Does the distro matter when applying for a job as a Linux admin?
linuxjournal.com
linuxjournal.com
I think it should matter to employers. No doubt you could learn OEL very quickly but I'm sure it has a bunch of little oddities and quirks that could make the day-to-day administration and troubleshooting more difficult for someone without practical OEL experience. From the employer's stand point if they can find someone who knows PAC & OEL inside-out why would they take any chances? It may reflect the job market more than your skill set or the company policies on recruitment. It's very likely they can find a candidate who meets their exact requirements. (Personally I would have just lied and spent the next couple of days learning OEL inside-out to back up my lies)
But OEL is just a RHEL clone - literally everything is the same except the logos, release file and installer artwork - so if you know RHEL or CentOS then the experience is valuable.
A good admin should be able to get up to speed on any distro within a few days and should be able to wrangle BSDs and other more exotic flavours of unix derived OS's easily.
What really matters is the history of the shop and the systems and the culture which has grown up around them. Any distro can be badly managed. If you're logging in to the servers using a VNC session as root, you're doing it wrong, no matter what distro is supporting you.
Being an admin at an established shop does entail a certain amount of putting up with decisions that were implemented before you showed up. What matters is if you are going to have the authority that goes with the responsibility that your are being asked to take on. If the expectation is that you will keep a patched together system on the air it matters a lot whether you are expected to replace it and manage the transition to a new infrastructure with grace and aplomb; or if you're being asked to be the janitor in a lunatic asylum where all the devs have root on the production machines and you'll only find out about changes when the system breaks...
The first is a professional challenge, the latter is a path to madness.
Fortunately, there's a relatively small core of distros used in the enterprise -- at least when compared to the vast array of all distros under development.
I'd think a "Linux sysadmin" worth their salt would be a student of the main families of distros, but competency in the relevant distro should matter when it comes time to hire. Of course, a rockstar sysadmin would know most linux distros, plus some other not-Linux OSes (any or all of Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, *BSDs and the list keeps going)
Anything that saves a bucketload of time for other people deserves rockstar-like adoration, in my humble opinion.
Optimization and performance tuning is another multiplier, if you can tweak a set of application servers to serve twice as many sessions you've just doubled the number of visitors you can serve before you need to buy more machinery, or cut your hosting costs in half if you're running on third-party equipment.
It's difficult to grok the entirety of that mindset, however, with experience in only a handful of Linux distributions.
I've worked with a few folks like this, and they aren't hamfisted, show-off rebels like a rock star. They are elegant, precise and quick. Like a rock star.
I could only see that being the case for short-term contract work.
From the article title: "Does the distro matter?" No. The differences among Linux distros is so slight that any otherwise qualified/competent admin can be expected to easily learn everything important in days or weeks.
Not sure I agree. After years of using Debian, I had a hard time administering CentOS. yum is a cruel joke... and that's when the dependencies aren't messed up. The quality control and the intrinsic design is ... inconsistent. This makes it hard to administer, and I would certainly never take a job where I would be responsible for CentOS or Redhat.
It's not that I couldn't use CentOS and stuff (I have and still do to some extent), but I certainly have a much harder time of it. I guess that would probably change pretty quickly if I really wanted it to.
I don't want to though.
(I've noticed an increase in the number of replies I get like this on HN now. Time was people made an effort to reply to what you actually said (and meant), not just state some tangentially related populist opinion. Maybe it's just me though...)
It may end up taking longer to do certain tasks and they may have to refer to documentation more often than someone competent in that distro thinks they should but linux is relatively universal and once you get past initial setup maintenance becomes rather similar.
In that any task can be completed in an unbounded amount of time. If you want to do things quickly, though, all Linuxes are not the same.
I've noticed an increase in the number of replies I get like this on HN now...
Generally, from the other side a candidate not having experience in RHEL (our bread and butter distro) isn't a deal breaker here. It's somewhat surprising if an applicant has really never used RHEL or CentOS but as you say there frankly aren't that many differences that someone intelligent can't pick up shortly. As long as there's a general knowledge of unix concepts the details of package management and where the config files happen to live isn't enough to get worked up over.
What would be a red flag would be experience in only one distro, ever, even outside work.
The fast (but painful) way to learn is to work on porting.
The defaults in the current Unix OSs - RHEL, SLES, Debian/Ubuntu, OS X, FreeBSD - don't match the 'standard' either - most of these, for example, are moving away from SysV init to something that handles dependencies (rather than starting an SMTP server when there's no network). None of these OSs use SysV packages either.
It's certainly valuable to learn multiple Unixs, but make sure that's practical experience rather than an expired 'standard'.
btw, Someone still hiring "Linux admins"? I can do it for free. =)