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Aren’t data center employees crucial as they are making sure your services are running perfectly even in an event of emergency. Why not hire them and pay them

Aren’t data center employees crucial as they are making sure your services are running perfectly even in an event of emergency. Why not hire them and pay them better wages

capableweb 6y ago
> Why not hire them and pay them better wages You would have to search a lot to find any big, international conglomerates with shareholders who would willingly pay higher wages for workers without a fight.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
To be blunt: Because they don’t have to. If they were struggling to find or retain talent or if they weren’t getting the caliber of employee required, they would certainly increase wages as they did with engineers. When I was tangentially involved with a datacenter company several years ago, they had hundreds of qualified applicants for every job opening. It’s a job that a lot of people want but with few openings.
yanderekko 6y ago
A lot of the workers are FTEs, hence the "class system". Those FTEs are likely the ones that would handle such emergencies.
aparsons 6y ago
Because Google turned the computers into a commodity. These employees swap out broken machines for the most part, but the software stack is so redundant that you can pull out a machine running a key job and the scheduler will simply retry it somewhere else. Similarly for files with GFS. All machines have their own battery so the possibility of the whole thing going down is slim. It’s beautiful how they’ve evolved from running on Sun mainframes in the early part of the century. The workers at the datacenters basically do mindless labour, so aren’t paid like a typical sysadmin.
comeonseriously 6y ago
Why do that when you can, instead, return more money to investors?
LinuxBender 6y ago
I assume some day they will want to use robots for this work. Amazon is already working on it for their warehouses. It is not much of a stretch to imagine they've had conversations about what physical work can be automated. I could be wrong.
kristjansson 6y ago
They do? TFA says as many as half they techs are FTE. The alternative is not that they hire everyone as FTE, its that they hire and fire FTE to meet their labor demand, and then we get lots of doom and gloom and stock price dips about Google firing techs in Iowa or wherever.

Aren’t data center employees crucial as they are making sure your services are running perfectly even in an event of emergency. Why not hire them and pay them better wages

capableweb 6y ago

> Why not hire them and pay them better wages You would have to search a lot to find any big, international conglomerates with shareholders who would willingly pay higher wages for workers without a fight.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

To be blunt: Because they don’t have to. If they were struggling to find or retain talent or if they weren’t getting the caliber of employee required, they would certainly increase wages as they did with engineers. When I was tangentially involved with a datacenter company several years ago, they had hundreds of qualified applicants for every job opening. It’s a job that a lot of people want but with few openings.

yanderekko 6y ago

A lot of the workers are FTEs, hence the "class system". Those FTEs are likely the ones that would handle such emergencies.

aparsons 6y ago

Because Google turned the computers into a commodity. These employees swap out broken machines for the most part, but the software stack is so redundant that you can pull out a machine running a key job and the scheduler will simply retry it somewhere else. Similarly for files with GFS. All machines have their own battery so the possibility of the whole thing going down is slim. It’s beautiful how they’ve evolved from running on Sun mainframes in the early part of the century. The workers at the datacenters basically do mindless labour, so aren’t paid like a typical sysadmin.

comeonseriously 6y ago

Why do that when you can, instead, return more money to investors?

LinuxBender 6y ago

I assume some day they will want to use robots for this work. Amazon is already working on it for their warehouses. It is not much of a stretch to imagine they've had conversations about what physical work can be automated. I could be wrong.

kristjansson 6y ago

They do? TFA says as many as half they techs are FTE. The alternative is not that they hire everyone as FTE, its that they hire and fire FTE to meet their labor demand, and then we get lots of doom and gloom and stock price dips about Google firing techs in Iowa or wherever.