[VoiceOps] Hiring good VoIP staff

[Alex Balashov]

I would strongly concur with this perspective.  I have had hired 
several people, all of whom had zero VoIP and voice telecom experience 
prior, and had quite bad luck with, as Troy said, "otherwise 
qualified" sysadmins/IT people/technicians, while excellent luck with 
developers.

On 10/02/2010 05:00 PM, Troy Davis wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Darren Schreiber <d at d-man.org
> <mailto: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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> VoiceOps mailing list
> VoiceOps at voiceops.org
> https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops


-- 
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems LLC
1170 Peachtree Street
12th Floor, Suite 1200
Atlanta, GA 30309
Tel: +1-678-954-0670
Fax: +1-404-961-1892
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/