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Test Your Skills With The Docker Puzzle

Posted: November 2, 20143 min read

We’ve teamed up with TrueAbility to present The Docker Puzzle Challenge.

Using Docker administration skills, those participating will attempt to solve a jigsaw puzzle for bragging rights on our leaderboard (and prizes). Besides some good fun, we’re hoping to attract those interested in Linux and containerization to our open positions. The contest runs from Nov 1 - 30: By the end of the contest, the Top 10 performers will be guaranteed an interview with DigitalOcean.

Our awesome customer support manager, Tammy Butow, has been using TrueAbility to help find the best candidates to join our support team. Read the interview below for some insight into the importance of innovative hiring techniques.

What are the top three qualities you are looking for in a job candidate?

Our support team is awesome; everyone is a self-learner and an excellent problem solver. We all enjoy helping developers with their Droplets and get really excited when see what developers are building. We look for the following qualities in candidates:

  1. Self-Starter / Self-Learner
  2. Team Player
  3. Love of Linux and Open Source

Why is hiring people who are keeping up with current tech important?

We are constantly excited to be working with new technologies. We recently launched CoreOS and Mesosphere on DigitalOcean. We love being able to support developers using many different types of technologies. In addition to the core Linux fundamentals, we always need to be learning so that we are able to support developers that reach out to us.

Can you explain why innovative hiring techniques are important to quickly filter for the best candidates?

We want to find the best people to help support and build a simple cloud hosting platform. It’s a mission that requires the greatest talent out there from all over. Our support team come from a variety of locations: Texas, Utah, Virginia. I moved to New York from Australia to join DigitalOcean. We are constantly on the lookout for extremely talented candidates. Using TrueAbility and other progressive hiring practices can help speed up the process tremendously.

Can you go into detail concerning your experience with TrueAbility?

Actually when I interviewed with DigitalOcean, I completed a TrueAbility challenge. I found it to be a really enjoyable experience. It’s a great way to test your skills in a real-life environment. It’s excellent for us to be able to playback the TrueAbility challenge and then chat with the candidate about their approach to problem solving in a fast-paced environment. It’s a lot to do in a short amount of time, but it’s a great way to assess a candidate’s skills. We’ve found our best candidates often love these types of challenges.

How do you compare these “challenges” which aim to mimic real-life circumstances, opposed to more traditional interviewing processes?

It’s fantastic to be able to simulate real-life experiences. For years engineering talent has been assessed using coding assignments, this is just another way to go about it. We still take more traditional pieces of an application into consideration: job history, expertise, recommendations, etc. But this is a way to level the playing field a bit and give everyone a shot to show their skills.

Why guarantee interviews to the top 10? Does the fact that they “performed” better actually guarantee better performance on the job?

Not necessarily, but again it’s just a piece of the application. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to be a top scorer. At the end of the day there are developers all over the world using Docker on their DigitalOcean Droplets, so it’s important for our support team members to be able to work with Docker and other leading open source technologies… We won’t just be looking at the top 10 though, we are excited to find out who has Docker skills!

Why The Docker Challenge as opposed to other Linux-based testing?

We have been running TrueAbility Linux Systems Administrator challenges for a while now. We started to wonder what else we could do! We love Docker and we’re excited to be able to create this experience with TrueAbility. Show us your Docker skills :)

Sign up and take the challenge here!

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