[AusNOG] Off Topic - Brisbane recruitment recommendations

Sat May 14 01:07:26 EST 2016

I always get a chuckle when some new "must have" technology comes along
that obviously because it's new, no one has any experience with. The in
practice cycle is so very predictable, people embellish their experience,
the recruiters put only these people forward because they ticked the rights
boxes, and enterprises generally either get egregious screw ups, or, the
industry drags its feet while employers poach the few with actual
experience off each other rather than investing in training those with a
clue who because they honestly declared their actual level of skills ie.
read the documents and labbed, but no operational experience, never get a
look in.

Kind regards

Paul Wilkins

On 14 May 2016 at 00:30, Joshua D'Alton <joshua at railgun.com.au> wrote:

> <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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> AusNOG mailing list
>> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
>> http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> AusNOG mailing list
>> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
>> http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> AusNOG mailing list
> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
> http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20160514/c89e550e/attachment.html>