I will second this advice; both of the engineers I have worked with who actively enjoyed being tasked with packaging software identified as systems operations / devops / site reliability engineering.
These are both very useful comments; thank you! In your experience, do the devops/sys ops engineers typically have useful coding experience? In our environment, porting a package to our OS may require a little, or sometimes a fair bit of modification to make it work and we often need to be able to read/understand the upstream code in whatever language it's in and change/add to it. Hence our (or at least my) assumption that we'd need a "developer."
A good sysadmin may not be able to do graphics programming, but they have plenty of practice in the sort of programming used in package management, as well as a fairly good understanding of operating systems.
They’re not going to grasp everything as well as somebody with a development background, like learning NEW programming languages on the fly and upstreaming changes, but I don’t think it’s totally outside of what they can learn and hiring a developer would present just as many challenges.
I might look more for somebody who bills themselves as “devops” or “sre” than sysadmin though since those job descriptions tend to effectively filter out those who can’t program at all. If anything I see those people as being software developers that specialize in systems administration.
In my experience a lot of people who started as developers 20+ years ago move on to system administration, and retitled themselves SRE/Devops over recent years.
I don't want to talk about ageism, or hiring biases, but I'd imagine if you found anyone who had an SRE-role and a long history they would be extremely likely to have had serious coding experience.
I've run into a few "young" devops engineers, and they tend to be more familiar with k8s, CI, and similar, rather than actually developing. But I guess that could well come down to the random people I've met, I wouldn't like to generalize.
> In my experience a lot of people who started as developers 20+ years ago move on to system administration, and retitled themselves SRE/Devops over recent years.
Usually they don't retitle themselves, companies do.
It seems the whole IT industry just collectively decided to rename the sysadmin role as devops when using cloud and containers technologies regardless if they actually use DEVOPS methodology or not.
In my experience creating packages for an operating system package manager or Docker images, a DevOps or sysadmin mindset is more beneficial than a developer mindset. For those packages, the goal is to follow operating system or deployment best practices.
I’ve not created a Python or Rust package or something like that. If you’re creating that type of package, my guess is that it may help a lot to hire a developer who loves to think about the most “idiomatic” way to package your code.
Edit: if your package will be published and used by customers, then you might look for DevRel skill as a bonus.
> In our environment, porting a package to our OS may require a little, or sometimes a fair bit of modification to make it work and we often need to be able to read/understand the upstream code in whatever language it's in and change/add to it.
What one needs to understand will vary so much depending on the upstream package and how it's normally built (what it expects) that I think even someone with experience in packaging will sometimes get stuck or need to seek help or advice. The more substantive the porting work is, the more that will be true.
That said, this kind of thing is pretty common for Linux distro packagers, and the weirder the Linux distro is, the more true that is. It's not at all unusual for Nix folks to add special build params, patch upstream software, or mangle binaries with sed in a post-build step to get them to understand NixOS' unusual filesystem structure, or to build offline in the restricted sandbox.
So I'd reach out to contributors to BSD ports systems, especially if they added ports for Linux-centric software, and contributors to really weird Linux distros (NixOS, GuixSD, GoboLinux, Void Linux, etc.).
I've never been in charge of hiring decisions anywhere so idk what the overall landscape of DevOps job candidates looks like. But I've done DevOps and I definitely do, and my friends in roles associated with that title can definitely do at least some coding and scripting in a way that I think suits most packaging tasks well. If a DevOps person has a CS degree of previously worked as a developer, they can probably figure out what they need to when it comes to patching upstream software to get it to build. Even if they don't, if they do some recreational programming, they can probably push through.
As a sysadmin I used to do package management for different OSes but this is not necessarily the most rewarding job. Atmo, most engineers doing that are juniors or started doing that as junior and never cared exploring anything else / moving company.
