[VoiceOps] Hiring good VoIP staff

[Troy Davis]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Darren Schreiber <d at d-man.org> wrote:

> Hey folks,
>        We're hiring rather aggressively at my firm and struggling to find
> good VoIP folks. Wondering if others have any tips/tricks/posting sites or
> good sample job listings?
>

The best results I've seen (not necessarily experienced) have been to hire
for DevOps and immerse in VoIP.  I've watched ops-savvy developers support
VoIP services and I've watched VoIP-centric sysadmins/engineers support VoIP
services.  The difference was obvious, and I totally believe the argument by
Facebook and others that devops folks are 5 or 10 or 20 times more
productive as - boiling devops way down - otherwise-qualified engineers who
don't code.

So, I'd almost ignore VoIP experience, and I probably wouldn't call the job
that.

Facebook might be the best example of hiring only devops folks for all ops
engineers, and I think that a lot more domain knowledge is needed to support
Facebook than VoIP.  My job description for an engineer supporting a VoIP
service would be close to "Application Operations" jobs on
http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering.  Aside from
making it less formal, I'd move my equivalent to its "Advanced experience
coding in one of the following languages: Shell, Python or Perl" near the
top, and I'd replace the college degree item with a note to describe
something they wrote or operate.

I'd mention "Experience with SIP, FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, etc a plus" near the
end, but I wouldn't expect or look for it.

I'd post to Github Jobs and Authentic Jobs, and look through who
forked/committed to related Github repos. I've done this successfully in the
past. In interviewing, I'm not that interested in how big a service they've
supported.  I care how deeply they can describe the problems they ran into,
how they diagnosed them, how they thought about and wrote tests, how they
decided what to automate/scale/work on (or punt), and of course what the
result was.

I'd set a high bar and explain that.  Ignoring how hard it might be to
measure, each new hire should increase the ratio of <customers, calls, or
other revenue-related metric> per engineer (by more than would have happened
merely from the growth in volume).  That ratio should grow as long as
they're automating the right things, like Facebook's ratio of users per
engineer has done.  I think including something about this - the metric, the
position's potential impact, and maybe even the difficulty of measuring it -
in the job description shows that you're savvy and stands out to like-minded
people.

Note: I'm assuming "VoIP folks" means one of a dozen common
engineering/operations/IT titles applied to the VoIP industry, not codec
developers. If you're hiring someone to create a successor to G.729, ignore
this email.

Good luck,

Troy
http://twitter.com/troyd
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