Building World Class Ops Teams
summary
Bootstraps an ops team only when facing hard problems like extreme reliability or rapid growth, not just to offload boring work; examples include Instagram with zero ops people and eight engineers still scaling to acquisition, and Parse building a mobile backend hosting half a million mobile apps. Practical tooling cited: AWS, Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, Cassandra, Redis. Hire T‑shaped engineers, hire for strengths not lack of weaknesses, expect 3x–10x growth and design for 10x scaling rather than unicorn resumes.
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chapters (28)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:40Bootstrapping enough steam
- 2:31Bootstrapping Teams
- 2:48Three Parts
- 3:20Do You Need an Ops Team
- 4:05Startup AntiPattern
- 4:47Ops Team
- 5:01Operations Engineering
- 6:31Hard Operational Problems
- 10:19Recruiting and Hiring
- 11:10The Perfect Engineer
- 12:00Unicorns
- 13:34Tshaped Engineer
- 14:37Great Ops Engineers
- 17:54Things that do not predict Great Ops Engineers
- 21:21Hiring Process
- 21:58Ask Questions
- 22:55Technical Leadership
- 24:29Good Questions
- 25:42Culture Questions
- 26:13References
- 26:32Hiring
- 26:46Ops Engineers
- 27:17How to Spot Bad Ops Engineers
- 27:34How to Lose Good People
- 28:13Treating Your People Well
- 29:13Dont Praise Harmful Things
- 30:05Start Up or Next
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