Re: [PLUG] Should I study Linux or NT first?

["William H. Magill" <magill@isc.upenn.edu>]

>   >>So we went to this recruitment fair at a local community college and got
>   about 75 resumes-- all useless, most with MCSE certifications.  
>
>   I work at a local community college...which one was it? Besides the MCSE
>   certs, what else made the resumes useless? Were any of the people qualified
>   for other IT positions at CIGNA? What was your reflection of the college's
>   IT program (I'll hold my comments on that)? Any feedback is appreciated.  
>
The obvious first question is -- what does IT mean?

If "they" are looking for DBase, Oracle, Cobol, Java, Python or Xml
programmers, MCSE is meaningless, maybe even worthless.

Ditto for Unix Sys Admins -- in fact, most Unix folks consider MCSE a
handicap, not a benefit;  a certification that the applicant has no clue
what a regular expression is and never heard of grep.

A Linux background means that at least the applicant understands the
jargon, and is probably trainable. (Of course it also means that the person
probably thinks that x86 boxes are "real computers" and has no clue what
a 24x7 enterprise operation really means.)

These MSCE and similar "certificate" programs are really no different than
the ones for "COBOL programmers" that they used to turn out a few years
ago. (College or Trade School, it makes no difference). Things are no
different today than they were 20-30 years ago, except for the fact that
there are more "graduates" with these certificates today than there were
then. They are really not much more than the old "high school diploma" used
to be -- they certify a certain level of basic literacy in a subject.
 
In general, only very large companies with bottomless budgets (are there
any left?) can afford "trainees" today. Most everybody else, including
startups, expect the new employee to "hit the ground running," and "be able
to carry their own weight from day one."

The only thing that really makes any inroads is experience. A couple of
programing examples in ksh or perl or C or tk/tcl, are far more expressive
and impressive than all of the certification letters one might care to
string out.  (ksh is the POSIX shell, other shells are other shells.)

There are probably a few job descriptions where such and such a
certification is required, but they are still rare today. 
SAGE hopes to make their new Sys Adm certifcation program ubiquitous, but
it's just barely defined and hardly known about, let alone widely required. 
Of course, now that SAGE is splitting from USENIX, that might change, but
such things move at a glacial when on "the fast track."

If you are looking for a job, any job, then it doesn't matter which you
study - NT or Linux. If you are looking  for a Unix job, then don't bother
studying NT, and vice versa. And if you want to write programs, neither is
relevant, unless you are going to work for a vendor and write OS code.

-- 
                        www.tru64unix.compaq.com
                              www.tru64.org
                             comp.unix.tru64
                        
T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill                          Senior Systems Administrator
Information Services and Computing (ISC)   University of Pennsylvania
Internet: magill@isc.upenn.edu             magill@acm.org
http://www.isc-net.upenn.edu/~magill/


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