Aug 11

Management: Hiring guidelines for A players

executive techniques, linux, operations, server farm, staff management, unix No Comments »

It’s challenging to hire a great ops person. How do you judge in an interview?

If I want an A player, I ask hard questions, set high expectations and request their commitment to the teams needs. Even then I make mistakes, but at least I have their commitment. I can work with that if their performance has to be brought up.

Here’s who I have in mind when I’m interviewing:

  1. They know they can’t win the first time, they’ll keep trying.
  2. They are not looking to change careers or directions – they should have been customer service oriented technical people for last 7 years at least.
  3. They hate work and dedicate themselves to eliminating it.
  4. They love people.
  5. They are students of their work.
  6. They are disciplined and self-motivated
  7. They accept work – this is an all-day every-day job. We have a “No Slashdot” policy.
    1. If you don’t have something else to do you are required to ask the NOC if you can help with a problem or same day ticket
    2. Do customer follow up mails.
    3. Eliminate work for someone

i. Write a script

ii. Write a tool that lets business users see data they’ve never seen

    1. “Widen the Moat” so we can make gains against downtime.
    2. Attempt to reduce the complexity of something to the appliance level.
    3. Read customer service and management books.
    4. Make (or review) a list of people you owe things.

i. Ask them if they are getting what they need.

ii. Ask them how you’ll know when they have exactly what they need.

iii. If there is no clear way to deliver what they want – tell them so.

iv. If you are going to drop their concern – let them know.

  1. Put goals, meeting and other important work things on the calendar for the next month, quarter and year.
  2. Invent drills to make sure we are where are where we should be in emergency response and disaster recovery.
  3. Write a new monitor and figure out how to make it supportable forever.
  1. Bad uses of time:
    1. Changing the degree of transparency of you xterms for 100th time.
    2. Second guessing management any more than one level above you.
    3. Pretending you can’t affect the direction of the management one level above you.
    4. Internet reading – even if it’s “background” research on technical things (digg, Slashdot, boing-boing, etc have nothing to do with what we do).
    5. Writing documentation no one but you can interpret.

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