Some Red State/Blue State Indicia
- Thread starter nsacpi
- Start date
Question: Do data center jobs count as tech jobs? Because that seems like an important caveat here.
So a new tech industry has grown dramatically that creates jobs across the country due to different location needs and we’re going to use this to claim California is fucking up? Do we expect all data centers to be built in California?
Not as much land as all of the other 49 states combined. And there’s a good reason to not want those jobs given the risk of rising utility costs for your residents.
**Server Engineers** are IT professionals who **design, build, maintain, and optimize server systems** — both the physical/hardware side and the software/infrastructure side — so that applications, websites, databases, email systems, and other critical services run reliably, securely, and with good performance.
Think of them as the people who make sure "the servers are up and happy" at companies of all sizes, from small businesses to massive cloud providers.
### Main Things Server Engineers Do (Day-to-Day / Core Responsibilities)
- **Install, configure and deploy servers** (physical rack servers, blades, or virtual machines in VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, etc.)
- **Manage server operating systems** — mostly Windows Server, various Linux distributions (Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/Rocky, Debian, etc.), sometimes FreeBSD or others
- **Handle virtualization & cloud infrastructure** — VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox, AWS EC2, Azure VMs, Google Compute Engine, etc.
- **Performance tuning & capacity planning** — making servers faster, finding bottlenecks (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network), deciding when to add more resources
- **Patching & updates** — keeping OS, firmware, drivers, and applications reasonably up-to-date without breaking production
- **Security** — hardening servers, managing firewalls, applying security patches, vulnerability scanning, Active Directory/Group Policy (Windows), SELinux/AppArmor (Linux), certificates, etc.
- **Monitoring & alerting** — setting up and responding to monitoring (Nagios/Zabbix/Prometheus, SolarWinds, Datadog, New Relic, etc.)
- **Troubleshooting** — when something breaks at 3 a.m., they're usually the ones figuring out why the database server suddenly started eating 100% CPU or why half the company can't reach file shares
- **Backup & disaster recovery** — designing, testing, and sometimes executing restores when things go really wrong
- **Automation & scripting** — writing PowerShell, Bash, Python, Ansible playbooks, Terraform, Chef/Puppet (especially in more modern environments)
### Different Flavors of "Server Engineer" (titles overlap a lot)
| Title people actually use | Typical focus | Hardware hands-on? | Heavy automation/cloud? | Overlaps most with |
|----------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------|--------------------|---------------------------|-------------------------------|
| Classic Server Engineer | Physical + virtual servers, Windows/Linux mix | Medium-High | Medium | Traditional sysadmin |
| Windows Server Engineer | Deep Active Directory, IIS, Clustering, Exchange | Medium | Low-Medium | Enterprise Microsoft shops |
| Linux Server Engineer | Mostly Linux ecosystem (often heavy on cloud) | Low-Medium | High | Web companies, startups |
| Infrastructure Engineer | Broader (servers + storage + networking) | Medium | High | Larger organizations |
| Cloud Engineer / Server Engineer (cloud)| Almost 100% AWS/Azure/GCP | Very low | Very high | Modern companies |
| Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) | Servers + extreme reliability + software eng mindset| Low | Very high | Big tech (Google style) |
**Quick note on titles in 2026**:
The classic "rack-and-stack + GUI-clicking sysadmin" role still exists (especially in government, finance, healthcare, manufacturing), but many companies now expect server engineers to know quite a bit of automation, IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), containers (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines — blurring the line toward **DevOps / Platform Engineering**.
In short:
A server engineer keeps the digital foundation of the company alive and performant — everything from the metal in the data center (or the VMs in the cloud) up to the services that actually run the business. When nobody notices anything is wrong with the servers… that's usually when they've done their job best.
Think of them as the people who make sure "the servers are up and happy" at companies of all sizes, from small businesses to massive cloud providers.
### Main Things Server Engineers Do (Day-to-Day / Core Responsibilities)
- **Install, configure and deploy servers** (physical rack servers, blades, or virtual machines in VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, etc.)
- **Manage server operating systems** — mostly Windows Server, various Linux distributions (Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/Rocky, Debian, etc.), sometimes FreeBSD or others
- **Handle virtualization & cloud infrastructure** — VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox, AWS EC2, Azure VMs, Google Compute Engine, etc.
- **Performance tuning & capacity planning** — making servers faster, finding bottlenecks (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network), deciding when to add more resources
- **Patching & updates** — keeping OS, firmware, drivers, and applications reasonably up-to-date without breaking production
- **Security** — hardening servers, managing firewalls, applying security patches, vulnerability scanning, Active Directory/Group Policy (Windows), SELinux/AppArmor (Linux), certificates, etc.
- **Monitoring & alerting** — setting up and responding to monitoring (Nagios/Zabbix/Prometheus, SolarWinds, Datadog, New Relic, etc.)
- **Troubleshooting** — when something breaks at 3 a.m., they're usually the ones figuring out why the database server suddenly started eating 100% CPU or why half the company can't reach file shares
- **Backup & disaster recovery** — designing, testing, and sometimes executing restores when things go really wrong
- **Automation & scripting** — writing PowerShell, Bash, Python, Ansible playbooks, Terraform, Chef/Puppet (especially in more modern environments)
### Different Flavors of "Server Engineer" (titles overlap a lot)
| Title people actually use | Typical focus | Hardware hands-on? | Heavy automation/cloud? | Overlaps most with |
|----------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------|--------------------|---------------------------|-------------------------------|
| Classic Server Engineer | Physical + virtual servers, Windows/Linux mix | Medium-High | Medium | Traditional sysadmin |
| Windows Server Engineer | Deep Active Directory, IIS, Clustering, Exchange | Medium | Low-Medium | Enterprise Microsoft shops |
| Linux Server Engineer | Mostly Linux ecosystem (often heavy on cloud) | Low-Medium | High | Web companies, startups |
| Infrastructure Engineer | Broader (servers + storage + networking) | Medium | High | Larger organizations |
| Cloud Engineer / Server Engineer (cloud)| Almost 100% AWS/Azure/GCP | Very low | Very high | Modern companies |
| Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) | Servers + extreme reliability + software eng mindset| Low | Very high | Big tech (Google style) |
**Quick note on titles in 2026**:
The classic "rack-and-stack + GUI-clicking sysadmin" role still exists (especially in government, finance, healthcare, manufacturing), but many companies now expect server engineers to know quite a bit of automation, IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), containers (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines — blurring the line toward **DevOps / Platform Engineering**.
In short:
A server engineer keeps the digital foundation of the company alive and performant — everything from the metal in the data center (or the VMs in the cloud) up to the services that actually run the business. When nobody notices anything is wrong with the servers… that's usually when they've done their job best.
Tapate50
Well-known member
They need to be. Hate them with a passion. Ugly, massive power vacuums that delete the landscape
Tapate50
Well-known member
zitothebrave
Connoisseur of Minors
But energy isn't cheap in California. Almost all renewables suck out there outside of solar too and even then not even close to as great as Arizona, New Mexico or Nevada. NIMBYs would never allow nuclear even if it's clearly the best energy option.