how to hire and sre in 5 minutes - max timchenko - devopsdays tel aviv 2017
TRANSCRIPT
How to hire a SRE in 5 minutes
MAX TIMCHENKO SRE II
TLV2017
@maxvtDevOps Days TLV 2017
“SRE”?
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“We enable service owners to focus on rapid delivery of value to PagerDuty customers by providing common infrastructure, self-service tooling, best practices, and subject matter expertise.”
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Not “SRE” (at PagerDuty)
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• Operating all the things
• Being a language/framework expert
• Gate-keeping access to production
• Forcing specific processes on teams
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HumanOps
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“Words are important and very hard.”
@arupchak Infrastructure Director, PagerDuty
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HumanOps Skills
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• Not an ***hole • Can listen • Can mentor and explain • Writes good documentation • Gets stuff done • Understands on-call • Eats food
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Technical Skills
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• Networking (the computer kind) • Release engineering, CI/CD • Software engineering • Application stacks, platforms • Configuration management • Monitoring, observability, alerting • Linux operations and performance • Security
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Application Stacks / Platforms
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• Load balancing • Service discovery • Distributed systems • High availability • Secret management • Cluster managers • Platform-as-a-service
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Evolution of Tech Skills and Scale
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Team Composition
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Product Owner
Manager
1x SRE III
3x SRE II
2x SRE I
Scrum Master
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Rank Missing Skills
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Need Borrow? Skill
⭐⭐⭐ No Continuous Deployment
⭐⭐ Yes Managing Complexity
⭐⭐ Yes Software Engineering
⭐ No Config Management
“Borrow”: can we borrow this skill from elsewhere in the company?
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Job Description
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“It is so difficult to hire”
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• Do you need “10 years of AWS Lambda experience”?
• Similar skills, not exact match
• Embrace non-traditional backgrounds
• Offer remote and flex time
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SRE Backgrounds
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© Disney/Pixar; https://herure.deviantart.com/art/Monsters-Inc-autographs-151458694
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Interview Process
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• Phone screen, with coding question
• On site interview, up to a full day
• Up to 6-8 different interview slots
• Technical, project, and people skills
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Interview Slot Examples
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• System design
• Frontend frameworks
• Business acumen
• Everyday coding
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Discussion Questions
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“What would you do if you suspect replicants gained access to your production infrastructure?”
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Hands-On Questions
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© 1999 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
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Disposable Interview Environments
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Evaluation and Scoring
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לוי בעונה הראשונה של רוקדים עם כוכבים צילום יח''צ: יוני המנחם
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Would You Like To Know More?
Jason Grimes, “Archetype of a SRE Superhero”, DoD PDX ‘17https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPmr7F5dXWc
Camille Fournier, “Building & Motivating Eng Teams”, OSS Leadership Summit ’17https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R-Y2DwWOr0
@maxvt
https://www.pagerduty.com/careersHearing about our SRE team makes you want to be a part of it?