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?
absolutely… you know servers are mostly linux right?
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.
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!
Specifically for a job of Linix sysadmin, probably yes. If you can afford it do a certification, it will help you stand among other candidates with no work experience.
For other IT jobs it’s not so relevant. Linux is technically on the servers but the infrastructure is hidden from you by multiple levels of abstraction.
the point that I could be considered a so-called “power user.”
There is no certain point. Power user is a rather vague description. It still includes “user” as opposed to admin or developer or guru etc.
If vague is good enough in your area, go for it. Otherwise look for a more formal qualification.
Good luck.
If your goal is to make yourself more valuable to employers/clients the best path is to specialize in some critical and niche enterprise tech. People that are good at stuff businesses were lured into using get paid very well. In my case it was SharePoint, but that’s just an example.
Knowing your way around the OS is taken for granted in these positions, so you have one piece of the puzzle, which is great, but you need the other pieces.
But be careful, if I have to choose between two experts, one with basic win+linux and the other only linux, I’m choosing the former.
Very bad advice, getting your niche might pay off for a certain job in a certain time period and makes you clueless and worthless in any other job other timeframe.
Rather focus on general overview and tools instead. I can imagine how you brain is melting away dealing your whole work day with only sharepoint, rofl.
No, it won’t. Corporations in today’s time have this entitlement that you should know everything beforehand. You need a lot more than that. Oh, you don’t know Ansible? Don’t understand Terraform? Can’t fix a Docker config? Haven’t used AWS? Rejected, next?
What education do you have in the area?
The IT/Sysadmin sector does have a risk with knowing enough to be dangerous.
Daily driving Linux is great to get used to the command line, but is different from running servers.
If you have no experience with running Linux servers, I would be focusing on that part, rather than daily driving at this point.
Running a server requires a bit of a different mindset to that of just using a desktop.
You need to be far more restrictive about installing software on the server, be more cautios of reboots, and in general focus on stabillity.
You also need to familiarize yourself with Debian/Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora based distributions, their package managers, apt and dnf, the general layout of the system, they are mostly similar, but they have their own flavours, especially when it commes to the config files.
Learn the basics of vim, it will allways be installed on a server, I prefer nano but can use vim if needed.
A big part of my job when I was a Helpdesk technician combined with a Linux sysadmin was storage, I had to set up VMs in vSphere and Nutanix and give them the correct ammount of storage, sometimes also expand the storage on a server, and work with mountpoints.
Play around with LVMs, learn the concepts of PVs, VGs and LVs, learn how to expand them, how to move an LV from one PV to another inside a VG, learn how to mount them.
Learn how to set a manual IP, this can change from version to version of a distribution.
Learn to get annoyed at YAML files.
Understand how to secure a system, I’ll admit that I never really had to do this as all servers I worked on was behind strong firewalls and not accessable from the internet, but I did my best with what I had.
This is a great response, would heed its points especially the yaml files.
Just make a template, once done you can easily do it while blasting Scooter, get pissed when it breaks due to a change of interface names, switch to Sabaton while you battle it out. After that you go to the local zoo and watch some Lynx just relaxing all day and ask yourself where it all webt wrong.
Prefers Nano over Vim? Why’d you have to go and commit a felony. Now I can’t take anything you say seriously. Damnit.
It is what I am used to, your approval did not factor into my choice.
And no sense of humor over what was clearly a joke comment. Icing on the cake.
Now I believe you now, you do use Nano.
Ah, I was involved in a hectic discussion in another thread, I also know that Linux users can be quite outspoken about their choice fs editor, so I didn’t catch the joke.
Sorry about that! (:
We’ve all done it, I’m sorry if my joke wasn’t apparent as well. Text is dumb.
You should have used nano(1) to write that joke.
Well, they could have been joking too. But touché.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Deploy database? You mean something like SQL?
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.
