There's something eerily true about TFA's observation that data centers have a big footprint but really low headcount. I work in the Atlanta area, and it's amazing how long you can work in tech without ever setting foot in a data center or even seeing one from the outside. They are truly highly invisible infrastructure, hidden behind more and more layers of abstraction. I'm all for abstractions that don't leak, but I'm not sure it's a purely good thing to get so disconnected from the hardware layer.<p>I used to tag along with our sysadmin sometimes, back when I worked in a place that ran its own data centers - a decade ago - and they aren't really enjoyable places (noisy, not built for human inhabitants), but there's something nice about seeing the actual hardware that runs your applications. It kind of keeps things grounded.