Why Data Centers Won't Hire You!

All right, I want to talk about data centers. Specifically something that doesn't make sense to me about data centers. See, there's this promise that a lot of politicians make about data centers that as someone who has worked as a software engineer for almost a decade now just doesn't make sense to me. Before I tell you what that promise is, I need to give you the software engineer's perspective to understand why the problem doesn't make sense. When we build and design software products, we typically want to build them in such a way that allows us to not care about the underlying technology. So, if I'm building a website, I don't want to care about what browser I'm using. If I'm building a browser or installing a browser, I don't want to care about what operating system I'm on. If I'm setting up an operating system, I don't want to care about what machine it's running on. Now, I know that last one is not always the case. macOS only runs on Macs, Android works on specific phones, but that's more of a regulatory problem than a technology one. Anyways, in the software world, we call this ability to ignore underlying technologies or other technologies that our system has to interact with, we call this abstraction. This is a key concept in software. When we build a website, we abstract away what that website interacts with through a application programming interface or an API. This allows us to ignore the technical details of the other system and application interacts with. And why this is useful for me as a software engineer is I can just focus on the product I'm trying to build. I don't have to worry about all those other things that other engineers figured out before me. Now, why is this relevant to data centers? And I'll get to this in a second. Abstraction is what allows very few software engineers to build massively impactful applications. By not forcing engineers to rebuild operating systems, computers, web browsers, and all these other underlying technologies every time we want to build a product, a company can just focus on its business need. And in turn that allows a company to hire very few software engineers. Abstraction is what allowed for software companies like Facebook to IPO at a valuation of 104 billion while only having 3, 000 employees.