Technical operations means more than just serving millions of hits per second to millions of people. Google, of course, has done that with flying colors. Another way of looking at the scaling of operations is the cost associated with growing their clusters to meet demand, in terms of the people who maintain them and the infrastructure...namely data center space and location. If you have not noticed recently, co-lo's are not doing so well; see news releases for C&W (Exodus), Intel Operations and MFN (a.k.a AboveNet). As these services go away and the co-lo industry consolidates, prices will go up as will the cost of operations.
FYI.....you are not too far off with your skepticism. Especially on the technical operations side. I won't say too much more than that. If you like reading between the lines, look at the job listings in Engineering, Operations and IT on Google's site.
Medicine + IT + Government = Veterans Affairs
The VA needs Doctors with IT degrees to ensure FDA compliance of new IT systems and to support HIS/RIS ops. Also, their systems are old and will need expertise in the future to migrate to newer platforms. And the pay isn't to shabby.
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Technical operations means more than just serving millions of hits per second to millions of people. Google, of course, has done that with flying colors. Another way of looking at the scaling of operations is the cost associated with growing their clusters to meet demand, in terms of the people who maintain them and the infrastructure...namely data center space and location. If you have not noticed recently, co-lo's are not doing so well; see news releases for C&W (Exodus), Intel Operations and MFN (a.k.a AboveNet). As these services go away and the co-lo industry consolidates, prices will go up as will the cost of operations.
FYI.....you are not too far off with your skepticism. Especially on the technical operations side. I won't say too much more than that. If you like reading between the lines, look at the job listings in Engineering, Operations and IT on Google's site.
Medicine + IT + Government = Veterans Affairs The VA needs Doctors with IT degrees to ensure FDA compliance of new IT systems and to support HIS/RIS ops. Also, their systems are old and will need expertise in the future to migrate to newer platforms. And the pay isn't to shabby.