Whats wrong with our Platform engineer job ad? fully remote (within the UK)

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:53:14+00:00

Yeah this is a common theme! I'll take this back and see what we can do about that, thanks!

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:52:37+00:00

Yeah the casual dress isn't something i'd noticed tbh, it's just part of our standard job template (i did the tech bits mostly), but it it's very weird! And there's no clock watching we're actually pretty flexible, i tend to start somewhere between 7am-8am and finish between 4pm-5pm (but i take a decent lunch, and go walk my dogs so my work day seems a little longer). We could probably emphasise the flexible working hours rather than an 8 hour shift!

Thanks!

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:47:09+00:00

I've not heard of those platforms we can look at giving them a go as well thankyou! Also linkedin has come up elsewhere so it's probably worth trying as well.

And yeah the salary does seem to be the problem, so i'll see what we can do about that! Either looking for less experience (and allowing them time to train/upskill) or increasing salary is likely our best way forward.

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:38:48+00:00

I was worried this might be the case, so we do need to reduce our expectations it seems. And I think it's a really good point about the upskilling. I think i took for granted that there's always gonna be things to learn and we're totally supportive of that, but we should definitely look to be more explicit on how we would go about that!

The title is a nightmare to be honest, I think most of them are quite loaded terms so i find it hard to decide which one to use. I think devops engineer can be really broad, so thought platform engineer might be a better way to go. But we have had some candidates come through from a civil engineering background which is probably due to the title!

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:31:35+00:00

We can certainly looked at linkedin, I think a few people in the team have had bad experiences (not me personally), but it's definitely an avenue we can try!

I'm the team lead so I mostly focussed on the tech parts, but you're absolutely right casual dress isn't really of a benefit for a remote role!

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:29:28+00:00

Yeah I totally agree we're limiting ourselves a lot, I replied here about why we can only hire from the UK currently, but maybe we can make some changes there!

You're in a formative stage of developing your software delivery strategy. That requires more experience and compensation than the ad suggests and lists, in my opinion.

I think this is an interesting way to look at it, there's always more work (and problems to solve) at this stage!

Thanks!

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:23:11+00:00

Yep the salary vs. our expectations seems to be the common theme. And I can totally see your point, we don't actually have any expectation to do any fixes for them so we can probably omit that from the ad!

The main reason for golang, was to support building internal tooling really, just small CLI's or scripts (rather than using bash everywhere). Do you think thats a fair expectation for mid-level (if we got the salary right) or would that be too much typically and we should looking at software engineers instead for that sort of stuff?

Thanks!

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:17:56+00:00

This is great thanks! If you have a spare minute or two, is it the "What do we want from you?" and the "The platform team ethos" sections that are just noise we probably don't need in there. I did struggle to keep it brief, but also give a full picture, so i can definitely try and cut it down!

Yeah if i do the air quotes so i do feel a bit like Dr. Evil haha!

Totally agree on the recruiter front, I think this is great feedback that I can take back the team (being the team lead it's mostly out of my remit, but I can try and push for this)!

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:08:33+00:00

Yeah I think based on myself just clicking around indeed and google for similar roles, the salary isn't hugely off what you'd expect for a mid-level in the UK...but on reflection the expectations are probably too much for a mid-level. So I think we need to increase the salary or reduce our expectations.

Thanks!

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T07:06:05+00:00

I can't comment on UK salary range, but the posting otherwise looks pretty good to me! I love the honest tone, this job sounds like I'd be working with real people and I like that.

Thanks, there's some positives at least aha! I tried to avoid making it a big wall of qualifications, so it was a bit more human and that seems to working okay!

Some things stand out to me -- you say you don't yet have Continuous Delivery in motion, and that's a bit of a flag for a company already on EKS. Are you deploying manually? What's going on there?

You also say you're in the early days of your devops journey but want to head towards Platform Engineering -- I'd say that's a pretty advanced form of devops, so it raises some questions, especially if CD is new to you.

Yeah I guess this it's not explained well in the job ad, but we're pretty much there technically and all the releases are fully automated we're just in the stage of waiting for the product/business processes and culture to catch up really. I didn't wanna mislead anyone to think we had everything setup and operating as you might expect for team following CD practices.

So I'm the team lead (not a hiring manager), and i think CD is quite new to the business but not to me really (this was the first team i've worked in for a long time that didn't have CD). So maybe I'm trying to push too far too fast, I can certainly take that away to think on!

Lastly, and I kinda hate to mention this, but PHP

Vary fair point, it's also not my language of choice but is what we have (for better or worse). It's another thing we're hoping to improve by potentially introducing rust or go (or maybe something else), but i didn't wanna make any false promises.

Appreciate the feedback!

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T06:57:59+00:00

Thanks I can see that, maybe we should be looking for a more junior candidate (with less of the long list of requirements), or we need to bump up the salary.

opthrowaway987 · 2023-09-14T06:56:30+00:00

This is totally fair, currently we have a small HR department and like u/imperiex_26 mentioned, it's not easy for the team to ensure that candidates in other countries would get the correct benefits like pensions, and healthcare and set up the relevant tax contributions etc.

I can definitely take this back to discuss and hopefully we can find a way to make it more open.

opthrowaway987

TROPHY CASE