November 21, 2003 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Wanted: a software engineer with an MBA, and at least five years experience clustering Sun Solaris servers in groups of 12. Communication skills a must: at least three newspaper article bylines required. Sales experience preferable. No phone calls or snail mail, please.
Highly specialized skill combinations are the new mantra at Web hosting companies fishing for job candidates in today's applicant pool - the largest in years. As a result, companies are searching for candidates that require little training to fit specialized niches ranging from ongoing R&D to project-based tasks.
These "new jobs" call for a sales force with technical degrees, software engineers that can double as customer support personnel, and engineers with Hollywood smiles who can be dropped off at customer offices to pitch in with high-end consulting jobs. Even though hosting typically attracts engineers of different stripes, the new requirements companies are levying on candidates range from managerial and communication skills to having "intellectual curiosity." In practical terms, this means companies are looking at hundreds of candidates before picking one.
The two Silicon Valley engineering slots that XO Communications (XO.com) has open at the moment have attracted 213 and 75 resumes, respectively, only a few days after being posted. XO has set up an e-mail committee to sift through applications and aid the charged with hiring for the positions.
"That shows how bad the unemployment really is in the Silicon Valley," says David Schairer, XO vice president of software engineering.
Macroeconomic considerations aside, having the benefit of choosing from hundreds of candidates is a positive for hosting companies that have been involved in brutal competition for years. With many firms running a lean operation, most are looking to have employees that can perform several tasks at once, or have a combination of skills that would support company's competitive advantage.
For instance, security-focused Web hosting firm ServerVault (ServerVault.com) hires only level 2 personnel (NOC experience plus an engineering degree) with adequate security certification, first-hand knowledge of major hosting platforms like Solaris, and experience with specific projects like site migration. ServerVault is looking for skills that would allow it to train personnel capable of setting up perimeter firewalls and secure Solaris systems as routinely as other companies configure dedicated servers. When you look at available applicants though this lens, it appears almost logical to interview hundreds of candidates to fill a single position.
"When you get selective and start looking for experience with specific projects the range of options narrows considerably," says Ike Brenner, senior vice president at ServerVault.
The situation is amplified by the fact that today's hosting industry has developed an appetite for a whole spectrum of jobs requiring professional cross training.
The Sales Engineer
As one of the very first Web hosts to develop virtual hosting and back end automation systems, XO Communications' production environment predates systems like Ensim and SWsoft by a good five years. But this doesn't make it antiquated; rather, it makes it entirely proprietary and the subject of ongoing R&D that can sometimes beat vendors that make off the shelf commercial software to the punch.
The candidates for XO's open Silicon Valley engineering positions come before the eyes of Schairer himself, whose name is on XO's patent that seals the firm's innovations in the arena of virtualization. The candidates considered for the job have to be much more than engineers with an advanced knowledge of Windows. They not only need to be able to write Windows applications, but have to be capable of making changes on the OS level, both in theory and in real operational environments that run both off the shelf products and code developed in-house.
But even fitting these criteria is not enough. The candidates have to be able to work in an environment where no professional is ever considered fully trained, and where intellectual curiosity is a requirement. As a result, XO routinely "mixes things up," says Barbara Branaman, XO's director of Web hosting. Windows engineers are sometimes sent to learn Solaris, and vice-versa, so that the two understood each other's problems more fully.
The big undercurrent at XO is that all members of the team are savvy enough to help XO interface with the customer. In fact, XO was one of the first hosting companies to bring a Silicon Valley staple - a sales engineer position - into the industry. XO execs say some of the services the company sells have evolved to be so complex that customers want expert answers from salespeople who are notorious for having a general understanding of technologies and underlying processes, but little else. Hence the solution - have people with engineering background do sales. Other Web hosts find they have to be walking the same path to keep up with evolution of services and technologies supporting them.
Tech to Business Translators
Rackspace Managed Hosting (Rackspace.com) is also one of the Web hosts that added the position of sales engineer - or "technical sales manager" - to the list of positions the company fills. Part of the reasoning behind this is because the company is actively driving down the cost of technology and services. Lower prices on services like dedicated hosting are causing small and mid-size businesses to start buying services designed with savvy Fortune 500 buyers in mind. Selling to this new clientele requires a lot of hand holding, and technical sales managers are expected to do just that.
Rackspace believes a sales engineer slot is just one of many new job profiles that will become more prevalent in the years to come. Web hosts are no longer retrofitting enterprise-oriented products for new multi-client environments, and are using off the shelf products instead, says Rackspace vice president of engineering Paul Froutan.
As a result, the focus of most jobs is making these off the shelf products work in existing environments, and combining these products with customer business goals. More often than not, customers are not keeping up with these new products and need help navigating new services based on them. In other words, a sale is no longer just a sale - it is a miniature consulting project and people doing this job have to be adequately prepared.
"To answer questions like this we need a business person with a good technical background or a technical person that had a lot of business experience, a 'translator' of sorts," says Froutan.
Rackspace goes to extremes to get this kind of talent by fundamentally looking for a staff with adequate management and communication skills, paying less attention to technical communication skills. The assumption is that an articulate person with a technical background and a business sense can catch up on particular business skills without much trouble. "Technical knowledge comes after a person," Froutan says. Though in today's job market, it's best to be armed with both - and a whole lot more.
