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Comment by mattydorey | Hacker News Reader

Thanks all, this is good feedback. The intent behind this was to innovate in this area by making the posting stick out so that the posting gets more visibility but also helps weed out candidates. We are looking for one person and we want to set the bar high for this position.

I'm surprised that each requirement/attribute was taken so literally, but I can see how people could view it like that after reading it again.

To be honest, if we could find someone that met most of this criteria I think we would be very happy. I wouldn't say they need 8 years of experience in each area, however my hope is that they would have worked with these technologies over the last period of time in varying capacities.

It will be very interesting to see how people take this and who applies. Maybe I'll post the results up so people can see after the search.

Thanks for the candid feedback.

Matt

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Something that has thrown me off here: The position very clearly reads as a senior System Administrator / Engineer, with some project management and lead experience. But the title is Director of Infrastructure. Speaking from my experience, a director is a manager of managers.

Is this req really a director role? If so, where are the criteria for the leadership and managerial components? The listing goes into quite a lot of detail about the technical side on things that would end up being optional when deep-diving with the right candidate.

If not, and it's actually a "director of the machines that compose the infrastructure", IMO the education bar is too high: I've never worked at Google, but I don't know anyone with a masters degree that gets Nagios alerts.

Lastly, as an outsider, I see "Customer up-time and data integrity is the most important thing in our company and we need someone who has the experience, depth and skills to lead this area of our company.", but the listing does not speak to the candidate's responsibilities with regard to the development / architecture of the software itself. A senior technical contributor or a manager with this charter will spend no small part of their time in design and code reviews. Frankly, in a lot of shops this position has to argue with Dev to keep them from doing things that seem clever but can't be operationalized, whether due to an unforseen technical restriction, or because the new idea will have a lot of corner / edge cases that will make administration of the application very error-prone.

Had I not moved across the country in the last year, I'd definitely consider throwing my hat in the ring... UT is on the short list of places I'd move next round, too. Good luck and please post a follow-up!

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