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Would being a Linux "power user" increase my chances of getting a job in IT/tech?

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?

stoy ,

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.

LifeCoffeeGaming ,

This is a great response, would heed its points especially the yaml files.

stoy ,

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.

velox_vulnus ,

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?

digdilem ,

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.

slazer2au ,

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.

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

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.

istanbullu ,

yes

pimeys , (edited )

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.

Edit: I did not mean being a devops here, but finding an interest in open source software and learning a highly lucrative programming language while going. You can get pretty far with Rust or Go in the modern startups, C or Java in enterprises. Being very good with Linux drives this interest.

Creat ,

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.

dino ,

This! Also if you company only employs windows machines … run.

MyNameIsRichard ,
@MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

dino ,

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.

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Well you just got dismissed early in the interview

pastermil ,

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!

superkret , (edited )

Yes, because you’re already familiar with the command line. But for a job in the professional Linux world, also try out RHEL (not Fedora), and familiarize yourself with best practices in patch management. There’s a lot more to it than just dnf upgrade if you have applications depending on specific versions of packages, CVEs need to be mitigated ASAP, downtime needs to be minimized and reverting a borked upgrade (including the installed database) needs to work 100%.
Also, get familiar with containerization, SELinux, VMWare hypervisors, a version control system, the LAMP stack and Samba.

dino ,

Good advice here, although I would recommend going for debian instead, get a grasp how different package managers in linux do the same thing.

  • Containerization
  • KVM
  • webserver apache/nginx yatta (ceritifcate handling, god I hate this)
Quazatron ,
@Quazatron@lemmy.world avatar

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.

bionicjoey ,

I’ve hired for junior positions on a sysadmin team and Linux as a hobby is the number 1 thing I look for. It moves your resume to the top of the stack.

jbloggs777 ,

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.

riskable ,
@riskable@programming.dev avatar

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 777 everything all this time? WTF! Immediate red flag this guy cannot be trusted with anything.

communism ,
@communism@lemmy.ml avatar

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?

billgamesh ,

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

GustavoM ,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

Even a simple “I know how to setup a network-wide ad blocker on docker by using my own image” can get you far, so yep.

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Thats oddly specific. I think “I have experience with Linux” would be better

GustavoM ,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

This is a IT-related question – of course being “oddly specific” is a great idea. Even if the job in question does not use anything docker related.

therealjcdenton ,

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?

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