The nature of ‘production’

 management, soft skills  No Responses »
Mar 022009
 

What does it mean for a system to be ‘in production’?

This came up for me on Friday. We have a NAS unit, a shiny new NetApp filer, which was recently purchased and set up, and although we are testing things with it, we hadn’t yet taken the final steps — it was not directly doing anything mission critical. Oh, it’s connected to several systems all right, some of which are mission critical, but itself, it’s not in the line of fire. Its documentation was not finished. But I was getting ready to pull the trigger for one application, switching one Linux-based NFS server to use the NetApp instead. I planned to take the weekend to sync the data and swap the NFS clients over, easy peasy. It should have been relatively easy. In fact, I was so not worried about it (despite the fact that the NFS server it was replacing is of paramount importance to one production software platform) that I took Thursday off to attend a full-day workshop extolling the virtues of NetApp and how to leverage various features to save time doing backups, maximize the resource usage, etc.

This made it extra ironic when I got paged at 3PM that the NetApp was “down.”

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 Posted by sabrina at 11:17  Tagged with:

How not to sell me your staffing services

 management  No Responses »
Jun 132008
 

*ring ring*
Me: Hello, this is Sabrina.
$(Colleague): Hey, Sabrina, I have a phone call for you. What’s your outside number?
Me: *gives it to her*
$(Colleague): Okay, thanks. I’ll put him through now.
*clicky*
Me: Hello?
$(Recruiter): Hello! This is ICantRead with WellKnownRecruiting Group!
Me: …okay.
$(Recruiter): …
*click*

*ring* *ring*
Me: Hello, this is Sabrina.
$(Recruiter): Hello! This is ICantRead with WellKnownRecruiting Group!
Me: Yes. You just called me.
$(Recruiter): I have some Windows/Cisco engineering candidates I’d like to talk to you about!
Me: I don’t hire Windows or Cisco people. How did you get my contact information?
$(Recruiter): Are you more on the Unix side?
Me: Yes. How did you get my contact information?
$(Recruiter): I talked to your assistant!
Me: I don’t have an assistant. You talked to someone else inside the company and then hung up on me. How did you get my contact information?
$(Recruiter): We must have gotten disconnected!
Me: No, you said “Hello, this is ICantRead from WellKnownRecruiting Group,” and I said “okay,” and then you hung up on me. How did you get my contact information?
$(Recruiter): I talked to your assistant.
Me: I don’t have an assistant. How did you get that phone number?
$(Recruiter): I dialed YourCompany!
Me: But how did you get my contact information?
$(Recruiter): There was a job posting on Simple Hire!
Me: I’ve never heard of that site, but I do have a job posting on Dice, and that one says “No phone calls and no recruiters.”
$(Recruiter): Well, this was on Simple Hire!
Me: That’s nice, but I don’t know what Simple Hire is, and my only job posting says “No recruiters.”
$(Recruiter): So you work more with Linux?
Me: Have a good weekend.
*click*

I assume the approach philosophy here is “if you annoy them enough, they will give in and buy your services just to get you to shut up.”

 Posted by sabrina at 10:18

How to make your hiring manager cry

 humor, management, soft skills  No Responses »
Mar 062008
 

I feel a little let down. You see, I’m hiring for an open sysadmin position, and … it turns out that it is hard work. Curse you, recession, keeping everybody from wanting to job-hop willy-nilly!

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve posted the job to LOPSA and Sage‘s job boards. (Representin’ my sysadminly peeps, yo.) I even posted to chi.jobs (eek!). I pinged via linkedin, I pinged via people I drink beer with. I pinged and pinged and generally looked sad and overworked yet hopeful. The only firm ping I’ve gotten in return, however, was a cold-calling recruiter who wanted to pitch some of her candidates to me. So today I used our corporate account and posted to Dice. And then… I started browsing resumes.

Ai yi yi! So many typos. So many people claiming proficiency in the programming language “Linux.” So many with vi skills. (Guys. I am a vi user myself. I love me my visual editor. Still… it is a text editor. It’s like saying that, as a car driver, you have experience with moving the shifter. — Now, if you were a coder and you were badass with lisp, I could see listing emacs. But let’s be real. It’s vi. It’s not that hard.) Aieee. Also, if the only employment experience you are listing is a two-year stint as a student employee at your college help desk, don’t insult me: you do not have 10 years professional experience with Linux. I’ll accept that you may have been playing with it since you were 10, but you probably weren’t doing it 40 hours a week, okay? (And if you were, someone needs to arrest your parents.)

Someone. Save me. Get me an awesome mid-level sysadmin candidate who knows the difference between RPM and .deb. Please. Save me from reading more of these resumes before my mind numbs over for good.

I signed up for a job seeker account as well, so as to scope out the competition. Seems like there are a bunch of “unique,” “prestigious,” and “fast-paced” trading firms hiring out there. I was tempted to rewrite my posting to call us “fun,” “laid-back,” and “awesome yet not stuck up about it,” just to taunt the other guys. I didn’t, though. That would have been snarky. (Also, my posting already has more personality than theirs out of the gate — especially the one that started out with the slightly hostile note, “We do NOT accept unsolicited calls – we ONLY talk to candidates with an appointment – We frown unfavorably on this!” Yeahhhh… I’m totally gonna want to work for you, Ms. Frownypants.)

So, after a brief brush with unpleasant reality (what… you mean qualified, ideal candidates aren’t just going to fall into my lap?? NO FAIR.), this is where I am at. Grumbling about typos and wishing.

Star light, star bright
First star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might
Hire a freaking sysadmin before I die of old age.

ObRelatedLinks: The Top Eight Ways Your Resume Disqualifies You For My Open Job Posting (my blog), 36 Beautiful Resume Ideas That Work (JobMob), How to Edit Your Resume like a Professional Resume Writer (Brazen Careerist).

 Posted by sabrina at 20:17

Cool boss tricks

 management, soft skills, time management  No Responses »
Sep 042007
 

Belatedly, in honor of National Boss’ Day, here’s a short list of things I liked that some of my previous bosses did.

1. “H—– Day.” My boss J. would sometimes pick a slow day and randomly announce it as a holiday, naming it after himself. I always said that if I became a manager, someday I would throw a H—– Day as well. (Not just because H—– Days often involved baseball…though that is definitely a plus.)

2. Office hours. My boss G. (the CTO) had half an hour of his schedule in each week which was designated as one employee’s face-to-face time slot. We didn’t necessarily meet every week, but it was really nice to have a set timeslot that, if you wanted, you could just stop by and talk about projects or whatever else was on your mind.

3. The IT priorities list. Same boss, G., had a single Excel spreadsheet with everything that all the groups (web, sysadmin, db, etc.) were working on. Every Friday, there was an hour-long meeting in which all the requesters met with the IT heads and bickered over who got dibs on IT’s time. I always thought that was clever — everyone always knew what other things were on deck, so if you got stuck on your top priority you could just jump down one, and nobody was ever yelling for things to be done out of order because you were aware of the reasons why someone else’s project got dibs on IT’s time. Furthermore, you had to jump through documentation hoops to get a chance to put something on the list at all, so there was a barrier to entry which prevented one’s whimsy from wasting our time.

I don’t think I’ve developed any cool boss tricks of my own yet. I’ve tried and discarded several ways of tracking projects, but in the end I always come back to my own version of the IT priorities list. The closest to H—– Days I’ve come is sending people home early a couple of times on slow days. (And the first time I did so, I was thwarted: my team was all involved with things they didn’t want to stop working on.) So, it’s still a work in progress. Sooner or later I’ll wind up with a management style of my own, I suppose, if only by accident!

 Posted by sabrina at 06:15
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