[TriLUG] Career planning - certs(?)

[Carl Crider]

 I dunno, it seems that most people hiring (right now, at least) in the "IT
Industry" have
no idea what they want. Most of them want 1 guy to do the job of 10. Oh, not
to mention they want to pay that person half a salary. Some ask for
"certifications or equal experience" ... which is confusing. Not all
SysAdmins are alike.
 I go back and forth on getting "Certs" like the RHCE. I had an MCSE from
2000 that helped very little when the bottom dropped out in 2001. It did
help when I finally landed
a gig running a Windows shop.
 90% of what I've learned about OSS and the inner workings of Linux, I
learned at home in my own lab setup. The other 10% has been leaned on the
job. For instance, I did an interview at Red Hat 4 years ago that I was *NOT
* ready for *at* *all*. Am I ready now? Well,
I'd like to think so. The lab I work in is an all Linux infrastructure and
we test all flavors of Windows/Linux for interoperability. I wouldn't have
gotten this gig without having intermediate Linux skills walking in the
door. Without that knowledge, it would have been impossible to comprehend
the job tasks and to learn more advanced skills.
 Do certifications help? To me, yes, but only if you've actually applied
what you've
learned. You can talk about digging a ditch all day, but if you haven't dug
a ditch then
the talk is just ..... talk. My advice is to dig in and get dirty.

BTW: I am looking for a new gig. If anyone has any "info", email me
off-list.

-Carl





On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 8:29 AM, <OlsonE at aosa.army.mil> wrote:

> Being able to speak both Windows and Linux/Unix has put me at the top of
> the list every single time I've applied for a job.
>
> Presently, I'm thanking Microsoft for my paycheck :). My last job, it
> was Linux / Tru64 / Digital Unix.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
> Behalf Of Greg Cox
> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 12:00 AM
> To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Career planning - certs(?)
>
> > With that said, what can you put on your resume that is learned
> > in the home lab?
>
> *opens resume, cross-references against hardware and process lists*
>
> Stuff I've gotten good at just from home:
>
> Linux (Debian and RedHat); MacOSX.
> DNS (BIND); DHCP; LDAP; MySQL; Perl; mail servers (postfix and
> sendmail); IMAP (dovecot); Nagios; Apache; NFS; cfengine;
> Cisco LAN switching.
>
> Oh yeah: set up your own certificate authority and get good at SSL
> cert management.  Everyone loves security.
>
> > I realize knowledge is knowledge regardless of where you learned it,
> > but if I setup LDAP at home and my 8 year olds uses it to login, that
> > doesn't exactly count as experience.
>
> It's not an enterprise, no.  But it's definitely experience.
> You should be able to tell me 'ldapadd' and the kinds of things that go
> on the command line.  You should know how ugly slapd.conf is.  I'd hope
> you knew about slapcat and making a backup.  You won't know how I'm
> using it, but if you've got the basics you're still ahead of the curve.
>
> Look at it this way.  If you're so green that you are coming in at a
> junior SA level (which I think is a safe assumption given that we're
> even having this chat), what I want from you is passing familiarity,
> basic
> knowledge, and the ability for you to pick up the setup the senior staff
> has put into place and get into it without too much handholding.
>
> I'd rather teach you things on the job than have you come in as a
> hotshot and break a setup you don't understand fully.  And even if a
> cert covers exactly what the job entails, there's no guarantee that
> things were set up fully standards compliant.  Maybe there's some
> funkiness going on, either from ignorant predecessors or from Important
> Business Reasons Long Since Forgotten.
>
> > I believe in certain certifications
> > because they put a professional face on your home grown experience.
>
> I'm abundantly anti-RHCE.  The experience I've had from interviewing
> them is that too many have drunk the RH Kool-Aid and they don't know any
> way that isn't The RH Way.  Some of my favorite interview answers come
> from RHCE-enhanced interviewees: 'what's postfix?'; 'No, there's no
> other way to restart a daemon than `service foo restart`'
>
> My favorite, though, was the RHCE who argued with me that, on a Solaris
> box, 'init 5' will start X.  In case you're not a Solaris person
> let's just say that's not what it does.
>
> I'm sure there are perfectly competent RCHEs out there, so any RHCEs
> on the list, untwist the knickers.  But I just don't the value in the
> cert.  I like SA's to be more well-rounded and hetrogenous.
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