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> They are not very competitive for hiring people with your particular skillset. There is plenty of ops talent willing to work at a high-profile startup. I hav

> They are not very competitive for hiring people with your particular skillset. There is plenty of ops talent willing to work at a high-profile startup. I have experience building and running PB-scale Ceph clusters, private and public clouds, HA infrastructure covering everything from DB failover to BGP, and interviewed at Gitlab when they announced going on-prem. I asked for half the market rate (because I was more interested in solving the scaling problem than money), but did not get it. The HR person at the first (non-technical!) interview asked a bunch of programming related questions from a script which caught me completely off guard. One question went along the lines of "tell me about a difficult problem that you had a particularily elegant solution for". I think they've learned by now that ops problems usually can't be solved by a simple algorithm. In retrospect I'm glad I didn't get it, but they seem to be having issues with more than infrastructure. As a side note, if there are other startups wanting to move to own hardware but struggling to find the right people, I would love to know where to find you. Non-AWS ops jobs are far and few between these days.

skuhn 10y ago
It has definitely become less common to see companies build much outside of cloud environments. And the talent has dried up to an extent as a result. Expertise and interest in building outside of cloudland is important to find, but there's also a challenge in finding the right operational mindset as well. It seems more common with more mature "startups" that have done the cost / benefit analysis and realized that the only way to achieve economies of scale for their business is to exit AWS. Dropbox, GitHub, Uber and so forth. Or businesses that simply must operate their own hardware, like CDNs. There are some smaller places that see value in building a low-cloud service from the beginning. One of those companies is where I work, e-mail in profile.

skuhn 10y ago

It has definitely become less common to see companies build much outside of cloud environments. And the talent has dried up to an extent as a result. Expertise and interest in building outside of cloudland is important to find, but there's also a challenge in finding the right operational mindset as well. It seems more common with more mature "startups" that have done the cost / benefit analysis and realized that the only way to achieve economies of scale for their business is to exit AWS. Dropbox, GitHub, Uber and so forth. Or businesses that simply must operate their own hardware, like CDNs. There are some smaller places that see value in building a low-cloud service from the beginning. One of those companies is where I work, e-mail in profile.