how to hire and sre in 5 minutes - max timchenko - devopsdays tel aviv 2017

How to hire a SRE in 5 minutes

MAX TIMCHENKO SRE II

TLV2017

@maxvtDevOps Days TLV 2017

“SRE”?

2

“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.”


Not “SRE” (at PagerDuty)

3

• Operating all the things

• Being a language/framework expert

• Gate-keeping access to production

• Forcing specific processes on teams


HumanOps

4

“Words are important and very hard.”

@arupchak Infrastructure Director, PagerDuty


HumanOps Skills

5

• Not an ***hole • Can listen • Can mentor and explain • Writes good documentation • Gets stuff done • Understands on-call • Eats food


Technical Skills

6

• Networking (the computer kind) • Release engineering, CI/CD • Software engineering • Application stacks, platforms • Configuration management • Monitoring, observability, alerting • Linux operations and performance • Security


Application Stacks / Platforms

7

• Load balancing • Service discovery • Distributed systems • High availability • Secret management • Cluster managers • Platform-as-a-service


Evolution of Tech Skills and Scale

8


Team Composition

9

Product Owner

Manager

1x SRE III

3x SRE II

2x SRE I

Scrum Master


Rank Missing Skills

10

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?


Job Description

11


“It is so difficult to hire”

12

• Do you need “10 years of AWS Lambda experience”?

• Similar skills, not exact match

• Embrace non-traditional backgrounds

• Offer remote and flex time


SRE Backgrounds

13

© Disney/Pixar; https://herure.deviantart.com/art/Monsters-Inc-autographs-151458694


Interview Process

14

• 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


Interview Slot Examples

15

• System design

• Frontend frameworks

• Business acumen

• Everyday coding


Discussion Questions

16

“What would you do if you suspect replicants gained access to your production infrastructure?”


Disposable Interview Environments

18


Evaluation and Scoring

19

לוי בעונה הראשונה של רוקדים עם כוכבים צילום יח''צ: יוני המנחם


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?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPmr7F5dXWc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R-Y2DwWOr0

how to hire and sre in 5 minutes - max timchenko - devopsdays tel aviv 2017

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