So I’m a few months into my search for a new role and of course have had a few hiccups along the way.   When I joined Compuware/Dynatrace I didn’t know what a Sales Engineer (or even APM) was, and it was a life changing experience.  As for Fastly, CDNs sounded boring to me – little did I know what an industry leader Fastly is and how exciting their technology was to share with other firms.  Because of that I’m applying for a lot of diverse roles in an effort to find out more about what is out there.  My career has had 2 that were very instrumental in my growth and experience, who knows what the next one could be?

Photo by Fabian Grohs on Unsplash

One of those almost was PagerDuty.  For those of you that don’t know PagerDuty is a SaaS incident response platform.  When things go wrong at your firm their platform can take automated signals, notify the correct team member and orchestrate the entire response process.  At Fastly the SEs all do pager coverage, and PagerDuty was the go-to tool.  It made scheduling easy and trading shifts even easier.  We knew that if we someone didn’t  respond the escalation policy could get to the next person in an expedient manner.  Working from the inside I learned how solid and well managed Fastly’s systems are.  Part of this was that no one ever took chances.  If things started to look off or there was even a hint of performance degradation it was quickly escalated and researched.  It was a big plus knowing we were leveraging PagerDuty.

So earlier I said “almost was PagerDuty” which might have you wondering what happened.  One of the key items in my search is that it has to be a technology that I can believe in.  And with PagerDuty I had already experienced their solution as a user and it was one I felt I could get behind 100%.  But to be honest I started with some skepticism when the recruiter initially reached out to me.  The first invite to talk with him was was scheduled to last just 15 minutes.  I remember saying to my wife “How on Earth can a recruiter do a proper initial call in just 15 minutes?”  Well Nick Benza totally proved me wrong.  That call was on time, organized and 100% relevant.  He quickly and accurately covered all the information I would need plus asked the key questions that were important to PagerDuty.  (And yes, I followed up with an e-mail that included “Solid and effective use of time.”

In my initial conversation with Kieran Galvin, the SE Manager, I let him know about some of my experiences with the process dragging on and firms not being responsive.  He assured me that that was not their way.  In fact during the process he let me know when certain activities were going on that might slow the process a bit.  Even with those important events things still moved smooth and there was ample communication from them.  He also was very clear in articulating what he was looking for.  It wasn’t cookie cutter.  He understood the dynamics of running a team of SEs on the front lines and how you needed people with different traits and skills that could float around to where the need was.

I also interviewed with Kyle Duffy, the VP above Kieran.  When I asked what he looked for in SEs the answer was clearly defined and felt like a list he had been utilizing for a long time.  And they also were traits that from his role I think could be quantified about a candidate and also in no way got in the way of what Kieran would be looking for.  The preferences seemed to complement each other and made sense.  It also showed that there was no micromanaging.  There was true trust and delegation in the SE organization.

Their technical exercise was the best one I have seen so far when it comes to evaluating a candidate’s skills with giving that candidate exposure to PagerDuty’s docs, APIs, UI and processes.  All of this was done without an extreme outlay of time that a candidate would never see future value from if they didn’t hire on.  I’ve experienced a few others that have been way too complex and dragged on for weeks or months until something got reprioritized inside the firm.

And unfortunately for me that was what happened at PagerDuty.  During the process it became clear internally that they needed to relocate the headcount to another location.  I’ve had this happen to me before.  And in those cases I got the canned “not moving forward” email out of the blue.  And it took research by myself or the recruiter to find out what happened.  PagerDuty was quite the opposite.  Not only did they not send the canned email – Kieran made multiple efforts to reach me on the phone.  When we did get to speak he was frank and honest about things.  It left me even more impressed with him as well as the firm’s character and integrity.  The whole process had been well thought out, efficient and respectful of everyone involved.

So if you are looking for a firm that takes good care of its employees, sells a solution that works plus other firms need, and where the leadership has integrity, you should check out PagerDuty.

Update:  This article was updated after publication to include a few sentences about the initial experience with Nick Benza.