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Ask Slashdot: How Did You Become a Linux Professional?
First time accepted submitter ternarybit writes "By 'Linux professional,' I mean anyone in a paid IT position who uses or administers Linux systems on a daily basis. Over the past five years, I've developed an affection for Linux, and use it every day as a freelance IT consultant. I've built a breadth of somewhat intermediate skills, using several distros for everything from everyday desktop use, to building servers from scratch, to performing data recovery. I'm interested in taking my skills to the next level — and making a career out of it — but I'm not sure how best to appeal to prospective employers, or even what to specialize in (I refuse to believe the only option is 'sysadmin,' though I'm certainly not opposed to that). Specifically, I'm interested in what practical steps I can take to build meaningful skills that an employer can verify, and will find valuable. So, what do you do, and how did you get there? How did you conquer the catch-22 of needing experience to get the position that gives you the experience to get the position? Did you get certified, devour books and manpages, apprentice under an expert, some combination of the above, or something else entirely?"
I ate a penguin!
Practice, practice, practice... learn by failure, otherwise you are just a common user
I spent much of my childhood reading instead of playing video games. I received my first programming contract when I was 16, did some telco programming after that, lazed around for a year then went to work as a system administrator. I'm still a sysadmin, in a devop role, where I earn 45USD an hour. I'm probably going to grow further than this, as I've been doing it for 7 years. I believe my next goal will be to reach 55USD an hour.
Far as education is concerned, I've no college degree, no certs, the fact is I dropped out of high school since it was keeping me back.
Being a "Linux Professional" in most fields of IT is like being a "Knife Professional" working in a kitchen.
It's a useful set of skills, and it gives you the ability to use a suite of tools that are very useful - and essential for some career paths - in that field.
But it's not how you should define your career, or even your desired job. (That you're thinking of it that way might be why you keep seeing sysadmin in a Linux environment as the only obvious role.)
How Did You Become a Linux Professional?
By installing the first one in a non-linux shop when I was asked to install some service, once it was in used I mentioned it in some meeting with some big dog. No one had the balls to acknowledge they didn't know.
It starts with my first account at the university for a computer lab running AIX V3.2 and HP UX 7.1.
It continues with me taking a C programming course, then diving deeply into MUD programming.
It goes along with Linux 0.99.4, which a collegue of mine showed to me running an MWM like window manager.
It sees me helping acquaintances compiling kernels for Slackware based distributions on their respective boxes.
It has to do with my second position as a firewall administrator of firewalls running on Solaris and later FreeBSD based machines.
It gets me to owning my own Solaris box along with a Linux box running several Linux distributions installed on top of each other.
It accompagnies me to a short stint as a system administrator at a research institute for distributed computing.
And now it sees me administer phone switches based on Linux and applications plugging into the phone switches and running on Linux too.
Bioinformatics has been very happily open source and Linux friendly for my entire career to date (14 years). Only the last two and a half of those 14 years have been whithin acedamia, but open source is an especially easy sell here.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
I started with Linux use early 2000s, went through a couple years of labor and frustration installing, re-installing troubleshooting, etc. until it became my primary OS. One of the best things UI did was grab one of those fat Linux Bibles and read it cover to cover (the one I read was the Red Hat Linux 8 bible) - not all of it will stick, some will be not useful now, and largely it makes a great sleep aid, but it will give you a general picture of how things work in Linux.
From there start setting up a test system where you can try out the more serious stuff like setting up a web server, FTP, shell, ssh, etc. Maybe try out LTSP, etc. Once you get to the point where you can confidently do something useful (business wise) then see about migrating it to work. Show your boss you could do x with Linux, faster cheaper and without licenses, and that you can write out what to do if it crashes and your not there. Once you get the chance, make it work and also show it to your peers. Once things are rolling on Linux, you've become the Linux professional. Now you're there, you have to keep up on all that stuff - and there's always more to learn.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
It's the 'foot in the door' - once your on this side of it, it's up to what you do with it.. Once your in, script your job to make life easier for you, while also doing everything 100% with out failure (assuming your scripts aren't full of bugs) - you will get promoted into another position - or simply ensure that you keep your job. If you don't get promoted, jump jobs - its basically ALL experience that gets you the higher end positions, nothing else, certs help with the bigger companies, smaller ones (where I prefer) want experience more than anything. Jumping jobs, ensures you get the varied experience. Multiple steady jobs as a sys admin, could land you the Sr Sys Admin in a smaller company.
Also, don't stop with just installing systems on new hardware, thats easy - try to get your hands on the 'old' stuff that barely works, and I'm talking Pentiums - nothing in the last decade. back when I was a teenager, my mom was given around a dozen plus systems for a project she was working on, she tasked me with seeing what worked and what could be done with them. I was able to get around 7 systems fully working, only some had no drives. Between them all, I got into networking (obviously), diskless nodes, DNS, various services, the kernel/modules/configurations, etc.., etc.. Because the amount of resources I had to work with was very limited, I had to really do my homework to get everything going AND usable. A few years later, my first 'good' job I scored because I knew what some strange boot codes from LILO were when simply no one else did, and I could get the critical systems going again (I was contract initially) - I only knew that info from the countless issues I ran into on that old hardware, and getting it all working.
When it comes to your employer verifying that you can walk the walk, and not just talk the talk - it's done one of two ways, and sometimes both - they will either verify from word of mouth (previous employer/references) or during your 30 day/3month 'probation' period.
So after the plastic mannequins posing as managers discovered that "Lye-nux" was in use by some enterprise that they read about in some shiny trade publication and was therefor "sexy", I was anointed "project leader" to build and configure a mail server and a separate file server.
I used retired machines (lots to choose from), (if I remember correctly) a Slackware 6 CD, and did what they wanted, when I was called into a meeting and asked how much I would need to buy the equipment and software I told them that it was done and ready to begin testing whenever they wanted.
This really pissed them off, (not to have to spend huge sums of money) they felt cheated somehow and after I had successfully demonstrated that the setups I created worked reliably management decided to scrap "Lye-nux" and spend $500,000 on high end Sun equipment instead!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
A Linux from Scratch installation is far from a usable system on the long run, but is a great experience for learning.
Wait, you're talking about needing to get the job before you can get Linux experience? The first thing you need to understand is how silly that statement is; we talked about this in my local LUG, a few months back, and one of the other guys summarised pretty aptly:
So, when we hire, that's what we look for: experience that actually you can get in your spare time.
My own response to the question was longer and provides more specific suggestions.
-rozzin.
I blame it on Mr. Linus Benedict Torvalds.
I was doing just fine with DOS and Windows
I was happy with the BSOD when Mr. Torvalds message, the one he posted on the comp.os.minix newsgroup appeared on my screen
Since then, I am hooked, addicted, and couldn't shake it off, no matter how I tried
I even had gone cold turkey, only to end up phailing miserably
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !