BROADCASTS.com

b'If you\\u2019ve been doing DevOps for the past 10-20 years, things have really changed in the industry. There\\u2019s no longer large pools of help desk support. People aren\\u2019t climbing around the data center and learning how to punch down cables and rack servers to gradually work their way up. Now, entry level DevOps jobs require about five years of experience. So, that\\u2019s where internships play a major role. But how can an internship program be set up for success? Where is the next generation of SREs or DevOps professionals coming from? Where do we find them?\\nToday, we\\u2019re talking to Fatema Boxwala, who has been an intern at Rackspace, Yelp, and Facebook. She\\u2019s a computer science student at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where she\\u2019s involved with the Women in Computer Science Committee and Computer Science Club. Occasionally, she teaches people about Python, Git, and systems administration. \\xa0\\nSome of the highlights of the show include:\\n\\nMentors made Fatema\\u2019s intern experience positive for her; made site reliability and operations something she wanted to do\\nAcademic paths don\\u2019t tend to focus on such fields as SRE, and interns tend to come exclusively from specific schools\\nFatema\\u2019s school requires five internships to graduate and receive a degree; upper-year students are already very qualified professional software engineers\\nCompanies don\\u2019t have time to train and want to find someone with an exact skill set; instead of hiring someone, they spend months with an unfilled position\\nContinuity Problem: You can\\u2019t train someone to be a systems administrator, if you aren\\u2019t willing to give them certain privileges due to inexperience\\nUse a low-stakes environment to train, where mistakes can be made; most systems aren\\u2019t on a critical path - don\\u2019t keep people away from contributing\\nIf you have never broke production, that means either you\\u2019re lying or you\\u2019ve been in an environment that didn\\u2019t trust you to touch things that mattered\\nInternship should mimic the kind of work that everyone else is doing; give them responsibilities where their work has an impact\\nBad mentors lead to bad internships; person in charge of your success doesn\\u2019t have the necessary skills; needs to be a good communicator, set expectations\\nAs the intern, ask about possible outcomes of internship early on; mentors should be clear about expectations, feedback, and offers\\n\\nLinks:\\n\\nFatema Boxwala\\nFatema Boxwala on Twitter\\nJackie Luo on Twitter\\nJulia Evans Zines on Twitter\\nSREcon MEA\\nDigital Ocean'