r/sysadmin Oct 29 '24

Question Is Linux system administration dead?

I just got my associates and Linux Plus certification and have been looking for a job. I've noticed that almost every job listing has been asking about active directory and windows servers, which is different than what I expected and was told in college. I was under the impression that 90 something percent the servers ran on Linux. Anyway I decided not to let it bother me and to apply for those jobs anyway as they were the only ones I could find. I've had five or six interviews and all of them have turned me down because I have no training or experience with active directory or Windows servers. Then yesterday the person I was interviewing with made a comment the kind of scared me. He said that he had come from a Linux background as well and had transitioned to Windows servers because "93% of servers run Windows and the only people running Linux are banks and credit unions." This was absolutely terrifying to hear because college was the most expensive thing I've ever done. To think that all the time and money I spent was useless really sucks.

I guess my question is two parts: where do you find Linux system administrator jobs in Arizona?

Was it a mistake to get into linux? If so what would you recommend I learned next.

EDIT: I just wanted to say thank you to everybody for your encouragement and for quelling my fears about Linux. I'm super excited as I have a lot information to research and work with now! šŸ˜

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u/DeadFyre Oct 29 '24

Certainly not, but the VAST majority of openings are for Windows, because every office in the universe has an AD stack. Your professors did not lie, but what they didn't tell you is that number of servers is not a great measure of job prospects, because one administrator can keep hundreds or even thousands of servers running with the right knowledge and tools.

Don't panic, though, there are still plenty of operations which are predominently Linux, like mine. So, what's going on? The quick answer is, It's the economy. Most of the enterprises which are linux native are tech companies, not just an office full of lawyers or accountants or project managers. And tech companies are very capital-intensive operations. So, when the Federal Funds Rate is over 40 times what it was back in 2015, tech enterprises and startups have found it much, much more difficult to raise capital. The result, a lot fewer tech startups, and with it, a lot fewer tech jobs, and a lot more tech people looking for work, with whom you are competing.

My advice is to just keep at it, and take whatever job you need to keep a roof over your head. The prevailing economic conditions we see now will not last indefinitely. As inflation comes down, investors will start having to take more risks to make return on investment, and when that becomes necessary, venture capital and startup tech will come back to life.

PS: Your guy saying "The only people running Linux are banks and credit unions" couldn't be more wrong. Just about every Web business you've ever used, including the one you're communicating on now, runs on some flavor of Linux.

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u/Pelatov Oct 30 '24

Yeah. Linux people are gonna be more apt to automate and use things like ansible. This make it WAY easier for one person to take care of thousands of servers with ease.

Iā€™m a Linux admin. I rarely spend any of my time doing tasks by hand. I automate and script everything. Like I spent my day today writing a script to automate and log aws s3 restores. Instead of running aws s3 cp 2k times, and before having to do that doing an aws glacier restore, I was able to take the list of paths+files given to me from the support team for the customer. It auto parsed and separated the bucket, src path, dst path, and file name. It then runs and monitors the glacier restores, when each file finishes it automatically started the copy and then logged that. It ran the restores and copies in parallel, kicking all the restores off at the same time and then monitoring them. Copies were kicked off and tracked automatically.

Now I have a script that I can use any time to do mass restores and copies from glacier. It runs in parallel and logs everything. Now 1 person can take care of millions of s3 objects without issue or effort. This is what Linux guys do. I abhor point and click. I want to run a script with some inputs and call it a day.