this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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I've worked as an IT architect at various companies in my career and you can definitely get support contracts for engineering support of RHEL, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc. That isn't the issue. The issue is that there are a lot of system administrators with "15 years experience in Linux" that have no real experience in Linux. They have experience googling for guides and tutorials while having cobbled together documents of doing various things without understanding what they are really doing.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen an enterprise patch their Linux solutions (if they patched them at all with some ridiculous rubberstamped PO&AM) manually without deploying a repo and updating the repo treating it as you would a WSUS. Hell, I'm pleasantly surprised if I see them joined to a Windows domain (a few times) or an LDAP (once but they didn't have a trust with the Domain Forest or use sudoer rules...sigh).
Reminds me of this guy I helped a few years ago. His name was Bob, and he was a sysadmin at a predominantly Windows company. The software I was supporting, however, only ran on Linux. So since Bob had been a UNIX admin back in the 80s they picked him to install the software.
But it had been 30 years since he ever touched a CLI. Every time I got on a call with him, I'd have to give him every keystroke one by one, all while listening to him complain about how much he hated it. After three or four calls I just gave up and used the screenshare to do everything myself.
AFAIK he's still the only Linux "sysadmin" there.
"googling answers", I feel personally violated.
/s
To be fare, there is not reason to memorize things that you need once or twice. Google is tool, and good for Linux issues. Why debug some issue for few hours, if you can Google resolution in minutes.
I'm not against using Google, stack exhange, man pages, apropos, tldr, etc. but if you're trying to advertise competence with a skillset but you can't do the basics and frankly it is still essentially a mystery to you then youre just being dishonest. Sure use all tools available to you though because that's a good thing to do.
Just because someone breathed air in the same space occasionally over the years where a tool exists does not mean that they can honestly say that those are years of experience with it on a resume or whatever.
Capitalism makes them to.
Agreed. If you are not incompetent, you will remember the stuff that you use often. You will know exactly where to look to refresh your memory for things you use infrequently, and when you do need to look something up, you will understand the solution and why it’s correct. Being good at looking things up, is like half the job.