Neal Menkus, Hardware Operations

As part of Google's security plan, when we remove a storage drive from the data center floor, we send it to a team that includes Neal Menkus. Inside the data security cage (which includes the bright storage lockers you see here), Neal and other workers use special equipment to completely erase all of the data. After erasing the failed drive, we physically destroy it an industrial shredder—one of his favorite jobs.

When Neal's friends ask him what he does for a living, he answers, “Imagine you walk into a large warehouse and there's nothing there except aisles of computer motherboards, thousands of them, stacked on top of each other in racks the size of refrigerators.” Then he asks his friends to think about how often they have a problem with their computer at home. “The same things happen to our servers, and guess who gets to fix them?”

Some of our employees with military backgrounds

From left to right: Sara Sutherland, Ryan Kinowski, Paul Gorsky, and Bryan Saxon

These four Google employees have something else in common: they have all, at one point, served in the U.S. Military. With past roles in the Navy and Coast Guard as electricians, submarine officers, electronics technicians, and mechanics, these Googlers now work together at the Berkeley County facility where their previous military experience comes in handy. "In the Navy, you had to learn really quickly and work with integrated systems," says Ryan. "That's still the case today."

Sara, who had once operated a nuclear power plant, now uses her expertise to ensure that the data center is a safe place to work. "We work with critical systems, and there are a lot of parameters to monitor at once. We've had to build health and safety procedures from scratch, and my experience in emergency response has helped me do that."