[AusNOG] Off Topic - Brisbane recruitment recommendations

Sat May 14 00:30:20 EST 2016

<long post, tl;dr "maybe the recruiting process is also in need of
upskilling?">

Can I ask a question..

Given what Bevan and Simon have said about generalists... why it is that
applicants to these sorts of roles who fail to get past the first interview
because of not being able to answer on the spot some "specialist" thing, or
even worse something even a specialist would need to refer to documentation
on.. well why does that happen. I get that some of these companies like AWS
Google and so on are after super talented people, but then that being the
case if they are only paying eg 100k for a SRE/DevOps perhaps they
shouldn't expect on the spot answers?

Putting it out there... maybe a lot of applicants/candidates are not good
at the interviewing process, so it might not be a matter of OP Cameron not
offering enough $ to attract applicants who are rightly skilled AND
interview well, could it be the applicants simply appear to fail to meet
the criteria to be able to fill the position?

Myself I had no trouble with Cameron's 27 questions (save the first, I gave
myself 5 minutes to get through the list and I only recalled the command a
few hours later), and in terms of a screening process for that sort of role
those questions seem reasonable for someone working in an MSP role, but
where is it all falling down?

As Mark says.. tell me what you can do.. well no one I know of is using a
hiring process around that, they are mostly all still asking "what do you
know.. NOW"!?

Frankly I think I should start a recruiter company, as having recently seen
a cutting edge MSP company.. I know what is needed :/

Disclaimer: My own views, not that of my employer etc.

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 11:51 PM, Jason Mikronis <jason at ausbbs.com.au>
wrote:

> Being a generalist means you simply read the documentation, and it makes
> sense!
>
> Even the specialists still refer to documentation as their features change
> every software update!
>
>
>
> Jason
>
>
>
> *From:* AusNOG [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] *On Behalf Of *Bevan
> Slattery
> *Sent:* Friday, 13 May 2016 8:33 PM
> *To:* Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org>
> *Cc:* ausnog at lists.ausnog.net; chad at cpkws.com.au
> *Subject:* Re: [AusNOG] Off Topic - Brisbane recruitment recommendations
>
>
>
> +2
>
>
>
> +1 for the statements supporting generalists over specialists and
>
>
>
> +1 for "Cloudy Cloud McCloudington".  #genius
>
>
> [b]
>
>
> On 13 May 2016, at 10:13 PM, Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org> wrote:
>
> On 13 May 2016, at 7:02 PM, Chad Kelly <chad at cpkws.com.au> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 5/12/2016 10:07 AM, ausnog-request at lists.ausnog.net wrote:
>
> Most people are having trouble at the moment.
>
>
>
> It is an interesting time that I've spoken about at Commsday events,
>
> talking about the void of skills in certain areas:
>
>
>
> - Cloud specialisation and experience (AWS, Azure, Google Compute)
>
> - DevOps skills - Ansible, Puppet, Chef - with deployment experience
>
> - Network (Cisco/Juniper/etc) + Linux + NetDevOps experience
>
> - Anyone with actual experience on SDN
>
> - IoT infrastructure experience - even using the AWS/Azure tools
>
> - Languages like Golang
>
> But these are all different skills.
>
>
>
> How many skills do you have? More than one?
>
>
>
> Your not going to find an individual with skills in every single platform
> and every single operating system as they are all slightly different.
>
>
>
> This is a consequence of mismanagement in the IT industry. It's a growing
> problem.
>
>
>
> It is my belief that quite a lot of the specialisation that exists now is
> a dead end. We actually need generalists in a Cloudy Cloud McCloudington
> world. People who understand concepts across a broad swathe of many IT
> disciplines, and how they interrelate to each other; and with enough
> applied skill to attack any problem from that "first principles"
> understanding.
>
>
>
> Even the newer Cloud platforms such as AWS and Google Compute vary
> slightly with what they can do and how they opperate.
>
>
>
> They all use the same concepts. A generalist can write you an API server
> front-end which can drive the provisioning pipelines on both of them via
> the same client-facing API, and write monitoring plugins to import
> performance metrics from both of them into the same Prometheus instance.
>
>
>
> A specialist will say, "I'm really good at AWS," but doom you to
> maintaining two incompatible OAM systems if you ever decide to put some of
> your workloads in GCP.
>
>
>
> You are better off building teams and having people with specific skill
> sets working on particular projects.
>
>
>
> People who believed that statement in the 1990s spent tens of thousands of
> dollars on Novell or Windows for Workgroups vendor certifications, then
> went into full revolt when Windows NT came along and their "specific skill
> sets" we're suddenly obsolete.
>
>
>
> If you want to get ahead long-term in IT, be a generalist.
>
>
>
>    - mark
>
>
>
>
>
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