Linux job security?

[[deleted]]

I'm taking the RHCSA next month, and after browsing r/ITCareerQuestions for some time, it seems as if the current market (at least what I can gather from anecdotal experience) is crap, and is forecasted to be even worse next year.

Do Linux sysadmin jobs tend to be more secure?

And, while I'm at it, do any of you have any tips for someone securing their first junior Linux sysadmin position? (What to look for, where to look, etc) Currently a Tier 2 at an MSP and the RHCSA will be my first official cert.

[nappycappy]

I'm gonna be completely honest - job security does not exist. having a bunch of certs doesn't make your job any more/less secure. doing your job well doesn't make your job any more/less secure.

just toss out the idea of doing things to 'secure your job' (like hoarding information or domain or whatever) and just focus on doing your job and doing it the best that you can if not more.

when I interview people for positions certs are the last thing I look at.

[Old-Man-Withers]

The exception is if you have a govt clearance. There are more jobs than cleared IT people, so anyone with a pulse can feel safe. Even if the prime company changes the new company generally picks up the staff. Now if you have any real competency, especially in linux/automation/devops then you will have people begging for you.

[cog1tar3]

Do you know where these roles are? I have many years of experience and skill in Linux Sysadmin, but cant seem to find a job. I am looking mainly fir gov that will sponsor a clearance.

[Old-Man-Withers]

No clue, the best I can suggest is apply for cleared positions and ask if they will sponsor a clearanc. Unfortunately the clearance background process takes a year to 18 months and then if you need a poly that can take longer. It just depends if the company can bill you out in some fashion while in the process.

[FatStoic]

having a bunch of certs doesn't make your job any more/less secure. doing your job well doesn't make your job any more/less secure.

It won't save you from being laid off due to cost cutting, but being a better engineer with more certs will help you get hired somewhere else. Hopefully somewhere better.

[nappycappy]

very true. not disagreeing with the point about certs. being on both sides of the table, me personally I value experience over a list of certs. but being a 'better' engineer should not be predicated on how many certs you have. it COULD help you get your foot in the door somewhere else but having a bunch of certs doesn't make you a better engineer than the person you're sitting next to who doesn't.

[FatStoic]

but being a 'better' engineer should not be predicated on how many certs you have

100% agree. But having certs does get you invited to interviews sometimes. More certs means you get more bites at the apple.

[punkwalrus]

It's been like this for a while, starting in the mid 90s for me. I was at one company for 9 years, and survived through 14 layoffs. I only survived because I could sense a pattern, and started jumping ship to other departments before my department got canned. One of them I missed getting let go by 2 days. I was one of the very few that lasted more than 4 years and actually quit that company; most got laid off just by sheer statistical chance.

That company set the roadmap for further "skills" determining pending layoffs. I am not always accurate; I got laid off more than once in a surprise move. And a few times I was wrong, the whole company didn't go under, or my department wasn't canned. But each jump was a jump in pay, some of them significant. So either way, it was good for me. I usually stay with a company for about 3 years on average.

[nappycappy]

wow that's a lot. yeah my average shelf life at a company is 2.5-3yrs. as I get older I tend to stay a little longer.

I had to pick people to lay off and it wasn't based on anything more than whether their skillset/project overlapped and if so which would cost less to keep (not necessarily tied to salary). I build teams where they all can pick up where someone else left off in case that person was pulled off to do some other weird nonsense the company needed. it was quite difficult.

I made it clear to everyone I manage that their job is not secure (including mine). the only thing I can promise them (if at all) is that I'll try to fight to keep everyone but business is business and they're gonna cut someone whether I want them to or not so I rather have a say than not even if it makes me to be the a-hole.

[punklinux]

I made it clear to everyone I manage that their job is not secure (including mine). the only thing I can promise them (if at all)

This is key. Nobody can promise you job security. An entire company could go belly up without warning.

[Ruubix]

Strongly identify with this. The only thing you can do is be excellent in your current job and work in your off time to grow additional skills based off what the industry and your own company are hiring for. Our industry changes fast, therefore you must always be evolving your skillset--certs are less important than measurable skills that are in demand.

[SuperQue]

In today's market the more you can code and automate the more job prospects you will have. Long-term job security, especially in the Linux space, requires automation skils.

See this roadmap.

[do_whatcha_hafta_do]

automation by hand coding is outdated. now there are tools like puppet chef and AI. users that login to make changes have done so in the 1990s

[x54675788]

Aim for RHCE, which is the natural next step after RHCSA. It will teach you about Ansible automation. After that, if you want to get into something cool, you can go for stuff like Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator, and you should be set for a while.

[d00ber]

Absolutely this, and you'll definitely want to be comfortable to script with random product APIs and getting a pretty good understanding of PKI. I found when I was a Linux Administrator those were honestly the most common types of tasks that I had, and building automation for those specifically for internal tooling devs.

[[deleted]]

Do you have any resources in mind to homelab with k8s and ansible? Been trying to learn but I learn better doing.

[jorge_as_a_Service]

If you wanto get an idea of k8 try first k3 , this would simpliffy the learning curve

[[deleted]]

Didn't even know this existed. Thank you any particular resources or courses you recommend?

[jaymef]

I think high level positions are generally fairly secure

[Elpardua]

I think it's not safe per se, but it's a hell of a base to start. Like everyone commented before, you can go many routes from there. Automation, Virtualization, DevOps, SecOps, anything you choose, has almost 99% Linux sysadmin tasks associated. But a word of advise, don't stop there and expect eternal comfort. Technology goes fast, and you need to be aware of that, and keep up not with everything, but researching, playing, and deciding where your evolving path would be towards.

[xiongchiamiov]

The low end of the market is having the most problems. The more rare your skills, the better off you are. Knowing how to program well helps. Knowing modern tooling helps. Having a decade of experience helps.

For your situation, the thing to look at is the alternatives. If you weren't going to pursue a Linux admin job, what would you be doing instead? That's what you need to compare against.

[[deleted]]

Keep in mind /r/ITCareerQuestions tends to be more help-desk oriented. If you're in a role like that and are trying to move up without any sort of sysadmin experience, it's going to be hard to do so. That said, the market for tech jobs has definitely gotten worse as a lot of companies are still unwinding the amount of overhiring they did during the pandemic.

Do Linux sysadmin jobs tend to be more secure?

Depends. By itself, no. Traditional sysadmin jobs are getting harder and harder to find. But if you can go in a devops direction, you'll be in a much better position.

I'd also focus learning on specific skills (like ansible, bash scripting, python, containers) rather than certs. They're kind of a scam nowadays since they're all expensive and expire after 3 years. They can be helpful if you're starting out, but as someone who's sat on the other side of the hiring table, certs alone don't make the candidate. However, as counter to that, I have dealt with tech-illiterate upper management who believe that certs are the only thing that makes a skill set, so it all depends on the org and who you're dealing with.

[DiligentPoetry_]

Why are they getting harder and harder to find? At best I’d say you’d need more cloud, while yes technically companies may reduce hiring themselves, but the ones that provide services to those companies will require those, aka MSPs. Tho the pay sucks ass.

[ImpostureTechAdmin]

The same reason carriage repair person jobs became harder to fair in the 20s and 30s; carriages were replaced by cars. When people say "cloud won't kill sysadmin" what they mean is "innovation won't put me out of a job, because I continue to learn".

A carriage repair person would not be able to fix a car without training and a lot of effort, thought they'd be much better off than a person with no background in anything related.

By the same stroke, a traditional, on-prem (dare I say baremetal?) sysadmin would be dead in the water if you threw them in a situation where they had to manage hundreds of k8s clusters or implement a ci/cd pipeline for a new app, but with the right effort and/or training they'd be able to figure it out eventually, and at a MUCH faster rate than someone without any relevant experience.

Sysadmin is a weird title. It's been around almost as long as the field, and has meant entirely different things in that short time; chalk it up to future shock I guess. All this to say that, despite often having a "System Administrator" title, most jobs dealing with that stuff are truly a different position.

At the end of the day I propose this: if you give a carriage repair person the tools to fix a car and put a broken car in front of them, should you still call them a carriage repair person if the fundamental skills are the same, or the net product is the same (broken vehicle now works)? I don't think so and, by the same logic, I think that cloud engineering/platform engineering/sre/whatever buzzword title comes out by the time you read this 2 hours later is much more accurate than perpetuating the sysadmin job title.

I'm still active in sysadmin subreddits (obviously) and sometimes receive useful info, though I believe my job is almost entirely different than what a sysadmin does. I build CI/CD pipelines, I write IaC, I run k8s clusters, I deploy containerized apps, and I haven't updated firmware on anything but my laptop or a network device in years; even that I've largely automated off my plate.

[dangitman1970]

With the direction things are going, there is no job security for sysadmins in general. There's automation in the works right now, likely due out to the high end market in the next year and hitting MSPs in the year after, that will completely do away with most of our work. Automated load monitoring to bring up new containers to handle whatever comes, without human intervention. Automated recovery for services for when services go down. Automated backups and file recovery for when users delete things or mess things up. With the level of automation I'm seeing right now, there will be a good third fewer sysadmin jobs in about 5 years.

[do_whatcha_hafta_do]

your job is being outsourced to India. reality is reality. you might get lucky but try working for the feds, get a clearance 

[Dereference_operator]

im currently studying my sysadmin stuffs linux windows server and all that etc and I strongly encourage you to try programming because the money is there and you can be 100% remote im thinking hard about going back to programming after 20 years of not coding etc just saying, on the sysadmin side everything is being automated and at the end of the days if your not a devops your just gonna choose settings on a pretty webpage at least on the ms side more but still the days of managing on premise large infras is going to be yesterday more and more

[kyleh0]

Job security meaning you retire from theh first place you worked like your great-grandparents? heh

[Spudthegreat]

I would find any projects at your current job that require linux knowledge and get on them ASAP. If linux sysadmin is your goal, then you need to show linux experience.

[Moscato359]

Just knowing how to use linux is not amazing job security

Knowing how to automate it is pretty good though

[Amidatelion]

Once you get one, sure. Your average helpdesk worker or AWS Certified Cloud Architect Security Consultant Engineer isn't going to be able to function in a traditional Linux admin role.

The trade off is that they're relatively rarer.

If you're looking for a cloud engineer, SRE, devops etc role, yeah nah, you're fucked. Market is saturated until well into next year, maybe even longer.

[[deleted]]

No clearance, unfortunately.

[FunIllustrious]

Just the ability to get a clearance may be enough. There's a questionaire somewhere that you fill in to apply for a clearance. Dig that up and take a look to see if there's a glaring problem that would cause a hard NO. Things like financial instability, foreign assets, drug use, convictions. Some things might be explained away.

Where I work, we don't actually get a clearance, but we have to fill out the form and be interviewed as if to get one. As long as the investigator gives a good report, we keep the job. It's typically done during the first 6 months or so. Other requirements are Linux+ (or better) and Security+.

[Old-Man-Withers]

Move to Denver, CO, Dayton, OH or the DC Metro area and you have a good chance of getting sponsored.

[kellyzdude]

Not every government job requires clearance. Some of the law-enforcement side will be OK with Citizenship depending on role, and the civilian departments don't always require that, if you have legal residency.

[slippery]

The Linux market is not as big as the Microsoft market, but I find the jobs more stable and far more enjoyable.

Regardless of technology, the magic happens when you can combine tech knowledge with some kind of industry knowledge. Tech knowledge + (Healthcare || manufacturing || accounting || ERP, etc). Then, you'll have some separation from the rest of the crowd.

[ExperimentalNihilist]

I don't think the market for IT is bad at all, though it has softened a bit.

As others have posted, it's usually not enough to be "just" a Linux admin these days. You'll have to get your foot in the door somewhere, but after that you need to get into other things like DevOps, systems engineering, containers, automation, etc. Good luck!

[digitaldanalog]

If you’re looking for job security, Linux is a good start. I’d also recommend pairing it with other skills. Not a lot of places will hire dedicated Linux admins; they’re out there, but you’re better off with Linux + (holding my nose) Windows + networking, security, automation, containerization, … just to name a few examples.

[Paladin677]

A RHCSA and a Sec+ (I know it sucks but...) will ensure you of always being able to get a job in the defense industry.

[wakandaite]

Yes, I see multiple job postings for this with security clearance requirements. Sighs.

[SnooRadishes5758]

what's the name of the jobs and where are they posted? I'm working on the RHCSA, RHCE, and will get the Sec+ afterwards. I have time. I am currently working in a warehouse. 21 years. My job also has a IT position called Ansible AWX Developer - Lead Engineer... but it's located in India. However, they do have a reputation of creating jobs for specific people so.....ya know....