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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
shortage of people having experience in working for free
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.
there is an even greater shortage of expertise in closed source software!
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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