My Daily Tasks As A Data Center Technician At Google (2025 Edition)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey y'all, it's Brittany. How's it going today? I hope everyone is doing well. In this video, I'm talking about my day-to-day activities as a data center technician at Google. I've gotten this question on LinkedIn a few times over the past week, and I thought I wrote an article about my activities as a data center technician, but I didn't. I talked about a whole bunch of other stuff related to the job, but not that. So I said, you know what, let me make a video because I can explain it better than just me writing this all down. And I think it's better to showcase what it's like inside the data center. That's what these videos behind me are showing, what it's like to arrive to a Google data center and what it's like to be inside one. Because I cannot take any photographs or any video, not allowed for various reasons. And so it has to be properly vetted. So all these videos I'm going to show you have been properly vetted on by Google and they're available on YouTube. There actually is some other videos too available on YouTube about the Google data center, but they're kind of old. So I mean, you can go ahead and watch them, but they're kind of like eight to 10 years old. But a link to all the videos that I'm showing is in the description box below. So you can watch them with audio because I muted them since I'm talking. But yeah, let me go ahead and get right into what my day-to-day activities or tasks are like as a data center technician or a DT for short. So Google has two teams. We have a network team and a maintenance, I'm sorry, a machines team. And within those two teams, we have network projects or deployments, and then we have network maintenance, and then we have machine projects or deployments, and then we have machine maintenance. And for the deployments, think of it as deploying new hardware. So for me, I am deploying new switches, new routers, new fiber, new optics, all that stuff. So with deployment comes working with vendors, because we do have a low voltage vendor that runs the fiber and other cabling. So I need to check their work, making sure that there's no broken fiber, that they plugged in the stuff into the correct ports, all that good stuff. And I have to run what is called quality assurance. I have to make sure that these switches install properly, that they're running properly, that all the links are up. And if they're not, I have to figure out what's going on. It could be a bad switch. I've had that. It could be, you know, a bad port in the switch. It could be a bad optic or bad batch of optics, things of that nature. And it's kind of the same for the machine deployments too, except they're just deploying machines. They are not deploying network hardware. Now, when it comes to maintenance, both teams, they are maintaining or fixing the items that broke. So after I am done deploying that network hardware, and the project is done, I say, hey, everyone, to the like network maintenance team, I'm done. This is now your responsibility to maintain it, because I'm going to the next project. And for those teams, they are figuring out why did that particular link went down? Like, oh, that optic broke, or oh, someone didn't plug in the fiber all the way. Same thing with machine maintenance. They're looking to see why did that machine that was running a particular service, it could be Gmail, it could be Gemini, it could be some AI workload. Why did it go down? Like, oh, the hard drive failed, or actually, the power supply failed, we need to replace those items. So that's, in general, what I do. So let me go into a little more particular of what I can share about my role. So for me, I need a lot of, you know, good organization, I need organization management, I think it's the word I'm looking for. Because as a, think of it like a mini project manager, I'm looking at these different tasks I have to deploy this new piece of hardware, upgrade this other hardware, migrate, you know, these fibers from one location to another. I'm managing all that. So I have multiple tasks going on. Some of them are due, like, let's say four weeks ahead, two weeks ahead, or week ahead. And I'm managing that. And I'm also communicating with different individuals communicating with my lead, if I run into trouble, or if my projects have shifted, sometimes I come in and a project was due in three days, and now it's due next week, because oh my goodness, we couldn't get that part because they're behind or there's a back order, and the vendor can't finish up until later in the week or something like that. So I'm working, communicating not only with my lead, but also with the vendor, because sometimes the vendor runs into issues, like the vendor reached out and say, hey, Brittany, I can't plug the fibers because there's already fiber plugged in there. And I was like, oh, well, let me figure out what's going on. And so things of that nature. I'm also communicating with my manager, because my manager is like, hey, we got because without the network, the machines in the rack can't communicate, they can't communicate, they can't run the gene, the Gmail, they can't run the Gemini. And so we are critical to a lot of this work. So I have to make sure that I'm on top of things. And if I'm not, that I am making making that known ahead of time, so we can figure out a potential solution or solutions. Or if there isn't, then we need to go ahead and make the proper individuals who are over these projects above you, like, you know, the ones like the program managers, project managers, things like that, they know, so they can say, yep, that's out of our control. Or, yeah, that kind of sucks. But this is how we're going to work around it. So we have to, you have to be able to look ahead, find potential blockers or obstacles, and then notify people ahead of time, come up, help come up with solutions, all that good stuff. So I am doing a lot of, like I said, organization. And I'm reading a lot of emails. That's one of my other day-to-day tasks is staying on top of my emails. And I get a lot. I think we all get a lot of emails. It doesn't matter if you work in IT or not. And so keeping abreast of that, keeping on top of my pings, because we use Google Chat, and people do ping me. And sometimes it's a vendor, or sometimes it's another person, sometimes a teammate. And, you know, I have to stay on top of those. Besides that, it's going to meetings. We have team meetings. I have to go to meetings sometimes for upgraded, you know, or not upgraded, but new trainings, things like that. Sometimes I'm brought into meetings to get updates from the vendor about their work. And sometimes I've just been invited to meetings because they thought I knew something that I, you know, I, frankly, and I don't. And I've just been brought into, I've been in a lot of meetings where I just wasn't needed. And I would sit there and I'm like, oh, okay, that's cool. Yeah. Sometimes I will learn something. Sometimes I will be like, yeah, this was a waste of my time. And that's unfortunate. But that, that's gotten better. I haven't been invited to a lot of meetings like that, um, anymore. Um, and besides that, um, the other, my other day-to-day tasks are trainings. I have to, just like everyone else, we have new, new hardware coming out, um, new tasks that I have to do. So I have to learn about how to do, you know, what's, what's my responsibility, what's the responsibility of other people. And so it's a lot of that. So I fit my trainings in throughout my day. Um, mostly out of my eight hour day, I'm spending anywhere from five to six hours on the, on the data center floor. Uh, I, you know, some days it's less, especially if I'm being pulled into a meeting or there's some just training opportunity or something like that. But usually it is five to six hours on the floor. Sometimes it's more, uh, and sometimes I've had to come and work overtime because we, we were behind on a project, you know, sometimes things happen. You get behind on a project, you gotta work overtime. And sometimes I spend more time on the floor and I don't mind, you know, I, I, it makes the day go by faster. Um, I enjoy working on the floor. As you can see here on the screen, when I say the floor, this is what I mean. Like the two guys you see walking here, that's the data center floor. Um, but yeah, the, those are my day to day tasks. Trying to think if I miss anything else. I mean, I'll talk real quick about, you know, you know, breakfast and lunch. That's one question I do get. Like, do you guys, do you guys get free food? Like it, like those people on YouTube show in their day to life videos. Yeah. Um, I get free breakfast and free lunch. We do have a micro kitchen that has a whole bunch of snacks, you know, some chips, cookies, things of that nature, all types of drinks, uh, water, coffee, tea, all that good stuff. Um, and we do get from time to time, you know, events where we have food. And so, um, that does happen, but you're supposed to be googly, not take more than you can eat and not just try to stuff, you know, fill up your, your refrigerator home with drinks and chips and cookies from the office. No, you know, we all need to share that does cost company money. So, uh, that's what we do. And so I, yeah, yeah, overall I enjoy it. And be, as I wrap up this video, what I've said, my day-to-day activities, they're not that different than when I worked at other data centers. I worked at the Twitter data center in Atlanta, uh, from 2017 to 2020. And basically it was a lot of the same work. Um, and I worked at other data centers. Uh, I worked at what was called Peak 10, but it's now called Flexidential. I worked there and, uh, that is a co-location provider. And so I would actually do more work there because I, they had elevated flooring. And so I would walk or not walk, crawl underneath the elevated flooring to run ethernet or fiber to plug in, um, the, the, the PDUs, the power distribution units, um, that power up the, all the machines and the, all the servers in Iraq. I used to go and set racks on the floor. I used to rack a stack, put stuff inside the rack. So I've done a lot. And when, when people are looking at the duties because they read, they read the job descriptions and they just want to know more is Google that much different. It, the biggest difference is proprietary. When you work at a, you know, if you work at a co-location provider, you're going to see a lot of Dell, a lot of HP, a lot of super micro, uh, a lot of Juniper, Cisco. You're going to see a lot of regular, hate to call it regular, but a lot of just normal hardware. But when you work at the Microsofts, or if you work at the AWS, or if you work at the, I guess AWS uses proprietary, but Google uses a lot of proprietary software and hardware. So that is one of the bigger, you know, differences between working there as a data center, data center technician than working at some other place. Uh, because you just can't like, if you're having, if I'm, if I'm having an issue with a switch, I just can't go to Cisco's website because it's not a Cisco and I have to use the internal documentation. And so that's when, when I help train new people, like that's going to be your biggest difference. You just can't go out there. Uh, it's like, oh, this is a Juniper switch. Like, oh, um, this is, um, some, you know, Dell server. I can just go out there and look like, nope, you can't look that up. Gotta, gotta use the internal documentation, but I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up there. Cause I'm gonna start just rambling more. But if you have any particular questions about my day to day activities, if there's something I miss, please ask in the comment box down below. If you are, you don't want to ask me in a comment box, you know, you can DM me on LinkedIn. Um, I'm always available there and yeah. Thanks for watching. See you in the next video. Bye.