[Jobposts] I'm hiring consultants; albeit strangely...

[Corey Quinn]

Howdy.

Let me start by saying I'm not a recruiter; I lost a bet to one and had to give up a piece of my soul. ;-)

I work for a consulting company called Taos. We're roughly 500 people (~400 of those are technical), with offices in San Jose, San Francisco, and Boise. We're an infrastructure services shop-- if it could possibly fit under the umbrella of systems administration / DevOps / network administration / janitorial services, we probably do it, and we're looking to expand our consultant pool.

Some common questions:

Where's the job? Well, we're historically focused on the San Francisco bay area, but we've been in business for 25 years and have done projects pretty much everywhere-- so it depends. Some of us are road warriors (by choice!), others of us are remote, and still others relocate to the bay area. As I'm fond of saying, "Everything is negotiable;" location isn't going to be a stupendous barrier here.

What's the job description? It depends on you; we run the gamut from helpdesk roles, to "I've been doing helpdesk roles for a year and I want to try my hand at sysadmin work" to "I've been a network engineer for a decade" to "I just wrote an O'Reilly book and want to do something else." I will say that we're consultants in the truest sense of the word-- we're not a contracting body shop, we offer significant internal training opportunities (I taught a class earlier this year titled "The Screaming Horrors of Git"), and we establish long-running relationships with our consultants and our clients.

Everyone's hiring, why should I care about this? We put a crapton of work into our technical interview; it's based not upon some arbitrary idea of what a sysadmin "should" know, but is instead derived from what our clients are actually asking for. In other words, it's a great yardstick to see how your current skillset matches up against what the industry is doing. It never hurts to have a conversation-- if nothing else, it makes a valuable datapoint for you to use at your next review.

What's it pay? As always, "it depends," but I will hi-light one thing that took me aback when I came aboard. A 40 hour workweek is expected-- and that's it. We're salaried, but in the event you wind up working more than 40 hours a week, starting at hour 41 you get paid what your hourly rate would be, plus 13%. Put slightly differently "my client didn't calculate out their deadlines properly and I pulled a 60 hour week this week, so this week's paycheck is 156.5% of what it usually is." 

One other perk: There's (usually) no expectation that you're on-call. In the event that the client requests it and you're open to it, you'll be paid a weekly retainer as well; some people love this, but I've always said "no thanks;" I don't wake gracefully anymore.

If any of this sounds at all appealing, shoot me a copy of your resume-- I'll give you feedback on it if you'd like. And if any of you are going to be at Texas LinuxFest in Austin in a couple of weeks, come see my talk and say hello!

-- 
Corey Quinn
Senior Consultant, Taos