3 ms·

> Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create? Are there jobs for local residents? If locals are qualified then yes. The DC itself does not have many per

by nixass 6mo ago

> Serious question, what jobs do datacenters create? Are there jobs for local residents? If locals are qualified then yes. The DC itself does not have many permanent staff (tech, facilities, security) but loads of work is contracted. I'd say that great majority of the work done in and around the DC campus is outsourced, and it creates work for plenty of people.

bdangubic 6mo ago
to build - yes. after it is built - no. so there is some temporary work but nothing permanent
- dilyevsky 6mo ago
  At least when i was at google, more than a decades ago at this point, hardware ops guys were locally sourced
  - rkomorn 6mo ago
    When I was at (then) Facebook, this was mostly the case, but we also ran data centers with a hundred thousands of servers off a dozen local techs. Facebook (and Google as well, IIRC) prided themselves on how few people they needed to run the datacenter. Maybe I'm jaded but "we created 50 jobs" just doesn't hit that hard.
    - dilyevsky 6mo ago
      I mean it’s a warehouse sized building, unless you’re doing a call center boiler room in there how many more jobs you’d expect?
      - rkomorn 6mo ago
        Me? Not many, but I also happened to work in adjacent roles that had me more informed than the average engineer. People whose communities are affected? I think it'd be reasonable for them to expect more for it to be worth it.
        dilyevsky 6mo ago
        What are they giving up? You get property tax revenue, permit revenue, some construction trickle down, and you do get a few dozen jobs and in return you give up some some grandstanding/political posturing opportunities. Seems like an easy deal to me, but hey that's just me.
- nixass 6mo ago
  You're wrong. People are probably impressed by the dollar value number it takes to build a DC/campus and then expect that the number of hired people should be "proportionally" equally high. It doesn't work like that but DCs definitely create more than enough local jobs for qualified even after it's built
  - dilyevsky 6mo ago
    This. At least until we’re at a point where some guy in the Philippines operates a telepresence android this is definitely a net gain for the community.
  - soco 6mo ago
    I'll repeat a question asked somewhere else: what exactly are those local jobs after it's built? Can somebody care to list?
    - phil21 6mo ago
      Electricians. Top skilled folks for the most part who can do industrial level conduit work and the type who can operate switching gear and control systems. There is enough of this ongoing work for these huge facilities to effectively employ a half dozen full time contractors or more. One of the facilities I work the most in has electrical contractors on-site every single day, with at least a few trucks in the parking lot. These are local union guys. Always something breaking, needing maintenance, or a new area of the facility being refreshed. The facility is over a decade old and the work has never slowed down. Plumbers. Cooling these facilities takes vast amounts of plumbing work. And it's also typically some of the highest skilled plumbing needed outside of refinery and other manufacturing plant work. When you have 50 giant chillers running 24x7 at least one is undergoing some form of maintenance at any given time. Probably overlapping with the above, but HVAC technicians. Again, the scale of these facilities means constant work being available as you are operating at miniature city sized installations. Security guards of course. Not really material though. I've noticed more armed guards than before, with at least two on duty 24x7. As these places get more controversial, I imagine this sort of staffing will increase. On-site (IT) technicians. For facilities these sizes, you will be staffing it 24x7 and have a large enough crew to get basic refresh projects done. Hard to really estimate this, but in the dozens of full time labor for these giant projects. Think folks who can pull cable, troubleshoot basic hardware, swap drives/bad RAM sticks, etc. For the larger refresh projects contractors typically get flown in during a surge so on-site staffing is relatively minimal, but very few facilities are operating "lights out". Then you have facility management - highly skilled positions that know how to operate all the electric/mechanical and cooling equipment during emergencies. Every facility I've worked in is staffed by a crew of around half a dozen of these folks or so, with the top tier subject matter experts being flown in during critical emergencies. These are the guys generally coordinating all the contract labor above. Probably a couple mid-tier network engineers and higher skilled sysadmin types as well depending on who is operating it. Everyone loves to pretend these are highly automated and copy/paste facilities hyperscalers are just perfect at executing - but there is a lot of "dirty" hands-on work to be done since that stuff is not nearly as perfect as advertised and often requires hands-on problem solving and on the spot hacks to get stuff going. As anywhere, how the sausage gets made is a lot uglier than the marketing. Once you get out of the highly competent hyperscalers, the above numbers go way up. Enterprise datacenter operators are going to need far more on-site labor due to simply not being great at this sort of work. The stories I hear of some current builds are rather humorous in how many people it's taking to get stuff working - basically solving what should be automated via manual processes. It's not a lot of jobs, but for these huge 100's of Megawatt facilities the low-end is probably in the 100+ range of FTE equivalent labor after construction is completed. Everyone but security and the basic "remote hands" type employees would be in the $100k+ salary range.
- polski-g 6mo ago
  There will be at least 5 employees working as smart hands 24/7, so probably 3 shifts -- 15 people. Plus 1-2 security agents working 24/7, another 6 jobs. Plus a foreman with some maintenance crew for HVAC/electrical (not 24/7) so probably another 1-3 jobs. That's a really sweet deal for a town with only 11k people and no other external investments on the horizon.
jnovek 6mo ago
Are you talking about contractors just while the DC is under construction or after it’s built as well? Google wants to build one in my home town and I’m questioning what value it will bring to the community.
jagged-chisel 6mo ago
It doesn't create ongoing jobs. It creates short term work, and perhaps the occasional momentary task. The only permanent jobs will be physical security.
- Rekindle8090 6mo ago
  What do you think people working in construction actually do when the project is done? Just spend the rest of their life homeless? No, they go to the next project.
  - pwg 6mo ago
    The problem is that when the lobbyists are pitching these builds to the local town councils, the "create X jobs" part of the marketing is very carefully worded to heavily imply "X long term jobs will be created" while also not actually directly saying "X long term jobs will be created". They want the council members thinking X long term jobs, but want to avoid legal liability for lying later when the reality of X was 99% temporary jobs lasting 6-12 months and 1% long term jobs for the community. And few council members seem to have been snookered enough yet that they know to ask the marketing lobbyist the pointed question: "How many of those X jobs are long term and will persist after construction and build-out is completed?".

by nixass 6mo ago

bdangubic 6mo ago

to build - yes. after it is built - no. so there is some temporary work but nothing permanent

dilyevsky 6mo ago
At least when i was at google, more than a decades ago at this point, hardware ops guys were locally sourced
- rkomorn 6mo ago
  When I was at (then) Facebook, this was mostly the case, but we also ran data centers with a hundred thousands of servers off a dozen local techs. Facebook (and Google as well, IIRC) prided themselves on how few people they needed to run the datacenter. Maybe I'm jaded but "we created 50 jobs" just doesn't hit that hard.
  - dilyevsky 6mo ago
    I mean it’s a warehouse sized building, unless you’re doing a call center boiler room in there how many more jobs you’d expect?
    - rkomorn 6mo ago
      Me? Not many, but I also happened to work in adjacent roles that had me more informed than the average engineer. People whose communities are affected? I think it'd be reasonable for them to expect more for it to be worth it.
      - dilyevsky 6mo ago
        What are they giving up? You get property tax revenue, permit revenue, some construction trickle down, and you do get a few dozen jobs and in return you give up some some grandstanding/political posturing opportunities. Seems like an easy deal to me, but hey that's just me.
nixass 6mo ago
You're wrong. People are probably impressed by the dollar value number it takes to build a DC/campus and then expect that the number of hired people should be "proportionally" equally high. It doesn't work like that but DCs definitely create more than enough local jobs for qualified even after it's built
- dilyevsky 6mo ago
  This. At least until we’re at a point where some guy in the Philippines operates a telepresence android this is definitely a net gain for the community.
- soco 6mo ago
  I'll repeat a question asked somewhere else: what exactly are those local jobs after it's built? Can somebody care to list?
  - phil21 6mo ago
    Electricians. Top skilled folks for the most part who can do industrial level conduit work and the type who can operate switching gear and control systems. There is enough of this ongoing work for these huge facilities to effectively employ a half dozen full time contractors or more. One of the facilities I work the most in has electrical contractors on-site every single day, with at least a few trucks in the parking lot. These are local union guys. Always something breaking, needing maintenance, or a new area of the facility being refreshed. The facility is over a decade old and the work has never slowed down. Plumbers. Cooling these facilities takes vast amounts of plumbing work. And it's also typically some of the highest skilled plumbing needed outside of refinery and other manufacturing plant work. When you have 50 giant chillers running 24x7 at least one is undergoing some form of maintenance at any given time. Probably overlapping with the above, but HVAC technicians. Again, the scale of these facilities means constant work being available as you are operating at miniature city sized installations. Security guards of course. Not really material though. I've noticed more armed guards than before, with at least two on duty 24x7. As these places get more controversial, I imagine this sort of staffing will increase. On-site (IT) technicians. For facilities these sizes, you will be staffing it 24x7 and have a large enough crew to get basic refresh projects done. Hard to really estimate this, but in the dozens of full time labor for these giant projects. Think folks who can pull cable, troubleshoot basic hardware, swap drives/bad RAM sticks, etc. For the larger refresh projects contractors typically get flown in during a surge so on-site staffing is relatively minimal, but very few facilities are operating "lights out". Then you have facility management - highly skilled positions that know how to operate all the electric/mechanical and cooling equipment during emergencies. Every facility I've worked in is staffed by a crew of around half a dozen of these folks or so, with the top tier subject matter experts being flown in during critical emergencies. These are the guys generally coordinating all the contract labor above. Probably a couple mid-tier network engineers and higher skilled sysadmin types as well depending on who is operating it. Everyone loves to pretend these are highly automated and copy/paste facilities hyperscalers are just perfect at executing - but there is a lot of "dirty" hands-on work to be done since that stuff is not nearly as perfect as advertised and often requires hands-on problem solving and on the spot hacks to get stuff going. As anywhere, how the sausage gets made is a lot uglier than the marketing. Once you get out of the highly competent hyperscalers, the above numbers go way up. Enterprise datacenter operators are going to need far more on-site labor due to simply not being great at this sort of work. The stories I hear of some current builds are rather humorous in how many people it's taking to get stuff working - basically solving what should be automated via manual processes. It's not a lot of jobs, but for these huge 100's of Megawatt facilities the low-end is probably in the 100+ range of FTE equivalent labor after construction is completed. Everyone but security and the basic "remote hands" type employees would be in the $100k+ salary range.
polski-g 6mo ago
There will be at least 5 employees working as smart hands 24/7, so probably 3 shifts -- 15 people. Plus 1-2 security agents working 24/7, another 6 jobs. Plus a foreman with some maintenance crew for HVAC/electrical (not 24/7) so probably another 1-3 jobs. That's a really sweet deal for a town with only 11k people and no other external investments on the horizon.

jnovek 6mo ago

Are you talking about contractors just while the DC is under construction or after it’s built as well? Google wants to build one in my home town and I’m questioning what value it will bring to the community.

jagged-chisel 6mo ago

It doesn't create ongoing jobs. It creates short term work, and perhaps the occasional momentary task. The only permanent jobs will be physical security.

Rekindle8090 6mo ago
What do you think people working in construction actually do when the project is done? Just spend the rest of their life homeless? No, they go to the next project.
- pwg 6mo ago
  The problem is that when the lobbyists are pitching these builds to the local town councils, the "create X jobs" part of the marketing is very carefully worded to heavily imply "X long term jobs will be created" while also not actually directly saying "X long term jobs will be created". They want the council members thinking X long term jobs, but want to avoid legal liability for lying later when the reality of X was 99% temporary jobs lasting 6-12 months and 1% long term jobs for the community. And few council members seem to have been snookered enough yet that they know to ask the marketing lobbyist the pointed question: "How many of those X jobs are long term and will persist after construction and build-out is completed?".