Linux talent search

With Linux becoming more prevalent in the enterprise, especially as a cost-saving option, chief technologists are starting to look for experienced talent to run Linux systems. But because it has only recently been introduced in many corporations, it can be hard to find employees with a background in running Linux at the enterprise level, even in this employers’ market.

“Until recently, with Linux, if something went wrong, you were at the mercy of the open-source community — bless them, but what a risk — or you had to bring in a consulting company,” says Curtis Brown, CTO of the New York-based Princeton Review, who has two back-office systems that run on Linux. “Only now are we really seeing systems administrators with Linux experience hitting the market.”

The Princeton Review‘s back-office systems require little or no system administration, but Brown says he has used Linux more extensively in other situations. “My sense is that the marketplace is saturated with largely self-taught Linux gurus with limited large-systems experience,” he says.

To complicate this situation, managers have been bombarded with biased opinions and half-truths from vendors and analysts with agendas, says Billy Marshall, vice president of Enterprise Sales at Red Hat. “The manager that does not have any organic experience can fall prey to the feeding frenzy in the market.”

Technically, many deployment configurations and scenarios are possible with Linux due to the technology’s flexibility and openness, Marshall says. “However, only a limited number of these will actually prove to be sustainable over the long term. The technical manager has the difficult job of sorting through the benefits and risks of a particular deployment plan, and most of them are ill-equipped for this challenge. They lack the experience with the technology [because] they grew up in a proprietary world. They lack trustworthy sources of unbiased information [because] the market is not yet mature enough to provide this information.”

In this kind of climate, finding the real expert can be problematic. “Most everyone we interview that is a so-called Linux expert is really a home hacker with no 24/7 experience,” says Jeff Carter, CTO of the Charlotte, N.C.-based supply chain and logistics applications provider Elogex. As a result, Carter trains internal staffers in Linux, which Elogex has deployed in development, quality assurance, and light production environments.

Unix administrators have some advantage with CTOs bringing Linux to the enterprise. Carter recruits among Unix administrators who have enterprise experience and “who know what it takes to keep things running even in highly flexible [or] chaotic environments,” he says. “These same Unix admins have the professionalism to understand the business side of operations while at the same time the intelligence and innovative nature required to work with a rapidly evolving open-source product.”

Although some chief technologists are wary of hiring younger employees with limited enterprise seasoning, others such as Henri Asseily say not to overlook the 20-somethings who played with Linux in college. Asseily is CTO of Bizrate.com, an online comparison shopping and market research company based in Los Angeles .

A member of InfoWorld’s CTO Advisor Council, Asseily says that making “a few well-placed questions can ascertain quickly the level of knowledge of a prospective employee.” His list includes: How do you build an RPM? What are the basic differences in the rc configuration between BSD and Linux? In configuring the Linux kernel, what is preferable, static inclusion or module-based? What’s best for development? For production?

Red Hat offers some in-house training on Linux, and Asseily says that’s good for teaching the basics. “For intermediate-level training, our best strategy is to pair an employee with an experienced Linux person and get some one-to-one knowledge transfer as quickly as possible,” he says.

Although the open-source community has a reputation for being a college student’s development playground, not all universities offer Linux development courses. Hal Varian, dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California , Berkeley , says his program doesn’t offer systematic instruction in Linux but does give students access to experts and tools.

“We give them a three-hour crash course in Unix when they get here, which is basically survival skills,” Varian says. “We also offer them a sandbox environment in which they can be system administrators themselves — without destroying our production environment!”

Red Hat’s Marshall sees a trend developing at the university level that will impact the future of enterprise Linux staffing. “In the future, as demand for tech workers increases, the developers and systems architects and admins will increasingly have cut their teeth on Linux,” he says. “The universities are very cost-conscious, and the relatively low expense of Intel systems combined with organic availability of Linux is quickly becoming the norm, especially at reputable engineering schools. The free availability of the source code leads universities to standardize on Linux for computer science courses.”