APM: [Fwd: (Google) Sr. Linux Cluster System Admin. & Sr. Software Engineer/Unix System & Network Administrator (2 Job Openings)]

[Bob Apthorpe]

Hi,

Dzuy Nguyen wrote:
> It would be very difficult to be a sys admin that lives thousands of
> miles away from
> the servers.  Very interesting jobs, though.  It would be ideal if
> google had built an
> op center here.

It's not difficult. I supported servers in California and Japan, and
clients in London, Sydney, Tokyo, Rome, Seattle, and Redwood City all
from Austin. Rarely should a sysadmin need to physically touch a
machine; usually that job is reserved for junior staff. In Google's
case, they mostly just reboot ill-behaving machines without diagnosing
them and send crews through the racks on a weekly basis to reap dead
hardware and add new machines to the clusters. A few of my coworkers
from Excite got jobs there after Excite died from the cancer of AT&T;
Google has a very small sysadmin staff compared to the number of
machines thay have deployed, at least as of a year or so ago.

> Robert Haig wrote:
> 
>> I like how they now add "relocation is a must"
>>
>> twice this guy has contacted me about this position, and twice I've
>> told him that hell would freeze over before I lived in california, but
>> he could pay me the Mountain View salary, I'd live in Austin, and fly
>> myself to meetings
>> once a week.
>>
>> guess they've gotten a lot of those responses.

That's what I told them so they've heard it at least twice... :)

-- Bob