[frisco]

Hey! Founder of Transcriptic here. This is exactly what we are. We're growing quickly and have customers at over a dozen academic institutions now. One of our key issues right now is that biologists aren't programmers and so we're doing a lot of hand-holding - we'd get really excited about someone building higher level tools (Heroku to our AWS) on top of us for specific domains that you know better than we do.

If anyone in this thread thinks this is an interesting topic I'm easy to reach at [e-mail].

[cagenut]

Hi Max, I took a look at your jobs page and my heart sank at this: https://jobs.lever.co/transcriptic/e1cfcb93-05d8-4026-8f70-3...

The first two bullet points there are like the two biggest red flags possible in an ops job post. It reads as a development team that has built a fragile and unreliable system and is looking for a superman to dump it on.

It will matter much more if your VP of Engineering position can capacity plan than it will matter if your operations position can code. No amount of ops rockstars can fight a (larger) dev team that won't design with real world workload capacity and reliability as not just a concern but a focus.

[frisco]

Hey, sorry that it came across that way. The ops position is definitely not about looking for a superman to dump a buggy system on. Issues are root-caused and it's a point of culture that we don't see the same bug twice.

Another Transcriptic just Slacked everyone your comment here which has prompted a discussion about what we're really looking for in an "ops" person. The "exceptional coding skills" bullet is in almost all of our engineering job posting, and we thought such skills would apply to really good "devops" people, too; maybe this is wrong and asking for the wrong skill set. (The SREs I know at Google are all really good developers.)

Being an "on-call position" is a side effect of our volume and the fact that cells don't stop dividing at 8pm. Depending on when projects get started we often end up running reactions all the time, and so yes there is a (metaphorical) pager involved. Even minor failures here are very time sensitive due to the biological nature, and lost samples can be extremely costly (and devastating to our reputation with customers). I think this ops role is more about setting up the processes rather than being the only person (people) to respond to issues.

We'll be reflecting on that job description and update the posting.

[cagenut]

Cool thanks for taking the feedback. And careful with the "because google" line of reasoning, whats right for them is very often not right for non-drowning-in-cash/monopoly-holders.