[matthewmacleod]

Wiring a simple / small home, it takes well over four electrician months, minimum.

It’s hard to take these numbers seriously - they don’t pass the sniff test for anyone who has had it done. Wiring a 1000sq ft home is a job that is measured in days, not months. While I only have experience of the UK, it is difficult to see any possible regulation which would mean installation being quite literally an order of magnitude slower.

But let’s use some Fermi estimation. California builds around 100,000 new houses a year, give or take. This suggests we’d need an absolute minimum of 400,000 electrician-months a year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks there are 70,000 electricians in California in total. Assuming they have an availability of 90%, then we could say that California has about 750,000 available electrician-months a year in total.

This would mean that over half of all available electrician time in California would be spent wiring new-build houses, if we assumed they were all small properties. It seems clear this can’t be a credible result.

I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong, but it’s hard to swallow without some idea of what possible thing could cause this betone vague hints about “code being insane“

[dazc]

He may just have gotten bad contractors. A friend of mine lives in a council run appartment in the UK and some simple jobs that have been carried out on his building have run into years, with multiple people on site every day (mostly doing nothing or doing stuff so badly that it needs another team to come in and rectify).

Recent example, upgrade to fire doors in corridors on 3 floors. Halfway into the job they realise each corridor is a different height and the doors they have already bought are the wrong size. Some levels of incompetance are hard to imagine until you see it happening in real time.