Career path for Linux admin
Posted by Useful-Priority9636@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 34 comments
Hi I just finished my sophomore year of college and for the past two semesters I got to work with Linux a lot and also bash.
I actually ended up really enjoying the projects I was given to work on.
So my question is, what’s the career path that I can look at after my education?
Dolapevich@reddit
Yo start deploying linux in anything that has a cpu, start having issues, fix them. Start a home lab, apply for a junio position, play some more, get to the enterprise, ace some certs, build your own kernels, stumble upon netfilter, lots of head scratching later, you are senior.
Plastic_Weather7484@reddit
Why is the contributing/maintaining some small packages part limited to Debian?
Dolapevich@reddit
I mean, it can be done with any distro. I said Debian because is the biggest distro, it has some small packages that could really use some love, and I am most familiar.
But yeah, pick your poison :)
libertyprivate@reddit
I feel so seen
Mydogsabrat@reddit
r/oddlyspecific
The_Real_Grand_Nagus@reddit
Switch to Linux at home now. Nothing gives you better experience than having to figure out something you actually care about that isn't just some theoretically exercise.
wezelboy@reddit
Higher education is probably a good place to start. Pay isn’t so hot, but there’s definitely a need for Linux admins.
Slight_Student_6913@reddit
I’m making 120k as a Linux admin and it’s paying the bills.
housepanther2000@reddit
The career path can be very good. Get your RHCSA and RHCE certifications. They hold a lot of weight within the industry.
Slight_Student_6913@reddit
This is the way. Look up Sander van Vugt on O’Reilly.
ParoxysmAttack@reddit
Help desk (you gotta do your time in the trenches bud, even if it’s only a couple months) > some kind of series if jr. to sr. sysadmin or engineer > retire as the very project manager you despised earlier on in your career.
xstrex@reddit
Posted in another thread a few weeks back:
Having just recently landed a great new position as a senior Linux engineer I can tell you without a doubt that there’s a lot of positions out there. I would however recommend broadening your knowledge into more systems engineering and less administration.
For instance learning things like Ansible, puppet, chef, kubernetes, docker, and virtualization technologies like VMware, proxmox, etc. also wouldn’t hurt to get into aws, gcp, azure, etc. Additionally things like storage & network are really valuable skills to have!
Edit: in the last 10 years I’ve held the following titles: Linux Systems Administrator, Linux Systems Engineer, Senior Linux Systems Engineer, Principal Engineer. Branching out from administrator is the path forward.
FlashFunk253@reddit
It's not easy to get your foot in the door, so just getting into any entry level or junior position (where they do at least some Linux is key. That being said, you want to be as well rounded as possible starting out: Formal education, certs, experience, home lab.
Linux is foundational to many branches in the IT world, so there's not really any one standard career path. There's general systems and server sys admin, cloud, cyber, storage and virtualization, and many more.
Many people will say DevOps or DevSecOps engineering roles are the next progression from Linux admin. It is true those roles will typically be more senior and pay much better, but there are other senior roles as well depending on the field you're in. Some other examples are: IT Manager, Director of IT, Project Manager, Information Systems Security Manager (ISSM), or other solutions architect/engineer.
Useful-Priority9636@reddit (OP)
Is there any internship titles I could look out for next summer?
FlashFunk253@reddit
It's kinda hard because every company is different as far as job titles and if they even offer internships. I would simply lookout for any "internship" and then find a job description make sure it's IT related and something you might be interested in.
I would recommend creating a LinkedIn account now, and networking with current students, staff, sys admins, and following companies you might be interested in. Many companies post their internship opportunities and open positions on LI as well, so you can go thru and see some of the job responsibilities and requirements.
alexisdelg@reddit
I suggest you also learn networking concepts, the first jobs you'll most likely find would be racking/imaging/managing servers, but having a good networking base, knowing how to configure cisco routes/switches/firewalls will be helpful.
I suggest you also learn about how to automate things, install from a usb disk or a cd will work for one server, but if you have a fleet of servers you probably want to learn things like pxe booting, DHCP, pre-seeding configurations and configuration management tools like ansible/puppet/chef
That will eventually lead you to containerization, docker images, etc
In my humble opinion you want to automate everything you can, so get familiar with those things. Eventually you might be tagged to automate containerization/deployment of docker images, so it's nice to get familiar with CI/CD tools and move towards devops.
All of those things have equivalents on the cloud, so you apply the same networking/routing concepts with AWS' VPCs/Subnets/NatGW/VPN GW/Transit GW. You can also apply image/preseed/management on EC2 instances for things like ECS clusters or just plain EC2 compute
Useful-Priority9636@reddit (OP)
That was actually one of my projects you mentioned: I created a bootable usb drive with Linux on it with a couple bash scripts that automate backups and security checks.
I am also interested in networking too
alexisdelg@reddit
Good, now IMHO, if you need to do manual steps, like connecting a pen drive, you need to automate it, or figure a way of doing it remotely. Always be thinking on how to scale things up from a handful of servers to hundreds. It's could be a matter with scale, or it could be that your servers are ina data center far away from you, you won't always have a chance to get physical with the server
Useful-Priority9636@reddit (OP)
Would installing the drive on a computer then turning it into a homelab be a good next step?
I could also learn proxmox so I can get remote access
alexisdelg@reddit
Try installing something like The Foreman in a server and preseeding a Linux distro with it to install in another server, then try and figure out how to add complexity to it, that will help you understand DHCP, pxe booting and the Linux distro you are trying. You can also hook it into ansible tower or puppet when it boots normally so you get some config management practice
dao1st@reddit
I started in Unix a million years ago, rane Xenix on my workstation and Linux later.
Nowadays, I am an intermediary between AI and things I need to happen.
Kleppy_is_Geek@reddit
Linux is great. Do some personal projects of your own so you can talk about them and your comfort level. Do make sure you are covering your basic IT topics. You should know know how to tie your soon to be linux systems in with the rest of the club (windows–AD/network/etc). You'll be an asset beyond a windows admin. Don't forget to dip your toes in cloud based solutions and containerization.
Specialization is a slow death.
Down200@reddit
This is something I admittedly struggle with too. Do you have any recommendations for projects or resources to look at that would help with this?
I've never messed with AD before, but there's a huge benefit to having one central source of truth for user accounts for end-users.
Kleppy_is_Geek@reddit
You can get real complex with setups but adding linux to a domain and then using AD groups for certain permissions is a great way to make framework that scales. A group that is given a specific role/access - sudo, ssh, dba, etc. Copy paste AD groups for each server gives granular security. A bit of overhead up front but a godsend when a user needs special access to only a few of many servers.
I don't have learning material to cite but I've used this in the wild and I'm sure there are videos on it.
RandomTerrariumEvent@reddit
See if your university has a research computing team/supercomputer you can get a job on eventually profit massively off of specializing in high performance computing.
gjcbs@reddit
I took the route of help desk, then a little Windows Admin time (this was very early RHEL days) then moved to Linux Admin role in 2004. Been at it for over 20 years. DevOps seems like a good focus, also learning virtualization, AWS and such helps. Point is, there are many paths you can take. Find one that appeals to you and keep playing around with Linux. Be curious. Listen, learn, practice and hopefully you can have a long career too. Good luck. My son is also taking this approach (mid 20s).
pnutjam@reddit
I did this too, but threw some networking in there after helpdesk.
Being the guy that can talk to different teams has been very useful. There are alot of companies where a little knowledge makes you the expert, especially in newer tech stacks.
Make sure you get comfortable with git.
power_pangolin@reddit
Even with experience right after college you might have to do helpdesk, but since you have experience with Linux, you can apply for L2-L3 jobs that uses Linux or applications that runs on it (LAMP stack, etc). If you are ballsy, want to turn heads - go for RHCSA before you graduate. You can dm me if you want to chat about RHCSA, but keep in mind I will not violate the NDA and give you specific exam information.
ZestyRS@reddit
This is assuming he wants to be a help desk type dude. People who learn a specific role can be an admin at niche companies out of college.
ZestyRS@reddit
Linux is broad as hell. You can develop applications, program, be a systems engineer, become a packet level networking guru, test rf technology, run a database, etc etc etc
tomkatt@reddit
Learn Kubernetes, and possibly ansible if you can, but if only one, k8s to get some containerization under your belt. Also virtualization if you don't already. Lastly, be sure your networking fundamentals are solid.
Those couple things will land you a job almost anywhere.
bamed@reddit
There are a lot of different paths you can take. Do you want to focus on building, maintaining, or monitoring? Are you also interested in networking, security, cloud, devops, embedded systems, or development? Looking to work with massive enterprise systems or something smaller? Could go anywhere from site reliability for something like Netflix to managing a single application server for a small company. Lots of options.
burdalane@reddit
It seems to be so difficult to hire traditional Linux sysadmins that having some Linux experience and demonstrating eagerness to learn might land you a sysadmin job. At least, that has been my organization's experience. On the other hand, maybe there aren't that many traditional Linux sysadmin job openings anymore, and instead, everything is cloud or DevOps. That is a possible path other than system administration, especially if you have interest or experience in programming. Learn to code, learn AWS and/or Azure and/or Google Cloud, containerization, k8s, maybe get cloud certified. If you want to go the sysadmin path, though, you can get Red Hat certifications.
devoopsies@reddit
Linux runs everything.
Phones, networking gear, your car, small IoT devices like your fridge, massive multi-thousand-node cloud compute platforms... it is everywhere.
Someone with knowledge in Linux can move across IT fields far more easily than someone without Linux knowledge, in my experience; obviously there are the bog-standard "Linux Administrator" jobs out there, where you run infra, but there are a lot of other jobs that you can move into as well:
There are probably a dozen more that I'm missing, but it's Friday and I'm about to go home, but my point is that "Linux Admin" doesn't have to be a full career path, it can be a career or job that opens other doors for you as well... if you want it to be.