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Demand For Linux Skills Rising This Year 94

Nerval's Lobster writes This year is shaping up as a really good one for Linux, at least on the jobs front. According to a new report (PDF) from The Linux Foundation and Dice, nearly all surveyed hiring managers want to recruit Linux professionals within the next six months, with 44 percent of them indicating they're more likely to hire a candidate with Linux certification over one who does not. Forty-two percent of hiring managers say that experience in OpenStack and CloudStack will have a major impact on their hiring decisions, while 23 percent report security is a sought-after area of expertise and 19 percent are looking for Linux-skilled people with Software-Defined Networking skills. Ninety-seven percent of hiring managers report they will bring on Linux talent relative to other skills areas in the next six months.
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Demand For Linux Skills Rising This Year

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  • by bhcompy ( 1877290 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @01:57PM (#49182213)
    The Year of Linux is finally here!
  • by Anonymous Coward

    So when will this dying site finally shut down for good?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by ganiman ( 162726 )

      Dying site? I found my last two jobs on Dice, both which turned out to be really great. I have always found Dice to be an excellent job resource site for IT professionals. Maybe the jobs you applied for through Dice didn't hire you :P

    • by Duhavid ( 677874 )

      The garbage disposer shows a reference to the item...

  • by BarbaraHudson ( 3785311 ) <barbara.jane.hud ... minus physicist> on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @01:59PM (#49182221) Journal

    Yet another report that doesn't give hard numbers either in the summary or the article. And of course, the pdf is walled behind a "give us your information and we'll let you download it" page.

    The criteria are pretty slack - as long as a company is thinking about hiring one linux worker, that's counted as a win. No saying if it's because they've consolidated several previous linux positions into one future job, or how many non-linux workers are being hired, to put the numbers into perspective.

    Notably missing was the "how many linux workers have/will you lay off" question, even though we know this is happening thanks to off-shoring, etc/

    I doubt we will ever have an unbiased set of numbers to work with - that would require someone who doesn't have a vested interest in the outcome.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I shy away from hiring people who highlight Linux experience as part of their skillset. My experience with them is that they are constantly trying to rework things that are already functional using OSS tools that are poorly documented and supported and when they leave to chase the next shiny job no one is quite sure what the hell they did. Knowledge of standard commercial tools that we already use is the most important thing.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        This is 90% of the reason we use Microsoft products. Everything is C#/.Net, IIS, & SQL Server. We never deal with whatever the FOTM software package the community is pushing. Although I do miss people telling me that they need a Hadoop cluster for their 60GB datasets.

        • These skillsets are for virtualized network / system engineers. I doubt any company you've worked for deals with this level of tech. Your puny server is just another data set inside my datacenter filled with Blades.
      • by Creepy ( 93888 )

        Even worse would be linking to GPL libraries before they leave and then telling the Gnu foundation about it just to screw your former company and deny responsibility because you wiped all systems logs after hacking root. I would never do such a thing, personally, but I do know how to think evil :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anon-Admin ( 443764 )

        That was worth the laugh!

        Your windows delusion is grand for an anonymous coward! Having spent the better part of 20 years working as a Linux professional I can tell you that all the fortune 500 and above companies have, use, and enjoy Linux. It is well supported, COTS apps are all over the place, and the OSS tools are well documented within the companies where they are used. They are far better documented than the custom internally developed apps for windows that every company has.

        Windows has it's place in

        • LOL "well documented" indeed. I work at HP, and it's over-documented sometimes to the extreme. Our clients demand ITIL level documentation on everything, we have two different SharePoint pages because of all the documentation. We also have vast amounts of Linux on the backend, I daresay you can't make an airline reservation without using RHEL somewhere in the back. It's all used with VMWare, massive virtualization, etc. So are these job descriptions...especially with the CloudStack requirements it looks l
    • Many HR people also think VMWARE=LINUX=CLOUD. OpenStack etc shows cheaper implementations of virtualization, and the requirement of virtual networking shows too. To me, M$ dropped the ball with their HyperVisor, it's just not getting the traction like VMWare/RHEL. At my job I can see thousands of virtual servers for MANY companies, even the WIN boxes are run virtualized on RHEL on Intel and Sun boxes. There's another giant failing of M$, not having an OS that can "bridge" the transition away from big Su
      • Sure, but those VMs don't exactly create a ton of job opportunities (which is why they're so popular - you don't need a huge staff to run a server farm of VMs). Companies go to VMs in "the cloud" because it's cheaper - fewer people on the payroll. So, they lay off most of their linux workers and hire one VM specialist. Sounds like many linux jobs are in danger.
        • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

          Sure, but those VMs don't exactly create a ton of job opportunities (which is why they're so popular - you don't need a huge staff to run a server farm of VMs). Companies go to VMs in "the cloud" because it's cheaper - fewer people on the payroll. So, they lay off most of their linux workers and hire one VM specialist. Sounds like many linux jobs are in danger.

          Whilst it is a perception that I can agree with my experiences are that the underlying issues created by using VM infrastructure is that it creates new classes of issues that frustrate organizations from utilizing the VM infrastructure that they get. Few people understand these issues until they come up to configuring CPU and IO schedulers in virtual environments.

          It may be easy to build a VM but you have to configure it differently or it has an effect on other VMs that you didn't intend - some of those fai

          • Again, this has nothing to do with increasing the number of linux jobs - to the contrary, it decreases the number, which gets back to my original point - the "study" is extremely badly done, its conclusions are bogus, and it's just another example of the linux foundation's false boosterism.

            For a long time, linux and open source in general was FUN as well as useful. Now the wanna-be suits/overlords have pretty much ruined it by trying to intermediate themselves into the process for their own personal benefi

    • @BarbaraHudson: 'Yet another report that doesn't give hard numbers either in the summary or the article. And of course, the pdf is walled behind a "give us your information and we'll let you download it" page.'

      If you haven't downloaded it, how do you know it doesn't gave any hard numbers. Besides, you can fill in any ole name and download it.

      Key findings from the 2015 Linux Jobs Survey and Report show that: [linuxfoundation.org]

      "The 2015 Linux Jobs Report reveals and analyzes the responses from more than 1,000 hiring ma
      • And yet your quote STILL doesn't give hard numbers. How many new linux jobs vs how many lost linux jobs (those "cloud" deployments are cheaper for a reason - employers can cut salaries). Also, the survey was self-selected. One that picks a uniform distribution across all employers, or, say, the top 1000, giving the hire/fire ratios, would be more accurate than this PoS "survey".

        Think of it - business has 10 linux employees. They will lay off all 10 this year because they're going to hire one new linux em

  • 100% (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @01:59PM (#49182225)

    100% are looking for a H1-B that they can pay as little as possible while holding a green card like it's the sword of damocles over their head.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I am not sure how you quantify a Linux skill? What does knowing your way around Linux even mean? Is knowing your way around Linux quantifiable by doing some odd configuration with hardware, ie disabling TCP offload for troublesome NICs? Or is it simply setting up services for others to use?

    Most people can do this stuff. Kernel development however ...

  • I can see companies caring about Linux expertise; after all, the vast majority of servers run Linux, so if you're hiring for someone doing devops you probably want them to know their way around Linux. But 44% prefer people with "Linux certification"? I know some companies care about stuff like RHEL certifications, but I didn't think it was that many.

    • ... the vast majority of servers run Linux, ...

      Um... "vast majority"? Citation please.

      • by Trepidity ( 597 )

        Well, the majority of web-facing servers anyway. According to Netcraft, about 30% of servers run Windows/IIS, and just about all the rest run either Apache/Linux or nginx/Linux (plus a few running *BSD, of course).

        • According to Netcraft, about 30% of servers run Windows/IIS...

          ...and those servers serve only 11% of active (not parked) web sites, implying that the average Linux server handles roughly - um - 3.5 times as many active sites as the average Windows server. No wonder there is a brand preference.

      • That stat is also counting a vast amount of virtualized servers that used to be stand-alone that technically run BOTH Windows and Linux. They are Windows servers running on top of ESX, Red Hat's name for VMWare's virtual OS. The actual hardware can be Intel, AMD, PowerPC (older Sun boxes)...anything Linux can run on which is why it's made such inroads into the market in a "backdoor" way. Your old hardware is failing, virtualize it. Now your running Linux too! Unless you use HyperVisor...but M$ doesn't s
        • Agreed, but rather than M$ systems, I was thinking other Unix systems, and not necessarily Internet facing. I've worked several places, admittedly a while ago, that still rely on big-iron systems running Solaris, HP-UX, etc... That kind of hardware can have advantages over a lot of hardware usually used to run Linux (VMs or bare-metal), but you also pay for it.

    • These are Cloud Engineer jobs, thus RHEL is the OS for it. VMWare is huge in the cloud, and the Cloudstack etc...the right employee could take your in-house system and virtualize it into some cloud service, or pull Cloud services into the network environment tighter. Having multiple cloud redundancy servers is becoming more and more standard. I work at HP, and we already have several data centers for already existing virtualized clients; and we've just started marketing it externally. I guess we have to
      • by Trepidity ( 597 )

        Yeah I can see Linux being important, I just didn't think companies put much stock in the certifications themselves, vs. work experience or interviews or other such screening methods. There was a period in the '90s when certs were a big deal, Microsoft's MSCE and Certified Novell Administrator and Cisco's CCNA and whatever, but in the 2000s the certs started being more ignored, at least in my experience, b/c they weren't that reliable a demonstration that the employee was actually any good. Maybe they're ba

        • I think their looking for RHCVA's and such, because those people can do official "warranty" or "support" work, have access to RH's support system, etc. As to the quality of employees with them, well...lol
  • ... to ask these same managers how their hiring goals of 2014 were met during 2014. That is, if they planned on hiring someone with skill X within 6 months, did they hire someone with skill X? Did they actively LOOK for someone with skill X? Or was it, "If someone with skill X comes in, they get 2 extra Brownie Points"?

    It's all well and good to say you plan on hiring certain skill sets in a given period, but if you haven't been fulfilling your goals in the past, what does that bode for the future?

  • For the most part, because the US is leaving a recession, that means there are more people hiring.
    Having Linux on your resume has never been a bad thing to have. Even if you are working in a Microsoft Shop, the chances are there will be the odd Linux system for some particular application. And hiring people with more skills then less is normally a good thing.

    • these job descriptions are Cloud Engineers really. Even an MS shop can't deny the lack of MS in the Cloud, Azure is new and shaky compared to Red Hat's ESX. Capturing VMWare and Novel is proving to be a boon for everyone involved, it's a serious force inside the data center.
  • by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @02:42PM (#49182589)

    >> want to recruit Linux professionals...likely to hire a candidate with Linux certification

    Wait...which one do you want? Professionals or certified neophytes?

    • by l0n3s0m3phr34k ( 2613107 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @03:31PM (#49183051)
      They want RHEL certifications that deal with the Cloud, specifically. These certs enable better support from RH, streamlined patching, etc. Like Cisco "engineers" have TAC access, and that is a major point to the cert. At my job we submit crash / debug reports to Red Hat support all the time; eventually they come back with some patches or a work-around. HR isn't looking for some basement dweller running Slackware on a 386; these are people who can virtualize existing systems, integrate Cloud redundancies, and work with established API's for meshing. Virtual networking is pretty new too. My company (HP) has a VAST amount of virtualized WINTEL on ESX...literally thousands of servers for hundreds of companies, at multiple data centers. Tying all of this together and keeping it all working is quite complicated LOL.
      • HR isn't looking for some basement dweller running Slackware on a 386

        Heej ! I feel personally offended by this. Although I'm in the attic running Slackware 14.1 multilib on a AMD FX8350.

        • LOL honestly your probably over-qualified for the jobs! I know I am at my job, but it's great getting paid to watch netflix all night...nice CPU, btw
  • From the Dice article: (at the bottom under methodology of the study)

    Respondents needed to have hired at least one Linux professional in the last year, or have plans to hire Linux professionals in 2015 to participate in the survey, and they were allowed to check as many responses to questions as appropriate.

    So they only surveyed people that hired a Linux professional last year or plan to hire one this year to determine if the need for Linux talent was on the rise?

  • by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) * on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @02:55PM (#49182715)

    Oh man sweet an unbiased report about the importance of Linux certifications! From a job board and a organization selling Linux certifications no less. I bet this report is totally legit and has hard numbers to back up all of the claims. I'm probably not going to be disappointing from some obvious slashvertisement.

  • FUUUUCK YOOOOUUUUUU!
  • Time to dump Mac and Windose manuals and download a Linux copy today! American jobs are waiting for you!

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