Fastest Growing Market Segment

[Paul Lussier]

Jon maddog Hall <maddog at li.org> writes:

> I would like to discuss this with the group:
>
> fdiprete at comcast.net said:
>> The trade rags are all stating that Linux as the fastest growing market
>> segment but....
>
> What I really see is that while Linux is eating into the commercial Unix,
> proprietary system space and staving off Microsoft servers a bit, it still
> is not expanding the over-all market that much, and in particular in the
> "first world" countries.

The other thing I see is that companies in general are being
*extremely* choosy.  There are a lot of people who got into IT (I hate
that term, it's completely non-descriptive...) or the sysadmin field
during the "boom" who really didn't have the aptitude for it, but were
given the position because there was a scarcity of talent.  These
people comprise most of the current "out-of-work" sysadmin crowd right
now. As a result, companies who are looking for a good sysadmin are
taking their time with finding exactly the right person to fit the
position.


> What I have seen and heard is that companies, particularly large
> companies that are profitable, are still squeezing their current
> employees to get more and more out of them.  This, combined with a
> certain amount of offshoring, means that although the economy may be
> recovering in total, the IT industry may not experience that growth.
>
> Also, while Linux is growing, a lot of the systems administrators
> who used to do "Unix" are now doing "Linux" without much extra
> training or inconvenience.

Agreed, I see a lot of places advertising for UNIX sysadmin positions,
but mentioning that RHCE or experience with Fedora, or Debian a
plus...  Many places are looking for Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX
people, but the job description will mention mostly Linux related
work.

> Finally, we are starting to see students from high school and
> college come out and enter into systems administration jobs at lower
> salaries than some of the greybeards (me included).

Definitely agreed there.  IT/sysadmins are still considered a
"necessay evil" by a lot of places.  They know they need these people,
but refuse to admit they're worth paying a salary equal to or greater
than that of a sw developer who works on a revenue generating project.

I've often likened being a sysadmin to being a janitor.  We're the
people who, if we're doing our jobs, taking the trash out, washing the
floors, and keeping the plumming from leaking and making loud noises,
no one notices us nor can be bothered to recognize the contribution we
make.  But as soon as the boss can't figure out he needs to have the
wireless on to get his e-mail when he's not in his office, or the
secretary can't figure out how to read a mail bounce error and thinks
it's her messing up, we're indespensible, and we come running with our
mop and bucket to clean up the mess.


> I think the real growth opportunity is not in systems administration
> work, but in consultancy with a strong programming background and a
> specialty in integration work.  This eventually may lead to more
> system admin jobs, but over a much longer period of time.
>
> Comments?

Another place to look is in the rapidly emerging "platform
integration" field.  A lot of companies are coming out with products
which ship to customers essentially on a PC running some flavor of
Linux with their proprietary layered software.  These companies are
either start-ups with a great idea and no money, or a big company used
to controlling the entire product from proprietary hardware design to
embedded software.  Now companies such as NetApp, EMC, and many others
are doing mostly a sw only product layered on top of Linux on a
generic PC meant to be a "black box" to their customers.

These companies now need people with a very broad range of experience
from programming to shell scripting to package development skills,
etc., essentially sysadmins, to work hand-in-hand with their
development groups to establish good sysadmin tools for their
products, build packages, roll customized kernels, do new hardware
evaluations, etc.  I know of a couple of people, myself included, who
have gone from being "pure sysadmins" to being "developers" recently.

In my case, I'm not really doing much different than I was before,
except (finally, after almost 2 years) I no longer have to deal with
the "corporate" (pronounced Windows) needs like desktop support, phone
systems, sw licensing, etc.  I'm still dealing with backups,
firewalls, user access priviledges, web servers, mail servers, etc.

However, now, officially, part of my job entails building new kernel
packages for our product (rather than just doing this as a favor to
the dev groups), and making sure we have things which make dev flow
smoother like our own Debian repository, and disk duplicator, and eval
things like SATA, and, and, and.

In other words, officially, my job now includes all the things I like
to do, and none of the stuff I really don't care for and am not good
at, and have no desire to get any better at :) And, in order to get
that job, all I needed was to be a sysadmin who knew all this stuff,
but was willing to work in a development group and be called a
"developer" instead of a sysadmin :)

So, look for things which include Linux and "platform integration" if
you're interested in that type of thing.

-- 

Seeya,
Paul