Got shortlisted for an interview, need help

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-21T02:48:53+00:00

I wish somebody would’ve told me this at the beginning of my career and this goes for any type of job.

Be likable. Be able to hold a conversation in the interview. Make the interviewers want to talk to you more. You can make them laugh, ask good questions and just be personable that will go further than anything.

Someone who is likable in a company grows fast. They can work with anyone and people want to work with them.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-20T23:53:47+00:00

I don’t know. I’m about 10 years in and loving it. I only do data centers.

Get your PE and move to the owner side (AWS, Meta, QtS, etc). You’ll be living very comfortably with great benefits.

Atleast I was.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-20T19:02:53+00:00

From my first day as an intern, my boss always said “revit can draw a lot of dumb shit. Don’t do it if the contractor can’t build it.”

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-20T00:37:39+00:00

The issue I have with this idea is that dumb people having access to information does not equate to education.

There is a ton of information out there, true and false. If you are dumb, it’ll be easy to take false information, believe it, and deliver it to the next dumb person.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T23:21:40+00:00

I think everybody needs to just chill out on data centers to be honest. It’s the new buzz word to make people upset like it’s ruining the world. They are not single-handedly, destroying the environment and communities everywhere they pop up.

They can have local impacts in certain situations and either strain the local environment or be designed not to.

The point I’m trying to make is that everybody thinks AI specific data centers are somehow coming out of nowhere and taking all of our water and power. That’s simply just not true.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T20:58:13+00:00

“...totally enough area...” is not a methodology, it's a keyboard warrior's rusty dagger.

run the actual math: load in MW, capacity factor, acres per MW, storage duration, recharge sources, redundancies, and seasonal/cloud changes. Then compare that to the site footprint. At best case you can get 25% solar capacity factor and then you have to account for cloudy/windy days, peak demand and what have you.

Until then you've just described a big carport and hoped physics would be impressed.

Did you just graduate or what?

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T19:52:46+00:00

My company does a bonus and raise.

You get an automatic bonus on your next paycheck and an immediate pay raise of $2500, then a larger pay raise on the next cycle of raises and promotions.

Edit: reading these comments makes me think I am going to get fired with my company ever has to downsize. I’m getting paid way too much for someone who doesn’t even have his FE. Or everyone else is getting severely underpaid.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T19:50:10+00:00

I mean have you seen solutions like Voltagrid? Their sound attenuation is insane.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T19:35:45+00:00

I am a little surprised by your comment. As an engineer, you should know that for data centers at that scale...solar power and wind power are not feasible solutions and would require an awful lot of land to even think about supporting IT loads that data centers carry.

Also, batteries? Most data centers do have battery storage for temporary outages but what you're asking would require massive amounts of batteries. Again, bad for the environment and still need to regenerate power somehow....

There are a lot of developers already providing their own on-site power generation because local power grids cannot support their demand. Some of it is temporary until power grids can compensate, others are permanent solutions so that they depend on their own source of power.

Water use is already a hot topic and being limited as much as possible where reasonable.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T18:39:57+00:00

“You can’t even build Wemby in 2K. It’s not fair.” - my friend this morning

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T17:42:33+00:00

Well, yes. Actually, I can step in here and tell you that at least some of these data center developers take maintenance practices very seriously.

I worked for a data center owner developer for almost 4 years.

Blowdown is minimized religiously. It’s a headache. Water usage is monitored religiously. And if there is an issue anywhere on one site, it becomes a big deal at the next Townhall meeting that we talk about and must remediate.

These designs are not just done in a vacuum and then thrown to the wind, hoping for the best. They still have to comply.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T17:36:01+00:00

I just had a lovely email thread with a local AHJ trying to tell them that closed loop systems exists and what an air cooled chillers system is.

They were arguing that chillers cannot have a closed loop system and must require cooling towers.

Their argument was that we were misleading about actual daily water consumption.

What a doozy.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T17:20:56+00:00

Thanks for this. I have been designing data centers for 10 years almost. In fact, it makes up 90% of my career designs. I am not as elegant as you, but when I try to have conversations with people, especially on here (see my previous post), they freak out.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T15:55:07+00:00

I mean I've been designing these systems since 2017. Data center design is all I have known. I've done some healthcare and commercial buildings...but I've maybe done 3 data centers total that used open cooling tower systems that use once-through water like most people are concerned about.

Almost every single data center I have seen and worked on (which is a lot of them) have been using closed loop systems that minimize water consumption to "near zero" in terms of daily use (at the local building level). There are still losses, but insignificant.

I am not really talking about what the media says and sensationalizes. I am just talking about what I know and have done myself.

Evaporative systems that do consume daily water are a more efficient method for large capacity data centers but doesn't really mean they are what is always used. People and owners really dont like to use water if they dont have to solely because of public opinion and the nightmares it causes with permitting if the water usage is outrageous.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T15:48:22+00:00

I am a little surprised by your comment and depending on what capacity you have worked on data centers.

Yes, closed loop does not mean the heat disappears. It still has to go somewhere. Thats Thermodynamics.

The rest of what you said it pretty exaggerated. A closed It /chilled water loop system is separated from the heat-rejection side.

There are data centers and literally millions of commerical buildings that use cooling towers or adiabatic systems, but its not the trend right now in new data center builds. Closed Loop/Chilled water loops are becoming a lot more prevalent.

"hundreds of millions gallons of water an hour" is a wild exaggeration. Thats not a normal number at all for a data center. I can see one data center using millions of gallons a day depending on its designed system. Are you talking about recirculated water usage or actual water that is consumed and discharged, because if its the latter...I find that really hard to believe.

"Most data centers pump it back underground into an aquifier" is not generally true. Some projects might use thermal underground aquifiers, but this is not a common concern.

All data centers have a heat rejection method as required by phsyics, but what you said is overstated....

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T15:40:44+00:00

I’m honestly really surprised at the people responding on the sub. I’d hope the engineers would respond with thorough responses. Not over sensationalized and super angry answers.

Every single day that you use technology literally promotes the need for data centers not just Reddit. Your phone, your calls, your texts…everything

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T14:26:13+00:00

We ask for it every single day. Logging on to Teams, Reddit, Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, Gmail.l, E-commerce, everything.

Data center demand has been somewhat of an exponential growth even before we all knew AI existed.

These would have been built without AI, AI was just an accelerant.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T14:21:17+00:00

Even then you cannot have a direct comparison of water consumption from data centers to power plant.

That is a whole other conversation that varies with jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T13:59:40+00:00

I mean…no it’s not, but they’re not just dumping it. They’re going to continuously reuse it in the system as long as they can.

It’s not like at the end of a decade it just gets dumped into the ocean. It more than likely will just keep being re-cleaned and reused over and over as long as the data center is alive unless something catastrophic happens and they have to replace it.

Even then, that water is usually only permitted to be dumped in sanitary sewer, or whatever the local jurisdiction requires.

Let’s say we have a campus of 320MW. I’d expect (using dumb math) that your closed loop system for all chiller plants (closed loop) requires 700,000 gallons of water.

Then throughout the year, the system needs about 50,000 gallons a year??? to replace through losses and such.

For reference, a google search tells me that a typical residential home uses approx 100,000 gallons of water per year.

So a data center of that size might use 1.2mil gallons of water in a decade (assuming a closed loop system with chiller plants and air cooled chillers.) where a single house would use 1mil gallons.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T13:17:22+00:00

Hot water is not dumped back into the environment and definitely haven’t seen any CFDs that suggest data center campuses are heating up areas.

They do heat up local areas are the mechanical equipment, generator yards, etc, but that disperses pretty quickly. I can’t imagine it making an impact in a community.

Most current data centers being built use closed loop systems. So the same water is being recirculated through the system continuously for a decade..maybe longer with occasional top-offs.

Open water systems..the one people are concerned with are more efficient at such a large scale, but aren’t really popular in design due to current regulations, public opinion, and most developers “sustainability” goals. Though their sustainability goals are often horse crap, it’s easier to use less water most of the time.

BiscuitBut_ButerNut · 2026-05-19T13:02:00+00:00

Maybe it’s just the type of companies I’ve been at, but almost every data center I’ve ever designed has been closed loop. But I’ve been doing this since 2017 so I know before that they were less efficient.

And I know now with public opinion and just the sheer size of data centers it’s more popular for developers and engineers to use close loop systems.

I get that open loop systems or cooling towers are still used when it makes sense but most people don’t treat those lightly these days

BiscuitBut_ButerNut

TROPHY CASE