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by alexpotato 199 days ago
We use Sad Servers for evaluating candidates for DevOps/SRE roles and it's phenomenal.

Feedback from candidates is that they find it a bit stressful during the actual interview but love the approach once it's completed.

The interview option also makes it trivial to just send to a candidate via Zoom chat, ask them to share their screen and "just works".

Happy to answer questions folks may have about how we use it.
1 comments
zenoprax 199 days ago
This is heartening - I'm about to start with the daily challenges today and document my experience and that sort of thing.

Any other suggestions? I have sysadmin experience as a homelabber and at work with a small company as a "tech lead" but have not yet had the chance to do it full time in a larger company. Currently focused on back-filling knowledge gaps and adding certs to support my existing experience.

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alexpotato 199 days ago
Sad Servers is great for trying out how to fix scenarios that you would probably run into while working in the real world.

If you are looking into more of the "people" side of things, I would HIGHLY recommend Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss [0]. A big part of being a team lead and/or working at a larger firm is understanding where people are coming from and then convincing them that your solution is "win/win". The book is great at highlighting multiple different tactics to do that.

Turn the Ship Around [1] is also great at giving examples of how to "change organizations in place". If you end up at larger firms, there will be a LOT of legacy infra and processes that you may want to improve. Marquet gives excellent examples of how to change things WHILE ALSO getting buy in from the team.

0 - https://amzn.to/48dBSn2

1 - https://amzn.to/4pfL2Wb

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zenoprax 199 days ago
I actually read "Never Split the Difference" a couple years ago! Initially just to prepare for a salary negotiation but I found it to be very useful in many other ways. Your second recommendation is also appropriate: I had a ton of latitude to build and configure whatever hardware was needed to solve $BUSINESS-PROBLEM (which was often very exciting) but it was done in a bit of a vacuum without any mentorship. Adapting to a more rigorous/larger/slower working environment is exactly what I need to do.

Great suggestions and thanks for taking the time to respond :)

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