Linux System Administrator for bidorbuy

4+ years exp required and 28k? I don't know an awful lot about the JOB market but is that not really low for someone with that skillset and exp.? There are jobs paying more for different software jobs requiring less experience, even in CT :D
 
SauRoNZA said:
Ended up hiring a young guy almost fresh out of school who had a passion to learn (the enthusiasm you speak of) and knew more purely based on his own exposure to building his home network and Linux media centre etc.
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thats me
 
That was me Moved city and ended up switching away from sysadmin after 3yrs part time and 2yrs full time though. At the time I was pretty happy to be getting around 15k. Took a "graduate" position in another field and still got about 15k for another 18 months after that... :/ I don't think 28k is really low, plenty of people in my previous company were on less than that, in fact probably most of the sysadmin guys (but then most of them sucked).
 
prOd said:
4+ years exp required and 28k? I don't know an awful lot about the JOB market but is that not really low for someone with that skillset and exp.? There are jobs paying more for different software jobs requiring less experience, even in CT :D
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This depends on the candidate. Having gone through probably a few hundred CV's for Linux admins in my career I can comfortably say that "years of experience != skills". Although the expectation would be that the longer you are at a job the more improved/developed your skillset would be. I had an interview with a senior Linux admin (he works for large corporate and administers some 40 servers) who worked in Linux for 8 years (covering pretty much everything and all flavours of Linux) and earning 50K/pm. During the interview I shoved over a laptop with terminal access to one of our test-servers and asked the simple task to extend a logical volume (this is really a stock-standard operation anyone should know) - the guy did his typical "ls", "mount", "df", then asked what version of Linux this is and then hoped onto Google with a "How to extend volume on Centos" - search. Interview over.
 
I recall the interview for my first serious sys admin job with fond memories... 5 gruelling hours! Still the craziest interview I've had to date :p

From having to troubleshoot a machine that was put together with all sorts of problems (ram not plugged in properly, ide ribbon flipped over etc) to having to install redhat (given a dvd but the machine had an unmarked CD drive!) all the way through to setting up services and getting a lamp stack running. I nearly didn't take that job, but ended up staying 5 years :)
 
patrict said:
I recall the interview for my first serious sys admin job with fond memories... 5 gruelling hours! Still the craziest interview I've had to date :p

From having to troubleshoot a machine that was put together with all sorts of problems (ram not plugged in properly, ide ribbon flipped over etc) to having to install redhat (given a dvd but the machine had an unmarked CD drive!) all the way through to setting up services and getting a lamp stack running. I nearly didn't take that job, but ended up staying 5 years :)
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I'm intrigued, how did you use the DVD in a CD ROM, are you a wizard? :p
 
Hehe :) That was one of the challenges, to troubleshoot and identify the why the machine would not pick up the disc... The correct solution would have been to see that it was incompatible and get a DVD drive, or a copy of the OS on a CD...

They were super sneaky, neither the drive nor the disk were marked, so the clue was the purple colouring on the dvd, and then to pull out the drive and see what the label said...
 
MagicDude4Eva said:
This depends on the candidate. Having gone through probably a few hundred CV's for Linux admins in my career I can comfortably say that "years of experience != skills". Although the expectation would be that the longer you are at a job the more improved/developed your skillset would be. I had an interview with a senior Linux admin (he works for large corporate and administers some 40 servers) who worked in Linux for 8 years (covering pretty much everything and all flavours of Linux) and earning 50K/pm. During the interview I shoved over a laptop with terminal access to one of our test-servers and asked the simple task to extend a logical volume (this is really a stock-standard operation anyone should know) - the guy did his typical "ls", "mount", "df", then asked what version of Linux this is and then hoped onto Google with a "How to extend volume on Centos" - search. Interview over.
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Oh man in my previous position at a big ISP I would've loved to have only admined 40 servers. The biggest problem is the basic sys admin is expected to just maintain existing systems not actually getting them all up and running from scratch etc.
Also out of interest were the partitions configured with lvm? Also nasty about sed and awk :)
 
Bump - I took a break from interviews as it was very painful and exhausting without having been able to find an appropriate candidate.

I really have really two opportunities (please read OP) - the one is a "mid-level" administrator and CTC will max out at about 35K. The other is a senior resource and CTC will max out at around 50K. Renumeration is obviously skill dependant.
 
Hey MagicDude4Eva, if you are ever looking for a relative noob to train from scratch I would relish the opportunity to become a Linux admin :love:

I would even do it for free for a while, if that's what it takes...
 
donbandito said:
Hey MagicDude4Eva, if you are ever looking for a relative noob to train from scratch I would relish the opportunity to become a Linux admin :love:

I would even do it for free for a while, if that's what it takes...
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I am not that cheap. We do train up interns. Drop me a mail with your current CV and you will be on the list for next year.
 
Rocket-Boy said:
Did you ever find your linux admins from the OP?
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No, the candidates we interviewed lacked the basic understanding / hands-on experience of managing a Linux environment. While I can appreciate the skill issue, most of them worked in operational corporate environments as "Linux admins" pulling 30-40K/pm. I have taken in an intern which works out great.
 
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