[grifferz]

I interviewed for a non-customer-facing ops position at Rackspace UK in 2006 and one stage was them handing me a pack of coloured pencils and blank paper and telling me to draw what my idea of "fanatical support" looked like.

[hyperliner]

If you want a job at Rackspace, a huge proportion of your result, assuming you are ok competent, would be to completely embody FANATICAL SUPPORT, for whatever role you are doing, I don't care if it is technical or product or marketing or sales or legal or operations.

Basically, what it means is that you will do WHATEVER IT TAKES to satisfy the needs of WHOEVER happens to be your customer. Most times "your customer" is a real customer, but you also have internal "customers" (for example, the legal team's customers are mostly internal).

Look at this page and internalize it.

https://www.rackspace.com/talent/culture/

A lot of the "culture" component tends to also be kind of cheesy, but I think that it is a sub-thread of Rackspace that is not necessarily part of the culture but perpetuated by HR. I have been told that during their "onboarding week" (yeah, it can take 3 days for the onboarding), people are encouraged to be silly and wear silly hats. Not everybody is up for that, but many are.

So for you, being in an ops position, be able to know what that is. They are not asking you to draw a Picasso. They are gauging whether you know what FANATICAL SUPPORT means for your role and whether you have even thought about it.

[josephjrobison]

Not so sure how FANATICAL SUPPORT applies to "satisfy the needs of WHOEVER happens to be your customer". I have a client with a $2k a month hosting bill with Rackspace. Which is small for big companies or startup tech companies, but a lot for a small non-tech business.

There have been occasions where we've received FANATICAL SUPPORT from individual techs, but mostly we're stonewalled by being on an infrastructure plan that doesn't allow for their FANATICAL SUPPORT it appears.

[autotune]

They have a page specifically noting what they support:

https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/cloud-servers-with-mana...

Speaking as an ex-Racker, yeah, if your infrastructure isn't listed on that page and you have something like Tomcat running or Cassandra, or Headless VirtualBox an dedicated box, it was best effort. If you want externalized customized support for that client outside the standard tech stack supported by Rackspace, you need to bring in an external MSP, consultancy, or FTE willing to take on your tech stack and provide an SLA, and pay for it.

[devnull42]

The Infrastructure plans seriously limits support techs from helping. They wont be able to see running configs or logfiles. They can't login to your box at all you are feel around in the dark and playing ticket ping pong until you get the info you need to even make an educated guess as to the issue even then you cant test the fix.

[gaius]

I'd draw a bottle of Kool-aid.

[hyperliner]

Seems your job is HR! Good one!

Take it to the next level: do people come to you to get their Kool-Aid, or do you take it to them? If you take it to them, then that is more fanatical.

[emodendroket]

> Look at this page and internalize it.

No, thanks.

[ohitsdom]

Wow. What was your response?