Americans should hire remote sysadmins. | Hacker News Reader

Americans should hire remote sysadmins.

semantici.st

9 pointssemanticist3 comments

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.

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).

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.

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