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Not only coders are hard to recruit

blog.sysadminsarena.com

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Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#61

Post by Peroni »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #56
Peroni wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great example. HN is the perfect place to find people right? I mean, I should know. HN who's hiring, like most online job advertising, is a crapshoot. It's a once-a-month post where you are drowning in noise. Finding a very large group of potentially relevant people for the roles you are hiring for isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Engaging said group and convincing folk from said group to come work for you is e…

I guess this is sarcasm. I was only responding implicitly to your initial question: >>When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora? So, yes, hn is where I engage with a company with a view with working with them where they happen to post in the right forum. Suddenly your point is that it isn't a good place to find jobs…

Apologies. Wasn't intended to sound sarcastic. I genuinely do believe that HN is the perfect place to find great people but it's still incredibly difficult and if you're hiring at scale it can be super tough to engage enough people on a place like this.

Places like HN and relevant IRC channels are great if you're hiring for one or two roles but beyond that then it's a bit of a lottery.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#62

Post by alexgotoi »

kesor wrote: post #33

When you have a very low supply of high quality people, and at the same time a huge demand for those same people, it is a major problem. You claim to solve this problem, by making it even harder? How does that help?

Kesor, we do not claim to solve this problem. We propose a product to help assessing easier the technical skills, not to improve the sourcing. In the recruitment process flow, our product comes after there is a short list of candidates (screened based on their resume) and want to perform a more deep screening.

We know there is the gap mentioned by you. Hopefully, in the future, we will be able to provide help in this area too.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#63

Post by alexgotoi »

freddref wrote: post #30

Isn't everyone hard to recruit? The difference in perception of coders might be that the evidence for a bad recruit is obvious in the code they produce. There could be many bad recruits in all other areas but are less obvious. I generally like the idea of clearer quantification of a persons output but it should be done very delicately. As in, if you are going to measure everything someone produces, maybe that data sh…

Great idea to offer the data to the one that is producing it and he/she decides what to share. Thanks

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#64

Post by davidgerard »

alexgotoi wrote: post #15
davidgerard wrote: post #13

So this is to have a test VM they have to fix? Excellent! I heartily approve of this method for finding a sysadmin. This is a thread where I talk about how we did this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8332104 We used to use it a lot - a trivial Java webapp running in a slightly misconfigured Tomcat with a slightly misconfigured Apache in front on a slightly misconfigured Unix box - though it's fallen by the ways…

Hi David, thanks for your thoughts. Very useful the thread provided. And YES, this is what we are doing. Keystrokes is just one of the metrics we are about to collect and analyze. We are also thinking about number of commands wrote, how many were correct, how many wrong, also a log of the entire test. In future phases, we may take into consideration pair working or capturing a movie of the test. What other ideas of r…

I don't know of any relevant metrics at all for this sort of thing :-) What we did was mostly review the log of their thinking as they went, then talk to them more to work out if they think like a sysadmin. We want sysadmins who can think, and that's the opposite of a process susceptible to Taylorisation.

Note that in my example, I don't expect them to solve all the problems. I do expect them to have a good try at it, doing it as an open book test with Google to hand. (Open book tests are always hard.)

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#65

Post by lisivka »

johnny_snq wrote: post #51
lisivka wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if I will follow best practices and will prepare backup, then restore backup locally (to check that backup is OK), then will play with backup until problem will be solved (to not harm target server), then prepare runbook, and then will just execute it at target server, I will pass your test? Just two commands.

Yes. you should pass the test. This is one of the scenarios we are thinking. you get the backup location do the restore. done you passed.

I'm talking about copy-pasting of solution.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#66

Post by languagewars »

marcosdumay wrote: post #60
languagewars wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I used to work in OS support my actions were optimized for the assumptions of a default minimal install and being able to describe actions to a person of questionable knowledge over the phone and interpret what they would most likely try to read back at me. The certifications were along those lines too.. While the exact nature of the certifications was ridiculous and would be even more ridiculous in terms of jud…

Do you work as a sysadmin? If so, how many times did you recover from a broken tty at work? (I mean, is it a number bigger than zero?) I've been one for a short while, and get to play devops from time to time. When I see a machine so broken that it can't give me a tty, it's time for a reboot (if last command caused it - actually don't remember it ever happening), full reinstall, or trash. I won't lose any time recove…

> Do you work as a sysadmin? If so, how many times did you recover from a broken tty at work? (I mean, is it a number bigger than zero?)

Before then I was an sysadmin for a little while, but I don't really see what difference the role makes. I've never had a job where I didn't at some point need to deal with a legacy serial console of some sort misrouted through incompatible aggregators, etc, in order to deal with a networking problem and/or auth problems.

The idea that I would blind reboot a system in a failure mode I can't diagnose is not something I would normally consider until I've exhausted all means and only if I know a fair bit about it. I'm sure some of my colleagues did things like that as some were developers with relatively little system knowledge, but only a few were stupid enough to mention losing failure data through laziness to senior staff.

> It's fun, but completely unproductive.

? If I had a page for you should have diagnosed and every time you hit a swiss cheese failure with that attitude than I wouldn't use computers at all anymore.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#67

Post by marcosdumay »

alexgotoi wrote: post #57
marcosdumay wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes Why do you think so? And, I'm hopping you don't rely on timing on this level. An experienced sysadmin would have little experience with basic tasks, since he solves them around once or twice per job. And you never know the environments they tried it before, that may be completely different from what you are presenting them right now. I'd say "installing X"…

What scenarios would you suggest to have?

No idea, but the certificates that focused on those things became enduring jokes.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#68

Post by johnny_snq »

lisivka wrote: post #65
johnny_snq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. you should pass the test. This is one of the scenarios we are thinking. you get the backup location do the restore. done you passed.

I'm talking about copy-pasting of solution.

Ok. Maybe I misunderstood you. If you are thinking of having the tests leak and people just finding solutions on Google I'm just thinking of dynamically generating the problem. How about 3 characters missing from the config file for apache at random. You have to understand what is required and then try to fix it. Does this solve your case?

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#69

Post by johnny_snq »

Peroni wrote: post #27

The premise that technical people with in-demand skills are hard to recruit has very little to do with the screening process. The screening process is not a difficult problem to solve. The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them. If this is a Hacker Rank for sysadmins, then great. I'm sure you'll have plenty of users but we're still a long way away from solvi…

As I see it, in my case, a part of the problem in finding good people to recruit was the grind through the 100s of applications and only a couple being good enough. This grind added up and I had to settle for less mainly because of time constraints. What if I managed to weed through double the amount of applicants by dismissing the ones that don't handle basic / medium tasks, would have had the time to engage more more quality engineers. It's just a game of odds and I hope I can tilt it.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#70

Post by dozzie »

Peroni wrote: post #61
ohyoutravel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is sarcasm. I was only responding implicitly to your initial question: >>When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora? So, yes, hn is where I engage with a company with a view with working with them where they happen to post in the right forum. Suddenly your point is that it isn't a good place to find jobs…

Apologies. Wasn't intended to sound sarcastic. I genuinely do believe that HN is the perfect place to find great people but it's still incredibly difficult and if you're hiring at scale it can be super tough to engage enough people on a place like this. Places like HN and relevant IRC channels are great if you're hiring for one or two roles but beyond that then it's a bit of a lottery.

Beyond a handful of roles you already gave up on finding brilliant people. You can't reliably find the best of the best in industrial amounts, no matter what you do. You can (probably) build stable supply for competent people at best.
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