Your First Hire Should be a Sysadmin

Sysadmins are what you bring in once you&#x27;ve grown enough that operational issues detract from development rather than add to it. A sysadmin should absolutely not be your first hire. At most a consult with an engineer in the early days to get you started. This would help if your coders are used to handing off deployment to someone else. Bluntly, if you completely lack ops knowledge, buy an hour block from an ops specialist that can get you over the rough patches.<p>My concern with a sysadmin first is that you&#x27;ll want your early development very tight with your production systems. A sysadmin is the last thing you&#x27;ll need while doing fast iterations on an MVP. In the early days your need for feedback is high and your operational issues are low. After some significant growth your ops needs will be high, and the feedback value of those issues will become lower (more repetitive less new information). This is where you bring in a sysadmin to manage&#x2F;automate the repetitive and filter some of the ops issues into actionable information for the development team.<p>Edit: Ops guy for over a decade btw.

I could not disagree with this more.<p>Focus on building your business and your product, not devops infrastructure. Unless your business is devops infrastructure.<p>Your initial technology stack should allow you to deploy code seemlessly from day 1. This is why Heroku is a great start for early startups, despite the drawbacks.

No, a full-time sysadmin is dumb idea for first hire. Your first deployment is not going to be complex and there will be a lot of moving parts. If you dev team can&#x27;t understand deployment I&#x27;m not sure what your expecting your first hire sysadmin to do.<p>Especially when services like heroku and take alot of the heavy lifting of the start ups hands, initially anyway.

I don&#x27;t think you should hire a sysadmin until you have a larger set of developers. Still, I think there&#x27;s a good point here: you should think about deployment early on. Having things automated will allow your early team to spend more time writing features and less time fighting fires and hacking production configurations.

We are a small 5 programmer company, and we implemented a couple of ansible scripts to deploy our applications a 2-3 month project.<p>For us, at least, a full-time sysadmin is overkill, and I would expect any decent programmer to be able to implement this himself as part of his basic skill set, or to be able to learn it quickly.

I imagine it depends on your focus. Want to pay someone else to do your sysadmin for you and take advantage of the economies of scale - use a PaaS provider and makes plans for when you outgrow it.<p>Want your developers spending time debugging CM scripts and install quirks? &quot;Full stack&quot; developers it is.<p>Want developers developing, and your application doesn&#x27;t fit into a PaaS architecture? You absolutely need to hire a sysadmin.

Your first hire should be the person who fills in the missing gaps in your product.<p>For example, good product, code is done, bad design =&gt; hire designer.

I&#x27;m also going to have to disagree with this one. There are plenty of frameworks (Ruby on Rails) and companies (Engine Yard, Heroku) that take care of these issues for you on a time-share basis (ie. 20 companies use them, they hire 5 sysadmins). I would say if you&#x27;re not spending 7 figures on server costs a year you absolutely do not need a personal sysadmin.

I really disagree with this. For your first hire, a full time sysadmin who cannot work on developing the product itself is just as useless as hiring a developer who cannot ship the code.<p>I think what this article is trying to get at is that your fire hire should be a full-stack engineer who can also play the DevOps role when needed.

Why was the title changed from &quot;Should&quot; to &quot;Could&quot;?<p>While I don&#x27;t agree with the author&#x27;s argument, he&#x27;s at least making a specific point.<p>&quot;Could&quot;, on the other hand, reduces it to being meaningless. Your First Hire <i>Could</i> Be a Weirkeeper. Or a milliner. Or a janitor. Or, you know, <i>anything</i>.

&gt;<i>Your First Hire Should be a Sysadmin</i> (an imperative and definitive statement)<p>Written by a Sysadmin....<p>He goes on to say how he built infrastructure and how it benefited the company but... He was far from the first hire at Crowdtilt - which invalidates the whole premise. why compromise the whole integrity of the article with a false premise and untrue suggestion.