practice worthwhile? If that is not possible, why don't interested organizations set up some testing programs?
    - jjk166 6y ago
      Hand eye coordination isn't really the issue. When welding, you put an incredible amount of heat into the material. This causes it to move in real time. A welder needs to predict how it will move ant actively account for this so that the final piece winds up in the right condition. The tolerances depend on the application - for furniture who cares if it's out a bit, for a coolant line to a reactor you need it to be damn near perfect. Then there's heat penetration - adding heat to the material changes its material properties. Go too slow and steel becomes excessively weak, go too fast and you don't form a strong bond. Again, big differences between "probably won't break if you sit on it" and "this will kill a dozen people if it fails" Finally, there's just plain old margin for error. If you're welding together consumer products, it doesn't matter if you scrap one every now and then. However if you're trying to join together two multi-million dollar custom fabrications, you need someone who's going to walk up to this and get it on the first try every time. I'd compare it less to being a major league baseball player and more to being a professional musician - you can't determine that someone could never do it, but some people are certainly born with a knack for it and you can't simply churn out more on a whim.
yourapostasy 6y ago
> Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply. In short supply for the wages offered. Bid enough out there, and the positions will fill. Bid consistently such that precarity is avoided and bid even more beyond that, and the bench will deepen. Short supply is entirely addressable by buyers.
- imperfectcats 6y ago
  I think these arguments assume welding is a low-skill job. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25166696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25166696 seems to explain why it isn't. There are definitely some industries where the cost to get to the level where you make good money is too high, especially when you aren't sure when you start if you have the required talent to make a great living. There will always be a shortage of great NBA centres - for reasons outside labour market functioning.
  - yourapostasy 6y ago
    Welding is a huge problem space, and I see a lot of welding shops talk about how they're constantly lowballed by buyers who can't tell the difference between hot-glue-gun-for-big-box-store-steel-blanks work and the-device-to-certify-your-weld-costs-more-than-your-house work. There is only ever a shortage of sufficient compensation to clear the market for a desired level of skills availability.
fred_is_fred 6y ago
Welders are in short supply is just CEO talk for "we don't want to pay them more".
stjohnswarts 6y ago
The only hope we have is to hire China to build plants for us at this point. The USA is forgetting how to do everything and becoming more antiscience every year.

by _n_b_ 6y ago

gricardo99 6y ago

Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply. I've heard this time and again over the years, but it doesn't make sense to me. If welders made > 300k/year, surely they wouldn't be in short supply anymore. Why isn't there simply a wage/price signal to compensate for this? It's not like medicine that requires 6-8 years of school, and years more of practice to fill certain positions (where additional constraints are the schools and hospital residencies limited capacity). For welders, labor supply should be fairly easy and quick to remedy.

LeifCarrotson 6y ago
I think there's an underestimated resistance to changing the labor rate. If a company quotes a typical job at 80 man-hours with $15/hr welders, and a year later you want to hire welders and can only find them at $20, they're more likely to complain there's a welder shortage and decline jobs because they don't have enough welders to complete them than increase their labor rate. Plus, if you increase the rate for a new guy, and your $12/hr hire from a decade ago hears the new hire is making $20, he's going to be pissed, so you'd have to increase costs across the board or suppress discussion of salaries.
- triceratops 6y ago
  This explanation doesn't really hold water. Some company is going to eventually win the contract by bidding with $20/hr welders right? It's not like the client is just going to give up on their project.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > This explanation doesn't really hold water. During the 2010-2019 US recovery wage stickiness was noticed, even with everyone complaining about not being able to find qualified workers. Companies were very reticent about increasing wages, often preferring to go with signing bonuses. It is suggested that this reticence/stickiness was because after 2008-2009 GFC many places were stuck with high wages (from the previous boom), and getting people to cut their salaries was almost impossible. * https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sticky-wage-theory.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sticky-wage-theory.asp * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity
  - spenczar5 6y ago
    No, I think you do see clients give up. There are certainly more infrastructure maintenance projects in the US than governments are willing/able to pay for. I’m not sure the market can bear much higher costs for construction.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    There was a rather famous story about Aceribo being abandoned due to lack of upkeep and high cost of repairs.
- Kye 6y ago
  I see this with those profiles of factory owners complaining about Those Dang Kids not wanting to work, while omitting the fact that they offer too little relative to other options. A lot of people running places like this don't want to accept they're also in competition with retail now. People look at the small difference between pay at the factory or mine (dangerous) and pay at Walmart (not quite as dangerous + employee discounts) and make the rational choice.
jjk166 6y ago
It takes many years to become a skilled welder, and nuclear is the hardest class of welding to get certified for. A few months at the local community college can get you to the point where you can do the most basic welding jobs, but these low skill jobs are the ones that either left the US or got automated, and the few such jobs that remain are mostly done by mediocre welders who should have retired years ago. If you want to do the high skilled welding that pays well, you need to essentially support yourself for years as you develop those skills on your own - and most people who have the means to do so have better opportunities in other fields. Realistically, employers need to eat the cost of training new people if they want the pipeline to open back up again, but it's more economical to poach a good welder after some other sucker puts their resources into them, so you get a classic tragedy of the commons.
Baeocystin 6y ago
It takes literal years of daily practice for a welder to get good enough to do the high quality specialty materials pipe fitting welds that would make up so much of nuclear plant construction. I am not exaggerating. A good welder/fitter team can work pretty much wherever they want, they are in incredibly high demand. There aren't more of them because not that many people have the baseline talent to be able to achieve the ability, regardless of how much practice they put in. Source: used to weld at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Could you expand on the "baseline talent"? This isn't the sort of hand-eye coordination that would be required to hit a major-league fastball, is it? (Somehow those employers are able to fulfill their skilled-labor needs.) How would an individual welder determine whether she has the talent that would make those years of practice worthwhile? If that is not possible, why don't interested organizations set up some testing programs?
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Hand eye coordination isn't really the issue. When welding, you put an incredible amount of heat into the material. This causes it to move in real time. A welder needs to predict how it will move ant actively account for this so that the final piece winds up in the right condition. The tolerances depend on the application - for furniture who cares if it's out a bit, for a coolant line to a reactor you need it to be damn near perfect. Then there's heat penetration - adding heat to the material changes its material properties. Go too slow and steel becomes excessively weak, go too fast and you don't form a strong bond. Again, big differences between "probably won't break if you sit on it" and "this will kill a dozen people if it fails" Finally, there's just plain old margin for error. If you're welding together consumer products, it doesn't matter if you scrap one every now and then. However if you're trying to join together two multi-million dollar custom fabrications, you need someone who's going to walk up to this and get it on the first try every time. I'd compare it less to being a major league baseball player and more to being a professional musician - you can't determine that someone could never do it, but some people are certainly born with a knack for it and you can't simply churn out more on a whim.

yourapostasy 6y ago

> Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply. In short supply for the wages offered. Bid enough out there, and the positions will fill. Bid consistently such that precarity is avoided and bid even more beyond that, and the bench will deepen. Short supply is entirely addressable by buyers.

imperfectcats 6y ago
I think these arguments assume welding is a low-skill job. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25166696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25166696 seems to explain why it isn't. There are definitely some industries where the cost to get to the level where you make good money is too high, especially when you aren't sure when you start if you have the required talent to make a great living. There will always be a shortage of great NBA centres - for reasons outside labour market functioning.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  Welding is a huge problem space, and I see a lot of welding shops talk about how they're constantly lowballed by buyers who can't tell the difference between hot-glue-gun-for-big-box-store-steel-blanks work and the-device-to-certify-your-weld-costs-more-than-your-house work. There is only ever a shortage of sufficient compensation to clear the market for a desired level of skills availability.

fred_is_fred 6y ago

Welders are in short supply is just CEO talk for "we don't want to pay them more".

stjohnswarts 6y ago

The only hope we have is to hire China to build plants for us at this point. The USA is forgetting how to do everything and becoming more antiscience every year.