How to find team with mature testing+CI/CD processes?

Question

After 13 years in the industry, my days of checking out the main branch to find that Billy Bob unknowingly broke the build yesterday are over.As are my days of being excessively reliant on the Tribe Elders for application knowledge, and being afraid to update existing software to meet changing business needs.These factors in my question are the best proxy for team skill level and conscientiousness that I can think of.I aim to limit my job search to jobs with a high (quantifiable) level of automated testing and CI/CD maturity, but the only strategy that comes to mind is filtering for this during initial phone screens. And perhaps setting an Indeed email alert for just the right key words.I have to think that the best and brightest minds on HN can come up with some much better strategies.

chatmasta · Accepted Answer

We&rsquo;re hiring our initial team at Splitgraph [0] and are looking for senior backend engineers. We&rsquo;ve put a ton of effort into optimizing our CI system and are always improving it. We&rsquo;ve got automated build, test and deploys along with tools for rapid onboarding and cached rebuilds when switching branches locally. We can spin up a new cluster on AWS, GCP or Azure and deploy the code from any commit hash without any manual input except for pressing a button in the GitLab UI. We use a combination of Docker, Terraform, and Nomad for prod deploys. In dev we&rsquo;ve got a Makefile based system that&rsquo;s smart about when to rebuild images and makes it easy to switch branches without destroying your environment.Developer productivity is our priority and the CI system is the foundation of that. (In fact I just spent the entire weekend optimizing the frontend toolchain and development workflow after the lessons learned from onboarding our first hires.)If you like Python, databases, DevOps, etc. and don&rsquo;t mind working at an all-remote early startup, please apply! Leave a note in the cover letter section of the form that you saw this comment. :)[0] https://www.notion.so/splitgraph/Splitgraph-is-Hiring-25b421...(Job posting also includes more details about the stack.)

burntoutfire · Answer

I've been on such teams. Usually it was championed by some devops who just cared a lot about it and was willing to put in a lot of work to make it happen.It's not all that great though. I'd say that, since it's usually maintained by devops guys, it's not fully designed with developers in mind. For example, the deployment to a CI is usually unacceptably slow for at least one seeminlgy unfixable reason (or perhaps the devops don't care enough, because the slowness doesn't hurt them as much). So, in practice, the CI is only used to run the automated test suite before the final OK on the merge and before that, you're better off running and testing things manually.

1123581321 · Answer

I&rsquo;d argue you&rsquo;re going to be more valuable if you bring your mindset and experience to a team that is small enough to influence and that doesn&rsquo;t yet have good CI in place. But if you want to find engineering teams that brag on good equipment and processes, I&rsquo;d suggest sifting through StackOverflow careers.