Ask HN: Is it possible to hire/rent sysadmins on retainer? If so, where? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it possible to hire/rent sysadmins on retainer? If so, where?

5 pointstypicalrunt7 comments

I've seen designers and programmers getting contract gigs, but I haven't ever seen sysadmins get the same kind of small-job contracts. Am I not looking in the right places? Or is this an untapped market?

For the people in early startups here, do you hire a sysadmin full-time, self-learn (I am in this camp), or keep them on in a retainer or as-needed contract?

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What I'd like to have is some kind of "sysadmin call center". I probably wouldn't feel comfortable hiring an admin to set up my app infrastructure and then don't keep him permanently. This is bad enough with code, but I'd find it hard that any documentation left behind will include all the minor details and setup option he has done to make everything work just fine (the equivalent of "use the source" would be "diff with a default system")…

But for simple maintenance or low-skill/time problem management I could easily imagine outsourcing that. Restarting your services, deleting some temp files if the file system is full, maybe doing an occasional upgrade of some packages etc.

Anything that someone with a basic grasp of Unix could probably do. Nothing major, i.e. if I have problem with the latency of my NoSQL replication system, he wouldn't be able to help me. But especially for single founders (or being the single guy at that technical level in a small team) it would be a big boon. You can go to that party, without worrying that you'd have to troubleshoot a non-working system wherever you are, in whatever state you are.

Not a panacea, but a bit more ease of mind. And it might work out for the admins, too. Potentially you can cover a lot of clients, as most of the time there won't be a problem and you're just waiting for one. Granted, according to Murphy's Law, you'll then get 17 calls at the same time, which is why I'd want this to be a team operation, not a single guy who sleeps next to his telephone and terminal

I used to spend a lot of time at www.webhostingtalk.com and this would come up every now and again. There are quite a few companies who do this. The good thing about the business is that it seems to be heavily based on word of month. I remember a friend was looking for someone and I referred him to a place that kept being mentioned with comments like "Steve from XYZ is really good"

That's actually an issue I worry about. Sort of like how everyone's plumber is the best. I could be wrong but there's no good way to tell if a sysadmin is good. The sysadmins I know are the types where, if they're doing their job properly, you don't even know they are there or anything happened.

Self-learning has worked well for me so far. Within reasonable time, you should be able to do most typical tasks (i.e. within the context of Linux, do things like install new packages from a repo or from source, configure Apache/Nginx/etc., and so on.)

Some things are tougher IMO, like setting up sendmail/e-mail related configuration in general, to make sure your e-mails don't bounce. But that brings me to another point that is valid in 2011 -- fortunately you can "outsource" many tasks to cloud service providers such as Amazon. Definitely know what goes on under the hood, but don't spend precious time maintaining the infrastructure yourself.

If you do hit a point when for some reason the "cloud" solution is too pricy or doesn't scale to your needs, you'll likely be having other (good) problems. In other words, don't worry about that until you're successful, and then hire help if so need be.

There was a post recently about starting up "rent a sysadmin." The problem is two-fold. How would you vet them apriori? After a while they could get reputation I guess but you're handing over everything to the sysadmin.

The second is that IMHO a good sysadmin is worth their weight in gold. So what would the caliber of the rent-a-sysadmin be given the short term and relatively "low pay."

Depending on where you are there may be roving sysadmins already. I'm in the SFBA and have supported myself in "lean times" (ahem between jobs) by sysadmin consulting.

You can try ODesk.com Choose those who have at least 1000 hours and 4.8 raiting and pay them really well (compared to what they already have, of course)

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