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Or maybe he was exactly right and management was extremely foolish not to listen to him. If your plan is to have excellent punching bags for when things go sou

Or maybe he was exactly right and management was extremely foolish not to listen to him. If your plan is to have excellent punching bags for when things go south who you can blame and who will not fight back early on, then your not hiring him was a good plan. If you wanted to avoid disasters, well, perhaps you should think about it. I can't blame the guy for not wanting to talk badly about his former management; it's not a way to win friends in a job interview.

btilly 13y ago
If your plan is to have excellent punching bags for when things go south who you can blame and who will not fight back early on, then your not hiring him was a good plan. If your culture is sick enough that this is what happens, then no good devop should want to work for you. Defensive behavior goes hand in hand with cultures where you need to defend yourself. Nobody is good enough that they never make mistakes. What matters is what happens after the mistake. In a good culture, whoever knows what the problem might actually be - who was often the cause of said problem - will immediately speak up and suffer no consequences for doing so. But the person who screws up and then tries to hide it will get fired. I do admit that there are too few good cultures. But those that exist have to filter out defensive behavior if they wish to remain good.
- nasalgoat 13y ago
  I've hired a couple of people who claimed to never have problems and/or pointed out to me in the interview that the test situation I ask them to diagnose "could never happen", even when I'm drawing on personal experience. Each time, the person in question turned out to be a terrible hire and never lasted more than a month. If you can't come up with a disaster in your career, you've never had a career.
  - baudehlo 13y ago
    And more importantly, don't know how to deal with one when they do occur. And they always do.
danielweber 13y ago
Eehhhh, maybe. You shouldn't talk bad about your current/former employer. On the other hand, surely everyone working in any kind of sysadmin role has a story of things going sideways. I'm still worried about the pop-psychology of "well, good candidates should have <stories>, and he didn't have a <story>, so he's not a good candidate." Just substitute other words in for "story" and you get more of a gut-feel that often doesn't translate into real world success.
- msandford 13y ago
  > On the other hand, surely everyone working in any kind of sysadmin role has a story of things going sideways. I want to agree with this but there are some big caveats. 1. What if you don't expect this question and thus don't trawl through memories ahead of time? It's easy to feel put-on-the-spot and have your mind go blank. 2. What if you're really talented and worked at a place with rigorous process and thus all the stuff going bad gets caught in test or QA or whatever? Nothing really goes sideways in that situation. 3. There are a lot of situations where things go bad not because you've made a mistake but because management's made a mistake. Not wanting to talk about those situations is understandable for a couple of reasons. Not talking bad about the former employer is one, so is not wanting to get all worked up about former management screwing you in a job interview. 4. You could have been on either end of the situation described by a previous HN story: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmer... If you're on the "lazy" team you might have been a damn-fine sysadmin with no horror stories. Or on the "hard working" team with plenty of disaster stories and a questionable level of talent. I'm not saying that having disaster stories makes you a bad sysadmin, nor am I saying that not having disaster stories makes you a good one. But I am suggesting that the correlation between disaster stories and skill level probably isn't p = 0.99 and might be more like p = 0.5 or 0.2 or maybe 0.07. Even if you find that the correlation is 0.7 (pretty decent) are you going to be interviewing enough people such that you can be sure that you don't end up with sampling error? If you need to hire 10 sysadmins and you interview 200 then perhaps you'll do a decent job of identifying the good candidates. But if you only need to hire one and you only interview 10 you don't have the law of large numbers on your side. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

btilly 13y ago

If your plan is to have excellent punching bags for when things go south who you can blame and who will not fight back early on, then your not hiring him was a good plan. If your culture is sick enough that this is what happens, then no good devop should want to work for you. Defensive behavior goes hand in hand with cultures where you need to defend yourself. Nobody is good enough that they never make mistakes. What matters is what happens after the mistake. In a good culture, whoever knows what the problem might actually be - who was often the cause of said problem - will immediately speak up and suffer no consequences for doing so. But the person who screws up and then tries to hide it will get fired. I do admit that there are too few good cultures. But those that exist have to filter out defensive behavior if they wish to remain good.

nasalgoat 13y ago
I've hired a couple of people who claimed to never have problems and/or pointed out to me in the interview that the test situation I ask them to diagnose "could never happen", even when I'm drawing on personal experience. Each time, the person in question turned out to be a terrible hire and never lasted more than a month. If you can't come up with a disaster in your career, you've never had a career.
- baudehlo 13y ago
  And more importantly, don't know how to deal with one when they do occur. And they always do.

danielweber 13y ago

Eehhhh, maybe. You shouldn't talk bad about your current/former employer. On the other hand, surely everyone working in any kind of sysadmin role has a story of things going sideways. I'm still worried about the pop-psychology of "well, good candidates should have <stories>, and he didn't have a <story>, so he's not a good candidate." Just substitute other words in for "story" and you get more of a gut-feel that often doesn't translate into real world success.

msandford 13y ago
> On the other hand, surely everyone working in any kind of sysadmin role has a story of things going sideways. I want to agree with this but there are some big caveats. 1. What if you don't expect this question and thus don't trawl through memories ahead of time? It's easy to feel put-on-the-spot and have your mind go blank. 2. What if you're really talented and worked at a place with rigorous process and thus all the stuff going bad gets caught in test or QA or whatever? Nothing really goes sideways in that situation. 3. There are a lot of situations where things go bad not because you've made a mistake but because management's made a mistake. Not wanting to talk about those situations is understandable for a couple of reasons. Not talking bad about the former employer is one, so is not wanting to get all worked up about former management screwing you in a job interview. 4. You could have been on either end of the situation described by a previous HN story: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmer... If you're on the "lazy" team you might have been a damn-fine sysadmin with no horror stories. Or on the "hard working" team with plenty of disaster stories and a questionable level of talent. I'm not saying that having disaster stories makes you a bad sysadmin, nor am I saying that not having disaster stories makes you a good one. But I am suggesting that the correlation between disaster stories and skill level probably isn't p = 0.99 and might be more like p = 0.5 or 0.2 or maybe 0.07. Even if you find that the correlation is 0.7 (pretty decent) are you going to be interviewing enough people such that you can be sure that you don't end up with sampling error? If you need to hire 10 sysadmins and you interview 200 then perhaps you'll do a decent job of identifying the good candidates. But if you only need to hire one and you only interview 10 you don't have the law of large numbers on your side. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers