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Re: [PLUG] OT: (outta sight!) making IT in Philly?
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Bill,
That sounds overly pessimistic to me. I know that Vanguard in Malvern,
and GlaxoSmithKline in KoP, and Juniper Bank in Wilmington all have
significant Unix admin staffs. All of their production databases, Web
and application servers are Unix, most moving from Solaris towards
Linux. Only their client desktops and some file servers are Windows.
I think Siemens Medical (was Shared Medical Systems) also has a strong
Unix base. All of these places are also using a lot of Java, Perl,
Oracle, etc. I assume most larger companies in the area are mostly Unix
servers, except for the small departmental systems and file servers and
such. Other than the desktop, it's really not such a Microsoft-dominated
world.
--Fred
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Fred Stluka -- mailto:fred@bristle.com -- http://bristle.com/~fred/
Bristle Software, Inc -- http://bristle.com -- "Glad to be of service!"
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William H. Magill wrote:
On 08 Mar, 2006, at 14:07, Ronald Kaye Jr wrote:
I want to know the same thing. I want to break into the Linux world
My background is novell, windows server, admin/engineer, etc,
and I have taught several Linux classes using RedHat, Fedora,
Slackware,
and starting thursday night ... SUSE.
rk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Floyd Johnson" <fljohnson3@isp.com>
To: <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 1:59 PM
Subject: [PLUG] OT: (outta sight!) making IT in Philly?
(I risk getting blasted for asking the same question twice.)
I'm starting to believe that those who have made a career with
Linux are
more likely to be sysadmins than proggies. If that is correct, how did
you make a start of it, given no professional experience in Linux
administration, in this metropolitan area? If not, how does one "get
connected"?
By definition "a Linux professional" IS a System Administrator. One
who deals with the operating system (Linux), not a programmer who
writes production code in Cobol or C. (Perl programming doesn't
count, it's expected of a SysAdmin.)
As a now retired Unix SysAdm (30 some odd years), my experience is
that there is very little "*nix" work in the area. It is a dominantly
Windows market today. (The only thing smaller is the OS X market.)
The IT market in Phila has shrunk considerably in the past 5-10 years
as most of the larger operations with many positions have downsized
significantly ... thanks mostly to the disappearance of "big-iron"
and its replacement by X86 based platforms.
That is not to say there is none, just that most all of it is
strictly word-of-mouth referrals from lists like this one (PLUG),
when one of the few positions open up.
Additionally, Linux SysAdmin work, like Unix SysAdmin work in
general, has nothing vaguely like a "career path" structure at most
companies -- you are it ... and are expected to do everything, from
SysAdmin and Networking work to programming, on-call 24x7x365. In a
big shop, you have a staff of one and can sleep somewhat regularly.
Put another way, many, if not most, of the positions available expect
you to "hit the ground running" and be able to run the entire
operation from day one. This means that finding a location that is
willing to take on an apprentice or trainee level new-hire is quite
difficult.
There does seem to be a fair amount of contract work around. But it
too is mostly word-of-mouth referrals.
T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 [Rev A motherboard - 300 MHz 768 Meg] OS X 10.2.8
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com
whmagill@gmail.com
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group --
http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements -
http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion --
http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
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