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Linux and your worth in the Job Market
Blog - Dynastys Blog
Written by Allen Sanabria   
Tuesday, 21 October 2008 10:23

I've been a Linux Administrator for about 6+ years now and I love Linux now more then I did then. Though I do not particularly like being a Admin or an Engineer any more. I actually prefer being an Architect or a Systems Programmer. As bad as the economy is right now, there are quite a few jobs out there. Especially for Linux System Administrators/Engineers!

The problem these days, is that the Linux SA's which WERE and ARE still highly regarded. Are being flooded with LAZY admins that have and continue to flood the Networking and Microsoft world. In the past year, I have met a few interesting Microsoft Engineers who actually knew the product very well. Besides the normal right click and actually knew how to script and automate ( This baffled me ).

Let me get back to the real issue. That is that I have in recent times, met Linux admins with those same poor qualities of the average not caring for their job Windows Admins. This really bothered me inside! As I hold the Linux community with the utmost respect. Seeing this happening in our community is like a slap in the face! I have come to the conclusion that all communities have these types of admins and not just the Microsoft communities.

Let me be specific on the type of Admins that I mean....

  • The Admin who always comes to ask you a question, but does not really care what the answer is. As long as the answer is right!
  • The Admin who portrays himself as the King or Queen of a product, but only knows how to use the product. While in reality he or she does not really understand how the product works.
  • The Admin who knows that a problem exists and will not even attempt to fix the issue and wait till someone else alleviates the issue.
The issues above are just the main offenders as there are more situations then the ones given above.

I here all the time from fellow co-workers to people chatting in forums or in blogs on how people are having a hard time finding a job in this market. I tell the same thing to anyone in my field and that is { YOU HAVE TO SEPARATE YOUR SELF FROM THE COMMON ADMIN }. This seems to confuse most people. What I mean by this, is what separates you from the other 100,000+ admins out there? Why do they want to hire you over the college graduate who more then likely just partied the whole time in college.

The answers that I always give are the 3 below....

  • You have to love what you do!
  • You should learn how to script, it could be in Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Visual Basic, Power Shell, Expect, etc...
  • Automation, which has to deal with the above.

Most admins out there can not do basic scripting and will work on the same task over and over and over.... This is a complete lost of time for you and for the company you work for. So for all of you who read this article and are asking the questions below...

  • Either out of a job
  • About to be laid off
  • You are always asking your self why am I not a Sr admin yet?
  • Why am I not making 100k+ yet? 

Look above and ask yourself do you have those skills? Do you still love what you do?

Once you can answer those questions honestly, then you will understand why you are where you are at today. For those of you who already knew the secrets above then this is not news to you.


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spauldingsmails  - Linux and your worth in the Job Market   |Registered |2008-10-21 18:46:14
While I agree there are good and bad sysadmins in the Linux world I find that
the average Linux admin is of a far higher calibre than your average Windows
admin.

Recently, as my company has had to come to terms with integrating Linux
servers into existing Windows environments, I am amazed at not only how
incompetent even senior windows admins are but also how hostile they are towards
Linux, including attempts to sabotage and undermine the work we have carried
out.

The amount of damage Microsoft and its legion of system administrators has
done is now the biggest problem we face when differentiating the Linux admins
from their below average Windows counterparts. This means convincing the average
consumer that Windows is not the definition of an operating system and that
there really is a better alternative out there.
januszzz  - I disagree.   |Registered |2008-10-22 11:07:07
I disagree!

With what? I disagree with the necessity of scripting skills.


Here is why.

I'm also ~6 years system administrator. I've never became system
programmer, instead I chose to lead my own business. But I must underline that I
do program in Perl, PHP, Ruby and bash.

Company:
My company delivers remote
Linux administration services, including proprietary services (mostly Oracle) in
the form of outsourcing. Our way of working is to standardize all piece of the
software. We have limited resources (of course) and we have to know what others
do. We try to do not rely on pieces of code that is not well tested by us. Our
tools are custom snapshot of Gentoo Linux, Puppet and internal wiki.

People:
I
employ 5 system admins who love what they do, but none of them is scripting
savvy. In fact, when I coordinate their work I got lots of problems with those
who do script. They still implement one time solutions because our clients...
januszzz   |Registered |2008-10-22 11:09:51
...our clients installations are so much different to each other that there is
no real possibility to maintain script for everything. In fact, scripts are hard
to standardize.

Situation:
1. We implement really huge system: 100 apache
servers, 30 mysql servers, SAN storage, HA, distributed filesystems, load
balancing etc etc. All job done by Linux guy. No scripting needed (except bash
on system start).
2. We do cluster of openvz servers. Networking is bleeding
edge, there are several dozens of services on each machine, some of them custom,
load gets really high... The same, no scripting. All is in Portage or Google
helps.

Conclusion:

Taking look at my last dozen of projects I must say I had
to acquire c++ programmer once. Scripting sysadmin becomes programmer and he
utilizes his resources on things I would not rather pay for. I need the job
done, and documenting everything is much better way of survival when one of your
p...
januszzz   |Registered |2008-10-22 11:10:50
...one of your people decides to leave. All Linux should be done by sysadmins
who just do Linux, if the solution needs scripting it is bad solution.

The
reast of the article is OK - people who love what they do, do it right. Regards.
dynasty   |SAdministrator |2008-10-22 13:34:55
Thank you for your opinion, as I do appreciate it. You and I could get into a
huge debate about what should be automated and what should not be. I have not
seen situations when a script is well thought out and deployed destroying a
system or systems, and I have seen situations where this could cause a huge
catastrophe if not thought out.
dexxtreme   |Author |2009-02-01 03:57:46
There are many cases where writing a script to perform a task is not only
recommended, but required to make sure that the task gets done properly. This is
especially true if you are a small staff that has to maintain a large array of
machines and services. You have to write scripts to backup data, sync databases,
run reports, process log files, process email, etc. If you have X number of
people and X*50 tasks that must be done every week, then you have no choice but
to automate things. In some cases, you may have to make sure that your scripts
are flexible enough to work in multiple environments. This is what
differentiates a good coder and well designed script from a poor coder and
poorly written script. The more robust the script design, the more situations it
can be used in.

You say that if the solution needs scripting, then it is a bad
solution. I think that if a solution can't be scripted, then it is a bad
solution. S...
dexxtreme   |Author |2009-02-01 03:58:55
...continued...

You say that if the solution needs scripting, then it is a bad
solution. I think that if a solution *can't* be scripted, then it is a bad
solution. Sometimes there are times when you can't manually perform a task just
because of the fact that you have so many tasks to perform. In larger
organizations that don't do a lot of scripting, whenever a person quits or is
fired, usually what happens is whatever tasks that person was responsible for
get forgotten about because someone forgets to pick up the tasks. (I've seen
that happen a lot over the years at my current job.)
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3.22 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 22 October 2008 09:03