Now that the team had settled back into an equilibrium, we needed to replenish our ranks. The storage team, after the departure of several people, was down to seven people. Split half and half into senior engineers and junior engineers. We needed to recruit more just to bear the workload. We had seven legacy storage products, two new in GA and more in R&D.

Recruiting proved more difficult than I thought. The first difficulty was that not many engineers knew the kind of technologies we were using. Storage has always been a niche in the tech scene. But now, because of market share gains of cloud based tech, many engineers stayed away from this type of work. It could be a bad move to build cloud products instead of using cloud products. Something I would experience two years later.

The second one was the broad scope of knowledge and skills we required for the role. Any single member of the team had to be able to do the work of testing hardware, doing the architecture, the deployment, operations, features development and more. We, or more accurately, I wanted people that were able to jump from domain to domain. This was my mistake. I was putting an unnecessary burden on the team. It’s not because I could do it that everyone should be able to do it.

The third one was my attitude towards candidates. Because I thought, at the time that, I had had issues with people not being good enough, even though it was my fault of not guiding and mentoring enough, my root cause analysis conclusion was that we needed better engineers. This created additional pressure on candidates. Louis (a) had recommended a friend of his which he trusted would make it once in the team. I did the interviews and was harsh with him. I denied him because he did not have operational experience. But, when you look at the storage team, many of the team members had never done ops before joining. Better, several had joined as interns before their university graduation. Even I, the tech lead, had not done this type of work before. What a fool I was. I didn’t know better.

In retrospect, back in 2013, I had been given an incredible opportunity when Manfred (b) had chosen me to replace him in the hardware lab. He trusted I would make it. He put his weight to get me in. When it was my turn to trust a teammate that put his weight in for a recommendation, I failed. I failed to pass on the opportunity I had been given.

Nevertheless, we were able to recruit new members. In order of recruitment: Stanislas (c) a part time intern, which has an interesting joining story, Mickael (d) as a DevOps, Mickael (e) from OpenIO. As well as two non-technical people that joined the team. Jean Baptiste (f) who was the product manager and Synda (g), later on the manager of the storage team.

I was not involved for the last two, they were chosen by Gaspard (h). Several people on other teams at Scaleway almost joined us but eventually decided not to. Maybe our reputation was preceding us.

One thing did happen. Our first tech loan got margin called.

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1. ​avaragado from Cambridge - Forty years of removable storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Forty_years_of_Removable_Storage.jpg​
2. ​George Chernilevsky - Own work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg​

1. ​Louis Solofrizzo, Storage DevOps at the time, still at Scaleway
2. ​Manfred Touron: Then hardware/firmware engineer, now VP engineering at gno.land
3. ​Stanislas Lange: Then storage intern, now Software engineer at Mistral AI
4. ​Mickael Gregori: Then Storage DevOps, now freelance
5. ​Mickael Bonfils: Then Storage DevOps, now tech lead at Synch
6. ​Jean Baptiste Bernard: Then Storage product manager now product manager at Bluespark
7. ​Synda B.: Then manager of storage, now Senior engineering manager at On
8. ​Gaspard Plantrou, VP of storage and database back then, now CPO at Numspot

If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

To pair with :

• Au DD - PNL
• EBADF