[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Don Marti]

begin Greg Lindahl quotation of Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 01:08:16AM -0700:
> On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 04:03:21AM -0400, Luke S Crawford wrote:
> 
> > Really?  I was always under the impression that Linux/UNIX  people
> > were able to charge a lot more.   At least from the informal salary survays
> > (that is, talking to people I know)  windows admins are lucky to make 60%
> > of what a similarly experienced Linux/UNIX admin does.    I'd be interested
> > to hear what other people know about this. 
> 
> Linux/UNIX people do charge more, but they're generally better
> educated and smarter than your typical Windows admin. (And apparently
> rarer, I really didn't get many replies to a recent Craiglist job ad
> for a Linux senior admin type...)

The problem is that it's a hard comparison to make
-- administrators of large client-server or web
installations make more money than administrators
of small office networks.  A higher fraction of the
Linux sites are the higher-paid kind.

But even if administrator pay correlates better to
size of network administered than to OS, an individual
can do well by learning Linux, since Linux skills
open up more of the bigger, higher-paying jobs.

(Proposed rule of thumb for administrator staffing:
skill of administrator needed is proportional to
the size of the network; number of administrators
needed is inversely proportional to the quality of
the hosts.)

-- 
Don Marti                                               +1 510-814-0932
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org         Linux device driver unconference: http://freedomhec.org/