Big Tech Is Coming to Small-Town America, but at What Cost? | Hacker News Reader

Big Tech Is Coming to Small-Town America, but at What Cost?

time.com

48 pointsColinWright55 comments

This article is referring to data centers that hire relatively small numbers of temporary contractors, not actual FAANG offices popping up and offering long-term engineering jobs.

Its a stretch to argue that these additional jobs, even if they are time-limited contracts through a contracting company that services FAANG, are a bad thing. The contracting companies aren’t misleading candidate when they’re hired - These are clearly contract jobs. They may not be great jobs, but they’re not displacing other jobs either. They’re just additional jobs.

Calling them “big tech” jobs is almost as misleading as claiming that the construction workers and electricians who built the data enter were “big tech” construction workers.

The general public is often confused about the difference between data center technicians and software/hardware engineers. I remember when I was younger and a FAANG company considered building a data center near my home town. Many of my extended family members thought I could move home, get a FAANG job working at the data center, and be set for life in my home town. I spent a lot of time explaining to people that my work didn’t resemble physically servicing data centers at all. This article plays off of that same idea.

Right, it's precisely like calling an FBA warehouse employee a "Big Tech" employee. They might be good jobs in a general sense, but they are not fat turkey jobs from the perspective of politicians like a junior executive making half a million dollars a year in a low cost of living state.

> Right, it's precisely like calling an FBA warehouse employee a "Big Tech" employee.

Amazon hires warehouse employees directly, though, so in a sense they are employees of a Big Tech company even if they’re not doing tech work.

The situation in this article would be more like the contracted electricians who work on Amazon warehouse buildings complaining about their electrician employer company and then the journalist trying to pin those complaints on Amazon because that’s where the work was done.

That would only be a reasonable analogy if the electricians did all their work in one facility for one company. One can argue that Google is the employer in this case because the contractors have never worked for Modis in the same capacity in any other facility. Trade contractors ply their trade for many different clients on different projects. It’s distinguishable from this type of arrangement.

The “contractors” in question here have a supervisor at Google, and the pay they receive is from Google via Modis. If Modis didn’t exist to be the contracting party the employees would be indistinguishable from full time employees under Google’s employ. Arguing that the contracting relationship is all that is needed to justify this is like arguing that I can form an LLC to hold my assets and receive my salary to avoid personal income tax.

I disagree, these contractors do the exact same job as some Google employees. They are directly part of "big tech", if they weren't there FAANG companies would grind to a halt.

In situations where the work is not inherently temporary (e.g. a construction project) or seasonal, it seems to me that employing people as contractors without any job security is itself part of the problem.

That is on top of the sexual harassment and other mistreatment that the article discusses as well as the fact that the corps are cutting political deals to avoid paying taxes.

Would you also insist that these companies hire and manage their own janitorial staff to clean the building every night? That work is neither temporary nor seasonal either, but no one thinks twice when every small and medium sized company contracts with a cleaning company.

I do insist that the companies should hire and manage their own janitorial staff, maintenance workers, mail room (so far as that still exists), food workers, etc.

A major part of American capitalism that worked was the fact that you could be poor, get a job at a company "at the bottom" and work your way up to the top. The transition to contracting out the bottom, and then an over-reliance on credentialism is a huge mistake.

That is a real interesting point, contracting out limits your ability to "work your way up," a big company. I am a huge proponent of mobility, especially inter-organizational mobility rather than intra-organizational mobility, but your point stands. Having the ability to move up in your organization and up outside of your organization gives the worker more choices and makes organizations actually work harder to do right by the worker. I think contracting out still can fit in this, but I am glad I read your point. It will be interesting to think through.

> That is a real interesting point, contracting out limits your ability to "work your way up," a big company.

Those times are gone. People don't stay at a company for 30 years and get a pension anymore.

https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-long-should-an-employe...

"The median number of years that employees have worked for their current employer is currently 4.1 years, according to an Economic News Release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics."

Certainly internal transfers have some advantages over external candidates, but I think most of those are shared by contractors who have been working internally.

I'm all for protecting workers, including contractors, but given the nature of modern business I'm not convinced "the company" is the right mechanism for that.

Also, keep in mind the average age of a company was 61 years, now it's 18.

https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will...

I wasn't around back then, but I kinda doubt that it worked that way for most people (other than outliers like the flamin hot cheetos guy) or that it could work that way today.

my grandfather started out as a more or less unskilled factory worker. he worked his way up to factory superintendent over the years, and was overseeing several factories in a region by the end of his career. this is what I think of as a "started from the bottom" story, but it makes sense as a trajectory. he ended up near the top, but the problems he was solving were never that far from the factory floor.

now suppose you're a cafeteria worker at google. whether or not you're an official google employee doesn't seem to have much bearing on whether you eventually become an engineering manager; it's a totally disjoint skillset.

to me, it seems like contracting and credentialism are just side effects of a larger shift. true entry-level jobs (ie, a job without any prerequisite skills/knowledge) are simply rare. almost all the "entry-level" positions that do have a clear upward trajectory actually require the person to have some relevant skills that can't really be learned on the job in a reasonable amount of time.

Applying your grandfather’s story to the cafeteria worker example, a more apt parallel would be working their way up over the years to head of food service for the all the buildings at a site.

Similarly, a parallel for data center staff would be being able to take a job that has a path to roles in either management for data centers or a increasing scope towards sysadmin and devops/SRE roles.

How many jobs do you think are above the average food service worker in a cafe? Maybe 2. On site “manager”, regional, then executive.

For some family chain like Chili’s or Outback it be something like this. 100 employees per store -> 3 managers -> 1 General Manager (32 in my metro) -> Regional Manager (2 maybe 3 in my metro) -> South East VP (maybe 5 in the US) -> President (1) -> CEO (1). That’s 3200 or more people at the bottom in my metro trying to get the top jobs.

I think datacenter tech is a good example of one that should actually be in house, and not even for the sake of fairness. I imagine after a while these people must understand a lot about the company's infrastructure, albeit on a low level. it seems dumb for the company not to provide a path for advancement to these people. then again, I'm an application dev, so I don't know much about how all that works.

as for the food service example, I still don't see why it's particularly advantageous to be an official employee of the company. if the tech company does really well, you get to go along for the ride to an extent, but at the end of the day, you're still working in what the bean counters would consider a cost center. if you work for a food service contractor, you could potentially get into an important role in the profit center of that company. maybe one day you manage cafeterias for several large companies, not just one.

the root problem in this example is that food service just isn't very profitable. no matter how you slice it up, there's not a lot of extra money sloshing around to pay anyone.

But that janitor at Google would be much more able to take classes on the side, maybe seeing how these tech companies work. And then use his reliability and degree to leverage that into a job. Or if he doesn't work his way up, the extra stability of solid benefits and job instead of moving around contracts would possibly help them support their children to go on to becoming engineers at google. Working 60 hour weeks because you are contracting at a few different places makes it a lot harder to advance

This article went into detail about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...

I found it compelling, but I’m not sure what the solution is, given I don’t actually want to see companies doing things inefficiently, I just want the workers to be treated better and have more opportunities.

AMP link for those without sub: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upsh...

Contracting isn't inherently bad, but contracting jobs on short term temporary contracts with 2 year cliffs, regardless of performance, seems inherently cruel. Presumably they're doing it to avoid having long term employees, who might actually have rights.

Giving people job security - and with it the ability to plan your life and make long term decisions - is a nice thing to do. Google can afford to do it. They should.

Cleaning an office doesn't take 40 hours a week, so it makes more sense that a cleaning company hires full time people and contracts with multiple offices.

The alternative is each office hiring individuals for a few hours worth each week and dealing with high turnover rate because the cleaners would surely prefer other jobs with more hours than doing the administrative work of a cleaning company on top of the cleaning work for no extra pay.

I do actually think twice about companies doing that. If you contract out a job indefinitely then it’s just a workaround to prevent giving all the rights associated with being employed. I honestly think no job should be able to be contracted out of it lasts over a year

Big Tech aside, many companies do not have the staff or money to hire and manage certain jobs like cleaning, facilities, and physical security. You can’t just hire people and expect they are autonomous. Someone has to be managing and monitoring them.

On Big Tech’s scale the overhead would be huge. I have no doubts the other reason is giving them full benefits.

But hiring a third party who is making profit on top of cost of hiring and managing these jobs is something they can afford?

I can understand if you are a small business hiring a cleaner for like 8 hours a week. When these companies have multiple full time jobs worth of contracted labor done every week for years, I don't really believe them if the justification is that they can't "afford" to hire actual employees

A lot of times the janitorial staff are FTEs of the company that employs them.

And ultimately, in the cases where the office is leased, the cleaning company might have been hired by the owner of the office park.

They're good additions to a local economy, but they won't, in general, substitute for the manufacturing or mining jobs that some of these towns have lost. There's simply a different scale of labor needed between maintaining and servicing the physical plant for data transformers and operating a manufacturing system that turns matter into differently-shaped matter or an extraction project to pull tons of material out of the ground and sift it.

Data centers don't maintain themselves, but they don't have nearly as many high-maintenance moving mechanical parts as an automotive plant, for example.

They are worse additions to the local economy than stable warehouse jobs. They offer similar wages but no stability.

That's what big tech has to offer here in flyover country in return for our cheap utilities and available land and some stunning tax avoidance.

> Calling them “big tech” jobs is almost as misleading as claiming that the construction workers and electricians who built the data enter were “big tech” construction workers.

It is called clickbait, and is the nature of “journalism” these days due to compensation coming from articles that evoke as much emotion as possible.

> Calling them “big tech” jobs is almost as misleading as claiming that the construction workers and electricians who built the data enter were “big tech” construction workers.

To be fair, an excavator is a fairly large piece of technology.

> Calling them “big tech” jobs is almost as misleading as claiming that the construction workers and electricians who built the data enter were “big tech” construction workers.

I'm confused by this statement. If not constructor workers employed by "big tech", what exactly would a "big tech constructor worker" be?

By the same that says logic, Elon musk is a federal employee because spaceX has government contracts.

They would just be construction workers

It's like calling a gasoline station attendant a petrochemical company worker.

No, they are petroleum transfer engineers.

If the gas station attendant is one of the few who works for a gas station owned directly by the gas company, is that not the case?

I think that's the point - there aren't big tech construction workers, they're just construction workers.

Thanks. I saw the word "Big Tech" and immediately think it is some clickbait headlines. Read the HN comments first and now saves me time to even read the article.

The funny thing is I have a friend of the family that has worked 7 years now at the prineville facebook datacenter, and has not had to worry about 2 year lay-offs, he's an electrician, his company in contracted to build/expand the datacenter there, with a full job with benefits that have only increased over time.

Because of expansion the 'temporary' construction jobs have turned out to be almost better than the actual jobs that actually work in there.

No its actually a result of a case MS lost decades ago - there are plenty of Big Tech workers on this sort of contract.

This Time Magazine story is an example of making readers less educated because it focuses on specific example of subcontractors who don't work for one specific company. And it drives that One Specific Example home with a human-interest angle on Ned McNally of Omaha at one specific company such as Google.

Another previous one-off story with subcontractor Shannon Wait and Google datacenter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874211

Another previous one-off about subcontractors working for Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19133586

Instead, this is the generalized template to understand : Many workers at $BIGCO are actually subcontractors.

From that general outline, journalists keep re-generating specific one-off stories. Instead, journalists could help readers understand that there have always been subcontractors (and often treated as 2nd-class) working for the more well-known brand name company.

Before tech giants like Google/Apple/Microsoft to act as the "bad guy" hiring subcontractors, there were newspapers. A lot of journalists/photographers "worked for" the newspaper but they weren't really staff employees. Instead, they were freelance journalists/photographers aka subcontractors. And at universities, you have adjunct professors ("subcontractors" even with a W-2) instead of tenured professors.

These "invisible" subcontractors are everywhere. At Costco, the workers handing out free food samples are not Costco employees. They work for CDS. (https://clubdemo.com/)

Likewise, CDS employees don't get the same benefits as true Costco employees.

My understanding is that subcontractors are far more common now than they were ~20 years ago. Perhaps the subcontractors that did exist 20+ years ago were treated equally poorly, but it is relevant that there are many more people in this position now.

For example, it used to be common for janitorial staff to be actual employees of the companies whose campuses they cleaned and maintained. That is no longer the case. A legendary example is an early Google chef who earned equity and was made quite wealthy in the process — while Google chefs today are not (to the best of my understanding) still employees.

Whether or not these additional contract jobs are a good thing for the community is debateable; certainly anyone who has driven from the US west coast into the interior (e.g. towards Denver) has driven through a lot of these one-stoplight towns with myriad shuttered storefronts, one gas station with the town's only restaurant (a Subway), and hardly anyone around on main street except an idling police cruiser. Truly any jobs would be a boon to the local inhabitants (although turning it into a company town has its own obvious drawbacks, e.g. see all the history of mining in Appalachia).

The real thing that is truly unjust is the tax concessions they extract out of the local officials. The sums of money that the Google/Amazon/Microsoft officials wave in front of these guys probably has at least 1 or 2 more zeros than they are used to seeing when it comes to town finances, and they too eagerly gobble it up out of desperation without realizing that the deal is highly exploitative.

I wish there was some way of either regulating this at the federal level, but the government seems to be highly in favor of enabling the business side of things instead of protecting individuals, e.g. the ridiculous Kelo v. New London SCOTUS decision [0] where Pfizer rolled into town and got the city officials to eminent-domain people out of their houses, only to have the whole deal fall through and now that site is used as a dump...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

All of the big tech companies are taking advantage of this contractor situation, that is why California lawmakers are looking closely at whether this is exploitation.

Every company hires contractors for different services. The company that cleans your offices at night is almost certainly a contractor, for example. If your office needs to be repainted, your company doesn’t hire a painter full-time and manage them directly. They enter into a contract with a painting company. If they need to expand their building, they contract with a construction company to do the work and the construction company hires people to do the construction work. Nobody would mistake the construction workers for employees of your company because the construction contracting model is commonly understood, unlike the data center model.

Working on a company’s contracted projects doesn’t make someone an employee of that company. It seems well-understood in common situations like cleaning or construction but people seem to struggle to understand how it works when it comes to unfamiliar topics like data centers.

The situation in this article is no different. The company they’re complaining about isn’t actually Google, despite how much the article tries to be about big tech:

> But the company that recruited McNally was not Google; it was Modis Engineering,

> The company that cleans your offices at night is almost certainly a contractor, for example.

In the good old days janitors used to be employees. Heck, even when I worked for the government the janitors were employees (but I believe even the janitors needed a security clearance.)

I believe even the janitors needed a security clearance.

Makes sense because people might leave sensitive documents around.

These days almost all of those folks are contractors for the government and even contractors can be required to have a security clearance.

A company is still morally responsible if they hire from a contracting firm that mistreats their employees.

I could be wrong, but I doubt that most janitorial contracting firms have a policy of firing people after two years and refusing to re-hire them for a set amount of time. However, if they do then that would be immoral for them to.

> have a policy of firing people after two years and refusing to re-hire them for a set amount of time. However, if they do then that would be immoral for them to.

The truth is that no contracting company wants to lost people after two years. Why would any company voluntarily let go of their most experienced workers and go through all the trouble of hiring and training new ones? Who would actually want to perform that cycle over and over again for no possible benefit?

They’re not doing this to be evil. They’re doing this to comply with poorly thought out regulations. Blame the regulators for coming up with these arbitrary laws.

The contracting companies would definitely be retaining their most experienced contractors if they could.

What regulations are you referring to?

Too bad California got duped into passing prop 22, which I imagine would affect these exploitative employment practices.

I understand this article is specifically referring to data centers, but big tech, depending on how one defines big tech, is certainly coming to some small towns. Bozeman, Montana is a great example. Snowflake has recently relocated to town, Aurora has a software and hardware dev office, many other large and small tech firms are located there. It's quickly growing with a large cadre of tech firms specializing in everything from computer vision to anti-drone technologies currently in use by the US Marines. There's a reason its one of, if not the fastest growing small/micro town in the country. -> access to engineers out of MSU, and the beauty of the area attracts folks from all over the country.

https://restofworld.org/2021/the-race-to-build-africas-5g-ne...

“At what cost?” Free, apparently.

Back in the mid-2000s at Google, there was some degree for advancement from data center roles, even as contractors, to full-time jobs — even up to fully-fledged engineering jobs (SWE and SRE and NetOps) — if you were extremely talented, dedicated, networked well, and had the right degree of luck. Note all the qualifiers: it was tantamount to impossible.

I rose up through the ranks as one of these, as did a medium-sized cohort of colleagues who became life-long friends. Many of us busted our asses (hard). These days, I reckon the glass ceiling has turned into a cement thanks to managerial cowardice, which was bad at the time, and further desire to segment the workforce/roles. We often said we came into Google through the backdoor.

The degree of disparaging remarks about the folks in the data centers was unreal. It would be foolish to say there wasn't a de facto caste system (SWE > SRE > SETI > SysAdmin > NetOps > Data Center Tech > Facilities). After a couple of promotions from an extinct job ladder and level below L0, I ended up exceeding L6 in my career and became SWE.

In short, the disappointment from the folks in the article resonates deeply. Each time I encounter someone in this position, I try to lend as much of a hand as I can.

Thanks for sharing. As I noted elsewhere, this is how things should work. If you have a smart, hard working person as a low level worker their ability to work hard and move up is essential for a successful society. Companies have moved to a system instead where you need the right degree from the right school to get into the right position.

The MBA types may say that you should focus on your core competencies. Google, being a tech company, running their datacenters sure sounds like a core competency.

Entirely. Credential signaling leads to mediocrity. In my opinion internal mobility between departments and roles improved in the last four years, except for the untouchables.

I didn’t even go to that great of a university nor study engineering. I learned years later that apparently my university was on some recruiting shortlist on account of it being a renowned engineer’s alma mater. I suspect that was the only reason I was even hired to clean the metaphorical toilets. It took most of my career to overcome the attendant imposter syndrome. Breaking the L6 ceiling put that to rest, but I don’t forget my roots.

Interesting to see an insiders breakdown of the caste system. As an outsider, I've always though that SRE was #1, and SWE second. SRE has so much more knowledge area to cover than SWE... I've been thinking of interviewing for SRE roles at FAANG, but I don't see why I wouldn't just go SWE.

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