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Open Source Expertise in Short Supply
whydoyouask writes "Information week has an article on the shortage of expertise for enterprise open source projects and it's ramifications for both enterprises and salaries
for those possessed of these skill. While it is suspicious in it's timing and references to Ballmer's recent email it does point out some definite considerations that companies planning open source projects better account for. Those looking for marketable job skills might also take note."
Anything compiled with GCC? They lied.
... Bill? Is that you?
Or you are
A dearth of OS specialists? I remember back when they were talking about a dearth of programmers in general.
Went back to school and aced one of those year-long programming courses. Knowing that it would look like one of those garbage diplomas, I bolstered my resume with side-projects, including a search engine (powered by, coincidentally enough, on Open Source).
When I graduated? No jobs available.
It's okay. I like being an English teacher in Korea right now, but if that segue is amusing to read, it wasn't to live through.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
where i work IT is hard at work...keeping all of the MS servers running. I do the Unix side, and they're always amazed when I can grab something from freshmeat.net and get it going to solve some problem . From a simple web form to an all out Wiki, it's just funny how much faster you can get results with OSS if you have the skills (and having the skills just means that you've been jacking/hacking it for years).
Now I need to get back to getting Horde 3 Beta running on my sandb^H^H^H^H server!
CV*)$#b
free ipod and free gmail!
Didn't you read the licenses of the products upon which you based your work? Did you really need a lawyer to understand the terms under which you received the software?
In that case, you deserve what you got, don't blame the GPL.
While I can see that Microsoft can use this to spin more fud, surely this could actually help development of major open source projects?
If good developers have a clearer path to obtaining work in the field then this will help keep and entice in new developers to major projects. I realise that a lot of the article is about administrators for these projects, but it seems to me that being a contributor would look fairly good on the resume if these are in demand.
This is a long way from paying the bills by being an open source developer, but fewer obstacles to people getting involved in projects in any capacity seems like a good thing.
--Q
If the real companies would actually advertize that they need open source people, they might be surprised at what they find.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Isn't by definition, OSS happens to be more of a 'stratch an itch' concept rather than a 'how much money can we make from this' thing?
Face it, Open Source is not as well-staffed as we'd like. Sure, Linux experts abound (many of them right here on Slashdot) as do many Apache administrators. But beyond that, most users are on their own when it comes to looking for good help with Open Source products.
There, again, did you see that word? Product. Open Source is mainly concerned with Projects, not Products. So while the person who initially opened the project on Sourceforge and the people who joined up early are all experts, those outside the main circle are not usually so well versed in the projects. Put a company behind the project, turn it into a product, and then you'll have a serious chance of getting "expertise".
When a project is just a project, no one benefits from having many users sitting around bitching on the mailing list. But when someone is trying to sell that product, the company trying to make a buck benefits by having people out there who are experts in the product and can provide support to a whole range of customers.
So yes, on the micro level some Open Source projects are well staffed with experts and companies can feel secure in their decision to go with that project because of the large pool of experts. But on the macro level, most Open Source projects are ill-funded, undocumented, and flat out bad.
Use your knowledge of open source and *nix to help your company PLAN for the switch over to open source. Help them realize what it takes. This is your chance to shine. Otherwise, they may freak out at the extra effort needed to get it off of the ground when they realize that it takes SKILLED admins instead of the run of the mill Microsoft admins.
So companies can't find as many people experienced in projects with Linux as the hordes of VB MCSDs, and they'll have to pay a little more? No kidding.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
long time I haven't seen SO funny troll post :)
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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There are a jillion online dating sites.
There are a jillion online employment sites.
Are there any sites that match FOSS projects with potential volunteers?
For example, I'm a lawyer and I'm not doing anything this evening. I'm sure some FOSS project could use one....But I don't know which or where.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
as evidenced by slashdot comments
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"open source experts" is rather vague.
For one, they're conflating administration and software development - I should think the difficulties of finding and/or training the two kinds of people are of different orders of magnitude of difficulty. (And it's not like learning Linux administration requires an expensive outlay on proprietary software, which is a big hurdle for commercial products.)
For another thing, as regards availability of open-source software developers, that's uselessly vague.
Do the need people who are highly experienced with the internals of a specific open-source project?
Or do they need people who are experienced with using a specific open-source system, for the development of their own projects?
Somehow, I don't think they're hard up for people who know how to compile with gcc and edit text files with emacs.
.
The article leads to a central value proposition of open source.
With OSS the expertise required to accomplish X is always within reach by non-career-specialists because a competent software engineer can come up to speed quickly by studying the source code.
"It isn't so much that we don't have smart administrators that need technical support from the vendor, it is that admins NEED someone external to blame when the shit does hit the fan."
I say "The Devil made me do it".
I've been working on an Open Source 3d model editor called TagCMA. I have a contact that knows a patent lawyer that says you can't get a patent for an Open Source project. I'm not willing to spend any extra cash to investigate if we have OS experts here. Can you get a patent on an Open Source project?
I've never seen such a blatant "hit-piece".
Vague "Unexpected costs", admins are 30% more expensive, Linux training is 15% expensive than Windows training, undefined problems causing a company to go from tomcat to IBM websphere, hiring open source programmers is a gamble, you may get sued for using Open Source, open source is harder to support than you realize...
Sheesh.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Doesn't "Open Source Expertiese" prettuy much amount to thorough knowledge of Unix, C, TCP/IP, shell, and a scripting language of choice?
shortage of people having experience in working for free
Corporate recruiting is so fundamentally broken, it's no wonder companies can't find people.
When I read about a company that "can't find qualified candidates", I'm inclined to suspect they're going through incompetent, ignorant, rigidly checklist-matching recruiters.
An ideal hiring process would see it as a matter not of finding the perfectly round peg and excluding the non-round pegs, but of evaluating the fuzzy Venn diagrams which truly describe how a candidate's skills coincide with the company's needs.
asked for 'independent' polls to reach his conclusions.l es/mi_m0CGN/is _1999_Jan_18/ai_53594866
http://www.findarticles.com/p/artic
"At the antitrust trial in Washington Thursday, Microsoft Corp's key economist witness, professor Richard Schmalensee was shown to have used survey information that had been paid for by Microsoft that reached conclusions requested by Bill Gates."
This article smells exactly like that. Balmer makes some while claims using dubius 'independent' sources to back his statements up. Miraculously, a week later a long article appears which supports his every statement, including testimonials.
How convenient.
Googleing Greenemeier shows around 11,000 hits, and most that I checked were articles just like this. His articles appear in online journals with "Linux" in their name, so he wears a Tux, but he doesn't eat Mackerel.
I am going to guess that there is a shortage of "enterprise" open-source people, that being people that big companies feel compelled to hire that have extra letters after their name and a slew of certifications, and the like.
On of the advantages of open source is the community, is its "equal opportunity" nature. Plenty of academics but also plenty of self taught geeks. Anybody can sit down and do the work.
The big shortage is proably in the middle management where those folks don't understand the benifits and the culture, and thus are reluctant to hire the kind of people that probably could
Enterprise is reluctant to even consider hiring people without the right pedigree, but its the sefl taught hackers that make major contributions to the software, and the community.
Businesses should stop being so set on worthless paper degrees, and look for people passionate about technology.
Before deciding to work for myself, I worked at a company where if there was an IT opening the prefered method of filling the position was sending a lazy secretary (who usually sat around playing freecell) to CNE class or MSCE, etc.
That company ended up with one sorry IT staff, I was a business analyst at the time, and ended up doing a lot of my departments IT because the most of the real IT group was so pathetic, and the guys there that were good techies, were so burdened cleaning up for and assisting the shitty people that they burnt ou quickly, thus re-enforcing the bad loop.
Anyway, the moral of this story is I am sure there is a lot more to the shortage than the article implies. Able bodies most definately can be found, but the companies are not looking for the most talented people, but rather the people that fit their outdated requirements. In short actions and experience should speak much louder than words on a resume.
sound a bit strange.
id rather be in possession of these skill...
i mean, id rather am in possess of these skill...
there is an even greater shortage of expertise in closed source software!
Nope, no OSS there.
But the one below.
And that's mentioned in passing.
Ever since that spam came out from Stevie boy my email has been getting a bunch of headhunter droids. What a pain in the arse. Well chock another one up to M$'s sins file.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Only if you go and install the latest stuff from Freshmeat. Most businesses use a supported commercial distribution (Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, etc.)
My business uses completely open source software because we have the technical personnel to make it work. When something breaks I am usually the one who fixes it, and if I can't I escalate to the community. We run our entire infrastructure on open source software and have extremely high returns on investment in these areas. We have found it to be very viable.
I used to work at Microsoft's Product Support Servicess. I can tell you that you are wrong if you feel the need to blame someone else. You can always blame someone else. I am not aware of any cases where Microsoft has been successfully sued for faults in their products, so maybe this is just a psychological need.....
Really, the reason for calling MS isn't to blame them, it is to escalate to them in order to get some additional perspective you can use to solve your problem (if you are intelligent) or to have someone babysit you through a process you are not willing to otherwise do (if you are not). Blame usually doesn't come into it at all, IMO.
Now, let me tell you about a time I needed technical support for an open source noncommercial product.
I had just locked down my box and Qmail started locking up on incoming connections. After about 10 incoming pop3 connections, the next one would hang until the service was restarted. The logs didn't show anything.
After doing my best to solve the problem (I was still somewhat new ot Qmail at the time), I sent an email to the list. Within about 15 minutes I got a reply asking me for more information. Within another 15 mintues, I got another email suggesting some diagnostics. It turned out the problem was that the log process would not handle an append-only logfile and so the log buffer would fill up and the process would lock. Unsetting the append-only attribute solved the problem. Total time to resolution after incident submitted: 30min. Total cost of support: $0. I could have paid for support, but I chose to have the community help me instead. Had it been more time critical (actually a system in production) I probably would have paid someone for their opinion.
PostgreSQL, Asterisk, and Samba also have extremely helpful communities, IME. If course not all OSS is this helpful. But the most common projects are.
My business (which supports much of this software) is at www.metatrontech.com
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License.
You stupid FUD-spreading dumb shit, try GNU General Public License.
Also, your lawyer's full of crap.
First, there is a lack of skilled computer people in any category -- unix sysadmins, Microsoft sysadmins, DBAs, coders, website design, etc.
In some categories (Microsoft sysadmins, website design) the lack of a clue is not immediately apparent to managers. In other fields (unix sysadmins) the lack of a clue tends to have immediate rammifications to management. [ Please note, I'm not trying to imply that MS admining is easier than unix admining -- IMNSHO, its harder, but that is another post. ]
The other main problem is that I see many people who are knowledgeable about admining OSS, but don't have the papers to get past many HR departments. They don't have college degrees or certifications, yet are probably more knowledgeable than the average MCSE (we can thank transcender for that!) and the average technical college graduate.
Finally, those who are knowledgable, and can survive the corporate HR hiring process tend to be expensive, CSS or OSS. You can find cheap MS sysadmins, but they tend not to be good sysadmins. However, due to the fact that MS tends to be nicer to those who set up flawed systems, it might not be obvious to management or the IT department that their workers are not as skilled as they should be.
Combine this all, and businesses get the impression that skilled MS IT people are a dime a dozen, and OSS IT people are rare and expensive, even though the reality is that any skilled IT person tends to be rare and expensive.
Just my $.02
Feel free to follow up with horror stories about your coworkers who are management's darling, but couldn't tell a sparc from an alpha.
How about the startups SpikeSource and SourceLabs?
My wife recently co-sponsored a visit by North African businesswomen to Atlanta.
To support her, I volunteered to give a talk about what could be accomplshed with Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, Apache, JBoss, Eclipse, etc. Initially the response was positive. In the end I was disinvited.
Talking to my wife afterwards, she just commented that there was a lot of fear and confusion over oopen source software.
What can I say? There's a lot of disinformation out there, I guess.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I canceled their crap 3-4 months ago.
The sky is falling.
The sky is falling.
The sky is falling.
Protect our advertising dollars.
The sky is falling.
The only chance you have is with RH and Suse, god forbid you should go to a newsgroup and ask someone. (Man, you gave us the internet and now we're using it, for something besides downloading songs and movies, ain't that a bitch). We just can't do that.
But relying on talking to someone on the phone for 12 hours for $200/hr. Yeah, that make sense.
Shi* I'll talk to you on the phone for $200/hr.
"Expertise in Short Supply"
I've been trying to hire recently, and I can say that it's hard to find good people. Not good in a particular topic, just good thinkers.
It's logical analysis and that's mostly missing. 99% of the applicants (to our java/perl shop) got into the business in 1999 after a quick nine-month certificate, and never learned how to program a computer. They don't love the art; they want a buck without having to think too much about it. They're not solving problems, they're "applying a skill," i.e., trying to slide through with old knowledge from courses.
For every good programmer, there are four hundred useless ones with "5 years experience" because anyone could be a programmer in 1999. And from what I've heard from the win32 side of the fence at my company, it's even worse there.
In my experience, it's really tough to find people who can work on any enterprise-level apps well.
It's one thing to write a few VB apps when you can keep referring back to books or online manuals to show you the fine details of e.g. which fonts to use, but taking that level of VB knowledge and applying it to huge VB-based apps (yes, they exist!) is a leap that most people simply can't do. There's a point where you can't just focus on the minute details of your chunk of code; trying to adhere to project- or enterprise-wide coding and design standards is a really tough thing for many people.
As an example, think of all the "professional coders" you know. Now think of how many of them would know about design patterns, and would either refer to the Gang of Four book when needed or have it memorised to the point where they don't need to. I'm betting less than 10% of "professional coders" (yes, I'm using this term loosely) actually know of the existence of design patterns, yet they're absolutely fundamental once you start working on projects over a certain size.
Finally, I've found that really good coders are really good in just about any language (and project). A top C++ programmer will become a top Perl, VB, Eiffel, Ada, Python, COBOL(!!) programmer, given a bit of training on language features and documentation standards, as the same design patterns will work relatively independent of language syntax. I don't believe there's a shortage of enterprise FOSS people that's any greater than the shortage of enterprise closed source people; they're both in big demand.
If you don't distribute the binary, you can keep your changes to yourself. Go re-read the GPL, particularly section 2: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
"The empty vessel makes the greatest sound." -- William Shakespeare; Henry V, 4. 4
Is that you, Jeff V. Merkey?
Don't you mean GGGGGGGGGGG$#%@ Stack Overflow?
Normally I don't nitpick about spelling and grammar, but this is bad. The story author sounds like he or she is from India or something. Kind of makes me wonder if this is that much more FUD.
bash: rtfm: command not found
If you're a shop with administrators with 20 years experience on windows, those folks are going to be quite cranky about moving to linux. Downright fearful, in fact. We had a few admins who were concerned enough that they considered retiring a little early rather than having to face upgrading from windows NT 4.0 to XP. Their job is to know exactly what to do when a client comes to them, and their "knowledge" is hard-won by experience. It will take a few years for such people to retrain to the same level of expertise on linux. It's deeply different. For a large shop:
That, as far as I can gather, is Munich's plan. It is an exceedingly rational one. The main point is that the first two or three years are going to be more expensive. You're going to be paying all the MS taxes and adding massive training costs for techs, and parallel deployments of linux boxes. It's got to be more expensive at first.
You have to appreciate the complete mind warp we are asking windows people to do. After the admin's are onside (this is the really tough part.) They need to get comfortable (they've done some implementations, they don't look for D: anymore to install stuff from. They google for help, and don't think the only source of true knowledge is a vendor) And finally, they have to get attuned (When we need a new application, their first reaction is to check out sf.net & freshmeat, and spend some time evaluating open source before looking at commercial stuff.)
This is seriously relearning how to think kind of stuff. It will take a few years to adjust to. Rolling out desktops has to be the last bit on the end, once all the techies are comfortable and attuned. Because when a client comes to them, they are the expert. The techies will feel really uncomfortable if they are not comfortable.
So like the realistic plan is something like... training for a year, with some pilots, then another year doing some server stuff. That second year will drag into two. Third year you start handle the tougher apps (those without ready analogues), move the clients over to open office, and train the front-line user desk staff. (roll out desktops for the techies.) year four, you do the desktop rollout. I seriously believe that end users in large shops will not require much training at all. All the complications in linux arise from administration tasks: installing software, configuring services, network connections, driver support. All of this stuff is handled by techis in a big shop. So all that is left to users is navigating in the file browser, which, honestly, is not going the take much training.
So in year five, most of your licensing costs drop to 0. Remote administration, for managing applications, configuration, and patches become much easier and simpler (cron + apt-get for debian stable users.), and viruses are something others worry about. So the ratio of admins to users will be able to increase, and you can re-task admins for other fun stuff.
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I see this idea all the time, and it is completely bogus. The admins are responsible for fixing the problem. Period. Are you going to empower them, or shackle them?
When we call up MS with an Exchange problem, they want us to de-activate our virus scanner, because they don't support that. In real life, there is usually a whole mess of interoperating bunches of code: firewall exchange Anti-Virus OS app environment.
No vendor will stand up and say, when you have an actual multi-vendor configuration, "this is my problem and I am going to fix it." The admin always has to prove absolutely that you are on a completely supported configuration (don't get me started on "compatibility matrices") and then run tests for each vendor, and figure out which one to sit on in any given situation.
What you really need is in-house admins who understand how the software works, in order to pin down where the problem lies in order to know where to apply pressure.
That whole analysis process is much more difficult on windows because it is much more obfuscated and complicated (layer after layer of compatibility, and unfathomable binaries) than linux (no binaries, can inspect everything, tend to have less depth and breadth in individual programs.)
It is really hard to have good windows admins, not because their aren't a lot of smart people running windows, but because those smart people have nothing to work with to develop anything beyond the most rudimentary skills.
If you run open source linux, (not canned binaries, and not applications built on ten layers of middleware) people who have the potential will grow skilled with time. but it is a long term thing. Skilled people are a long term investment.
JM
Oink, Oink!!
Are you sure this is not a political ploy by cheap-foreign-labor lobbyists to declare a "labor shortage"?
I have been peddling around for PHP projects with very little response. If there was truely a shortage, then companies would not be demanding 7 years of expertise in the language and a jillion certs just to be interviewed. And I bid low.
There are just plain too damned many developers floating around that nobody wants. Somebody is too quick to declare "shortages", period!
Table-ized A.I.
I have never heard a clear definition of what "enterprise" means (beyond Trek). The best definition so far is "spend a hell of a lot of money on it". Or, "Has too many PHB's poking around in it".
Table-ized A.I.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The problem isn't lack of expertise. The problem is shitty documentation. I'd LOVE to use Open Source more often. Everyone I work with looks at Microsoft first. I think that's insane. I ALWAYS look for an Open Source solution first. (As a side note, why in the hell is ANYONE paying money for WinZip when 7-Zip is free?) Anyway, OSS documentation tends to be poor, non-existent or outdated. (Functionality changed a few hundredths of a version ago and nobody updated the docs.) Yes, I know I can contribute, blah, blah, blah. Doesn't change the current situation.
I see very little demand for people who have a good understanding of the "open source revolution" (OSR) or who are smart. Look at the second paragraph of my resume:
I realize that many on Slashdot have been using Linux, Apache, and MySQL for longer than I, but I have been using them for far longer than most technologists.
Furthermore, my resume is filled with terms and phrases from the OSR. My resume all but screams, "OPEN SOURCE! OPEN SOURCE, OF COURSE!" On top of that, I live in an area that is supposedly one of the best for those seeking work in IT, the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area (I live in northern Virginia). Finally, I am an expert in content management systems (CMS's) generally, especially open source CMS's such as OpenCMS, which I have used for years.
How many headhunters and HR people do I have calling me, begging me to interview and promising me huge bonuses? Almost none. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of those with whom I interview know far less about the OSR than I, and some have not even begun to use Linux. In the last two years, I have not had a single job interview with anyone who knew anywhere near as much about the OSR as I. My experience strongly implies that employers have not yet begun to understand that technologists who began using Linux back in 1997 tend to be much smarter than those who waited until after, say, 2001.
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
I will be needed someone by Jan/Feb, Please send your resume's to SimonTek at Theopenstore dot net. Very useful if your in the SE part of the country, Savannah, GA. Hopefully if the business takes off, I will hire more.
SimonTek
Looks like there's a lot of PVR type jobs on hotlinuxjobs. Commercially speaking, Linux is a new product; you simply can't find people with 3 years experience writing embedded software for Linux, and if you can, they WILL cost every bit they're worth, reguardless of nationality. Face it, you'll have to resort to training new grads. And probably a technical hiring staff to sift through the reams of paper it will take to find the qualified guys (I do like to think I'm a qualified guy).
If you're looking for a linux admin to do the same sit on your ass for a meager salary job as a windows admin, it will be difficult to find someone. Especially if you're looking for someone local, and your business isn't in Finland or Silicon Valley. The bubble may have burst, but that doesn't mean a swath of talent is going to suddenly arise in technologies that didnt exist 15 years ago.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
of open source. It's not that you don't need a vendor / supplier / consultants / body-shop to help you get your stuff transtitioned over and set up correctly. You still need that, because internal IT people are just too close to / busy with mundane user needs to be kick-ass developers fixing obscure bugs in applications. Wietse Venema is probably not going to be worth keeping on staff at PayPal, and let's not even talk about the, uh, *indirect costs* of trying to hire djb :).
The value proposition comes from the fact that if IBM pisses you off, you can tell them to go away, and you can hire someone else to replace them. You might be screwed if you don't document anything and fail to keep a copy of any source code they wrote but you're screwed in that case no matter what.
Uh... dude... You have a paragraph titled EXCEPTIONAL INTELLIGENCE and support it with a list of me-firsts, and wonder why employers aren't knocking down your door.
/. resumes have this problem). And third, your assumption that people who know OSS have a higher level of intrinsic intelligence is off the mark. Sounds like you need some humility in your resume and interviews -- that holier-than-thou attitude some techs have is an automatic rejection in moderate sized and larger companies. Even out here in the Silicon Valley...
First of all, the paragraph does not support your heading, unless you were to add IQ score and MENSA membership numbers. Second, the heading is horribly arrogant and will turn away most hiring mgrs I know (I bet half of
Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio agrees. "There's a dearth of skilled Linux administrators, by comparison to the more-mature Windows, Unix, NetWare, and Macintosh environments," she says. And what happens when too much demand meets too little supply? "They can command a premium," DiDio says. "They get a 20% to 30% salary premium in the large metropolitan markets."
Mature? Please. When you consider that one good Unix guru can do the work of five Winblows admins, the 30% "premium" for higher skills is worth it and that's why people pay it. But surprise, surprise, you won't cost yourself any more if you don't hire new people but let the ones you have do what they have been recommending for years.
This is the kind of stellar logic we can expect from the person who actually signed SCO's nasty NDA and came out blithering about what a strong case SCO had, when in fact SCO has nothing. Her shilling knows no bounds and we can expect her to faithfully echo whatever M$ is saying at anytime. Why do people ask her anything anymore?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
SourceForge (SF) has been doing this for years. And SF lets its open source projects advertise for volunteers who want to work on non-technical matters (such as software documentation), too. So a project could advertise its need for a lawyer as well as, say, a PHP coder or DBA.
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
Imagine that, a lawyer without his hands in someone else's pocket.
Next thing you'll tell me, the Red Sox won the World Series, AND beat the Yankees in route doing it.
OSS means working for free. The Negroes have had enough of working for free when they were slaves. This is why there are no Negroes in OSS, they wants to get PAID!!!
As far as Negroes are concerned, OSS is just another tool in a plot perpetrated by The Man, to keep a brotha down.
Funny thing, the parent has been modded "flamebait" (which it is), but the truth is that in the world of well paying IT jobs, the truth is... that not many enterprises do use Open SOurce enough to hire Open Source specialists. Mostly, they just go for the guy who knows C++ and Java, and has... an MCSE.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Very true.
The only places where Open Source is used exclusively is in in-house IT companies where the skilled UNIX people are, and in educational/reasearch institutes which usually run exclusively on Linux/FreeBSD, once they've upgraded from their aging Solaris machines.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
this newest article on the front page
says OS development isn't quite all the rage...
i mean people love it, but experts are in short supply
for the free OS programs you don't need to buy
now this lack of experts
should start ringing bells
in the ears of those corps
who might lose business to dells
I say OS is great and OS is grand,
but in order to become the way of the land
you must fight, you must train,
craft experts all your own
fuck this college nonsense,
throw a student a bone
train them yourself,
don't trust for-profit schools
because those learning institutes
graduate too many fools
The article says different, says colleges are grand
and they've started to make linux the law of the land
But I say that's bunk, and that they're full of crap,
and are way less accurate than my campus LDAP
See I'm at RIT, in the CS track
and I say this path is filled with cheap hacks
In my Operating Systems class
I figured I'd learn
How to make a small kernal,
or have small changes to discern...
But instead all they taught
was threads in C
a topic I learned
IN CS THREE!
ANd as half the students
smiled with glee,
There was one who was pissed,
and that there was me.
You can say all you want, but schools are slow to turn,
and I'll have learned very little by the time i adjurn,
I'm no OS expert, but I've got karma to burn...
Pretty much everyone who runs linux runs 'canned' binaries. Maybe you like to compile sed and fsck but I'll take the ones that come with the system. The availibility of the source code doesn't solve all problems. Sorry, you come off as not knowing what you're talking about.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
No vendor will stand up and say, when you have an actual multi-vendor configuration, "this is my problem and I am going to fix it."
Actually, when we as an MS super-uber-prime-"Thanks for letting MS suck the blood out of your Fortune 50 corporation" "partner" asked MS for help with our multi-vendor web site problem and gave them our uber-partner-special case number, they said "3rd party load balancer, eh? - we don't support them - suck it"
I then called Resonate (the load balancer vendor) and they _immediately_ began working on solving the (eventually found out to be an MS network config & MS OS patch) problem and it was not a third level support engineer that I had to fight to get to talk to, it was the first guy who answered the phone and he knew everything from MS config dialogs and Solaris system settings from memory.
Resonate - best commercial product tech support I've ever experienced.
If two students, who are writting an irc client in order to improve their programming skills, deside to use sourceforge as a repository (so they both can work on it) and put it under an free software license "just in case", they are part of "most" free software projects.
But they are also utterly irrelevant to any business case. The only software projects that are relevant to business is that which has achieved a code base that is mature enough to be used. That includes basis software like Linux and FreeBSD, server software like Apache and SAMBA, desktop software like OpenOffice and Firefox, developer tools like the GNU chain, Perl, Python and PHP, and and databases like MySQL and Postgres.
What is relevant is whether you can find expertise for *those* projects (and products), not whether you can find expertise for some random hobbyist project on sourceforge.
Measured in number of projects, the random hobbyist and studenst dominate. Measured in number of users, it is a much more limited number of projects that dominate, and it is primarily those projects that a busniness case should be build on.
I find that when business people say they can't find enough qualified people, what they really mean is they can't find people they can push around for nickles and dimes. Even during the "great IT shortage of the bubble" I knew people who couldn't find a job to save their lives, and they had been working in the field for more than a decade. The problem is management, who gets paid 70K, wants people to work for 30K-40K. While this may be different in other parts of the world (I live in the midwest in the US), I find if you offer people what they are worth they will do what you ask/need and more.
One problem I notice is that a great many skilled OSS (well not OSS really, Linux would be better to say) admins have very poor people skills. They feel that it is their job to hole up in the server room and fiddle, not to help users. Sorry, but if you REALLY want your pet OS to take over your orginaziton, you have to support the users. Yes, that inculdes the really stupid support.
We all hate it, no argument there. I can think of many things that I'd rather be doing and that would be better uses of my time than going and explaining to someone for the 3rd time how to use Nero to burn a CD. However, that's just part of my job as a support guy. They pay me not just to make the servers work, but to help the users.
Now when you are switching to a different platform, this goes quadruple. The users are going to have MANY problems. Granted, it'll generally be with stupid little differences, things you don't even think about because it's so similar, but they'll have problems anyhow. You have to be willing to hold hands and help through this process. If not, users will find it insurmountably difficult and demand a change back.
I personally find this one of the two biggest problems with "qualified" OSS admins. They have the technical skill, but a BOFH attitude. I mean while I love to fantasize about causing hell for problem users, I realise that supporting them is part of my job, even if it's not fun. One thing I can say for a lot of paper MCSE's, they can do the hand holding (since they aren't good for much else).
Well said.
It also needs to be said that most of the cost of converting from Windows is that Microsoft has deliberately made the cost of conversion as high as possible.
In my experience the TCO of converting to Linux is about on a par with most other operating systems. As technology evolves, sites are periodically obliged to evolve with it, and there is both a benefit and a cost to doing so. All this is very normal.
What's not normal is getting locked into a software product so you can only get out at prohibitive cost. Properly, that cost belongs to the product that locked you in, not the product you want to migrate onto.
I reckon anyone who fills a position based on choosing the candidate with the lowest slashdot id gets exactly what they deserve.
Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
1. Write an article, noting that you don't have enough of 'em scruffy free software hippies, post article to /.
2. Get flooded with zillions of job application letters, choose cheapest turd, fire bunch of old Unix admins
3. Profit!
Wait a sec...
This sig is intentionally left blank
My CV is wall to wall OSS and I cant buy a job. Not one that pays a living wage anyway.
FUD: "Open source isn't supported well, or costs more to support"
Reality: "Open source tends to be supported extremely well, but the costs are incurred differently than with commercial software. More expensive is harder to evaluate since commercial stuff tends to be aquisition based + annual maintenance while open source tends to be a combination if in-house expertise, low aquisition cost, possibly higher annual maintenance. It could be a wash or either one could be higher. The difference is that _you_ are in control and can switch (or cancel) support contracts at will. Try that with some commercial product."
FUD: "Linux admins are hard to find"
Reality: "The Linux admins you do find tend to be 10x-100x better technically than the paper-MCSE idiots you'll get for windows admins. This translates to fewer admins needed overall, plus much less ''support'' required since the admins are more self-sufficient. You need to be able to hire people with 2-3 years of ''real'' experience vs. the 5-10 years demanded by most HR departments."
FUD: "Open source may force you to self-support with web searches & mailing lists"
Reality: "Most (99%+) windows problems I've encountered tend to be solved by google or microsoft knowledge base searches. The other 1% we either live with or assign a low-level tech to call and sit on hold waiting for a high-school dropout to read us a script about rebooting. The fact is, most commercial support sucks. Hard. Be glad there are mailing list archives, google searches, etc. to help solve problems. As a bonus, once you've solved the problem you're never forced to upgrade to a new unstable version by the vendor -- you support your own stuff with your own experience coupled with the experience of the community at large."
FUD: "Open source expertise is hard to find"
Reality: "There are a lot of open source projects in a lot of different fields. This is really like saying ''Computer experience is hard to find'' back in the 80s or 90s. The problem is finding experience for the specific product you need. Try finding a ''sagent'' admin to hire (an expensive proprietary ETL tool) -- it's hard because there aren't many people using it. Likewise finding someone with 10 years of Oracle or DB2 is going to be easier than 10 years of MySQL or Postgres, the point of which is that 1: the commercial product may have been around longer and 2: the commercial product from 10 years ago was likely a very different beast than the current product, so the value of 10 years of experience in a specific product is suspect at best. In this case you should be looking for 10 years of RDMBS/SQL experience without regard to the specific products used."
A lot of this seems to be a fundamental phase-shift in IT expertise required hitting the shoals of inadequate HR hiring practices.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Hi, I'm an open source expert and currently looking for work. I finished my last contract a few months ago and have been using my savings to allow me to further improve open-source software.
I am currently:
Implementing bounty into bugzilla.
The ability to pay for bug fixes that are important to you, to incentives developers to fix them.
Converting a number of linux/gnu configuration files (all if possible) into xml with defining XSD's, using xmlstarlet to replace the various grep and Perl scripts currently used to read configuration.
Developing a system to read information from windows registry files and use that information to configure a linux/gnu system. The system will use registry to xml then xsl to transform that into an xml file compatible with the for mentioned linux/gnu configuration files.
A number of radical modifications to the way that the KDE user interface works.
Dynamically loading of content in view, instead of loading the entire content, improving latency and reducing memory and processor overhead, the user interface will update in constant time instead of linear time with constant memory and CPU usage, instead of linear memory and CPU usage.
Changing the way that menu are displayed.
The ability for applications to request a menu based on context. A menu will the be generated based upon this context, allowing for machine learning (moving items up and down the context hierarchy), and the ability for any function to be accessed from any menu.
Machine learning will allow the GUI to generate a menu tailored to the task in hand, statistics can be shared so that an organisation can look at how an application is being used, adjust there work processes and feed back the adjustments into the menuing system.
I am also working on other reviews of OSS software, identifying points that need looking at and suggesting possible solutions.
Apart from that I have helped write a ADSL modem driver , put forward a number of patches for the kernel,(usb and pcmcia network card), and reverse enginered the Microsoft access database fileformat.
So, if you've got an OSS problem and you think I can help provide the solution drop me an email at oliver_stieber@yahoo.co.uk.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Mandatory gentoo plug
"They've got to start somewhere, right?"
Now you know why people don't like outsourcing. Everyone talks about we should be glad those "menial" jobs are gone, but those jobs were the "starting points", plus those aren't the only ones going bye, bye.
I am the main developer of the LiVES Video Editor/VJ tool, a project I have been developing for two years, and which is in the top 450 projects on Freshmeat. (see http://lives.sourceforge.net). I've been looking for work involving my open source skills for over 18 months without any success so far.
If anybody wants to give me a job using/developing open source software, please contact me at the contact address on the site.
Yeah. A friend of mine started an open source company, but they couldn't make any money giving software away.
Another friend started an astroturfing company, but his client killed him to cover their tracks.
Some may think this is some kind of flamebait, but it's not. It's just good, practical advice from a hiring manager.
/. userid. I'm a long time Linux user and have had a /. userid for about 5 years.
Yes, I'm somewhat impressed on the geek level by your low
However, a good reality check is needed, because I wouldn't hire you either. Why not? Read on.
I'm a hiring manager in charge of an international (two offices, in in Canada and one in California) team. Our company runs its entire infrastructure on Linux. We have close to 400 servers running Linux, and some of our workstations (mine included) also do.
Like you, I have been using Linux since 1997. I love hardware, I love Linux, I prefer to use FOSS wherever possible. I think it would be cool to hang out with you at LUG meeting. I'm also a Debian user (this is being typed in Konqueror on Sid) and we probably started around the same time. My upgrade path from Red Hat 7.3 was Debian and I should have done it sooner.
However, if your resume arrived in my inbox, with that "Exceptional Intelligence" paragraph in it (or other paragraphs written that way), I probably wouldn't even finish reading it before I trashed it.
You have to understand something about how people look at resumes. They're looking for reasons to dump your resume as much as they are looking for reasons to interview you. Maybe more so.
What do you think happens when people look through a stack of resumes? We do triage. There's a "No way" pile, a "Maybe" pile of second-stringers, and a "Potential candidate" pile. The easiest pile to fill is the "No way" pile. Give me a reason to dump your resume and I will. And it won't take long, either. In triage, most resumes don't get more than two minutes of my time. If I spend five minutes on your resume, it was either way too long (I don't care if you have 15 years of relevant experience, distill it into no more than two pages), badly written (if you're not a good writer, pay someone who is), or I was really interested in it.
The second easiest pile to fill is the "Candidate" pile. If your resume has what I need for the job and is well done, it goes here. These are as clear-cut as the ones going to the trash.
The "Maybe" pile is the people who don't go to one of the other extremes. It gets looked at if, for example, the people I want from the "Candidate" pile are not available anymore or they don't pass the interview. So far, I have never touched the "Maybe" pile after triage.
Once triage is done, I take a closer look at the "Candidate" pile and decide which of those I want to interview. Typically, I will interview 1/3 more people than I have openings for, unless there is only one opening. Then I will usually interview only the top two candidates.
I think you can see from this how much your resume is working against you. It doesn't all but scream "OPEN SOURCE!" It screams some less flattering things, like "EGO!" and "IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!" and "PRIMADONNA!"
Now, it may well be that you are not any of those things. I don't know you; you may well be a great worker and a really great team member. However, I can't know that when I read your resume. At that point, you are your resume. It makes the impression of you. Good impression, good resume, good skillset, and you may be getting a call. Otherwise, no chance. In fact, not just that paragraph from your resume, but pretty much your whole post, comes across as an ode to yourself and how great you are. That never gets anybody hired.
You may well have exceptional intelligence. Let your interviewer make up his or her own mind about that, though. Also, don't talk about revolution. As an individual, sure, I think the free software revolution is great, and I do believe it will be the dominant model in the future. However, as a manager, what I care about is getting the work done. Running our business is job one. We mostly run our business on free software, but
Too often the cries of "we should use OSS and it'll be cheaper/faster/better" sounds to your average exec like a special case of "we should reimplement all our systems with ThisYearsNewTechnology and things will be cheaper/better/faster".
Arguably, whether or not things will be cheaper/better/faster is actually fairly incidental to most short term business thinking. But then again I suspect I'm a cynical old git.
There is no patent on design patterns - people have come up with good designs even before that book, and will continue to do so.
Maybe the article really means a shortage of people who can bullshit management with big words like "Gang of Four" and "Xtreme Programming", who can justify this way that the project took two months longer than required, thus tricking the PHB into doing sane software development.
I also wouldn't be surprised if it worked as increasing job-security because you can re-do the project as often as you like by refactoring it to some new design pattern, "which will solve all problems and make maintenance easier".
Good programming practices can only be beneficial when the developer has access to code even after a single project is finished, for example when he is developing as a one-man-company, in a big company, or in open source. I bet many of these companies complaining are really looking for one-shot project developers, and then wonder why there are fewer of them with open source (where developers have access to source, so that they can plan for the ages).
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Highly proficient in finding and integrating open source tools and have excellent understanding of "open source revolution."
Is this even grammatically correct? And I'm sorry, but saying you have Exceptional Intelligence on your resume seems like overkill to me, unless you intend to imply you have an army of spies working for you. Also, you seem to make a mistake many, many people make in that you can't separate intelligence and knowledge. I'm also quite intelligent, or so I like to think, but that doesn't mean i know anything about Linux, can bring up the passion to learn it or would be suitable for on the job training in Linux.
6-8 of .NET Development
That's not possible. .NET was not even available for until 2000 and most didn't adopt it until 2002.
LOL. A bunch of idiots looking for a person that owns a time machine.
Yea, I would pay someone 80-100k as long as I can use their time machine.
Fascist Idiots
However, in my experience, they still have IT people that just know how to maintain Microsoft-based systems and, whilst I've no doubt many of those people know MS products well, they have no interest in trying OSS because it's human nature to stay in the "safe zone" in a safe job rather than risk learning something completely new and not being as good in that new area.
What we therefore have is a "chicken and the egg" situation - IT managers not wanting to invest in training and hardware to deploy OSS solutions that might not give them what they need and IT techies not being able to evaluate OSS solutions properly against their existing solutions.
In the UK (and I guess to a degree in the rest of Europe), I keep hearing about the upsurge in IT spending but I don't see salaries rising from the lows they got down to about 2-3 years ago - in my particular case, not that I'm thinking of changing jobs currently anyway, I work in VoIP & telecomms convergence on mainly Linux-based servers and there is simply *nobody* offering anywhere near the salaries that I am currently getting.
I suspect that the next year or so will see a lot of techies going freelance as contractors in order to get the types of salaries they could have got prior to the slump just after the millennium.
However, as the old saying goes, "you pay peanuts, you get monkeys"!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
On first thought, I think that a lot of the people developing OSS don't know how to market themselves, as opposed to software.
If you have a piece of software out there, that's a good thing, it looks good on a resume, but you will rarely be able to sell it. What you want to look into is offering support and development expertise for similar classes of apps.
I am in the middle of a fairly large project for a big corporation, to deploy around 3-5000 security boxes. One of the candidates is a BSD-licensed (!) OSS product, and we are seriously considering taking the developer (young student) in on retainer to manage future development and bugfixes (he's currently working at a PC shop.)
As the external consultant, I was charged with evaluating various products; I gave the client a very (I think) set of decision criteria on which to base their choice between the two final candidates; they never once flinced at the idea of OSS out of general principle, and the companies I contacted for support were able to provide professional, rational arguments and models of how they work.
Not bad, really. I have, however, found that this is very uncommon in banking clients of mine--they prefer to have someone to sue, I guess. Rather, the companies that are pragmatic about IT in terms of product development (e.g. industrial goods and pharmaceuticals) seem to be more embracing of this sort of thing.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Its. Its. Its. Not "It's" which is short for "It is". Its.
It's more like adventure (game we ran on PDP-11 along with star trek, gravity version).
Admin work:
Windows 98% 'knowledge of good practice'
unix 90% good practice plus scripting skills
linux 50% good practice, plus scripting skills and 40% reading debug output, finding workarounds, snipe hunting
FC3 megaraid driver no longer works with the 2000 vintage PERC2 card in my server. The driver was rewritten and the old hardware abandoned. So much for a quick upgrade on the Dell 2450. My laptop turns the ethernet port off with no cable and on again when cable is attached. This totally flumoxes qpplications and the kernel. Solution is to disable the 'feature' until I can find someones fix. A nit, yes, but annoying as hell to have to figure out what the hell was going on.
The more I mess with linux, the more i find myself running stuff with debug enabled and digging through source. This is NOT admin work.
Thank you for taking the time to write such a lengthy and insightful reply. Your position as a hiring manager makes your perspective all the more valuable.
When I modified my resume this summer (early July, IIRC) to insert the offending paragraph, I was well aware that it might have the effect (on readers) that you describe, but thought that I had almost nothing to lose given the lousy response that my resume was generating at that time. I also thought that it might be a good idea to experiment with resume styles. I thought that one of the reasons that I was not getting calls from prospective employers (not even as to positions for which I was well qualified, e.g., CMS positions) was that employers simply were not drawing the inference that I wanted them to draw, to wit, that I am much, much smarter than average. Why? I do not know. As of July, I suspected that it was because they were not reading my resume closely enough and did not realize that I had been using Linux, Apache, and MySQL for years and years.
FWIW, the response that my resume drew in early September (shortly after changing my resume) was the best that I have had in years, so changing my resume may not have hurt. It is hard to say, however, because September is a huge "hiring month." A disproportionate amount of hiring takes place in September, so the increase in the interest from employers may have been due to merely seasonal factors.
For the time being, I shall leave my resume as it is, if only so that I can get additional feedback on what I can do to get employers to notice me. All other means of getting employers to notice me have failed. I am completely befuddled as to why they do not understand that someone who has been using open source for as long as I have is much, much smarter than average. If you have any thoughts on this matter, please let me know.
I am even more befuddled as to why the "natural course of things" is reversed in the sense that I know so much more than nearly every person with whom I have interviewed in the last two years. In the last two years, I have not met a single hiring manager who knew as much as I about the OSR. Indeed, the knowledge (of the OSR) of the typical hiring manager is but a tiny fraction of mine. To me, that is simply half-assed backwards. Why are those who know the least in the position of hiring? And why must those who know the most (e.g., people such as I) work so hard to find their next contract or gig?
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
You're not an arrogant cunt. Much.
Pretty much everyone who runs linux runs 'canned' binaries.
Debian and all the RPM-based distros have source packages, so you can examine and read the exact code that you're running on your system. You can't do that (easily and/or inexpensively) with Windows, Irix, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, ...
--
I'm done with high tech employment! They can take their need and shove it. I've been burned too many times. If they needed open source people they should have called me one of those three and a half years I had my resume on the internet and got nothing. I'm now a lowly prepress technologist. My pay? over 3/4 of a programme analyst. The skill needed? 1/5 of a programmer analyst.
And I have much more free time now.
If someone called with a job now I would turn it down.
Ahhh. Remember the Golden Days of Trolling ?
/.
1997! 1998!! 1999!!! 2000 with the troll network accosiates?
Whoever didn't troll then, can't understand the decay of
Since I have gone freelance last month, jobs are being lined back-to-back : integrating OpenLDAP, building a Samba domain controller, tweaking SpamAssassin, auditing security for a web server, etc.
Open-Source now have a lot of momentum, a kind of honey moon of sort if you want. Gone are the day of 1999 where IT director where laughing at the concept. It's now part of the landscape. Lot of people are not using on a large scale right now, but are trying deployement or pilot.
Since most of the IT workforce have been happy to drink the MS Kool-aid exclusively for the past decade, they are basically helpless when it come to deploying and maintaining Linux. Unfortunately for them, they can't click their way to competence, Linux not being as forgiving as the various flavor of Windows in this regard. Actually, it's pretty damn hostile to newbie sysadmin. Thus these people need help with Linux and Open-Source, and their bosses are willing to pay.
At this point in time, a lack of Linux expert in the workforce and the service industry may slow the adoption of Open-Source. If you have been earning a living doing the proprietary stuff in the past years and considering going freelance eventually to offer Linux and Open-Source services, NOW IS THE TIME !
The walk in the desert is coming to an end for us Linux geeks. For most of us, it's been mostly a work of love, faithful that we where doing the right choice when using and advocating Linux. Now, it's payback time.
:wq
For how long have we been told IT staff are being made redundant? Now, all of a sudden, we're in shorts supply.
This reminds me of the reaction we received when the decision was made to move our VMS house to Unix. Several engineers complained that they had built their career on VMS and would quit rather than switch to unix. Hmmm I wonder where those guys are now :-)
What you should do in your job ads is describe or give an example of what your ideal resume would look like. That way job applicants could customise their resume for you since they'd have a better idea of what your vision of your business is. Right now, you're hurting yourself since you have a more limited pool of candidates to choose from. Resume skills really have nothing to do with job skills unless of course your business is to produce resumes that fit your preconceived notions.
This is open source's (and insert any new way of doing things) achilles heel...fear. Information Weak is targetted at managers, and is a mouthpiece for M$. I really laugh at how it considers 'open source' to be a new programming language!
Haha, what a poorly done troll. You could at least look up the proper terms for things.
Besides, the GPL is no more viral than lojack. You can't easily steal a car protected by lojack, you can't easily steal code protected by the GPL.
Oh and your statement about defragging ext2 is complete bunk, it automatically defrags itself as it writes.
Odd that you'd mention token ring support (which has been there for years) coupled with Shared Source which has been around for what, months?
Next time, try writing something yourself, instead of copying and pasting crap you don't even understand, dweeb.
What I do know is this. Groups like objectweb, apache, and codehaus has established a reputation of mature high quality software backed by experienced developers. From my own experience, the guys I know in open source "kick ass" and are far better than the average programmer. My theory for this is a really good programmer or one that is eager to learn and grow will find a way. That seems to be manefesting itself in the form of open source.
With the way business guys treat programmers these days, the likelihood the management fear and hate programmers is very likely. With all the out-sourcing and off-shoring going on, how can a good programmer get some satisfaction? Write great open source software.
Go over to dice.com, or whatever, and take a look. There are *far* fewer ads for OSS pros. Usually, the OSS stuff is thrown in as an extra (along with 30 other skills needed for an $18/hr job), not the primary job. OSS jobs tend to pay much less than proprietary counterparts. Compare Linux admins to Solaris, or Postgre to Oracle.
This articles reminds me of those idiotic "shortage of BSCS" articals. Again, look at the job ads, very few jobs require a BSCS. Employers want experience, and lots of it, in a variety of specific products.
It is not about doing it but about being able to make small fixes to the numerous relatively old (read: unsupported by vendor) programs in use in big companies. The main tools like Office and Windows are not the real problem but in every transition to a new OS (-Version) all the small tools used by a small percentage of people in the company with lots of data in unreadable propietary formats are the real difficult thing to transfer. When you use Open Source Tools for this you are able to adjust them to the new OS yourself which is far cheaper than finding a new tool and converting all your data.
Linux is not Windows
Parrot-girl has spoken! All hail Parrot-girl!
I found it on careerbuilder.com. Ad is for a "Systems Mgt Specialist" in Denver, CO - Just in case you want to apply. Please understand, these skills are the required minimums for one job.
z VM(Expert)o od)
T ML(Exposure)i sual Basic(Exposure)
.
REQUIREMENTS
Skills Required:
MVS(Expert)
VM(Expert)
zOS(Expert)
JES2(Expert)
JCL(Expert)
General PC(Expert)
LAN/WAN TCP/IP(Expert)
Tivoli(Expert)
Tivoli Workload Scheduler(Expert)
Tivoli System Automation(Expert)
HMC for Mainframe(Expert)
Tivoli Event Console(Expert)
eESM(Expert)
AIX(Good)
Linux(G
OS/2(Good)
SUN Solaris(Good)
UNIX(Good)
Windows 2000(Good)
SUSE Linux(Good)
Red Hat Linux(Good)
Lotus 123(Good)
Lotus Freelance(Good)
Lotus WordPro(Good)
Microsoft Excel(Good)
Microsoft PowerPoint(Good)
Microsoft Project(Good)
Microsoft Word(Good)
Security(Good)
DB2(Basic)
Firewall(Basic)
MQ Series(Basic)
PeopleSoft(Basic)
SAP R/3(Basic)
Seibel(Basic)
Websphere(Basic)
AS/400(Exposure)
C(Exposure)
C++(Exposure)
H
Oracle(Exposure)
Perl(Exposure)
V
Visual C++(Exposure)
Years of Experience Required.Minimum of 5 years managed operations experience
Education Requirements.BS in CS or CIS . . .
This is going to get harder, as more and more projects wake up to the threat of litigation and require some type of assurance that the submission is free from "work for hire" restrictions and other ambiguities of "ownership". Open source projects need to do this but, believe me, it's going to make it even more difficult to get qualified people who use FOSS in certain corporate environments, who need to put food on the table, to submit anything other than problem reports and suggestions even when they have an actual code fix in hand.
"Went back to school and aced one of those year-long programming courses. "
Hard to believe that by taking a programming course that people weren't beating a path to your door step [rolling eyes].
Did you have a B.S. degree in a science or engineering field? Or was it a degree in "elementary ed" and then 2 semesters of programming?
Try to think like an employer for a change. Your first IT job, you'll work like a dog and be treated like shit. It was the same back in '81 when I graduated and I'm sure its the same now.
I got out in '81 and made a grand total of $12K a year. Got a raise after six months though. I was making $12,600.
Oh, and I'll bet you're not willing to move, either. After 18 months of making $12K, I moved to a different city, where I immediately went to $21K. That job sucked worse, but it was important experience. After 1 year, I was able to get a job making $29K. I worked for that company for 10 years getting incremental raises until I made about $60K. Then I went into business for myself, moving up after 8 years until I made about $100K.
Then I took a job with a fortune 1000 company making the same amount of money, but with benefits, 4 weeks vacation and a titled position.
Great job. But dude, you've got to have real credentials to get a job, then you have to work at shit jobs for about 24-36 months, and just shut up and work.
But you're an "easy way out" kind of guy. Employers can smell you miles away. Hell, you're 13,000 miles from me and I can smell you.
It's a vicious cycle. You don't get the offers without the experience, and without the position you don't get the experience. Try siddling up to it from the side i.e. maybe do some web work or administration or, god forbid, tech support for a bit. These are all valid routes into a better I.T. position.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Usenet
Google
The developers mailing lists
The product's website
The community in general
There are legion of committed and interested people out there who will help you with the product for gratis. It's a hard sell to get the big thickies in charge of a company to realise this, but slashdotters should definitely know better. I have always gotten better, faster, and more informative replies from mailing lists than I have ever got from MS or other similar companies, even when *paying* for my support call to them.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
While it is suspicious in it's timing...
WHY....why do people find it so fucking difficult to distinguish between "it's" and "its"? I mean, in comments, mistakes are one thing. However, shouldn't you at least preview story submissions? I mean, it's a story about the IT profession. We're supposed to be professionals. How can you not know the difference between "it is" and "it possesses"? It's not that difficult. If you ever write the word "it's", simply read it as "it is". Applying that to the above example nets you, "While it is suspicious in it is timing..."
Obviously, that does not make sense. Therefore, eliminate the superfluous apostrophe. Sigh.
http://xkcd.com/386/
I'm in the same boat, exactly. I need good thinkers, and I think they are around. Maybe.
My problem is that I want to hire generalists , and I'm having a lot of trouble finding people who haven't focused their careers into extremely narrow niches. I need WEARERS-OF-MANY-HATS, and I'm finding that this type of professional is rare.
I'd love to hire a couple of people are are equally comfortable (and experienced) with everything -- ranging from poking around with device drivers, to developing XML schema, to whipping out perl scripts, to unraveling assembly code, to system administration, to heavy-duty real-time programming (on VxWorks, for instance), to mod_perl, to rebuilding Linux kernels, to CVS expertise, to Makefile wrangling, to Java and Eclipse, to GUIs, to shell-scripting, to good C/C++ coding skills, to, well, everything.
I keep thinking to myself: "I know all this stuff. I can't be the only one out there who does."
I've been interviewing people, and I honestly can't find anyone. Everyone I've talked to has a lot of expertise just one or two things. Not useful. Where are the people with well-rounded computer careers? Where are the people posessing a broad range of expertise?
WTF has happened to this industry?
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Well that is a surprise - it costs more to switch from one OS to another than to just upgrade the OS version - who would have guessed it ? I assume that the cost of switching from Unix to MS Windows is also higher than upgrading Unix version. I would expect that the cost of switching from Unix to Linux (and/or BSD) would be marginally higher than a Unix upgrade.
But Ballmer says that the cost of OS Software is just a small part of the total implementation cost, so why is he suddenly talking about the extra cost of OSS training compared to MS training ?
wow it's nice to hear someone lay out the plan so well. this is almost exactly what i have been trying to make happen at work. though i am only just introducing my users to firefox.
we currently have a ms access database frontend with an ms sql 2000 server for our data which i have made it my goal to convert to a php webfrontend and a mysql database. then we won't need office anymore cause we won't be tied into access by our frontend. the biggest problem of course is getting the man power to do the conversion. I am the only full time techman on sight.
myself, i have been learning how to administer a linux server at home while trying to wow my boss with useful time saving code that will get our first linux server running in the office.
this is all great and wonderful but for me personally the licensing costs is really not my reason for doing it. i just really want to use software i can trust. and by trust i mean know how it works and thus be able to find a solution when they break. a solution that isn't "well i'll just reboot the computer"... dumb windows.
Short preface, I am self employed after having struggled with a problem similar to yours for about 1 1/2 years. I hope to be in the position of recruoiting people in the comming 6 months.
> FWIW, the response that my resume drew in early September (shortly after changing my resume) was the best that I have had in years, so changing my resume may not have hurt. It is hard to say, however, because September is a huge "hiring month." A disproportionate amount of hiring takes place in September, so the increase in the interest from employers may have been due to merely seasonal factors.
One reason why it may still get you response is because it provokes. That said, you first have to get people to read it instead of putting it aside after the first or so paragraph, and I'm afraid I'd have to agree with gujo-odori that many won't.
(oh, and to Gujo-odori, excelent post, hope it gets moderated approprately so others will see it and learnn a bit)
Provoking in itself doesn't hurt as long as you can get people to think, but findign the line where it will make peopel think without annoying them or pissign them off is extremely difficult, even more so when you are dealing with someone whom you don't know.
In my specific case, the issue seems to have been that HR people read from my resume that I'd not be an easy person to manage (and they are somewhat right there).
At a certain point for me the conclusion was simple. I don't feel like presenting myself differently from what I am, and if I am hard to manage, then I better go manage myself.
> I am even more befuddled as to why the "natural course of things" is reversed in the sense that I know so much more than nearly every person with whom I have interviewed in the last two years.
HR people are not really there to judge your technocal knowledge or skills, they are first of all there to see if you'd fit into the organisation and if there are any obvious problems with you as a person. At least overhere, when you pass the initial filter, you also get to talk to people who do know a lot more in depth. One of the tasks of HR in this is to ensure those peopel are not wasting their time.
On another note, if the people in HR would be technically skilled, the company would most likely not be busy recruiting technical people, they'd be hiring new HR people.
This all is also (sadly enough because it is extremely pointless imho) why certifications play the role they do. They provide HR with a checklist for knopwledge that they simply know they cannot judge. It is an additional filter (and a bad one for that), no more and no less.
So first of all, you'll have to make sure that the HR people think you'd fit well in their organisation, and why you'd be the best person to add. You main tool for this is not even your resume, but your application letter.
Your resume should never be more then a few minutes read. If you insist on including lots of information, consider making a portfolio of your work that you can include (always ask first if they'd be interested in receiving it!) or use an appendix to your resume to explain details when you think they are relevant. What is very important is that it provides a startingpoint for an interesting talk, it should not tell all there is, if it does there is no reason to interview you usually.
Anyway, hope this helps a bit.
You are a rare bread in the hiring business. I've tried to be a generalist, and it doesn't work in the real world. My first job was in a storage company, so I learned a lot about SCSI. Now the only companies that want to hire me are those who want experts in SCSI. Doesn't matter than I can deal with anything, I've never professionally worked with databases, so nobody believes I could work with them.
I have a carpenter friend, and I keep asking how he got is current job. He used Senco brand nailers, and this new company uses Pasload brand. There is no way they should have hired him.
That reminds me of the old school type network guys that act like union auto workers. "You can't move me to the transmission line, I have been working on the engine line for 30 years."
While everyone is bickering over what basically amounted to stubborn laziness, the Japanese promptly take over half of the US auto market, and thousands of US auto workers (not to mention thousands of workers from supporting industries) lose their jobs in the process.
My point is if you sit around getting fat on one skill, someone leaner an meaner will eventually take your place.
Having a bookmark to Google does not make you an expert on everything.
"reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released."
I'm still chuckling...---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
the only way to troubleshoot other open-source programs is to do what Norris did: search the Web and post queries to the open-source community.
Or, ummm.... read the source code, maybe?
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
[looks all around Slashdot...]
lack of open source expertise?!?
Excuse me, while I have a cognitive dissonance moment...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
There are other opposite issues with commercial software products. Most companies will release unstable or incomplete software because they need the revenue. They will do this in the hopes that enough people will buy such a product in order to fund the bug fixes. I've been in situations where we were paying $15,000 a year for 4 licenses but were told we'd have to wait a year until a specific feature was fixed. With open source I can fix it myself, submit a patch, and everyone is happy.
I'm learning this the hard way. I talked our company into using Subverion for our project but finding a Subversion trainer has proven difficult.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I almost made it thru the article until I saw a quote from Laura Dido:
Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio agrees. "There's a dearth of skilled Linux administrators, by comparison to the more-mature Windows, Unix, NetWare, and Macintosh environments," she says. And what happens when too much demand meets too little supply? "They can command a premium," DiDio says. "They get a 20% to 30% salary premium in the large metropolitan markets."
Even though what she says seems true, her name just pegs my BS meter.
Make damn sure you know how to administer a Linux box before you try to push it as a solution to company problems. If you slip up in something, and services go down, everyone will blame you and your newfangled box.
On the other hand, if services on a Windows server go down, people are only mildly irritated, 'cause they're used to it.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
"It also needs to be said that most of the cost of converting from Windows is that Microsoft has deliberately made the cost of conversion as high as possible."
Yeah, they made Windows easier to use so it takes longer to retrain people to use Linux - the bastards!
Nowadays you can write the finest software of all time if you take that same situation, substitute Devry (or psuedo-educational institution of your choice) graduates (or drop-outs, depending on your level of vitriol) and Visual Studio.NET for the typewriters.
Wait, never mind, somebody beat me to it, after all how many folk out there did Power Builder libraries at some point in their careers...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
There is no shortage of Open Source expertise. Plenty of skilled Open Source people need work. The problem is PHBs in HR and IT now require various gatekeeper items for Open Source jobs, like Red Hat certification, specific Linux flavors, and other irrelevent things. Having years of experience isn't enough. So they deserve whatever "shortage" they get.
Perhaps that's changed, but I hardly have time for job searches anymore. Working as a temp at the USPS and sleep consume every bit of time I have (have to pay the bills somehow, and looking for Linux kernel or Perl work doesn't do it). Today, Veteran's Day, is the first non-Sunday day off I've had in ages.
In the begining of the IT BOOM the demand was on an IT generalist in the middle and towards the end of the IT BOOM it shifted to wards IT specialists and from what I have seen in the post IT BUST it has once again shifted to companies looking for IT generalists.
I got my current job because the witdth of my skill set not the depth of those skills.
Open source deffinitly plays into this as more and more corpations adopt open source products.
-- "Life's not fair, but the root password helps."
"I've been interviewing people, and I honestly can't find anyone. Everyone I've talked to has a lot of expertise just one or two things. Not useful. Where are the people with well-rounded computer careers? Where are the people posessing a broad range of expertise?"
Why can't you find surgeons who know multiple types of surgery, and who are generalist? Why can't you find generalists (GPs) who are surgeons?
The simple answer is there's too much knowledge to be great in everything. At best one can be good at many things, and great at a few things.
You want a surgeon who's great at all kinds of surgery, and is a great GP? Then be willing to pay for that, and wait.
No, no, for peace. Poorly worded, I suppose.
I've been thinking the exact same thing recently. The problem is that I don't know how to advertise my skills to find small jobs similar to those you are taking on.
Do you have any advice or insight into your situation? For example, are you leveraging years of past experience and/or a large network of contacts?. Or are you in a very technologically progressive region (depends on the local industry; eg. manufacturing blue-collar towns lag at least 5 years behind the mainstream)
Become an Registered Nurse, and you will get a job right away. Or, for that matter, get a commercial drivers license.
I.T. is about the only career field with no practically no such thing as entry-level, and no clear career path. It's all about having the exact right experience, in the exact right products and technologies - not too much, not too little, no experience in the "wrong" products/technologies - and every job has a completely different list of products and technologies. Good luck.
Yes. I have been working 3 years for a Linux integrator that mostly service the SMB market; I also worked on a few "large" project (mostly, email servers). I would not say I have a large network of contact, but I have a good reputation in my circle. So far, all my lead where from contact made at my LUG, where I often do presentation at the monthly meeting. These presentations help build my credibility, and friends from the LUG contact me with offer when they heard I started freelancing.
I don't know how well this could apply to your situation, though. The LUG idea is a good one assuming that 1. you have one in your area, and 2. at least some professionnal frequent it.
I think the idea is to make yourself visible, and demonstrate technical proficiency. Other avenue might be to participate in local technical mailing list and forum, and offer sound advice. Or frequent your local board of trade to network with local businessman (although you will need to adapt your discourse for these people).
Sorry I do not have anything more concrete, I must admit I have been very lucky so far to be in the right place at the right time. Could you expand a little on your professionnal background ?
:wq
Your ideas are very well thought-out and informative, and there's no doubt in my mind that they're true.
However, this works because Munich is centralized and has that German obsession with efficiency. They're not really as culpable to an outside body as a corporation. Granted, there are the same control structures, theoretically - both governments and corps are generally controlled by a dozen or so guys in suits - and if they decide that switching is a good idea, great.
However, if a major, publicly traded corporation decides to do this, not only will you have to listen to the screams of every middle manager and every [pansy] Windows admin, you'll have to hear cries of infringing on due dilligence from your shareholders, and that can get you a fat lawsuit. It is never "Are you doing what's best for the company five years from now?" it's, "What are you doing to drive up the stock prices today?" and if you ask those hedonistic Wallstreet types to wait five years for a payoff, wow, you're in for a talking to.
That said, go open source!
"It's a different story for companies that are primarily Microsoft shops. A total switch from Windows to Linux, or even a significant Linux deployment in the middle of a Windows environment, will be three to four times more expensive--and take three times as long to deploy--as an upgrade from one version of Windows to a newer release, according to a Yankee Group study Ballmer cited in his memo. He also cited a May Forrester Research study that said Linux training is on average 15% more expensive than Windows training. The author of that report, Forrester VP Julie Giera, says the caveat there is that her report's sample was very small, mainly because she couldn't find many companies who'd been running Linux more than a year and who closely tracked costs associated with the deployments." this is exactly why not to deploy microsoft in the first place - it's called lockin this is how microsoft has billions of dollars - they are an illegal monopoly that locks you company into their technology and you have to keep buying from them. Training is more because it is better and you are actually learning something - like how to troubleshoot problems. there are nt admins out there that couldn't troubleshoot their way out of a wet paper bag. My boss was interviewing nt admins that are going to get layed off to bring into our team and asked a simple question of how you would troubleshoot Internet Explorer problem of not being able to get on the internet in a networked environment - one out of four said they would check network connectivity first - the other three said they would reinstall internet explorer - this is the difference in training - this is what microsoft has brought on with their crap - more crap that people have to un-learn.
Finally. I've spent 25 years developing a broad industry knowledge, adequate depth of knowledge across the board, and specifically tried to develop and maintain a generalist's skillset. .. etc). No body seems to understand that generalists help your specialists work better. No one understands cross-disciplinary synergy.
In the Past 3 years, I've been interviewd a dozen+ places, and in almost every case, "you have too much experience", "Your experience is to broadly based", "But we only need a Network guy (or XXX admin guy
Where are you, and what are you hiring for!
-- All That's Evil in the Geek Space
"It's" is short for "it is". Don't use it by mistake when you mean the possessive sense: "its".
It's true that Slashdot and its users are prone to spelling error.
I agree. It makes it much harder to sell people on open source, but it is much better to control expectation, and be able to meet realistic targets along the way, than it is to tell them they'll be reducing costs in a year, and watch the project spin out of control because everything was under-estimated, and the windows admins are trying to torpedo the thing anyways, so the project fails.
We need a few, slow, well thought outand documented successful transitions to demonstrate that it will work in a large organization. Trying to ram it through by being overly optimistic is going to be bad for everyone.
I'm glad you got some response out of it. It may be partially the September effect, and also there are probably a few places where that approach might work. In any case, I hope you find work soon. Things must be rough in that area. I'm from San Diego and moved to LA last year to take a job b/c the market down there was as bad as what you describe. I didn't get a single interview despite having a good resume, proper (and individually tailored) cover letters, and good relevant skills for the jobs I was seeking.
:-) then a resume that says "EXCEPTIONAL INTELLIGENCE" just might get somebody's attention in a positive way.
:-)
One thing you might want to try is having different versions of your resume. Tailor it to the job you're applying for. If the "Smarter than your average bear" resume seems right, use it. If a good, tight, just-the-facts bullet-point resume is best, use that one. And for each job, save a copy of it with a filename including the name of the employer, the job, and the date you applied, such as acme-coyote-supplies-sysadmin-2004-11-11-resume.tx t. TThat way, you always know what resume you sent to which employer and can answer questions about it and can show up to an interview with a copy of that one.
As far as smart goes, many (perhaps most) employers do not look first at how smart you are. I don't either. I look first at how well I think you will fit in on my team. A resume can create a feel for that (not always, of course, but it seems accurate enough that with the exception of only one person, I would have hired everyone I interviewed this year if I had that many openings). Best personality fit trumps best brain every time.
If the hiring manager has a team of aggressive, in-your-face people who are constantly competing to see who has the most geek cred and think BOFH is a sysadmin how-to (OK, it really is
In other places, not. All of us from the engineering VP (my boss's boss) on down are low-key. We hire people who are passionate about their work and technology, but not in an in-your-face kind of way. Together with personality fit, the other thing we really look for is people who are self-motivated and don't need to be managed. If I hired a person who actually needed to be managed, I'd consider myself to have screwed up in the hiring process. So far, I haven't (knock on wood)
After personality fit and self-motivation, then comes smarts and experience. Those things matter, of course, and a candidate who doesn't have what we want in that area will also not succeed. However, fit with the team trumps those to the extent that if the 4th smartest person fits in better than the smartest or most experienced one, the 4th smartest one will get the job. If there's something she doesn't know that we want her to know, we'll teach her.
Why do the people who do the hiring often know less than the people being hired? Depends on the place. Sometimes it's just plain old cluelessness. My brother worked at a place like that. It wasn't that way when he started, but a few years along there were a bunch of management shakeups and stupidity reigned. In other cases, it's because HR acts as a filter and only the resumes that get by HR even get seen by a hiring manager. Finally, you don't have to know more than the person you're hiring to be a good hirer or manager. There are a number of people on my team whose depth of technical knowledge is greater than mine, and I hired all of them. I wasn't a manager when I joined this company, but I rose to team leader in less than a year and manager a few months after that. I did and do have a good skillset for the technical aspects of my job, but the things that made me a team leader and later manager were:
- Demonstrated skill in getting the big picture on our projects and helping manage them and focus on things like quality control and how to improve our process, and voluntarily stepping up to do those things. That really helped out my boss.
Does anybody pay attention to obviously biased articles from Info Week? A typical Info Week issue will have a two page Microsoft advertisement in the middle and a couple of other MS ads inside the front and back covers.
Since the magazine is free they have to make their money from advertisers; they aren't going to alienate their biggest client by running honest, unbiased articles about Linux. Indeed, they have a strong incentive to run anti-Linux articles in order to stay on MS's good side and keep those advertising dollars rolling in.
As I said the magazine is free and you get what you pay for...
If adoption stops because it is too expensive to get the skilled people then the remaining skilled peoples market will most probably fade because Microsoft solutions will re-assert in all those situations that were ripe for picking.
Short term cashing in?
When I started at a consulting company in 1997, I wondered why some of my colleagues did not like me before we had talked. A few months later, someone mentioned I looked like a brown-noser because I was always having conversations with our boss John. They finally realized John kept coming to me for conversation because WE BOTH LOVED COMPUTERS.
- Both of us were programming for fun in the 80s.
- Both of us made a profession out of our hobby.
While John had written some shareware that was still making a few dollars a month, he was not a good programmer, so he became a technology manager. He knew before I arrived that I was good programmer; I was hired because I impressed HIS boss by glancing at a screen of code, pointing to an error, and explaining how to fix it. So John went out of his way to become friends with me.
Once my colleagues had their epiphany, most of them were OK with me, at least enough to ask for help. One of them tried to get me fired. She was a "bang your head against the computer until it does something useful" type of programmer, but she had established herself as the guru, and I was threatening her position. She was friends with the owner of the company, and he did not like me because our boss' boss had hired me without consulting him. I only survived because their method of getting me fired was to keep giving me impossible assignments, and I kept succeeding. (The assignments were much fun and great for the resume.) I hope never to deal with that much politics again.
---
The grandparent post uses 1999 as the divider between the computer-lovers and the computer-jobs-for-money people. I think the line is much earlier. Almost everybody at the consulting company in 1997 belonged to the latter group.
MSWindows started dominating around 1992, and that killed command-line programming on PCs. Unix people have the attitude, but I do not know anybody that started with Unix after 1992. Hopefully Linux is creating a new set of command-line program writers. All of the well-known hackers were involved with computers before 1992. The youngest hacker known to me is Justin Frankel, but even he was writing software before 1992. (Wikipedia says he was programming before starting high school in 1991.)
Can anybody name a great hacker that started with computers after 1992?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Just tell me which book on C to buy and I'll call you back in 3 months lookin' for work.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
>as the saying goes, if you think training is expensive, try ignorance.
Exactly, my thought. BTW, several companies are providing support services in the open source arena -- such as...
SpikeSouce, SourceLabs, and OpenLogic
Also IT training companies are starting to offer some mainstream open source courses, like eclipse, hibernate, etc.
See http://www.inferdata.com
We're supposed to miss a gay Egyptian terrorist? Jeff Jacoby was right when he called Arafat a monster.
READ THIS
If you can still have any respect for Arafat after reading that, I have NO respect for you.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/11/0 19239
I don't understand the problem here. But maybe that's because I meet their criteria.
You've got some linux binary which is doing something odd. You can track down how the source was built, and build it yourself, with -g or a couple of printf's. Heck, just running strace on it often provides a lot of information. That's because the UNIX API is pretty compact, and folks with only a modicum of experience will be able to grok it.
I've never heard of anyone running anything like strace on windows. I suspect that the reason is because the control flow and system calls are so complicated that not too many people will be able to make head of tails of the output, so it isn't much use. Windows programs are BIG. linux ones tend to be much smaller (and do less) so they are just plain easier to figure out (the normal advantage of modularity.) Linux packages will often be built by a bunch of small programs held together with some scripting. That is much easier to figure out than some monolithic ubercode.
Again, it comes down to barrier to entry, if the code is smaller and easier to figure out, and there is more information available (source code is documentation too.) then there is a bigger chance that a reasonably motivated geek will acquire significant skills, and perhaps even insight. On windows, you don't have a chance, you just kind of ride the bear and pray.
That you feel compelled to report your experience only emphasizes that it was unexpected and unusual. It is always good to hear about companies who understand and can help. The fact is, they aren't common, and that kind of support is extremely expensive for the company to provide. The tech has to know about all these third party apps, and have testbeds to try things out with them.
;-) which is exactly what a contractor must do. But it is bad for the organization. The real argument against outsourcing is the loss of institutional understanding, the loss of strategic knowledge. Folks will eventually figure that out, but it will take a few years.
There is also the possibility that you got the one guy on the support desk who knows his ass from eyeball, and the rest of them would have sent you flying. I hope it is more than that.
Experience in my organization with a load balancer problem:
Eighteen months of talking to nice gentleman with south asian accents and funny schedules, two complete unit replacements shipped and installed, a software upgrade or two. Turned out to be a (to be fair, fairly obscure) DNS configuration problem. This was from a major vendor (no need to embarass them here) and of course my staff wasn't without blame here either. A large vendor had me turn off anti-virus before diagnosing a problem with their mail server, a company that makes a lovely proprietary language for web applications (interpreter built in java) had us downgrade our servers, and remove SMP support from our kernel ("we don't support multiple processors on linux, we don't support RH x.y, only x.y-1") The best one was... I bought software from another vendor for linux in November. In April of this year, they decided to change their pricing policy. the new price was, wait for it... ten times the price the previous november, and the november price had five digits in it, and the support costs went in line with the new pricing. Oh, and they dropped linux support too. We dumped them.
In general, all support sucks (though you get lucky once in a while, and it is a blessing when you do.)
I'd rather roll my own luck, training my own staff, than depend on hit and miss commercial support. I'm sure some pencil pusher will insist that that is terribly expensive, but they are dead wrong. It is far more expensive to deploy hundreds of disparate system with only the vaguest clue of how they run, (and little fragile procedures that reduce analysts to just typists) and then have to run to get support on them all.
Good IT staff is a strategic necessity for any large organization, because bad IT staff can easily cause orders of magnitude of difference in costs on projects, without any improvement in deliverables. Most organizations don't get that, and can't figure out what good IT staff look like. They hire low skilled staff for full-timers, and contract out all the projects because low skilled people cannot handle it. This is just wrong, because contractors never will have as much organizational knowledge, and they don't see the big picture (aren't paid to) so they implement the spec (and the specs are always perfect, right
Hell, I can't tell what anybody's worth in an interview, no matter how long. It's really hard, and it's hit and miss.
I think your post is great too, and also worthy of being modded up.
What you say about HR and the corporate culture is spot-on. And as much as it may seem harsh, unreasonable, or unfair to us at times when we are unemployed, that's actually not a bad thing. If you get into a company where you don't fit the culture and it doesn't fit you, you won't be happy and neither will they.
However, in big companies HR departments can certainly get in the way. I'm very happy to work for a company small enough that my first contact with HR came only after the decision to hire me had been made. They mailed be the paperwork to go and take a drug test and a couple of forms to sign and send back. Before that, my very first contact was from the director of software development, to whom I report. We used email to setup an appointment for a phone interview, then I went to a second interview in person to meet her and the CTO. That whole time, I never heard from anyone in HR at all.
We have a great HR department, they're very helpful and really know their stuff, but I do think the best situation is when there are no filters between the hiring manager(s) and the candidate(s). Our HR department takes great care of you after you're hired. You don't even know who they are before you're hired. That's the way it ought to be. I know that probably doesn't scale well and is probably the reason why all big companies make you get over the HR hurdle first. That's one of the reasons I love working at smaller companies (we have under 200 employees and are not publicly traded). Granted, not all smaller companies are like this; some of them suck. But by and large, I prefer them to larger ones (the worst company I ever worked for was also the biggest; over 10,000 employees in 1989 and probably a lot more by now).
it's ramifications
suspicious in it's timing
"its".
Once you finish ooh'ing and ahh'ing about strace, it's time to look at ltrace. For warriors only, please.
Windows has equivalent tools, but as you say, they're impossible to follow because of how complex the API is and how "featured" the applications are.