[nixass]

> 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.

[jagged-chisel]

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]

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]

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?".

[jnovek]

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.

[bdangubic]

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

[nixass]

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

[bdangubic]

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

[dilyevsky]

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]

I'll repeat a question asked somewhere else: what exactly are those local jobs after it's built? Can somebody care to list?

[uberduper]

There's going to be continued support from local electricians, low voltage wiring vendors, various facilities service companies, HVAC, and now plumbers.. lots of plumbers. So many leaks. A site like this is going to have probably a few hundred full time people on site all the time in addition to the contracted folks.

[array_key_first]

A DC does not have a few hundred full time people on site 24/7, it's going to be less than a dozen. It takes much, much less people to run a data center than people think.

[uberduper]

A dozen people couldn't handle the number of daily nvidia compute tray RMAs one of these datacenters produces.

[phil21]

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.

[bdangubic]

> 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.

For the size and resources they are using you can build a lot of other things here that will employ significantly North of 100 (this is too many but lets keep it for the sake of argument) employees with significantly North benefit to the population than F'ing data centers.

[MobiusHorizons]

I mean yes, but that would require demand right? The demand is currently for building data centers, should you just wait around for better things to be in demand? It’s definitely a strategy, but it doesn’t seem like the obviously necessary strategy

[dilyevsky]

At least when i was at google, more than a decades ago at this point, hardware ops guys were locally sourced

[rkomorn]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[polski-g]

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.