blog.sudosu.net » Dakim

Worst. Cover. Letter. Ever.

schof — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:36:13 +0000

This used to contain the text (with names and e-mails taken out) of a cover letter I received from someone applying for a job. The letter was a masterpiece, insulting (either by assertion or implication) almost everyone at the company.

Despite the over-the-top nature of the letter, posting it here and picking on it started to seem more and more like kicking someone when he’s down. There was no larger message, no lesson to learn from the letter — just me making fun of someone who made an asshole of himself.

I deleted it. I don’t want to be that guy.

An Epiphany, and My Technical Goals

schof — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:48:06 +0000

First, the epiphany — despite all the fires, and multiple top priorities, and projects, and all the other fireballs of stress that scream over my desk — there is nothing I can do for Dakim that’s more important than hiring. Over the next two years, I’m probably going to add significant headcount to my department — and nothing is more important than making sure I have the right people when I need them. (With strong emphasis on RIGHT. We’re looking for rockstars.)

I need to start going to conventions, user group meetings, etc. — immediately I’m going to start attending the Los Angeles Linux User Group meetings and the local Python SIG. I’m not sure what else I’m going to do, but it’s becoming obvious that I don’t scale — that the long-term solution is NOT for me to increase my skills, as I’ve been doing, but to hire people who have the skills.

That said, in the short term, it’s clear that there’s three technical areas where I must improve my skills:

I need to be a world-class guru in apt-based package management.
I need to greatly improve my skills at low-level TCP/IP issues — packet captures, diagnosis of networking problems, etc.
I need to greatly improve my skills at dealing the Linux kernel, on all levels — compiling, kernel options, loadable modules & drivers, etc.

I guess it’s good to have a clear vision of where I need to go. Now I need to get there.

Whew — A Five-Hour, Four-Way Support Call Gets Closed

schof — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 01:10:40 +0000

One of Dakim’s [m]Power devices (located at a client site) wasn’t communicating with our servers correctly, and it took five hours and a bunch of people to correctly diagnose the problem.

On the call we had a member of the client’s IT staff (at the corporate office), a member of Dakim’s support staff (on-site at the client location, which is not the corporate office), myself, and two different members of Secure Computing’s Sidewinder support team. (The first one’s shift ended, and he transferred us to a different tech.)

Let me say first off that I was TREMENDOUSLY impressed with Sidewinder’s support. (I hadn’t been familiar with their products before this.) Both techs were ninjas, and we started speaking with them after about 30 seconds in the hold queue.

After we’d been on the call for a while, we were able to rule out Sidewinder as a part of the problem, and the Sidewinder tech got off the call — and a short while later, we ruled out Dakim’s [m]Power and Dakim’s servers as part of the problem — it was a problem with the client’s network config. We stayed on the phone with them and on-site, troubleshooting until we were able to diagnose the issue and tell the client exactly where the problem was.

This was absolutely a money-loser for Dakim, and economically a bad decision — between the remote tech and myself and drive time, this cost Dakim between 12 and 14 person-hours, for a problem that turned out not be our responsibility at all — but I really like working for a company that provides that kind of customer service. There wasn’t anybody looking at us and tapping their watches — from the CEO down we know the costs of this kind of support, and we still want to provide it. I feel good about that.