One of the most sought-after jobs in the tech sector is not that of a software developer. This high-paying role has convinced many young people to study computer science.
Instead, the data center technician role is the most popular tech job, and it doesn’t even require an expensive four-year degree to get hired, Wall Street Journal reported.
Deborah Martinez Castellanos, 24, earns about $90,000 a year from her job, though others with more experience can earn six figures.
She is one of many data center workers responsible for keeping the American Internet running, and she is aware of the enormous responsibility that rests on her shoulders.
“I don’t want to say you’re scared, but you do feel like, ‘OK, you can’t panic,’” she told the WSJ.
An Amazon Web Services data center is seen near single-family homes on July 17, 2024 in Stone Ridge, Virginia.
The largest facilities cover millions of square feet and can house over 100,000 racked servers.
The servers enable the internet to host trillions of photos and emails in the cloud, while also powering emerging AI chatbots.
Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google have invested billions of dollars over several years in building the facilities, the WSJ reported.
Now these companies and many others are desperate for people like Martinez Castellanos to maintain the massive networks of computer infrastructure they have built.
An analysis of job postings cited by the WSJ found that the number of job openings for data center technicians has increased 17.8 percent since January 2020, while the number of tech jobs overall has fallen by more than half.
Deborah Martinez Castellanos, 24, has been working full-time at Aligned Data Centers since August 2021. She earns $43 an hour, which equates to about $90,000 a year
A data center is pictured in Ashburn, Virginia, a city located just over 30 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.
Before joining her current company, Martinez Castellanos studied data center management at a community college that offers one-year certifications and two-year associate degrees.
In 2021, she was hired for $29 an hour at a data center that rents space to companies across the country.
She now works three days a week and every other Wednesday in twelve-hour shifts, a common schedule in the industry.
She called her extra-long weekends “amazing” and used her days off to paint, play guitar or go hiking in Northern Virginia.
On the days she works, she starts at 6pm and finishes at 6am the next morning.
During that time, she watches screens that monitor the temperature and humidity in the rooms that house thousands of servers.
She receives notifications on her phone and computer when a server is about to overheat, and then takes action to fix the problem.
Given the size of her facility in Ashburn, Virginia, she easily walks 10,000 steps a night while solving all sorts of problems.
The largest facilities span millions of square feet and can hold more than 100,000 servers stored in racks. Racks of servers are shown above
Damian Diaz, 37, was hired as a data engineer for Google in South Carolina. He earns $112,000 a year, excluding bonuses and stock
The area in Northern Virginia where Martinez Castellanos lives is called Data Center Alley because it houses more than three dozen data centerswhich Powering 70 percent of global internet traffic.
According to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior, data centers across the country employ more than half a million people, including cleaners, security guards and other staff, as well as technicians. a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis.
“The data center industry is growing like crazy,” Chris Kimm, senior vice president at data center operator Equinix, told the WSJ.
Equinix will train employees who only have a high school diploma, though Kimm says certifications and associate degrees are helpful.
In South Carolina, 37-year-old Damian Diaz was hired as a data engineer for Google.
Diaz told the WSJ that his on-the-job training lasted a year, adding, “It was like drinking from a fire hose.”
He emigrated from Cuba nearly 20 years ago and before Google, he held various jobs, including working in an ice factory and building fences.
Four years into his tenure at Google, he earns $112,000 a year, excluding bonuses and stock. He uses his earnings to bring his parents from Cuba to the US.
Pictured: Iron Mountain Data Center in Prince William County, Virginia. This facility is part of Data Center Alley, a collection of many data centers that handle approximately 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic
A photo taken on December 6, 2016 shows Google’s new data center in the Netherlands
After dropping out of college in the 1990s, Nick Park entered the industry when it was still in its infancy.
It paid off to start from the ground up, and now the 45-year-old manages multiple data centers for Uber, earning him $175,000 a year, plus bonuses and stock that double his base salary.
“Data center technicians are the unsung heroes,” said Park, who lives in Phoenix. “We do our jobs well, so [servers] “They usually don’t break, but when they do, the situation is quite catastrophic.”
“I’ve been on call since 1999,” he added.
The irony that artificial intelligence (AI) – which could threaten human jobs across multiple disciplines – is boosting employment in the data center sector is not lost on those in the industry.
According to Joe Minarik, CEO of DataBank, it is unlikely that AI will replace the workforce working in data centers.
“If a server in a rack goes down, I need a body to physically look at what went wrong. Did a circuit breaker trip? Did a server catch fire?” he said.
“We still need people.”