A Startup Vet Reveals His Secrets to Assembling a Superstar DevOps Team
For Fabian Schonholz of NBCUniversal, it starts with hiring people who are willing to stand up to him.
Today Fabian Schonholz is the senior vice president of technology and operations for NBCUniversal Media, where he oversees the company’s cloud-based game publishing infrastructure. Prior to that, though, he founded several startups, where he developed a unique approach to hiring software developers and engineers. Here, in his own words, Schonholz explains that process.
It’s hard to hire DevOps guys within the parameters that I set for hiring. I will only hire people that are superstars. And there are two elements: They need to know what they’re talking about, and they need to be able to stand up to me and have an open mind for having strong discussions. I want really smart, intelligent people that you’re going to have good discussions and arguments with.
I want intelligent people first and smart people second. Intelligent people will adapt and learn. Give them five minutes and they will become experts in anything you give them. Smart people will do almost the same thing, a little slower, and they’ll be able to somewhat muddle along and solve some of the problems that intelligent people will solve with no problem.
When you bring anybody new to a team, they will disrupt that team. Period, end of story. They key is to make sure that disruption is positive, rather than negative. The right hiring practice basically ensures that that is the case.
I know within the first five minutes whether I’m going to hire you or not. Because one of the questions I ask is, “What makes you tick?” And that question is really meant to figure out if you have any self-awareness. If you look at me with a blank stare, I know you’re not going to work out. But even if you can’t answer the question right away, if you start working through the answer to the question, then that tells me that you’re self-aware.
I try to run an organization that is passionate but not emotional. That means that we don’t take things personally. If I say something that may be not in favor of what you’re thinking, I’m not making a judgment about you. I’m making a judgment about your idea. And if you understand the difference, then we will get along just fine. If you’re not self-aware, then making that distinction between emotions and passions becomes impossible.
I have hired folks who, on the phone, just couldn’t talk. But they knew what they were talking about.
People sometimes don’t know what makes them tick. I ask myself that question of myself every day when I get up in the morning: Why am I getting out of bed? And I’ll tell you, some days I have a hard time answering that question.
Early on in my career, I did have some challenges with small details in the hiring process. They were things that I might have missed in the interviews or the team missed in the interviews. They surface later, but they were there all along. We just weren’t looking for them, because we didn’t know, because we were young and didn’t have experience.
There was one case which is funny. There was this fellow, very nice, very knowledgeable, very intelligent, but he had only worked at governmental organizations, and with very lax schedules. So I didn’t want to hire the guy. I told him, “I don’t think that you’re going to be able to do the kinds of things that we want you to do.” And he looked at me and said, “You’re wrong.” And my whole team, they said to me, “If you don’t hire this guy, we will all quit.” So I hired him. As it turns out, he was one of my best hires ever.
Transparency is so important. When I ran startups, once I decided that I wanted to hire you, I would try to dissuade you from coming to work for me. With a startup, I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I may have to shut down the doors tomorrow. So if I don’t give you full disclosure, if I don’t give you everything that can go wrong, I would be remiss.
That transparency remains throughout your tenure with me. I was running a company a few years ago, and we started running into money troubles. We didn’t know if we were going to have money to pay salaries. I told my people, “Look, this is what’s going on. If you need to quit because you have to feed your family, I understand. No problem.” But no one quit. And when the time came to shut the doors, I said, “Look, let me help you find a job.” Some of them came with me to my new company because they could go for a couple months without a paycheck until I could get funding. Some of the other people I placed with friends of mine who had their own companies. Everybody knows my hiring practices, so people always say, “If you’re shutting down a company and you have people, send them my way.”
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