[TriLUG] OT: Job and request for help!

[Paul G. Szabady via TriLUG]

Folks,

Thanks for all the awesome responses, some offline and others to the 
list.  !!!

I'm going to try to summarize all the questions ideas below, addressing 
some directly and others overall. Of course, some of these we be 
improved upon and/or clarified.  Others unfortunately, are personal 
preferences or ambitions and either can't addressed directly or we're 
limited by state and/or university policy.

Not in any specific order:

* "Weekend work occasionally"
Someone mentioned they can't ever work weekends due to personal 
commitments.  Not much we can do about this one.

* Work from home office
I personally would love that, but the state/university doesn't allow for 
that.  In some cases, exceptions are made, but there's no official 
policy like what the Cisco's of the world have.

* Include link(s) to benefits information so that applicants can 
estimate total compensation package, not just base salary.
I may be naive, but this is something I would expect the applicant to do 
in their investigation of the position and it's entity. Anything that is 
not determined in advance should be brought up in the interview 
process.  I think too many people consider an interview to be a "will 
you please hire me", rather than a time for two people to discuss an 
opportunity and determine whether or not there's a fit.

* A lot of technologies mentioned, but no mention of the value of 
experience with competing products.  E.g.: Openshift vs Heroku, apache 
vs nginx
Interesting point.  Seems like there is room for improvement in this space.

* We mentioned application monitoring tools, but didn't specify which 
one(s).
In this instance, the reader misunderstood us to meaning something akin 
to nagios or zabbix.  However, we were actually referring to things like 
AppDynamics (used here), CA's Wiley, New Relic, Blue Stripe, etc.  So if 
it was misunderstood by at least one, there may have been others.

* Where did we post the opening?
By default, I believe we post / email internally, our HR website, and 
two or three of the monster.com's of the world.  I personally have 
posted them to groups such as TriLUG, NCSA, and Linkedin Groups like 
Linux Expert.

* Salary is not enough when compared to consulting gigs.
Not much we can do about the state budget.

* No actual mention of what operating system experience is required for 
the position.  Nor did we specify distro(s).
What the <bleep>???  How did we not see the forest through the trees 
here?  <Slaps forehead>

* Remove the requirement for a college degree, and I bet you'll quickly 
fill it with a highly competent person.
I'm not sure that this is an actual requirement, but have an email in to 
my boss to see if it is.  Generally, I believe work experience is 
considered in lieu of degrees, 2:1.  So 8 years of experience for a BS, 
etc...

* No part of that posting sounds or looks like a Linux sysadmin job. 
'Solutions Engineer?'
We brainstormed for a "catchy" name because past attempts using systems 
administrator weren't attracting what we needed.  Maybe we should 
reconsider the name...?

* Multiple people said the posting wreaked of a developer.  Possibly 
even a full stack developer (web, app and db type).  Many said the tone 
wasn't quite right, but couldn't quite pin point the issue. Many were 
turned off.
Wow!  That is definitely not what we are going for.  So I think we need 
to make some adjustments.  We work in a horizontal support model and as 
such, we in essence work above the OS and behind the GUI.  For example, 
when we need a system, we spec out what we need for CPU, mem, diskspace 
and any standard or non-standard bits we may need (like nfs, san, or 
local storage; 10gb links instead of 1gb, etc).  We install and 
configure our own compiled apache/php stack via puppet, jenkins, etc and 
monitor with appdynamics for performance and zabbix for services.  We 
have subject matter experts (SMEs) for things like wordpress, sakai, 
jboss, tomcat, etc but we work as a team and try to cross train in 
everything.  Hence the large list of service offerings and tools.  We 
provide and support the infrastructure for the enterprise (zabbix) 
service monitoring, (appdynamics) perf monitoring, (wordpress) CMS for 
thousands of sites, openshift, etc.  The list goes on and on but we are 
the middleware team, *between* OS support and developers/DBAs.  Maybe we 
need to rework this in a better and more meaningful way.  We have so 
many opportunities to learn new technologies as well as supporting the 
existing ones.  I can truly state I love going to work.

* Pay seems low compared to fortune 500 company
Hmmm, I may need to start looking around.  ;)

* UNC's Reputation is very bad.  I have heard nothing good, only bad.
Ouch.  I don't even know how to respond to that.

If you guys know of anyone that's interested, please send them the link 
and/or have them contact me for questions.  In the mean time, I will 
talk to my boss about what changes we should make to the position.

Thanks again!!!

Paul
@ Thy Service

On 2/26/2016 12:01 PM, Paul G. Szabady via TriLUG wrote:
> Greetings, TriLUG!
>
> I have posted a number of times about openings in our group, but have 
> yet to see any applicants mention trilug in their 
> application/interview.  So I can't help but wonder, is there something 
> wrong with the way we are advertising LINUX sysadmin positions that we 
> don't get any viable candidates?  Here's our most recent post, which 
> is in it's third or fourth repost.
>
> https://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/93013
>
>  - If anyone has any recommendations on what may entice people with 
> linux experience to apply for this position, I would love to hear from 
> you.
>  - If you know of a better forum to post these positions, I'd like to 
> hear from you.
>  - If you're interested, PLEASE go apply!
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> -- 
> Paul
> @ Thy Service
>