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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."
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?
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.
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.
If it only took one year, it probably was one of those garbage diplomas.
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.
It's not what you know, it's who you know. I knew Jack Shiayte about Linux 2 years ago. Instead I studied Japanese, made friends in Japan, and got a job here working in an average paying IT company... who's lending me out to work in a research institute which has a supercomputer ranked 14th on the world listings. In a year or two, I should be able to get a job with a fairly sizable salary... mainly because of my ability to translate IT technical documents between languages. I only got that inital job because I knew somebody. It was only after that I began studying my butt off on Japanese, Cisco, Linux, and FreeBSD. If I were you, I'd study Korean, meet a few people in the Korean IT industry, and get yourself a job like I did.
READY.
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Related, I don't think the line between administrator and developer should be considered as it usually is today. They should blur a good deal, especially in the open-sourcy world. The "right" stuff is kinda the same in both fields, it's really more a question of specialization. But I expect a good admin to be able to write decent software (and keep those skills somewhat honed during day to day administration by making sources fixes, writing little tools, etc...), and I expect a decent developer to be able to admin stuff (they need to be, in order to have the right insight into what the admins need their software to be like).
11*43+456^2
CoBOL? Did you say CoBOL?
I beg your pardon. Design patterns don't work with CoBOL.
Well, maybe some of the new object CoBOLs, I haven't looked at them. Is anyone actually using those? I mean, it seems like moving from the old CoBOL to the object oriented CoBOLs is going to take a major re-write anyway, ...
You're absolutely right!
I am the UNIX systems administrator in my company - we have a wide range of UNIXes, midframes and mainframes that we develop on, and we of course have problems from time to time. My first source for support is always what is available on the internet, next level is a relevant community.
Only in very special situations will I use the technical support that we pay for, for several reasons; the most important being that a consultant simply isn't in as good a position to solve the problem as I am, having worked with and thought about it for so much longer. In the recent 4 years I have had external support on site 3 or 4 times: once because one RS/6000 had been damaged in a thunderstorm, another time because we needed to upgrade the some firmware on an HP9000 - the latter isn't difficult, but I thought it would be better to let an external company handle it, the reason being that if I screwed up, my company would face the bill, but if an external consultant screws up, it not my company. Sometimes you have to be devious.
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
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.