Words mean things. Especially words in job descriptions, and even when those words are missing.
I recently did a couple of interviews for a large web hosting company – big enough that if you know the space, you’d know them. Here’s a description of their requirements and expectations for a recent SRE (site reliability engineer) opportunity they posted:
- Knowledge of large-scale, high traffic platforms and the design of scalable, robust services in the real world
- Experience with Infrastructure as code tooling (e.g., Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Pulumi, Vault, etc)
- Experience programming in one or more of the following: Go, Python, Ruby, C, C++, Java, etc
- Experience with Unix/Linux operating systems internals (e.g., filesystems, system calls, namespaces, containers)
- Knowledge of large-scale, high traffic platforms and the design of scalable, robust services in the real world
- Experience with analyzing and troubleshooting systems.
- Understanding of standard networking protocols and components such as: TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS, IP Subnetting, and Load Balancing
- Passion, integrity, and humor that makes our team better as a whole
This is a very reasonable-looking job description! I’ve built large, scalable platforms, though nothing quite as large as what they’ve built. I’ve used Puppet and Ansible. I’ve done some programming, though in fairness mostly smaller projects, and I haven’t touched C or Python much in a while. I’ve built big servers, I’ve built big networks, I know a fair bit about *nix internals. I know my way around tcpdump and wireshark, I can troubleshoot network protocols with the best of ’em. I also had most of the nice-to-haves. (One of the nice-to-haves was “polyglot chops,” listing off several programming languages they use. But it was a nice-to-have, so I wasn’t too worried about its absence.)
Based on the above, I felt pretty darned confident going into a Zoom interview with a hiring manger. (I did the initial HR screen a few days previous.)
Almost immediately I was asked about the programming languages I’ve worked with. Like, within maybe five minutes. We were barely past the small-talk stage when my development experience (of which there is precious little, which is why it’s not on my resume) came up. When I said that I know some basic stuff but haven’t done a great deal of programming in the last several years, and most of what I’ve done was fairly domain-specific, you could almost see her heart break a little.
Turns out, the job would be about 50 percent SRE (the thing they advertised), and 50 percent developer. Which I’m not.
Fortunately, all this intervew meant was a couple hours of wasted time on my part (and on theirs), I don’t desperately need another job at this time. But if they had listed all of their requirements, and been a bit more up-front and accurate about the role, I could have saved everyone involved some time.
If you’re writing a job description, please include the whole thing, not just half of it.