I’m trying to get a job in IT that will (hopefully) pay more than a usual 9 to 5. I’m been daily driving Linux exclusively for about 2 1/2 years now and I’m trying to improve my skills to the point that I could be considered a so-called “power user.” My question is this: will this increase my hiring chances significantly or marginally?
yes
Exactly this. Having an interest and a hobby to an open source system will make you better in your job and a much more interesting candidate to hire.
Source: started with linux in 1995 as a kid. Never having issues finding great jobs.
- don’t call yourself “power user”
It might just be me but it gives off “I can set up a printer, yay!” vibes.
Lots of good advice here. I’ll add that you could develop an understanding of IP networking and how it works on Linux, network interfaces, with containers, with iptables as well as stateful and stateless firewalls, CIDRs and basic routing, IP protocols and some common protocols like DNS and HTTP. This used to be pretty common knowledge in applicants 15 years ago, but very few have it today I find. DHCP and PXE boot is fun to learn too, and is still common in datacenters.
What is the alternative to DHCP? Besides static IPS of course.
Not much, although it’s not strictly necessary for IPv6. But not much is pure IPv6 yet. Perhaps 2025 is the year of IPv6!
Probably not. I guess it depends what you want to do in IT. And the org. Some orgs use a lot of Linux, and Linux is a whole different ball game at the enterprise level. It’s not just knowing about Linux, but how to properly manage, secure, and patch it at scale.
It might also depend on if you have previous IT experience. If you’ve got a ton of previous experience it could help.
Put it this way - it doesn’t hurt.
Nothing fully replaces real world experience with the exact software and technologies your potential employer uses, but having demonstrable ability to use and understand linux is very transferrable. Ultimately it comes down to the interviewers and what they’re looking for, and to the more technical of those, choosing linux as a daily driver shows you’re more interested in understanding how computers work and that you have a degree of problem solving ability.
Read some adverts of the jobs you want to get, being realistic that you may need to start low to get that experience, and build ability in what’s wanted, especially the bits that are marketable.
When looking for Linux tech jobs to apply to, a lot of them actually have Vim experience as a preferred quality. Can any experts confirm this?
Been in the industry for over 25 years, I have not once been asked to use vim. I mean, of course I do, but mostly I am the only vim user in my teams.
Nah. That’s like bragging that you memorize a lot of Pi digits.
Some on the IT team in my company use vim, some use nano, some probably use notepad or something ridiculous.
It’s just a text editor and knowing vim doesn’t automatically make me assume you’re competent at anything.
It highly depends on the job. Some companies run fully on Windows, no exceptions. There it obviously would not help. But many still either host various services on Linux, or buy hosting/cloud commuting that is Linux based. There it might even be necessary.
It also depends on what you mean by “power user”. I would generally advise you to look into the server side of things. In my work, there are zero Linux machines that have a GUI of any kind installed. t The 50 or so Linux machines are all administered through SSH and Shell.
This! Also if you company only employs windows machines … run.
Or just start introducing Linux containers and VMs that run on Linux. You can use Docker Desktop and Putty from Windows.
My personal experience: Absolutely!
I’ve always landed on jobs/projects that involve Linux server. Generally startups with not much expense to spare would go for this route. However, even bigger companies would opt for enterprise Linux.
I wouldn’t say that will work on every IT jobs out there, but when it does, you know you’re in for a fun ride!
“The Cloud” is mostly Linux—specifically Linux containers. Kubernetes and Docker are Linux specific technologies.
Most “IT” roles these days will be for from Linux knowledge ( not all of course ). It is a good skill to have.
If you do encounter an environment where they do not use Linux, it may be because of a lack of skilled staff. You could be the reason they adopt it.
It will. Keep in mind that, depending on the type of job, you’ll have to keep learning new tech just to keep up: virtualization, containers, orchestrators, automation, backups, logging, auditing, scripting and God knows what else. It’s a good starting point to get you the jobs that the Windows crowd won’t touch because of the command line.
To give yourself a better chance, learn things like:
- Bash scripting
- Docker
- Docker Compose
- Kubernetes
- Oauth2 and and an authorization server like Keycloak
- Build and deployment tools like Jenkins
Also learn how to deploy database and web servers manually.
It sounds like a lot but they’re things you’ll be expected to use.
No, dont learn docker, learn containerization and what tools can be used for it. No to Kubernetes that comes much later and/is VERY specific. No clue what keycloak is, but it sounds useful. Never hear about Jenkins. Id rather say get a grasp on python and skim what tools are used to administer servers -> ansible and puppet maybe.
Well you just got dismissed early in the interview
I almost want to agree with parts of this but I cannot imagine the downvotes for supporting a comment that includes “never hear about Jenkins” and “don’t learn Docker”.
Jenkins has about 50% market share for anybody keeping score at home. In many verticals, the market leader has about 35% market share so 50% gives Jenkins enough domination in the market that saying “never hear about” them is going to hurt your credibility.
I think most organizations using Kubernetes should not. However, most of those would still benefit from containerization and so knowing Docker is a good thing even if you use a different tech ( Podman is the same thing ). While I think people should not be using Kubernetes as much as they do, it is still going to help you to know it when you are asking those people to hire you.
Knowing Python is fantastic advice for DevOps and IT in general.
Ansible and Puppet are solid recommendations. I think Ansible is the market leader ( probably about a third ).
Keycloak is great but it had less than 5% market share and so not knowing it is not going to hurt.
Deploy database? You mean something like SQL?
I interview developers and information security people all the time. I always ask lots of questions about Linux. As far as I’m concerned:
- If you’re claiming to be an infosec professional and don’t know Linux you’re a fraud.
- If you’re a developer and you don’t know how to deploy to Linux servers you’re useless.
So yeah: Get good with Linux. Especially permissions! Holy shit the amount of people I interview that don’t know basic Linux permissions (or even about file permissions in general) is unreal.
Like, dude: Have you just been
chmod 777everything all this time? WTF! Immediate red flag this guy cannot be trusted with anything.- What are basic Linux permissions?
- What does
chmod 777do?
Quick and dirty: the basic permissions are read, write, and execute, and are applied to the owner, the group, and everyone else. They’re applied to all files and directories individually.
It’s represented by a 3 digit number (in octal, which is base 8, so 0 to 7). The first number is the permission given to the file’s owner, the second to the file’s group owner, and the third to everyone else. So, the owner of the file is the one user account that owns it, the group applies to all members of that group. User and group ownership are also applied to each file and directory individually.
Read, write, and execute are represented by the numbers 4, 2, and 1, respectively, and you add them together to get the permission, so 0 would be nothing, 1 would be execute but not read or write, 2 would be write but not read or execute (and yes there are uses for that), 3 would be write and execute but not read, 4 is read only, etc through to 7 which is basically full control.
This will take a little bit to make sense for most people.
chmod (change modifier, I think) is the program you use to set permissions, which you can do explicitly by the number (there are other modes but learn the numbers first), so chmod 777 basically means everyone has full control of the file or directory. Which is bad to do with everything for what I hope are obvious reasons.
chown (change owner) is the program you use to set the owner (and optionally the group) of a file or directory, and chgrp (change group) changes the group only.
It gets deeper with things like setuid bits and sticky bits, and when you get to SELinux it really gets granular and complex, but if you understand the octal 3 digit permissions, you’ll have the basics that will be enough for quite a lot of use cases.
(Additionally to the 3 digit number, permissions can be represented a bit friendlier where it just lists letters and dashes, so 750 (full control user, read and execute group) could be shown as rwxr-x—, where r=read, w=write, and x=execute, and what they’re applied to can be represented by the letters u for user (aka owner), g for group, and o for other)
This goes into more detail of those basics: https://opensource.com/article/19/6/understanding-linux-permissions
Thanks. Bookmarking for future reference.
Also, they didn’t mention it but you can always just do this (the easy way, thanks to GNU):
chmod a+x somefileto give it execute bits. It works intuitively like that forwandrpermissions too.It’s just quicker to type out
chmod 775than it is to do it the other way 🤷Juwt remember “man chmod”.
Read, write, and execute are represented by the numbers 4, 2, and 1, respectively, and you add them together to get the permission
Maybe I’m the weird one here but this seems like a counter intuitive way to remeber/explain it. Each octal digit in the three digit number is actually just 3 binary digits ( 3 bit flags) in order of rwx. For example read and execute would be 101 -> 5.
While that’s literally what it is, that’s not really how it’s represented and requires also understanding binary numbers.
Even knowing that, I’ve always found it easiest to get to the permissions the way I described, which when you think about it is actually the same as what you’d do to translate binary into decimal/octal if you don’t have them memorized: look at the values of each position that’s set to 1 and add them together. So, 101 in binary would be 4+0+1, or 5, which is the same as saying read is 4 and execute is 1 and add them together, the latter of which I think is easier to learn (and is how I’ve always seen it taught, though clearly YMMV)
Both get you to the same place though
That’s a fair point, I guess I used binary numbers so much i uni that I just know the small ones by heart and that’s why I find it easier. Following the example, I never convert 101 as 4+0+1, I just see it and know it’s 5.
Can I ask if the reverse applies, eg is having no idea how to use non Unix like OSes (like Windows) any kind of red flag? Kinda been considering trying to go into a tech career so that I can have a 9-5 office job (I’ve until recently worked in what would be considered “blue collar” jobs, recently switched to an education job, would be nice to just sit down in an office and use computers for a living). I’ve used (GNU/)Linux from a very young age (parents had an Ubuntu laptop), as my primary OS/daily driver since I was 13, and exclusively (i.e. got rid of my Windows partition due to Windows enshittification) since I was idk maybe 16 ish? So I’m pretty comfortable doing things in Linux. But I have a reputation for being a tech person among my friends and they ask me to fix their stuff sometimes and whenever it’s a Windows problem I literally have no idea how to use the OS lol. So are Windows skills and knowledge also expected for tech jobs or just Linux/Unix-like?
Depends on the tech job. A lot of corporate IT support jobs care a lot more about troubleshooting windows because that’s what the employees use
There’s not much to learn in Windows land! Learn how to set file permissions, how the registry works (and some important settings that use it), and how Active Directory works (it’s LDAP) and you’ll be fine.
If you’re used to using Linux nothing will frustrate you more than being forced to use a Windows desktop. The stuff you use every day just isn’t there. You can add on lots of 3rd party tools to make it better but it’ll never measure up.
When you have to go out on the Internet to download endless amounts of 3rd party tools the security alarms in your head might start going off. Windows users have just learned over time to ignore them 🤣
If you’re used to using Linux nothing will frustrate you more than being forced to use a Windows desktop. The stuff you use every day just isn’t there.
Absolutely. I tried using Windows for gaming some years back when Wine wasn’t as good and it was such a struggle. I was used to thinking there’s more software for Windows since it’s more widely used, but I was shocked at both how much software I used was Linux (or POSIX-compliant) only, some of which had no Windows alternative. I remember struggling so much to just try and get some files off a LUKS-encrypted drive on Windows and was shocked that there was basically no option at the time. I also hate how Windows users just download random exes off the web for all their programs. I only ever used chocolatey to install anything for that brief Windows stint.
If you’re a developer and you don’t know how to deploy to Linux servers you’re useless.
Welp, found your red flag
sudo chmod 000 /Lol been there, and with the
-RtooSorry for your loss. I hit myself with the ‘rm -rf /*‘ several years back when I was actually trying to do ‘rm -rf ./*‘.
Now I do ‘ls’ instead of ‘rm’ just to make sure that what I’m deleting is what I’m intending to.
Figured I was very lucky that it was just on my own workstation and not on any of the servers I was tasked with maintaining. I lost a day or so of work. Had it been our dev server? Would’ve destroyed my team for a while.
Have you just been
chmod 777everything all this time?Oh man, I ran into a dev at a meetup who proposed this solution.
And I had to do a polite, “Oh wow maybe that works but I don’t think that’s a solution in my company” because YIKES.
Honestly, it depends on the business.
If I were the hiring manager we are a 80/20 split on win vs Linux servers. You may be top tier on 20% of our systems but we have automated about 85% of the tasks on those boxes. The other 15% is being covered by the windows people.
How do I justify hiring you to do 15% of the work of the others?In order to be paid above average, you need to be good at something others find hard. But don’t pigeon hole yourself to one thing.
Being good at windows and Linux will make you a more attractive hire. As a Linux daily driver you should have no excuse to not know virtualisation or containers. Run up some qemu VMS or some LXC containers to expand your skillset.
I make it a condition of my employment that I never touch windows servers, and I get paid very, very well.
Linux experience is far more important than windows experience, IMHO. Almost every company has Linux servers. Loads of companies don’t have windows servers.
Depends on the job, a lot of places don’t use Linux
However Linux jobs tend to pay more than the non-Linux equivalent if you can find one
Most places deploy to Linux, and for those knowing Linux helps a lot. Also a lot of places will give MacBook pro, expect you to know the CLI so a lot of Linux knowledge will be useful there.
You didn’t tell us what you think the usual 9 to 5 pays. Are you asking whether a tech job pays more than minimum wage? Many of them do. Also, when you’re interviewing, and even when you’re writing a cover letter, try to avoid the term power user, and instead provide details of things that you’ve actually done. Anyone can call themselves a power user, but what does that even mean? If you say you’re a power user, if you’re lucky the interviewer will ask you for details, and if you’re unlucky they won’t, because they’ll assume you’re just grandstanding. So you’re better off providing a little extra information up front, and not gambling on them asking for it.
