Hiring in a Post-DevOps World

A Job Description Nobody Agrees On

The episode was prompted by Josh Hertz, a self-described professional rabble-rouser and the sysadmin for a podcast, ranting to Matty about job postings that want ninjas and rock stars. The panel is Mike Fiedler, Director of Technical Operations at Datadog, and Jill Jubinski, who manages technical recruiting at DigitalOcean. Mike says the biggest hiring problem is that the job description is "entirely too wide and hazy," because everyone uses words nobody agrees on: we want 20 years of Docker experience and every DevOps tool, and someone who's capable of everything and amazing at anything. Post for DevOps when you want a build engineer, and you get contention. Jill says the word means support at some companies, engineers at others, and developers at others, so you have to understand what the job actually needs "and not just have all those crazy buzzwords."

Matty repeats his observation that nobody in Chicago hires sysadmins anymore, only DevOps engineers whose descriptions read as sysadmin jobs. He once spent 25 minutes in a cab explaining to a contract recruiter why the posting was bad, and says he doesn't care what you call it, just describe it: "no, we use Jenkins."

The Sysadmin Badge

Mike says at some point in the last decade the title system administrator "became a dirty, dirty badge." You can't study for it, he says, and the sysadmins of the corporate mail and web servers "hated everybody because running a mail server is usually not very much fun." When companies needed operational mindsets, they reached for a new term. "Not only can we be a DevOps, we can be a DevOps ninja."

Josh says he started as a sysadmin and moved to systems engineer as he began designing systems to scale, and that DevOps suggests you're doing continuous integration and configuration management. Matty says system engineer wasn't just a nicer word for sysadmin, but that sysadmin became a "server janitor" title.

Ninjas, Rock Stars, and Heroes

Matty cites a Reddit user on r/devops: "ninja and rock star are code words for you will be one person doing the job of an 8-person team." Mike says a rock star is one person in the spotlight supported by a band, so what he wants is "a tenor in a choir." Josh suggests a session musician, and Matty says you don't want "a DevOps Axl Rose." Jill says the words conjure hiring that one difficult person on your team, and that what teams need is a team player.

Jill and Mike discuss hiring someone a step above the team. Jill likes it if they share knowledge and raise everyone, and Mike's point is that it's how you frame it to the team: if you're telling everyone else they're now second string, that's a terrible message. Matty says a 10th Magnitude ad he saw was rewritten to say they're not hiring ninjas, rock stars or unicorns, just really good developers, winking at the cliché.

Matty adds that rock stars signal hero culture, and points to Jennifer Davis's talk "From Hero to Zero." Mike says there's a time for it: a three-to-eight-person startup's first ops hire may need the hero who'll work 120 hours a week. At a company with a 30-person operations team, though, the hero is "quickly going to be not as popular amongst their peers."

Recruiter Fail

Jill says she reaches out to 15 to 20 engineers in a given week, each with an email special to them, and that mass emails come from agency recruiters, where "it's all about numbers." Josh asks if targeting works and she says absolutely: people are more receptive, and she wants to build a network so that when your friend is looking, "you'll think of a non-shitty recruiter."

Matty's LinkedIn says he loves his job and has zero interest in any opportunity, and a recruiter who had clearly read the profile replied that people write that to lay low for their employer. Mike says recruiters who do a cursory Google and then send a Ruby on Rails front-end job to someone who isn't one are basically sending spam, and that nine times out of ten he ignores them. Jill says her engineers forward her funny recruiter emails, and that she sometimes cold-emails her coworkers a Drupal job for a laugh. Matty stays in touch with the polite recruiters who ask for five minutes of help, even if they've never placed him.

What Candidates Get Wrong

Jill says resumes full of buzzwords and things you touched but didn't dig into get figured out, and Mike says to be honest: three lines of Perl doesn't make it a skill, and if he asks about something esoteric and you flounder, the phone screen is "going to take a nosedive." Trevor adds that if you say you don't know something in the first interview, don't act like an expert an hour later, "because the interviewers do talk to each other." Josh interviewed someone who listed expert on the OSI model and named three of the seven layers, and Matty's response is that in baseball that would be a good batting average.

For interviews, Matty tests whether you understand things, not whether you remember every tar flag. Trevor learned that whiteboarding isn't about the right answer but how you get anywhere, and Mike's question is one with no right answer where he keeps throwing monkey wrenches to see how you handle adversity. Jill says smart organizations hire for critical thinking and problem solving, since tools like Chef and Go change in three months. Josh says DevOps is knowing what you don't know. Jill's pro tip: "If you don't know something, admit you don't know it. Don't make it up."

Culture Fit and the Resume

Matty asks how to convey a DevOps mindset in a resume. Josh says listing "problem solver" and "self-starter" doesn't help, and Mike says it comes out in interviews, where the interviewer poses the right questions and the whole team talks to the candidate. Trevor points out that a bad resume never gets you in the door, and Matty's answer is to skip the adjectives and show what you did, such as any experience working across silos.

Jill wants to see open source contribution, and Matty says you can at least do something small like whitespace fixes. Mike says junior DevOps people rarely have the experience, so he'd read an objective statement as why you want ops and not development. He suggests tailoring several versions of your resume to the company, and Jill's related pet peeve is a candidate whose materials say they want to work at Google when she works somewhere else. Josh admits his own summary reads "a DevOps rock star, 10x pirate ninja," which is "100% snark."

Check-Outs

Jill

• Beer: http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/45/680/
• Newest obsession: Rowing class: http://www.cityrow.com/ (there are probably many others outside of NYC)

Josh

• I’m officially the SysAdmin for Caustic Soda, which is a podcast about horrible things. It’s like Mythbuster for all that is gross and horrible. Now that I think about it, I can’t recommend it.
• Influxdb is an open-source, distributed, time series database with no external dependencies. Currently in Alpha (v0.8.8) it's going through a major refactor, the "production ready" version v0.9.0 is due out this month. The ease of installation and setup is what sold me on it. I think it has a lot of potential, so we'll see how v0.9.0 looks when it's released.
• The Bruery:  Briefly mentioned. Small batch, high quality beers out of Placentia, Ca. Their barrel aged and sour beers are outstanding. I recommend Loakal Red as the gateway beer for those that like IPAs.

Mike

• http://www.opsschool.org
• Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum
• The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't

Matt

• Elevate - brain training app
• Doing the fitbit thing again. We can be buddies. http://mattstratton.com/fitbit

Trevor

• The Decemberists: What a Beautiful World, What a Terrible World. They're back!
• Microsoft reviews pull requests for C# from github
• Walking around your neighborhood. Discovered a new spice shop and comic shop by wandering North.