Fastest Growing Market Segment (was: linux jobs?)

[Kenneth E. Lussier]

On Sun, 2005-06-26 at 14:18 -0400, Jon maddog Hall wrote:
> 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.

I think that disruptive technologies beget disruptive businesses. Linux,
being the disruptive technology in this particular case, has spawned
several businesses that are disruptive. For example, I talked to a
company not long ago that has a micro-payments system. They are an all
Linux shop with a product based on Linux. Micro-payments are disruptive
to the business model of the traditional credit card companies. Also,
Linux-based PBX's are disrupting the proprietary PBX vendor model. I see
Linux really digging itself in in the embeded world, too. You can now do
on Linux what you used to only be able to do on a proprietary $5k per
seat embeded development kit. 
  
> 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.

What I have seen in this area is that employers that are large companies
are moving to Linux by utilizing the skills that their current IT
department already has. If they need to hire someone, they are hiring to
augment the current skill set. So, if they already have an IT department
that is highly skilled in Unix, then they go out looking to hire someone
that is skilled in everything *else* (i.e. Windows desktop support, DBA,
web development, and anything else that they can get). They don't want
to hire different people with different skills when one person with a
lot of skills is cheaper. Most of the sysadmin job postings that I see
aren't really sysadmin jobs, they are "do everything from desktop
support to developing our website to writing some new app for our sales
department". The term sysadmin has become diluted to the point where no
one really knows what a sysadmin is anymore.

> 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).

This is true because companies can pay them less because they have less
experience. "Professional" Linux experience was hard to come by for a
long time because most people weren't using Linux in their companies (at
least their companies either didn't know they were using it, or they
wouldn't admit to using it). So, kids coming out of college or high
school had as much "real-life" experience with Linux as the grey-beards,
but they were half the price. 
  
> 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.

I see systems administrators getting absorbed into development work a
lot these days. Software developers can write code, but they need
someone to build they system that the code is going to run on. I am also
seeing a lot of job listings (ain't Craig's List great? :-) for system
integrators and Linux consultants. Maybe the IT industry is headed
toward an outsourced solution back to the days of TAOS and CT where you
hired a "Sysadmin Company".

> Comments?

No. I don't really have anything to say :-)

C-Ya,
Kenny

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