j e s r u s h . c o m

There are many facets to hiring technical folks, but one important area is the issue of how they stay on top of the new technologies which are coming out at a frightening pace. I used to ask a standard question: Give me an example from past work experience where you learned or discovered a new technology (new at the time) and used it for the organization’s benefit?

But after asking that question many times, I realized it was too narrow. People “accidentally” get exposed to new technologies all the time through friends, school, etc. Maybe they never sought out new technology and just “stumbled” on something. I needed to tease out the real proactive learners from these casual ones.

After some experimentation, I finally nailed it with an incredibly simple question which has been extremely effective over the past year: Technology is changing all the time. What periodicals do you actively read to stay on top of it?

A good technical person who stays on top of their field should be able to rattle off a number of periodicals or e-newsletters related to their expertise. For example a network engineer might mention Technet. A security expert might say Bugtraq or Mark Minasi’s newsletter. A more senior individual might even throw in some strategy, such as CIO Magazine. If their answer seems canned, you can pry further to validate it: Tell me about something you read in that periodical in the past three months?

But here is the best part: People who don’t stay atop their field absolutely punt this question. They’ve got nothing. One candidate told me that he reads the documentation which comes with the software used at his company. Another mentioned a four year old SQL book which she had read a year ago. Many others are surprisingly honest and simply tell you, “I don’t have time to read anything like that.”

This question is a deal-breaker for me. I count on my technical people for innovation, and their capacity for such is drastically reduced when they aren’t following the industry. This has quickly become one of my all time favorite interview questions.

PS–This reminds me of a great management practice: Assign technical periodicals to individuals on your staff, formally give them an hour or two every Friday to read them, and then have them present short “book reports” to the whole team on interesting findings. Most geeks love learning new stuff and get excited about new technology. This is an easy way to keep your team both happy and on the cutting edge.

David Christiansen has a great post over at techdarkside entitled, “What IT Should Learn from GoDaddy.com“. In it, he argues that IT departments should offer pre-spec’d, preconfigured, “cafeteria style” offerings to their internal organization. A la:

• Standalone High-Speed-Production-Server: $16,000
• Standalone Medium-Speed-Production-Server: $11,000
• Virtual Medium-Speed-Development-Server: $6000
• Storage Space: $5000/TB

The idea is that your infrastructure team would go out and spec out these configurations for typical applications, add some overhead (say 15%) to cover cabinet space, UPS, etc., and then offer them to all departments for whatever applications they want to run.

Christiansen argues that departments will be more likely to use these configurations (rather than going through the trouble of spec’ing something custom) because they are readily available buffet style, like a cafeteria.

What I love about this approach is that it clearly places the onus for paying for the gear on the originating department (so the gear doesn’t somehow come out of IT’s budget!) and that it increases visibility into the inner costs and workings of the IT hairball. This is a great way to take your users to the next level in understanding their infrastructure needs.

A story: I was once a team member on a project to move an office from one location to another. Even though there wasn’t enough equipment and people to fill all of the available office space in the new location, the project manager insisted on taking advantage of management’s good will and the available resources to build out the unused space.

Several months after the move, employees began complaining about high noise levels. It was determined that the cubicles were too noisy because the ceiling was highly reflective, the cubicle walls were short, and the cubicles were too close together. All of the cubicles office wide—including all of the unused build out—had to be replaced with taller walls and moved farther apart. Fixing the unused build out added about 35% additional cost to the change.

This was a classic case of “overbuilding,” the tendency to buck rolling wave planning and build things now which aren’t needed until much later. You see this all the time in IT Infrastructure projects. A small business learns that a bigger competitor has a high-availability SAN. Because that little business might someday have hundreds or thousands of customers and because they want to “keep up” and look “big,” they spend big money on their own SAN.

Next thing you know, a tiny IT staff has to manage a super-complex system in which they are using 10% of the functionality. Three years later, when better, simpler, faster technology rolls out, they’re stuck with the existing system.

How do you avoid the overbuild mess? By taking the building-block-approach to infrastructure design. A topic for another post…