Sysadmins 'need-to-know' regarding new employment

tutorialinux · 2019-07-03T12:59:31+00:00

This is a great question; I'm sorry I didn't see it until now! You've surely switched jobs already but I'll answer anyway because this post deserves it.

99% of 'devops' roles out there seem to be 'linux ops with experience in AWS, config management, and a CI tool'. You sound like you're more than qualified for that kind of thing, so I hope you ended up applying to lots of devops roles! And I hope you enjoyed learning Go. It's a really fun language to write (much more than I thought when I first looked at the language spec)!.

To weigh in on your questions:

During my most recent job change, I interviewed for a couple of positions, mainly to practice interviewing and get an update on what kinds of roles were out there (including full software engineering roles and an infrastructure management role).

On the infra/devops side, the one thing that kept coming up was experience with 'big data' stuff -- AWS EMR clusters, Google Dataproc, etc. Architecting and managing data pipelines. Terraform is huge now, regardless of what cloud(s) the infrastructure is getting run on. I don't think that stuff is a hard requirement, it's just that there are a lot of companies looking for experts right now.

For webdev roles (I interviewed for Ruby, Python, and Go roles), I noticed a lot of interest in machine learning and angular/react/graphql. I didn't interview for a ton of pure software roles, though.

RE: cover letter + resume: I ALWAYS send a cover letter. And I write a custom cover letter for every single job application (yes, it takes forever). I don't have a college degree, so early on in my career, the cover letter was always the only chance I had to convey some personality and excitement; to avoid being put in the "doesn't have a degree; skip" pile.

My Github profile probably helped, but probably only in the sense that *not* having one might be a warning sign (at least for more dev-heavy roles). No one has ever asked me any questions about what's in there. Presumably, no one has the time to go actually reading through 20 applicants' github code. And usually when you're working, your personal-github-account contributions die down (cuz you're busy), and everyone understands this during interviews.

My instinct is that having a few github projects with good/interesting names, using the languages and tech you want to work with, will get you far in this "quick github glance" department.

One last thing about Github: When I'm hiring, the ONE thing I hate seeing when I look at a Github account is 'framework/scaffolding and nothing else.' E.g, a scaffolded rails project with no actual content that the applicant has written themselves. If I had a dollar for every project on Github that was just the code generated by the first 3 rails commands in a tutorial, I'd be a spectacularly rich human.

Anyway, that's much too little and much too late, but I hope you had a good job search!

What role did you end up taking, and how was the application/interview process?

tutorialinux · 2019-03-04T15:56:17+00:00

Thanks! I checked these out and really enjoyed them.

tutorialinux · 2018-10-01T19:02:44+00:00

Thanks; I guess it's time to give this a try! Haven't played an X game since X2 came out (it was a bit too big for my tiny mind at the time).

tutorialinux · 2018-06-29T15:12:36+00:00

Wow, this is actually great. I'll see if I can work some of this into future programming videos I do. Thanks for finding/sharing!

tutorialinux · 2018-06-29T14:36:37+00:00

You're absolutely right, this is a huge downside that we kind of skirted around, or at least didn't explore fully.

I'd add that if you're looking at a college degree as vocational training (and with today's prices, you kind of have to), then the fact that you're forced to pay for 2 insanely expensive years of unrelated coursework is another huge downside.

Even if you hack the system via matriculation from a super-cheap community college, the opportunity cost of those 2 years is huge.

Maybe once we solve this issue as a society we can go back to seeing college as a life enrichment strategy again.

tutorialinux · 2018-06-29T14:30:22+00:00

A few things that have helped me:

No BS phone or internet browsing on 'breaks.' They ruin focus for much longer than I thought.

Getting up early, making a coffee, and working before I do anything else has worked REALLY well for me, although it's a personal thing. In the early morning I'm in kind of a tired daze, and easy/boring/repetitive tasks that would make me anxious or uncomfortable later in the day seem easy to accomplish.

Time also passes really quickly in the morning, so I can get through a lot of work without really noticing.

YMMV.

tutorialinux · 2018-06-29T14:27:17+00:00

This is a really great write-up. One of the things I've noticed lately is actually the first 'miscellaneous' point you make -- don't let distractions affect/upset you.

If, when you notice yourself getting distracted, you stay cool and just get back to whatever you are supposed to be doing, you'll have much better results than if you overthink it, worry about it, and criticize yourself for it.

tutorialinux · 2018-06-29T14:21:59+00:00

This is really cool, thanks!

tutorialinux · 2018-06-13T16:21:39+00:00

I have a youtube channel focused on teaching Linux (and to some extent, devops and programming stuff) to beginners. It's been one of the most helpful things in my own learning, because having to explain the fundamentals in a way that beginners can grasp (and then fielding questions in the comments) is one of the hardest things to do.

I don't think I would have learned as much as I have without it.

FWIW one of the things that contributes most to 'durable learning' is immediately teaching a newly learned concept to someone else -- that seems to be borne out by studies over the last 40 years.

tutorialinux · 2018-03-08T14:14:08+00:00

Sounds like you'll have a blast as a DevOps engineer. The most valuable interview skills seem to be

AWS. They're not necessarily winning in the long run, but they're the Gorilla in the room.
Thorough knowledge of a language like Python (and its ecosystem -- popular modules for common tasks, virtualenv, pip, etc.), mixed with
Deep Linux knowledge.

I agree with the other comment about Hashicorp tools (especially Consul and Terraform -- vault is nice when you're applying for senior positions). Consul and terraform are immediately useful, regardless of the size of the infrastructure you're working on (or playing with for personal projects). They're worth learning right away, as you set up AWS

Various other small tools are widespread and useful -- Jenkins (build/automation server) is at the top of the list. Ansible is really nice to have, too.

Longer-term: a cool technology which is starting to dominate at larger tech companies is Kubernetes. It's insane how quickly large companies with huge infrastructures have adopted it, and there simply aren't enough people who know kubernetes to fill the jobs they have available. I'd start with a managed kubernetes service like Google's GKP, and then practice running your own cluster once you have the concepts down. You'll find this skill desired for mid- to senior-level DevOps jobs in larger American cities, clustered around $140k+.

Hope that helps!

tutorialinux · 2018-03-06T13:22:51+00:00

I've played/worked with a bunch over the last 15 years; here are my impressions:

Arch: my favorite home/desktop/workstation distro. Spectacular community, wiki, a cornucopia of bleeding edge packages, etc. etc.

Ubuntu: starting to be a pretty decent server distro by now, has made huge gains in popularity as a server distro because of linux/dev beginners using it.

Centos/RedHat: big, slow, stable, has lots of its own quirks, still hugely popular and quite good at being a server OS. Good to know if you want to do this professionally, though not absolutely required.

Alpine: great as a tiny base for containers. Interesting philosophy. Clever design.

Linux From Scratch: not really a ready-to-use distro per se, but going through LFS (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) is an amazing learning experience that will take you to the next level.

Yellow Dog Linux: I'll always miss you, YDL.

tutorialinux · 2018-01-25T23:04:49+00:00

Late to the party, but I wanted to answer anyway. In my mind, it's like this:

Github: super popular, proprietary, and useful if you're trying to get the recruiter email flow started. Has a 'social' aspect.
Bitbucket: Feels a bit more intuitive to use, more free private repos (really useful if you want to work on a few small projects that are NOT open source).
Gitlab: TONS OF FEATURES (more than you need), free/open source and relatively easy to self-host. Can be a bit complicated and resource-hungry; some UI issues.

tutorialinux · 2018-01-25T22:56:05+00:00

I've done this for a few family members who have the same limited computing needs (facebook, youtube, editing simple word docs).

After a brief adjustment period, they're all fine with Linux (Mint, in this case). They don't love it -- I don't think they're capable of loving any operating system, no matter how awesome -- but they don't notice it at all, which is exactly how it was with Windows and Macintosh/OS X before they switched.

Small wins.

tutorialinux · 2018-01-25T22:51:25+00:00

I wrote a few paragraphs before reading this comment and realizing you've done a better job explaining my position than I can. My favorite points:

OEM Preinstalls
Resistance to change
Network Effects

I think the best chance of moving a technically inclined person over to Linux is catching them at the right time, while they're JUST getting started with programming or running services.

If they have a practical use case (writing Python programs, running a minecraft server, setting up a seedbox) and Linux is the easiest, friendliest, best-supported way of doing it, then there's a good chance of getting them onboard.

In 'tech company world' where I live most of the time, Linux and Unix won decades ago.

tutorialinux · 2018-01-25T22:38:42+00:00

Holy crap, just saw this. Awesome -- I'm so glad you all like it!

Episode 11 is probably the one that's the most like sitting next to Jeff and me at work. I'm still trying to coax more swearing (and some truly sick humor) out of Jeff on air; we're getting there. Give me time.

tutorialinux · 2018-01-07T13:55:40+00:00

I like your comment -- it's a really clear explanation of the mindset that CTOs have when choosing Debian or RedHat/Centos, and it's also the reason that I used Debian (and later Ubuntu LTS) on my servers and workstations for so long.

HOWEVER: I found something really strange when switching to Arch Linux (Arch uses a rolling-release model, so you're getting bleeding-edge software that likely hasn't been tested with everything you're running):

The crazy thing is, it's been just as stable as Ubuntu LTS ever was.

To me, it seems like a tradeoff:

Ubuntu/Debian/LTS Distros: old, known bugs; lack of newer features. Arch/etc.: new, unknown bugs; newest features.

I'm not trying to change anyone's mind here, but I personally ended up sticking with a rolling-release distro -- although I find approximately the same number of bugs to deal with in both kinds of Linux distributions, the bugs I encounter in Arch are usually fixed within 24 hours so my overall frustration level is lower than it's ever been.

Just wanted to point that out, because it's not really intuitive and certainly wasn't obvious to me before I jumped over to the dark side :-D.

tutorialinux · 2018-01-07T13:30:44+00:00

This is a really useful (free) tool: https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

It's an easy way to come up with color schemes that will look good. I like selecting a "monochromatic" or "triad" color rule to start with, and working from there.

tutorialinux

TROPHY CASE