[Imc-tech] EE is hiring -- anarchist techie wanted...

[Sascha Meinrath]

FYI:

Electric Embers seeks Sysadmin / Client Support Engineer

http://electricembers.net/jobs.php

Do you enjoy administering Linux and *BSD systems?  Would you like to 
support the work of hundreds of progressive nonprofit organizations, 
artists and activists?  Would you thrive in a creative, cooperative 
environment with a supportive team of peers instead of a boss looking over 
your shoulder?  How would you like to have something you've helped build 
consistently surprise your clients with responsive, friendly and 
high-quality service?

About Electric Embers

EE is a small, personal, democratically run, socially and ecologically 
responsible ISP/ASP, dedicated to serving the progressive and nonprofit 
communities.  In the twenty months since our inception, EE has grown 
sixfold.  We currently serve over 300 clients, ranging in size from 
individual artists and grassroots activists to nationally-recognized 
progressive nonprofit groups.  We provide a range of services from 
standard Web/email hosting, to customized list hosting and virus/spam 
filtering services using open source software, to dedicated and managed 
server hosting for a small number of clients, all billed on a sliding 
scale.

We are also interested in developing new services for which there seems to 
be a need, and we participate in the open source developer community in an 
effort to both influence and support new software and services. In 
addition to the developer community, we also maintain close ties to a 
diverse set of nonprofit tech consultants, which creates opportunities for 
collaboration and improves the client-provider relationships that we 
develop.  Please see the About Us section of our Web site for more 
information.

Job Description

We seek a third person with an entrepreneurial bent and diverse talents 
and interests to join us as an equal partner in building and operating our 
small and growing cooperative business.  The term "entrepreneurial" is 
used here both in the sense of "independent, flexible, driven, 
jack-of-all-trades" and in the sense of "willing to accept modest 
compensation now in exchange for less tangible benefits and the 
expectation of increased pay in the future".  You should also have a 
demonstrated commitment to working in the nonprofit sector, with all of 
the pleasures and sacrifices entailed therein.

You would, like all partners (we have no employees), participate to some 
extent in all aspects of the organization:  regular system administration, 
emergency response, client/technical support, documentation, service 
improvements and development of new services, long-term strategizing, 
software development, development of peer relationships with consultants 
and other orgs, even billing and accounting.  This is not just a 
theoretical high-toned principle, but a daily reality.

However, we do each focus our time and expertise on a limited subset of 
these areas, and your primary responsibility would be the interfaces with 
our clients: tech support, general client support, setting up and 
maintaining user accounts, maintaining and improving client-facing systems 
such as the Web site, phone support, and billing system, and possibly 
managing advertising materials and activities (of which we have done 
little or none to date).  You should therefore be experienced not only in 
the technical side of administering UNIX-like (currently all FreeBSD) 
servers top-to-bottom, and to some extent in Windows PCs and Macs and 
related client software, but also in dealing with humans, especially 
extremely non-technical humans.

Work Conditions and Pay

We strongly believe in maintaining work conditions that keep us happy 
while allowing us to pursue other personal interests.  We operate with a 
"virtual office", meaning we each work out of our homes.  With a third 
partner onboard, we will transition to a four-day work week, and daily 
hours are as flexible as possible.  We take a generous number of holidays 
and paid vacation days, with the result that our full-time employment 
takes up only 47% of the days in a year.  This is no dot-com.

We are enthusiastic about the Cooperative model for business, and we 
embody it as much as possible.  All partners receive the same hourly rate, 
all share equally in any remaining profit at the end of the year, and all 
receive identical raises as we grow.  We operate entirely on the basis of 
consensus, with all partners having equal input into decisions, and all 
expected to contribute actively and creatively to building EE.

We expect this position to start as 2 days/week, climbing to full time at 
4 days/week over a six-month probationary period, after which you would 
become a full partner.  Pay at full time will be $2300/month initially, 
plus end-of-year profit sharing, and will climb along with the business -- 
we expect full-time partner salary to reach $40K/year by the end of 2006.

Job Duties

  - Using an email/web-based ticketing system, respond to technical
    support requests, new service inquiries, and billing questions

  - Set up new and make changes to existing user accounts

  - Maintain and improve client-facing systems: EE website, phone
    system, etc.

  - Share responsibility for performing regular maintenance on
    approximately 10 FreeBSD servers

  - Respond quickly to emergency service failures caused by software and
    hardware problems and share responsibility for solving them

  - Participate in the development of services, documentation, internal
    systems and strategy, and relationships that improve EE's ability to
    provide high-quality services to our clients.


Requirements

All EE partners will have different technical strengths and weaknesses, 
and part of the sysadmin culture is learning from your peers on the job. 
But to succeed at EE, you'll need a basic level of competence in all of 
the following areas, and preferably expertise in one or more:

  - System administration of UNIX-like operating systems (FreeBSD
    preferred): new OS installations, kernel configuration, use of
    standard shell commands and low-level utilities, disaster recovery,
    sensitivity to security issues, etc.

  - Compiling, installing and configuring open-source applications used
    to provide Internet services: Apache, MTAs, BIND, SSH, database
    servers, etc.

  - Using and troubleshooting TCP/IP network protocols: IP, TCP, DNS,
    SMTP, HTTP, FTP

  - Understanding, creating and modifying simple-to-intermediate scripts
    and interpreted programs written in perl, PHP, SQL and shell commands

  - Assembling and troubleshooting computer and network hardware:
    switches, hard drives, hardware RAID, NICs, power supplies, fitting
    things into tiny boxes, etc.

In addition, you must have:

  - Entrepreneurial spirit (we can't stress this enough.)

  - Ability to work as part of a small, tight but distributed team, with
    flexibility and a commitment to democratic decision-making

  - Strong English-language communication skills (verbal and written) in
    matters both technical and non-technical

  - Ability to learn new things quickly

  - Patience, humility and a sense of humor

  - Willingness to be woken for work in the middle of the night to fix
    something in the very rare event that a system breaks

  - Work or substantial volunteer experience in the nonprofit sector

Geographical location:

  - We are currently in San Francisco and Oakland, and would greatly
    prefer the third partner to be in the same area as well, for the
    sake of face time as well as visits to our colo facility.  However,
    we will consider a candidate in another region, as geographic
    diversity may bring its own compensating benefits.

To Apply

Review our Web site and email a resume (attachments are fine, we have a 
kickass filtering service) or a URL for one along with a well-written 
cover letter -- the more it tells us about you, the better -- to 
jobs at electricembers.net.

Electric Embers is an equal-opportunity agency and does not discriminate 
based upon age, ethnicity, gender, national origin, disability, race, 
size, religion, sexual orientation or socioeconomic background.  (We're 
both straightish white males and strongly encourage people who are not to 
apply.)