“Please take this job.”
I sent that through Gmail chat to somebody who had worked with me at Beatport. I was hiring an infrastructure engineer for Reality Check and did not want to interview any more strangers.
The role mattered. We needed somebody who understood Fedora packaging, Puppet, Cobbler, automation, and enough programming to help us run the infrastructure from what I called a control tower.
It was also the person who would become my go-to operator. I wanted somebody I trusted.
Hiring in New York was competitive and slow. Every company seemed to be looking for the same people. Reality Check was small, the role needed to be local, and I did not want to wait months before tackling the systems work already in front of us.
My old Beatport team was the obvious place to look. We had operated a fast-growing ecommerce platform with a small infrastructure group. I knew who could work through an ugly incident, who would automate the repetitive parts, and who could be honest when a plan was bad.
The person on the other side of the chat understood why I was asking. He had worked for me before. He also understood why the position could not be remote. This was still an era when much of the work required direct access to racks, switches, storage, and the people running the data center.
I did not try to make the pitch polished. I told him I liked hiring people I liked, reminded him how long it had taken to find the right people at Beatport, and asked him to come build the next version with me.
There was a practical selfishness to it. A trusted hire would make Reality Check better. It would also let me stop being the only person holding every infrastructure question.
The chat started with a joke. The need behind it was real.
Please take the job.