[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Chris Miller]

Don Marti wrote:
> 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.)

My local school district - I just graduated, so it's not my district any
more >:) - has over 1,000 employees over 23 sites with perhaps 5,000
computers running various versions of Windows on diverse hardware, with
various versions of Mac OS X running on diverse hardware.

They have 4 total "official" network administrators.

Would you please forward your post to the Pleasanton Unified School
District and to the Pleasanton City Council?  They desperately need that
bit of wisdom.