A Data Center Worker Burned Out After Four Years on the Road
What It's Like to Work in One of America's Data Centers
A Hacker News discussion of a WSJ piece on data center work. One commenter describes traveling for optical networking deployments across 35+ states and several countries over four years, noting that most data center jobs are contract work — cabling firms, electricians, security — and that telecom is a miserable industry. Another recalls a bank employee who flew worldwide with duplicate boxes of floppies to install software updates.
I used to travel doing optical networking deployments between data centers. Got to see a good 35+ states and even some foreign countries over 4 years or so but also completely burnt out. Telecom is a pretty miserable industry.
- moofin_men
I used to travel doing optical networking deployments between data centers. Got to see a good 35+ states and even some foreign countries over 4 years or so but also completely burnt out. Telecom is a pretty miserable industry.
Most of the work in/around DCs is contract of some sort. Local structured cabling firms, electricians doing stints of various lengths, security, etc. Some of it good and lucrative, some of it not.
- PaulRobinson
I started out in a "data centre" in 1998/1999 in the North West of England. Things are radically different now.
When I joined that ISP we had ~2000 subscribers, and one modem rack that could take 30 concurrent 33.6k dial-ins. The company had just been acquired by a small independent telco in Cheshire, headquartered in a small town that is most famous for a weekly farmers market and an annual steam rally.
We shared that headquarters at first with the founder's other business - a dating agency for rich people in later years - and slowly took over.
The building was a farmhouse of sorts. We'd turned into a rabbit warren of offices, and then, we decided to expand.
First we turned one of the offices into a "machine room". We didn't even bother with fire suppression that first time, we just ripped up the carpet and laid some laminate, put some 19" racks in and got the power upgraded. The air-con was insufficient in that room and the following summer I had to wheel in portable units and had a Cisco router in there report that the inlet fan had a temperature of ~80C. That was around the same time the chief of staff was asking us why we wore jeans and t-shirts and couldn't we wear suits? No, no we could not wear suits.
Bit by bit we took over more rooms through the building, we started working in a portacabin in the car park (where the neighbouring farmer's sheepdog would join us for lunch).
At some point we needed to install ~20k modems, (Nortel CVX1800s - 56kbps had arrived!), and th […]
- chiffre01
Engineers, really? Maybe technicians ?
- _superposition_
The smell is nostalgic.
- philipwhiuk
It's bizarre that Digital Realty wants to put a DC in a town centre. Surely the latency disadvantage from being outside city limits is neligible.