Your organization has embraced the Devops philosophy, and is growing. So you set out to hunt for Devops practitioners, and quickly find that usual hiring approaches (e.g., recruiters looking on LinkedIn) simply don’t work. What do these these mythical Devops creatures look like? (Hint: a lot like unicorns and combs). What is their natural habitat? (Shockingly, they don’t hang out on LinkedIn). How can you capture them?

1. Dave Zwieback
@mindweather
Head of Systems

3. ?

5. Who?
Where?
How?

6. Who?
Where?
How?

18. Пойди туда –
не знаю куда,
принеси того -
не знаю чего.

19. Go I know not
whither,
And fetch I know
not what

21. Who?
Where?
How?

22. Haskell, Closure, Scala, Erlang, Go…
GC tuning, fo’ sho’!
|||||||||-shaped people
(a.k.a. tech generalists)
“Zen and The Art
Neckbeard Maintenance”
of
tcpdump Fu
Crafting sarcastic responses to mean sysadmin tweets

23. You might be a generalist if you…
• have been doing this “for a while”
• have a jagged, non-linear career path
• have a healthy interest in “disaster porn”
• have some arcane, secret knowledge
• have wide-ranging interests
• have a non-traditional (non-CS) background

24. ✓ Who?
Where?
How?

25. ✓ Who?
Where?
How?

33. IRC!

38. ✓ Who?
✓ Where?
How?

39. ✓ Who?
✓ Where?
How?

41. “Thank for not giving up on me. I
can't do this week but let's get
something on the books for next
week. Tuesday afternoon say?”
Actual response after 7 e-mails in 5 months.

42. 56% higher response rate
hiring manager vs recruiter
(YMMV)

43. “When I hired John at Etsy in
2009, the near-term recruiting
process was a few months, but the
actual recruiting process had
been going on for a decade. ”
Chad Dickerson, CEO of Etsy

44. “I skipped haskell did 3 languages [Java, Ruby, and Clojure]. I
spent an hour or two on the Java code. The rest was just for fun.”
vs
“Just to summarize - the skills you need for DevOps are really
pretty different than the skills needed as a developer.
(Fortunately I've done both for a long time).
It's pretty rare that DevOps positions gets coding test [sic], since
one generally doesn't write code as part of the job (one does write
scripts, and things like chef 'recipes’ for example). That's why I
answered it in 'bash' - it's the lingua franca of DevOps.
So if you're measuring the potential quality of DevOps guys
using the measuring stick for developers, you're likely to run into
a disconnect.”

47. Photo Credits
• After the War, when there is no hope, by balt-arts
• Devopsdays Rome 2012, by pkhamre
• Hardcore devops, by Matt Moor
• The Recruiter Honeypot, by Elaine Wherry
• one world, by Kai Schreiber
• Coles Beach, by Kuyan Redman
• Greeting Card: BE MINE mini slip, by Cheryl T
• silo canister, by alan berning