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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

#41

Post by Peroni »

dijit wrote: post #37
Peroni wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've hired 3 people from an IRC community I run, they all turned out to be exceptional (sysadmins and developers). I've never been hired from IRC though.

Don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible if you do it right. I've hired quite a lot of folk as a result of interacting with them on HN alone. My point is that it's a significantly more difficult problem than screening those people.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#42

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #37
Peroni wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've hired 3 people from an IRC community I run, they all turned out to be exceptional (sysadmins and developers). I've never been hired from IRC though.

[deleted]

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#43

Post by ldabiralai »

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…

Agree 100% with this.

At the past companies I've worked in finding the talent is the real issue. At my previous company it wasn't so bad as we had an in house recruitment team who generally dealt with sourcing, and generally we had a bigger budget for these kind of things.

However now I'm working in a smaller startup and we're having a lot of difficulty finding the right candidates without bowing to the extortionate cost of recruiters. We've tried the monthly who's hiring, angel.co and other such sites but it's a very slow process, and it's a lot of work to trawl through profiles.

Could do with some disruption in this space!

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#44

Post by [deleted] »

alexgotoi wrote: post #10
pmoriarty wrote: post #8

There's been a lot of criticism of hackerrank.[1][2] Are you doing anything to make sure your service gets more respect? [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12825953 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667174&source=techsto...

Glad you asked that. As i saw in the treads mentioned by you, the common problem is that the tests are more about theory, and less about practice. Which is true. Sometimes, in interviews, you are asked about algorithms that you studied in college and never used before. It's very difficult to score high in this tests. We propose to eliminate this gap by having real job, day to day, scenarios like: install apache, mysq…

[deleted]

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#45

Post by alexgotoi »

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…

Indeed Peroni, it's difficult to find and engage high talented people. But we are trying to solve another problem here. We want to optimize the time spent by hiring managers testing the potential candidates. When you have to test 15 candidates (1h per candidate) in a week, you need to take of production 1 technical person (most time a senior one). This is 15 hours per week. The biggest problem is when they look great on resume and during the interview you realize that is not so good as the resume stated. This is where we want to help.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#46

Post by globalgobble »

CmdrSprinkles wrote: post #38
globalgobble wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. We should not test edge cases and specific scenarios. We are trying to test the candidate and his abilities in daily tasks. If I say I use vi instead of "commands" I will probably solve most of the "text" editing tasks faster than an admin that only knows how to get around using commands. I can come up with tons of scenarios when where you do not really know the internals you can get stuck easily…

While I mostly agree with you, I can speak from experience with how we handled the first point: We were interviewing a new admin for the sysadmin/maintenance team and her answers to "how would you solve this problem?" were "Open that file and check that these variables are set and, if not, set them". One of the more jerkish people there went down the rabbit hole of "How are you going to edit that file? What if you do…

Brilliant answer :-). I totally agree with you. But this is the problem..you cannot implement such a thing to a tool like sysadminarena.

Actually I believe being a sysops/devops or whatever you want to call it is one of the "most" challenging jobs in the IT industry. You get zillions of technologies you have to administer and maintain but it's impossible to master all of them. What makes a good admin is the ability to learn,adapt,ask for a help and knowing where to look for an answer. It's easy to look up the parameters if you know the fundamentals.

Interviewing for me as a devops person is one of the most frustrating experiences. You are often asked questions that are specific to the environment of a company you are interviewing with. It's unbelievable how many times I've been asked about parameters of tar, du etc. It's totally stupid. And imagine interviewing with a company that uses only a specific subset of technologies and they heavily emphasize on that.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#47

Post by alexgotoi »

ldabiralai wrote: post #43
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…

Agree 100% with this. At the past companies I've worked in finding the talent is the real issue. At my previous company it wasn't so bad as we had an in house recruitment team who generally dealt with sourcing, and generally we had a bigger budget for these kind of things. However now I'm working in a smaller startup and we're having a lot of difficulty finding the right candidates without bowing to the extortionate…

Agree that the sourcing is hard. We have this in mind, too. As i wrote in the Medium article, we will offer a practice mode for sysadmins. If we will have traction in this are, we will take into consideration to offer a sourcing product also. Until then, we focus on delivering a testing product for companies and a practice product for sysadmins.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#48

Post by johnny_snq »

throwawayosiu1 wrote: post #19
johnny_snq wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are going to give real life scenarios based on the various roles you are testing with.(basicly a ssh login to the test machine) And we plan to asses the candidates way of solving the problems based on what commands and what process it uses to identify and solve the problem.

1. How exactly are the sysadmins graded? (because in the end, let's be real...this tool will most probably be used by HR folks to filter out candidates and they'd not care too much if you send over a screencast/replay of what the candidate did) 1.1) Sys admins generally have their own set of tools (which would be customized per company I guess)...would these be installed by default? (I'm assuming you are provisioning…

1. I'm thinking the best grading sistem would be yes / no ? rigth ? If you manage to solve the problem and tests pass you pass. 1.1 If you get root access on a machine you have the freedom to add whatever tools you feel fine. 1.2 I don't think doing a terminal emulation is the way to go. 2. Advanced tests are on our plans but we haven't got everything figured out yet.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#49

Post by alexgotoi »

otoburb wrote: post #24

The Cisco Certified Internetwork Engineer (CCIE) certification used to be the gold standard amongst network engineers 10-20 years ago. Becoming a CCIE required a passing a notoriously difficult hands-on 8 hour in-person lab examination[1]. SysAdminsArena reminds me of a remote version of the CCIE Lab Exam for sysadmins. Fun fact: the CCIE program was established in 1992 and was originally going to be called "Cisco To…

20 years later -> SysAdmins Top Gun :))

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#50

Post by tristor »

Speaking of sysadmins, a note for yours. You are currently serving blog.sysadminsarena.com over HTTPS with an HTTP to HTTPS redirect, but are not doing the same for your website. In fact, you don't have an HTTPS endpoint for your website at all. Going to your website by modifying the URL from the blog entry (because clicking your logo takes you to the front page of the blog, not the website) results in a `ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED`.

Just an FYI :)

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