I have the experience, but not the energy nor passion as I am almost burned out already. I hope you find some awesome people.
If it was a paying gig would you consider it? 5 to 10 hours a week, let's say 10. What kind of salary would you expect?
Just curious.
I also have the desired skill set and experience far surpassing what they’re asking for but not the time or energy to do this since my work already demands 60+ hours a week and on-call from me. Yes I’m American.
To answer your pay question; around 4-500 would be the average pay for 10 hours this position in the working world. Since the fediverse instances have next to zero reliable income (donations can’t be counted as reliable) I understand this is a difficult if not impossible bill to pay. This is why they’re asking for volunteers whose work schedule is more sane and therefore have the energy and time to commit. I wish I was available to do so, maybe if my current job search is successful at finding something more chill.
Knowing this is a volunteer project, I'd never request renumeration. If I were contracting with a large company, I guess I'd charge 300-500 per day. That's just based on quotes I get on LinkedIn, as I've never worked as a contractor. Also I couldn't have it interfere with my main job, where I'm also on call, so it would be lower priority.
So I'm a systems engineer in the real world for an (almost) unicorn (current valuation might even have tossed us over that magic number). My salary is on the lower end of the spectrum but I'm happy with it because normally the work life balances is dandy. My total comp is well into 6 figures USD. Oh and I'm fully remote.
Now, this is not something you can get out of highschool. I've been working with Linux for 10+ years, built (and maintained) entire AD forests, have a fairly deep understanding of networking and containerization, etc.
Again. You don't start like me. You start getting a gig in front line help desk and answer questions. In your free time at work you learn (that's never going to stop). Eventually your outgrow help desk and move into some other role (and keep learning). The people who are successful in this field A) can always be learning, B) have a means to destress/avoid burnout and C) have customer service skills.
oof its like you're either me or i'm you. hope you find your way past the burn out or out of it if you end up sinking into it. i'm going on like 3.5 years of battling it and there are better days and worse days, but i have no idea what else to even do. managing infra and writing code have been my entire career up to now.
In my opinion Lemmy.world should start selling a bit of merchandising (t-shirt and so on), just to add a little on the donation side.
BTW. the donation links are in the group info.
A CTO of 5 years with many more years of experience here. I would be really glad to help, but not in scenario where I have to prepare a CV for international readers and have no pay at all as this looks to me like a job application with no job.
Considering you are running on Digitalocean infrastructure, I am completely unsure why you would ever need Ansible and Terraform as it just adds complexity without certain benefit, especially if you mention Kubernetes which DO already provides with two clicks.
I'd personally suggest trying out ArgoCD for declarative clusters. With this thing, I've seen 2 companies maintained by a single DevOps engineer with no problems. Huge timesaver and makes everything transparent.
In case this process changes and becomes less corporate-y and more transparent, I'll be ready to apply. Hope you're going to find the right people! Long live Lemmy World!
Ansible/Teraform are portable. I don't see it's usage as a failing, rather as avoiding DO lock in.
Agreed with the rest though. This is quite the ask.
I'm a big fan of Kubernetes, and for larger projects the flexibility and power it brings is unrivalled. But for smaller projects, assuming equal levels of competence, delivery teams using managed Kubernetes are almost universally later and have more issues than teams that use simpler solutions. Container-as-a-service solutions like GCP CloudRun or AWS FarGate help somewhat, but are not cheap for a given amount of compute time.
Terraform (or IaC in general) absolutely has a place, because even if you use Kubernetes, most projects have more infrastructure to manage than just the cluster - at the very least, lemmy.world has a CloudFlare proxy to manage - and clicking buttons in a management portal is not a repeatable way of deploying that, or deploying the Kubernetes clusters themselves.
Ansible also has a place, particularly if you're deploying onto bare metal. I wouldn't use it for new deployments unless I had bare metal to configure and maintain, but lemmy.world is deployed onto a bare metal server as I understand it. Plus, the most effective tooling is generally the one your team understands.
I read it as Lemmy World PsyOp at first and thought there’s some conspiracy bullshit happening on the instance. lol. Good luck on your search!
Lemmy World psychological operations, the secret communist agenda of the administration team!!! leaked!
4 applicants x 5-10 hours is .5 to 1 full time employees. Very generously speaking the ask here is for 100k/yr in free labor. The stringent interview process is going to be very limiting on potential candidates.
The experience isn't going to be a learning experience since you're looking for people that already know it all and I wouldn't even put it on a resume, it just advertises to employers you're ok being lowballed.
Perhaps this is a necessity for an instance of this size, but to me that seems to indicate that lemmy.world has reached the upper end of reasonable scalability, which given the workings of the fediverse would be fine.
Yeah, I agree. I really doubt they're going to find anyone with these conditions
Senior Network engineer with lots of experience in the field (servers + network), 15+ years if you need help let me know I'm happy to lend a hand.
How about another approach?
There is no good reason for Lemmyworld to keep on growing to an extent that this kind of overhead is necessary. The idea of Lemmy is decentralization and not creating a new reddit instance. Close your registration, limit your amount of communities and let Lemmy grow in other directions.
The thing is. Not to grow. LW wants to get stable.
Understandable, but aren't growth and instability related in this case? There are many instances with capacity that are already run by capable people. Just spread the load (ahem) across the Lemmy verse and only handle as much as you can. But maybe I'm missing a point, I just think that this would be the best for Lemmy in the long run.
I mean is that even up to them? People gravitate to the places with the most content, and right now that's lemmy world. I think the only way they could combat that is to make lemmy world private, but it might lead to people not using lemmy at all instead of spreading out to other instances.
The other option I see is to make the instances more specialized and basically do away with generalist instances like lemmy world. So you have an instance focused on news with its own subcommunities, one for gaming, one for politics etc. But that could hurt usability. It's not an easy problem to solve.
I agree with your points and like the idea of more specialized instances and also country related instances. I think it's solvable if the different admins work together.
Lemmy.world doesn't have to go private, they could just not accept more users and communities for a while. It wouldn't change much since everyone will still be able to post and comment on Lemmy.world from all instances. New users would just have to choose a different instance that's all.
For me that's the whole point, I don't see any benefit of a big instance, the Lemmyverse doesn't need one.
I'm qualified, but 5-10 hours can mean a lot of different things.
Are you looking just for oncall/incident response, or are there more active reliability projects that you need help on?
Out of curiosity, will you be able to weed out bad faith volunteers? I am sure there are a variety of interests that would be more than willing to pay a junior admin to be a Lemmy Sysop and it’s not like the candidate will volunteer that information.
I think they'll be fine, the form asks for a CV + video call + lemmy user name and optional github profile.
I'd be surprised if a bad faith candidate got through that. A probation period could work here, where their access is a bit restricted at first
Hum, I hate to be that guy, but the good (experienced) bad actors have multiple profiles curated exactly for this reason. There's a reason why companies require proof of identity and a background security check.
I threw my hat in the ring. Hope you all get some good people!
You may be asked to participate in an on-call pool
Unfortunately, this is where I noped out. But I ditch most paid positions where I can't avoid standby-time.
No offense but you're asking for some crazy free labor. This would only make sense for college students or new grads trying to get experience. Why would I add another on-call shift to my existing career?
Everyone involved is a volunteer. If it's not for you it's not for you. All good!
It's a FOSS project, of course they're asking for volunteers. They're all volunteers themselves. It's not like the lemmy devs are making gobs of money from it.
You do know that lemmy.world is a non-profit volunteer project, right?
Threw my hat in the ring, I'm a senior devops engineer.
Don't have any Lemmy experience though. I have no desire to self host it, but I wouldn't mind being part of the team to maintain a large instance.
Get rid of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 - good luck 👍
I spent 4-5 years running a high traffic server using Linux, nginx, apache, php and whatever we did with Python, and would be glad to help. This was in 2010 though, so….
Lol. I read the header as "Lemmy World PsyOp" and was like "well, that's disappointing," lol.
Very cool! Would be nice to have folks from different timezones to help with outages that currently occur mostly when everyone in the team is sleeping. Good luck!
Sysop... reminds of the good ol' BBS days. What a great time that was.
This is really tempting actually. Do you by chance need someone with skills in various storage technologies?
I'm curious what the backend looks like based on your requirements here... Ansible is always a red flag for me that your servers are pets not cattle. Just maintain a golden image, especially since you mention kubernetes. And if you're using self managed kubernetes USE REMOTE ETCD. Trust me, it will save you so much time and drama.
I wouldn't be interested unless it's paid so I am just throwing that out there for y'all to consider.
This made me laugh. Configuration management systems like ansible, chef, salt, and puppet only exist because people wanted to manage a large numbers of systems and keep them consistent and replaceable, i.e treat them like cattle instead of pets. They were born out of the pets vs cattle analogy.
I realize containerization has taken that a step further but it's funny to hear someone talk about these tools like they're something archaic.
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