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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."
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.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
Either they're idiots and I don't want to work for them or they're up to some sort of Evil and I don't want to talk to them.
.
But wait! Don't order now, you're both right.
And the biggest problem with evil idiots is that there's no way to plan for what they do, the havoc they cause even takes them by surprise, since it isn't at all the havoc they intended. About all you can do is watch the windshield getting closer, and closer, and closer. .
Worked there, done that, lost my T-shirt.
Come my brothers in source. Let us climb the corporate Masada (The Empire State Building), lift our eyes to the heavens and swear:
"Never again! Never again!"
Dear corporate world, perhaps there is no shortage of Open Source developers. Perhaps people who are attracted to Open Source are just the sort of people who get tired of taking your crap the soonest and would rather jump into the volcano than take your $300 a week. I have my own business to attend to. I was not put on this earth for the purpose of minding your business. Mind your own. If you did I might well be more inclined to lend a helping hand. I like helping. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Implimenting some cockamamie scheme that anyone with one brain cell to rub against itself can tell is only going to blow up your face isn't helping, I'll go where I can see I can do some real good.
Currently that means showing the Moms and Pops how to get off the Microsoft wagon and keep that money in their own pocket, as well as relieve themselves of license anxiety, by switching to Linux and OpenOffice.
There's no shortage of Open Source people, it's just that you're looking straight at us and we're still managing to 'fly under the radar.'
KFG
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).
THe open source killer app is freedom....
Lets face it, part of why they are amazed is that to get some new software, they are used to the evaluate, request, fight for money, fight harder for money, buy software cycle. ANd this cycle eats a certain bit out of the pocket and productivity of the business. With open source I can download Fedora Core 3 and install it on workstations as part of a pilot program without paying anyone anything. I don't need to budget for it, I don't need to fight for funds. I can get things done faster for these reasons.
My business (running Linux infrastructure) is in the process of merging with a Windows shop and starting the development of another business unit as well. After seeing what I can easily do with Linux, the other business owners decided that Linux was a good move. We will still have some legacy Windows systems and a Windows test lab. But our business will run on Linux.
I spend less because I use Linux. This is because of good planning and because I have no legacy needs which lock me into a product or operating system. Not everyone is so lucky.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"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.
Prior art.
If your technology and information was out there public, prior to their claim of invention, then it's there bad.
But the problem is, you need a lawyer with about 350 billion dollars behind him.
That's one of the main reasons the US needs to reform it's patent laws.
But then again, what do we do with all those left over lawyers. Ahhhhh! We increase the number of representatives in Congress.
Which brings us to the question, could we be more f&*%$d than we currently are?
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.
But there are reams and reams of intermediate projects that don't have the critical mass for this type of support.
For instance, a widely used package, which I'm using right now is dom4j. If you look at the News section [at date of this article] you can still see that there are a LOT of bugs being fixed here. This is in a project that is several years old, dealing with XML parsing. XML started being used seriously from 1999.
Now I have made some work arounds to some fairly major flaws, which well, worked. But they were right before a product demonstration and took 16+ hours to figure out. They have subsequently been fixed.
So I took on the risk for using that tool and paid the price. Still I love OSS and it is my living, but there are drawbacks, and these are noticeable. So I think this article is wise to not stick its head in the sand over what is a real issue for business.
It then comes down to risk versus cost savings.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
"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.
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
My own personal experience now amounts to some 20 years in tech support roles and I simply have no interest in entering management because I enjoy "playing" with the latest hardware and software. However, I don't consider that I'm doing my job correctly unless I am trying to make myself redundant by training others in what I know and passing on the knowledge I have freely. My attitude is that if everyone beneath me knows what I know, that frees me up to go learn about new things and always stay on top of the latest technologies.
Unfortunately, a lot of people I've worked with in the past (and to a degree today) have a "jobsworth" attitude of hoarding information and never passing on what they know purely to protect their own jobs - it doesn't matter whether they support Linux, Windows or anything else...
On top of all this, there has always been a huge chasm that separates tech support people from their managers and the rest of the organisation anyway, particularly sales people. I always take the attitude that I'm supporting our products not our customers because I'm trained in fault-finding hardware and software issues that are not usually specific to a specific customer. Therefore, when a salesman phones me and says "You need to work faster on your Acme Corp. fault because they are about to spend $2 million with us", I usually get very angry with that person because of his/her assumption that the speed and efficiency of my work is based upon what the customer spends with us.
The fact is that being in tech support is never easy - you're always associated with being involved only when things go wrong, you do sometimes deal with dorks who only want to pass a problem on to you without staying involved and learning from your experience and you frequently deal with people who do not understand that sometimes you have to experiment and gather information (all of which is time consuming) when you get a problem nobody's seen before.
Yes, I fantasize a lot about just turning somebody's system off or sticking a screwdriver into the micro-circuitry of their product but the reality of the situation is that I like my job and the fact it pays the mortgage.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Blame isn't the big problem. The big problem is that open source is "programming-by-fad" and if you aren't doing something faddish you are shit out of luck. Search comp.databases.oracle.server for subject "Denis Prize" for an example where someone offered five grand for something simple, got no takers. comp.databases.oracle.server is a very active free support group for oracle, look what happens when people ask questions about versions 7 or 6. They get treated like they asked about Windows or something.