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> Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.

There will be few jobs created after construction is complete, and the ones created won't pay anything like typical tech comp.





Maybe you should calibrate your definition of what "typical tech comp" means and what roles that applies to, and at what companies.

Median US Salary for a Data Center Technician is around 80k.

Median US Salary is $63,360.

Median household income is around $75,763 (Detroit CSA #s).

There's a lot of people out of work right now.


How many people work in a modern data center?

How much will the local energy prices rise due to the datacenter? More than that offset by the employees they hire I bet.

Only as many as are needed to physically rack the hardware and do hand-on maintenance. The people actually using the servers shouldn’t be located on-site.

A giant datacenter of AI scale will have a dozen or so contractors for physical plant on-site pretty much every single day as long as the thing is in operation. More if a refresh project is ongoing, which after a few years will be more less all the time.

They certainly are not high density employers, but these huge hyperscale facilities typically employ 150-300 people directly, and probably at least that many on average in contracting roles. They are massive facilities.


Most people will be very happy with a fraction of the typical tech comp if they have a job.

Most people who need a job won't have that job at that data center.

I have known what kind of jobs a data center needs. Are these highly qualified people or do you just need to install some parts?

> Are these highly qualified people or do you just need to install some parts?

They're not software engineers or data scientists if that's what you mean by "highly qualified".

Datacenters techs do the physical parts of the job we once called "system administrator". That definitely requires skill and attention to detail, not just the ability to "install some parts".

When the tech industry transitioned from on site systems to datacenters and big compute / big data, "system administrator" got split into "site reliability engineer" and "datacenter technician" as they scaled independently, with datacenter tech being focused on manufacturing and physical troubleshooting.

They have always been the "blue collar" workers of tech, both in terms of pay and prestige. Like tech support, the job is considered more of a stepping stone into the operations (not R&D) side of big data companies.

That all said, the qualifications of applicants for a job depend a lot on the labor market, in particular, the desperation of applicants. During the dotcom bust, a lot of CS grads (including me) were applying for technician jobs.




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