Comment by nixass
4 days 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.
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.
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.
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?".
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.
to build - yes. after it is built - no. so there is some temporary work but nothing permanent
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
With all due respect this is a vague as you can make a statement. What is more than enough local jobs? I drive by roughly 20 DCs on any given week between driving my kid to school and then to practice, the parking lots for the DCs are smaller than those of Chuck E Cheese and even at that size you never see more than 10-15 cars parked there. So not sure what more than enough is but it does not help much local economy
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.
I'll repeat a question asked somewhere else: what exactly are those local jobs after it's built? Can somebody care to list?
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At least when i was at google, more than a decades ago at this point, hardware ops guys were locally sourced
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.
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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.