When I was hired for my job in information security, Linux skills weren't required or even spoken about. After I started, I automated some of my work with shell scripts and wrote other shell scripts to clean up my data for me. Now any new employee that comes in will see "Linux shell scripting recommended" on the application.

"Linux jobs" might be rare, but jobs where Linux skill comes in handy are abundant.

Senior linux system administrators are in very short supply. Companies have given up training people for that kind of work, schools don't teach it, and most of my sysadmin friends migrated to management or dev over the past few years. I've been looking around for a new gig in San Francisco (not south bay) the past month and sometimes it feels like I'm the only candidate and there's all these companies that can't find people.

It's nice feeling wanted but I won't do the work of five guys by myself and be the only one on call for years at a stretch, something will have to change soon. I wish Google would adopt that Lee Iacocca philosophy of training people specifically to spread their way of doing things across the industry, at least there'd be competent mid-levels around then, but they just churn those people on 1 year contracts like everyone else.