[AusNOG] Job: Head of Network Operations - NEXTDC - SydneyC

[Ben Buxton]

I will chime in here, I've interviewed well over a hundred network engineer
candidates for Google (hi Phil!). Some personal thoughts here...

On Sun Feb 22 2015 at 9:14:36 AM Skeeve Stevens <skeeve+ausnog at theispguy.com>
wrote:

>
> I'm seeing a massive amount of foreign application these days (90%) but
> equally missing relevant experience and the certifications rarely seem to
> be as 'solid' as locals.
>
> What strategies are Google/AWS using to find good candidates locally - if
> you don't mind telling us?
>

I think I've found your problem.

90+% of the world's network engineers live outside Australia, so it only
makes sense that you will get a substantial number of applications from
overseas.

My experience tells me the following generalisations (there are exceptions):

- Certs are a poor signal that someone may be a good candidate. Candidates
with and without certs are equally likely to perform well in a technical
interview and job. All it tells me is that they can memorise and rattle off
the vendor literature. In fact, I tend to find that those with large cert
counts are particularly poor candidates as they seem to lack actual
experience and cant work through oddball real-life problems.

- The location of a candidate has no correlation with how good they are.
There are equally good candidates from around the world. You need to seek
locally first to get a 457 i think, but there's only 1% of candidates
locally.

- Candidates who have worked in large companies can often have very narrow
experience due to siloing. They may have just touched the firewalls, or the
access side, or the peering edge. Whereas often candidates from smallish
companies/networks often have had to be "jack of all trades" and their
dealing with knock-on effects across infrastructure mean they can quickly
become brilliant engineers at large networks.

So by excluding (or strongly biasing against) foreign candidates, those
without certs, and those from smaller companies, you have just gone and
dropped your pool of quality engineers by 90%. There's your problem.

Go and find good engineers by speaking with them about interesting
engineering challenges rather than first looking for CCIE numbers. And be
open to global candidates.


> Or... what advice would you give to engineers who might be missing in some
> experience, to help them fill the gaps?
>

Be curious. Turn on interesting protocols in a lab and fire up
wireshark/tcpdump on them. Break them in interesting ways (and see what
tcpdump shows). Write some software to do tedious tasks for you.

Dont just memorise the cert cram material. This becomes really obvious to a
seasoned interviewer.

Apply for positions at your dream company, even if you think you might not
cut it. Many/most of my colleagues never thought they'd get the job, but
did.

Unfortunately it seems you may need certs to get past some resume
screeners...but you probably wont be happy working for those companies.

BB
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