27.11.11

Hiring and embedding new team members at Hyves | Javalobby

Hyves is a social networking site in the Netherlands with mainly Dutch visitors and members and competes in this country with sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Hyves was founded in 2004 by Raymond Spanjar, Koen Kam, and Floris Rost van Tonningen.[citation needed]

In May 2010 Hyves had more than 10.3 million accounts. These correspond to two thirds of the size of the Dutch population (which stands at over 16 million in 2010), however these include multiple accounts per person and inactive accounts. The number of accounts had grown by over two million as compared to the 1.5 years earlier. Hyves can be used free of charge, but there is an option for a paid Premium Membership (called Goldmembership). Goldmembers have access to some extra features, such as the ability to use some more different smilies in their messages and more uploading-space for pictures. The creators have said that the basic form of Hyves will always be free.

Hyves & DevOps

The leaders at Hyves stumbled into DevOps by accident five years ago, when nobody (including them) was aware that it was actually a cultural movement. They've been practicing with trial and error on how to go about this DevOps thing ever since...

Something I am interested in

How do you hire new team-members and embed them as fast as possible inside the organisation and get them up to speed ? Is there something like a devops profile for ops/devs candidates ? How do your developers find the right people within ops and vice versa ?

The ideal qualifications

  • 2-3 years of development experience
  • 3-5 years of systems/operational experience
  • full stack knowledge (hardware, OS, networking, standard services, custom build services)
  • 3+ years experience running large scale operations
  • 2+ years of devops experience.
Hyves found that people who start with system development experience then change to system administration would be better devops engineers.

Qualifications not easy to match

  • full stack knowledge (not so much)
  • 3+ years experience running large scale operations
  • 2+ years of devops experience.

What People Would Do under Stress

Cat dog fight

The Default Answer

The default answer to this problem is to define more processes, hand-overs, deliverables, have more meetings..

(More documents)

but...

What Hyves Tries to Do?

  • Extreme focus on operation
  • Release early, release often
  • Small teams of smart people
  • Failure is a common topic
People + Culture >> Process

First Steps for a new hire

  • Mentor / Go-to person
  • Lunch with the founders
  • "Swimming while you can stand" project
  • OPS-team
  • Disruption shift after 6-8 weeks
  • Mandatory datacenter hardware fixing

Joint OPS/Dev Team

  • One room
  • Ticket team (development)
  • Ops team (system engineering)
  • Dashboard
  • Deploymeister (development)
  • Rotate often

Other Stuff

  • ACI's on site problems
  • Techlunches every friday
  • Joint project teams
  • A & P meeting
  • Common irc channel with monitoring notifications
  • Lots and lots of out-of-bound activitives (Beer++)
  • Hackathons

Problems

  • Capacity planning
  • Unexpected consequences
  • Resource management / refactoring
  • Database schema management
  • Ownership of code and services

Stuff that works

  • Joint OPS/DEV team
  • Failure as a first-class citizen
  • ACI's
  • Joint project teams

Hiring Process

This process is quite common.
  • CV-selection (15 minutes)
  • Assessment evaluation (5-30 minutes)
  • Telephone interview (30-60 minutes)
  • On site interview (3-4 hours)

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