[Techtalk] How to get a job (was: Redhat certification of value?)

[Lina Mårtensson]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 11:05:42PM -0800, Val Henson wrote:
> I'm interested in hearing other people's ideas.  Lots of people start
> out doing Linux for fun and then aren't sure how to turn into a
> career.  I'm curious to see how other people did it, since I took the
> conventional route of getting a computer science degree and working on
> Linux in school.

I haven't really turned Linux into a career, but I've gotten myself
computer jobs without a degree. 

When I finished high school, I didn't want to start studying
immediately. Some friends of mine worked as PHP progammers at a company.
I thought it could be fun to work there too. :)

I didn't know how to program, but I'd wanted to learn for a long time,
I'd just been too lazy. I had taken one of those worthless Pascal
courses at high school, so I knew what if and while was, but not much
else. I talked to the boss at the company my friends worked at shortly
before graduating from high school, and I had obviously said "I WILL
learn PHP", as opposed to "I CAN learn PHP", because I heard from my
friends later that that had impressed him. He said I could have the job
if I learned, so I stuck around at the company and had my friends get me
started and then I was hired.

Needed for this: Probably the year has to be around -99, with a huge
boom in the business. A company that doesn't care too much about quality
but that very much likes to hire kids fresh out from high school (or
drop-outs) because they don't know what their rights towards the
employer is. (This was a _very_ bad employer, but that's another story.)
And you have to be stupid enough not to realize that you can't work as a
programmer if you can't program. ;) (Since I didn't know that, I could
do it.)

After this, I got myself a boring HTML job but my plan was to sneak
myself into Java programming instead. I didn't have time to carry out my
plan before this dotcom company had to shut down the office, though.
This was one of the very first signs of the recession, so it was still
easy to find jobs.

A friend of mine had had a summer internship at a startup which made a
map engine in Java. I applied, confessed that I had only done a small
amount of Java problems from a book for beginners, and sounded very
interested and enthusiastic instead. It worked. I got the job. Oh, and
here's finally some Linux involved as well. The company had a Linux
server, and I was the one who knew the most about Linux, so I ended up
taking care of that.

At the same time, a person at a mailing list tried to talk me into
working with him as a Linux system administrator at Antigua, which I
considered for a while. For that, it was enough that I had been running
Linux at my home computers and was interested in Linux.

Right now, I am studying to get a M.Sc. in CS. Looking back, I don't
really understand how I could get those jobs (except for the HTML job),
and how I could think that I had a chance to get them. But I don't seem
to have disappointed my employers, so I guess it wasn't bad ideas after
all. Unfortunately, I think you need an IT boom for this to work.

	/Lina