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.

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.

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.

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.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

shortage of people having experience in working for free

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

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.