
Americans should hire remote sysadmins. - semanticist
http://semantici.st/archives/277:americans-should-hire-remote-sysadmins
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unreal37
I am tempted to write a rebuttal for this. "Why hiring a remote sysadmin is a
really bad idea." It would be easy to counter most of the arguments he is
making.

The big thing for me is not the time difference per se, but the lack of
integration with the business objectives and the other team members. It's the
fact that the operations/infrastructure/scaling side is critical to the
success of most startups (ie. Twitter).

If a good ops guy knows he needs 4 extra large instances of some cloud host,
spread across different regions, he needs to work with the developers to make
sure they are developing their software correctly for the architecture. And
monitor the growth of the application, usage, etc to ensure it scales
correctly.

I would think the majority of startups would want their sysadmin to be tightly
integrated into the business and not just "some guy" who keeps the rented
cloud servers running.

~~~
semanticist
My experience has been that the majority of startups don't hire a sysadmin at
all, and instead rely on their developers to handle everything. Especially at
the early stages when they're not rolling in magic VC cash, it's hard to
justify an extra salary for someone who isn't primarily creating
features/adding obvious visible-to-end-users value.

My main point is that it's possible to get a specialist for less than a
Valley-focussed startup might realise, not that you should just hire 'some
guy' who is detached from your team. If your remote workers aren't integrated
into your business then you're doing it wrong (and don't think that you
absolutely need everyone in the same room: look at GitHub, who do superb work
with a distributed team).

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MrEnigma
I work with a team that's distributed across the world. Most of us are in the
US (split across the time zones), but a few in europe, and a few elsewhere as
well.

I've found it's not all that big of a deal, much less than I thought it would
be. However if there are issues/questions that arise you have to handle them
fast, as your overlap in a day is just a few hours if that.

If the company has a hard time getting requirements out there, or the employee
has an issue with getting 'stuck/blocked' all the time, then it's going to be
a much bigger deal.

