I\u2019m looking for a company to have a realistic subset of job requirements.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nI\u2019m finding more and more that managers have no clue what Systems people do. When they find that their current admin is moving on, they will say \u201cLet me see your resume\u201d and will build the job req. from that resume. Unfortunately for some of us out here, that person may have a Master\u2019s or a PhD, and was happy to take that salary offered, so they just hung around there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The job request may be for a solid UNIX guy with some windows to help users and a good knowledge of networking, email, web, and to support a small or medium sized office environment and have a nice personality to make the folks there feel good about their computing experience. How cool would that gig be?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead, since the bust, a job request like that has turned into a request for someone with 5 years of a specific UNIX platform, 4 years of Sendmail, 4 years of Apache, an MCSE, and a college degree in Computer Science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do you see the disparity there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Too often, the folks looking for a replacement think that the work we UNIX admins do is magic. They think we\u2019re making magic with bits and bytes, and carefully build job reqs and descriptions as if that\u2019s the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In reality, just like any career, we learn as we go. Certainly, a certain level of proficiency is necessary to be useful to an emloyer, but to expect today\u2019s Systems Administrator to have memorized the entirety of complex packages such as Sendmail, Apache, Snort, Portsentry, PHP, XML, and on and on ad-infinitum is laughable at best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The best admin will be the one with an extreme adeptness at finding answers quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m looking for a company that doesn\u2019t find a college degree to be the end-all, be-all of skills measurement.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI was a music major t Louisiana State University. I have a 3.0 in Music Education and a few semesters left to complete. At the time in Louisiana, a first-year teacher in East Baton Rouge parish would make 18,000\/yr at their first assignment. While at LSU, I worked at the computing services center in network design & engineering as a work\/study assignment. I had a local web-hosting company contact me regarding a position with them at 25,000\/yr.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine the decision-making\/thought process to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had a wife & two kids (my wife\u2019s disability had not progressed at all at this point) to think about, and a promise of a very small salary, should I continue to impoverish my family for a minimum of two years and an entire semester of student teaching (during which I couldn\u2019t hold a daytime job, since on assignment at a local school), only to have an 18k job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Obviously, I took the gig. Since then, I\u2019ve progressed through all the standard growth. I was a Windows admin, Exchange admin, basic networks. I found out really qickly that Windows administrators don\u2019t sleep much (at least in those early versions of NT). I picked up on Linux (I had been fiddling with it for quite a few years) and installed it on an extra box at my office, and an old 286 at my house. After a couple years of working with it, I got into an AIX\/SCO\/Linux gig, and never looked back. The road since has taken me from small startups to 3Com corporation itself, and it has been a wild ride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fast-forward to today\u2026 I\u2019m published in Linux.com, working on a book for Nostarch Press, and looking forward to a long, happy career. (I\u2019ve already been doing this for 10 years).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From my perspective, I\u2019d rather hire someone like myself, than a college graduate with a year or two. I can guarantee success from a track-record rather than a pile of promises and a piece of paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a final aside from all this, I\u2019m still looking for a new job. I\u2019m being sent to third shift right now, and not looking forward to it at all. While it\u2019s a great company with some good people to work with, 3rd shift is hell on earth. If you\u2019re in the Atlanta area, and need a UNIX admin, let me come in and talk with you. I\u2019d bet if we skip all the silliness preceding that conversation, that we\u2019d have a deal that could be made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tecnical Recruiters rank just below lawyers in my book. Never have I had to deal with a larger group of unconcerned, poor workmen as I have in the case of technical recruiters. Some anecdotes: I\u2019ve looked for work on and off for the last five years or so. I\u2019ve a really well-designed resume, and have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":355,"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions\/355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}