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."

Comments

Hard not to be cynical...

[wrinkledshirt]

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.

Re:Hard not to be cynical...

[Neo-Rio-101]

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.

Re:Hard not to be cynical...

[gcaseye6677]

Got to love how companies are always complaining about lack of experienced professionals, but then they try very hard to avoid actually giving someone experience. They've got to start somewhere, right?

Re:Hard not to be cynical...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Back to business: you generally have a limited budget. While we have a couple interns, we still need skilled people NOW. We can't afford (from both a budget and time perspective) to train everyone in basic programming.

Well, as the saying goes, if you think training is expensive, try ignorance. If you you can't afford to train people, you sure as hell can't afford to employ good people who already have those skills, which might explain this:

System Administration is worse than programming. I just cant find anyone with decent "basic" skills, much less someone mid-level.

I suspect the problem isn't games, Linux fans doing their own thing, or newbies playing with your system. It's far more likely to be that you simply aren't offering the market rate for someone good enough to do the job you want done. If you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys. :-)

See also my reply to the grandparent post.

The Only Time I ever see "Open Source"

[Greyfox]

In job postings, the employer's usually shotgunning keywords. They'll want Linux, Windows, 3 forms of UNIX, C programming, PHP, Apache, Perl, etc. I don't know what they're up to but I'm pretty sure it's usually no good. 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.

If the real companies would actually advertize that they need open source people, they might be surprised at what they find.

Re:The Only Time I ever see "Open Source"

[Tablizer]

Here is how typical job ads look these days (curtesy craigslist.com group effort)

1. Need a PhD, no MA, MBA, any Master's Degree, BS, BA, or any Bachelor's degree or AA or AS, or any Associate's Degree accepted.
2. Must speak all languages human and computer.
3. Must have a 4.0 GPA from grade school on.
5. Applicant must have perfect attendance and never been late once in your life.
6. Must be in excellent health.
7. Must pass a background check, alcohol, and drug tests.
8. Must pass the BAR exam, Perfect 1600 SAT score, Ace the GRE
9. Must have an IQ of 160.
10. Must possess perfect spelling and grammar. You can not do anything wrong.
11. Professional attitude and dress is a must.
12. Must graduate from a Top tier school(Ivy League).
13. Must have 15 letters of excellent references.
14. Write a 150 page pager on why do you want to work for us.
15. Never quit a job, been terminated, or laid off before.
16. Never a straight shooter attitude.
17. Excellent interpersonal skills.
18. Pass personality tests.
19. Never use any curse words.
20. Must have a perfect credit history(No late payments ever!!)
21. Must be under 40, but have 41 years experience.

You must attend 20 interviews, go to a panel interview, pay for parking, and buy everyone in the company lunch and snacks.

Re:The Only Time I ever see "Open Source"

[JohnFluxx]

"I'd probably advertise Java as a must-have,"
"even possible I'd consider someone with no Java skills"

I hate you.

Open Source != Linux

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Moral of the article

[jkitchel]

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.

Matchmaker?

[Thunderstruck]

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.

Open Source Expertise in Short Supply

[stratjakt]

as evidenced by slashdot comments

Hopelessly vague

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Wow

[ErikZ]

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.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

shortage of people having experience in working for free

what they forgot to mention:

[Foktip]

there is an even greater shortage of expertise in closed source software!

Blame?

[einhverfr]

This is EXACTLY the reason the company I work for refuses to switch to Linux. 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.

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

Title should read...

[stevens]

"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.

Re:I blame the GPL

[eclectechie]

I know you are trolling, but I'll bite anyway for the edification of others (as if anyone will see your post at -1).

So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use.

Wrong. You are only required to publish your source code if you distribute the resulting binary.

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

Re:Good Article -- ROI, based on how long?

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

The payoff is going to be dramatic, but it isn't going to be quick. In any big shop today, there will be a small army of unix/linux guys, and a much larger army of windows people. There's more windows out there, and they take more people to run anyways, so you always end up with more windows admins.

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:

• count on a migration period of about five years.
  
• Train the admins, make them your friends.
  
• Transition back-office stuff first, so that admins cut their teeth away from users prying eyes.
  
• For the desktops, try an easy one first, like firefox. Let simmer for a year or two.
  
• wean people slowly off of desktop apps, with more and more web applications, making sure they work with firefox.
  
• Then try a bigger one: open office. This is the really big one. take it slow, careful, and thoroughly researched (like how to transition Joe's macro's etc...)
  
• After that, users will barely notice when windows is swapped out and replaced. They'll already be used to firefox & openoffice. the linux thing won't be a big deal, especially if it's on KDE.
  

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.

Re:Good Article -- NEED?

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

it is that admins NEED someone external to blame when the shit does hit the fan.

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.

FUD vs. Reality

[smoon]

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.