remote work devops jobs?

[Bryan Berry]

This is a somewhat off-topic post for this mailing list, but it is the right audience.

Are there devops/sysadmin opportunities for offsite/remote-working engineers? Chances are small that I will end up in the US or Northern Europe any time soon. I am following my wife's career with a United Nations agency. I have a decent job w/ a big bureaucracy in Rome, but nothing here is cutting edge. I have looked at elance.com and other online job agencies but most sysadmin offerings seem to be $30 usd/hour or less, definitely less than what I get now.

devops colleagues, are there remote working devops opportunities currently available? If not currently, do you expect there to be some in the future? I am not currently looking for a job as I just signed another contract but 6-12 months from now I would really like to work in a more dynamic environment. Also, 4 years from now my wife and I will probably move from Rome to a 3rd world country. At that point I will really need a remote working position.

Regards,

Bryan Berry

Rome, Italy

https://github.com/bryanwb

[Elliot James Murphy]

My employer Canonical hires most of our sysadmins and developers to work remotely, often hiring based on timezone rather than location. Canonical.com should have the current listings. I believe several other very interesting companies do as well, such as Automattic, Percona, Opscode, Couchbase etc.

You will encounter many companies with silly reasons for not hiring remote -avoid them. Go for the companies that embrace remote work and have most of their team distributed - they will be much nicer and have processes that work rather than leaving you out of things.

I made the decision 7 years ago to move to working with and building distributed teams and have loved it. You get to hire talented self motivated people, at the expense of not being able to employ talented people who don't have high levels of self organization/motivation.

If you want to work with cutting edge tools in your next job, set a track record of contributing to (whether with code or documentation) cutting edge tools now. 
-- 

elliot murphy

[Bryan Berry]

Elliot, Ranjib

Thanks for your helpful comments. I will be implementing puppet at my office this fall so hopefully I will have a lot more to show in my github account. I will also take a look at Odesk.

[Nathaniel Eliot]

Let me register a recommendation against the project bidding market websites. My experience with them was that they're great -- if you're an Indian or Romanian firm who can afford to compete on price. American wage expectations will be disappointed by the price expectations of most buyers on Odesk, et. al.

--
Nathaniel Eliot
T9 Productions

[Mukunda Modell]

Hey Bryan,

deviantART is looking for a remote devops engineer!

We have a development team spread out all over the world and steadily growing with well over 30 developers and a few ops personnel.  It's a really great company to work for, drop us a line if you are still looking:

  http://deviantart.theresumator.com/apply/tevH3P/DevOps-Engineer.html

[mastinder singh]

thanks.

--
regards,

Mastinder singh
Uk Number +447624169401
India +918105601518
USA (205) 588-4757
Israel 057 - 9463862
Website: http://mastinder.in

[Patrick Connolly]

Sounds like you're probably past this Bryan, but for anyone else, if there's a company that you're interested in working remotely with, but they're gun-shy about the prospect, it might be an opportunity to carve a space for yourself. You could frame the proposition in such a way that you help them recognize that processes and workflows that work painfully for remote workers, do so because they are weak to begin with. Remote workers, to employ and oft-used phrase, bring the pain forward. So to have the person partially responsible for helping to build better processes and culture -- to have that person as the remote worker, it's probably exactly what they want: The person who can fix the pain-points should be the one experiencing them first-hand :)

That's not to say they wouldn't need a devops engineers on-site as well, but I really feel a remote employee with these sorts of skills can fulfill a much-needed role.

[Brad Knowles]

On Jan 22, 2012, at 5:20 PM, Patrick Connolly wrote:

> Sounds like you're probably past this Bryan, but for anyone else, if there's a company that you're interested in working remotely with, but they're gun-shy about the prospect, it might be an opportunity to carve a space for yourself.

Speaking as the sole DevOps guy working at a small startup here in Austin, I can tell you that the primary value I see for us is that we might be able to hire someone to help us provide round-the-clock coverage for our production systems, once we get to the point where we need that. We're not there today, but we do have plans for growth that could potentially put us there in the near future.

Looking for competent folks who can do remote working is definitely something that I will continue to be thinking about, as we grow our products and services.

--
Brad Knowles <br...@shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>

[mastinder singh]

Please let me know the details

--
regards,

Mastinder singh
Uk Number +447624169401
India +918105601518
USA (205) 588-4757

Israel *057 - 9463862
Website: http://mastinder.in
*

[Bryan Berry]

Patrick, Brad_K, everybody

thanks for the great replies

I have talked w/ a few companies whose staff are 100% remote and the blocking issue so far has been that they require their staff to work w/in a certain range of timezones.

Hopefully something will work out in the future. In the meantime, I have a decent job here in Italy that pays my bills and lets me spend most of my time on Chef.

[Spike Morelli]

Hi everybody,

this is a topic very dear to me as I spent the most of 12 years of my career working remotely as some kind of engineer (pure SA, operations, architect and whatnot) and it pains me to see the industry still struggling with it so much despite some good progress being made.

First of all I'd like to thank Patrick for making a fantastic point about remote workers bringing the pain forward. The whole perspective he offered is golden and merits some serious consideration.

Building on top of that I'd like to address four things that on paper seem obvious and yet in my experience are totally mismanaged.

# You don't hire remote engineers the same way you do with co-located ones

Not everybody can work remotely. Companies generally focus too much on the role when hiring and too little on the individual. This can result in a complete disaster when remote. Frequently people want to work from home, but have either no experience with it or don't fully realise that they are not cut for it. It's important that the hiring process looks closer at the person and ascertain whether or not they are a good fit.

# Once you have one remote person in the team the whole team is remote

I've been first hand through the pain of being the sole remote person in teams of 5 and 10. The dynamics are pre set-up for a co-located team and the results are horrible, the remote guy feels excluded and his productivity is 70% of what it'd normally be and that is reflected in the rest of the team creating first and second class engineers.

# the importance of communication grows tenfold

Communication is king in distributed teams. Even when working in supposedly isolation, like an operations team covering 24x7, there must be structure in place to make sure that knowledge and issues investigation, to mention 2, are shared across teams. Likewise decision making will greatly suffer is there isn't a process for people to follow because you won't be able to get into a room or take advantage of hearsay or water cooler conversations.

I think devops has a fantastic chance to help this situation for two main reason:

* delivering value is the focus

* communication is acknowledged as an important element

The first one helps addressing the biggest concern of all: managers can't see their people working. This comes from our factory days and we're still entrenched in it more than anybody would like, but it's a reality and needs to be faced. A movement that focuses on value will hopefully shift away the attention from hours worked to stuff delivered and help settle the problem. The second ties back to what I was saying re comms, which is normally a problem in engineering groups and devops is doing a lot to fix that.

If anybody would like to further discuss this (also off-list) please do get in touch, I'm constantly doing research on the topic to try and help the team I manage and the business I run which are both fully distributed.

hope this helped,

cheers,

Spike

--

http://www.spikelab.org/

http://twitter.com/spikelab

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/spikemorelli

[Ernest Mueller]

Canonical does completely globally distributed teams and their Juju team specifically is a devops tool.  Their manager is here in Austin and we talked about the challenges of that model.

Ernest

Sent from my iPhone

[Cyril Ledru]

Hi Spike,

Thanks for your feedback. It's very interesting.

Could you expand on your first point ? What makes a person fit for remote work ?

How do you know if you are, is there some skills to acquire if you're not, and how to recognize if someone you want to hire is fit ?

Cheers,

Cyril.

[mastinder singh]

Hi Everybody,

One advantage of remote work is you can save a lot of timing to your traveling time and your availability for same work is more. I also work as remote consultant for some of big companies and as more companies start giving their vpn on mobile platform it is increasingly become more efficient to do stuff.I use to restart servers from my iphone when there was need to do so.

--
regards,

Mastinder singh
Uk Number +447624169401
India +918105601518

USA 1-855-946-2329 / (205) 588-4757

[Ann Marie Fred]

I have a few years of experience with working from home, and several years
of experience with working with cross-site teams. I can chime in with a
few things I think are necessary for a remote worker. A remote worker
needs to be:
Motivated
Independent
Self-managing
Responsible
Good at time management
Excellent at communications (oral and written)
Honest and trustworthy
Good at ignoring distractions
Willing to ask for help if needed

While most of these are disciplines that you can get better at with
practice, some are harder to learn.

Working from home can be great, but it's a special skill, because it's easy
to get distracted with things that need to be done around the house. Also,
there's no one there to see if you're goofing off, so you have to motivate
yourself to focus on the task at hand. It's easier to focus and be
productive if you have specific tasks that are due on a regular (daily)
basis. Scrum helps with this by providing a quick daily checkpoint
meeting.

Ideally, remote workers should be in the same time zone as each other, or
at least close to the same time zone. I've found that working with people
5 hours away (the UK, for example) is workable. You just learn to block
off your mornings for communication and meetings, and do independent work
in the afternoons and evenings. Working with people 7 or more hours away
is painful. You end up losing days of work because you can't find someone
who can help you get past a blocking issue. Perhaps you send an email
describing a problem and asking for help... then the person on the other
end misunderstands something... and now you're into a second lost day. We
work with people in India, but they're actually on a 12-8 PM working
schedule, so we at least have a couple of hours of overlapping time in the
Eastern US. While you *can* call people early in the morning or late in
the evening to keep things moving along, nobody likes to do that on a daily
basis.

One other tip, especially for software engineers, is that it really helps
to bring people into the office for a week or so, once or twice a year.
First of all, face to face communication is high-bandwidth, so you can get
a lot of work done in a short amount of time (planning, design work,
strategy sessions, training, etc.). People tend to trust and respect each
other a little more once they've met in person. They're also more
comfortable asking questions, or asking each other for favors, which means
people are more productive when they get home. Finally, it builds a
stronger team and improves morale.

A year or two ago, multinational development teams were the norm here. But
we're trying to consolidate projects locally as much as we can now. My
current project is probably 75% local and 25% remote.

Ann Marie Fred
Seeing - Mapping - Understanding - Believing - Acting