What are hotter skills in the market?

Weird question, all as good as each other, depends on the environment you are working in.

Having said that, config management is important as this is the way you should be looking to deploy systems, generally speaking.
 
OK. To add context, I have two roles on offer to me as a junior engineer. One with the first set of tech and the second with the other.

Which will enable me to improve my career moving forward.
 
memyselfandi said:
Puppet ... yuk .... give me Ansible any day over that ...
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Super constructive comment.

Both will lead you to "improve your career" but its all pretty subjective, I don't know your life goals or your career path.

Any place worthwhile will be interested in improving things so the current stack shouldn't be set in stone and you should be able to improve with any job/environment.
 
I guess I don't have a career path at the moment. I just want to get in to a role which will expose me to Linux on a full time basis.

I'm looking obviously to make the most money and get as high up the chain as I can as quickly as I can.

I'm 35 now and need to set a very aggressive pace before I hit 40. I wasted too much time in one job doing tech support for 8.5 years so now I am on a catch up job.

In relation to original question, I am looking at it from the perspective of me in say 2-3 years looking for a new role with a higher salary.

Which set of skills (1 or 2) will further enable me to do that do you think?

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What I have noticed about my peers in the industry is that they have ALL the skills which they accumulate throughout their careers. They move on every 2-3 years and like a snowball pick up new skills as they go. So if you look at their CV's they have got it all (relatively speaking)
 
If I had to pick (as you've probably gathered it's a bizarre question) it'd be option 1. Option 2 seems to be a typical template for web hosting support, which isn't necessarily where you want to be to pick up a broad set of skills quickly.

Dealing with configuration management tools in itself suggests that you'll get a fairly deep understanding of some other software stacks along the way (as well as tools such as Katello/Satellite, and the potential headaches that may or may not go along with them).

As you've said yourself however, accumulation of knowledge and skills - as well as actively keeping oneself informed - gives you the flexibility that sets you apart. It's absolutely worth spending some extra time getting to grips with technologies that grab your attention as opposed to focusing on a "Linux" skill set - that comes with time and daily exposure. Pay for some time on AWS yourself, or fire up some VMs locally.
 
opethdisciple said:
I guess I don't have a career path at the moment. I just want to get in to a role which will expose me to Linux on a full time basis.

I'm looking obviously to make the most money and get as high up the chain as I can as quickly as I can.

I'm 35 now and need to set a very aggressive pace before I hit 40. I wasted too much time in one job doing tech support for 8.5 years so now I am on a catch up job.

In relation to original question, I am looking at it from the perspective of me in say 2-3 years looking for a new role with a higher salary.

Which set of skills (1 or 2) will further enable me to do that do you think?

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What I have noticed about my peers in the industry is that they have ALL the skills which they accumulate throughout their careers. They move on every 2-3 years and like a snowball pick up new skills as they go. So if you look at their CV's they have got it all (relatively speaking)
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Your final paragraph sounds pretty much how I've built my Linux career, it's the nature of the role though, you tend to have your fingers in all the pies so broadening your skill set is part and parcel of it.

Honestly, for me, it's difficult to suggest one over the other, they're 2 sides of the same coin and it's not as clear cut as looking at 2 stacks and picking one, what types of businesses are they? Do they do stuff you are interested in? Is there training offered? Is there a lot of technical debt?

Maybe I'm over thinking it, but I'm willing to bet there is a lot more to these jobs than the 3 things you've picked out to query but if you really had to pick I would go for option 1, maybe job 2 is just about to start implementing Ansible, for example.

As others have said I would be spending your own time up skilling if you are trying to play catch up, then I would pick the job that you feel better about, has better prospects or is in a company that does more interesting stuff.
 
Had my technical interview with job two today (Apache AWS). They have around 20 servers. The job is going to be pure, AWS and Apache configuration.

I think they have plans to optimise the architecture of the platform but it wont be great depth in terms of Linux. They said it would be patching the servers and basically hardening Apache security.

a lot of AWS. All the plans they have is utilising more of AWS's services.

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The other role with the museum is 90 servers, running Red Hat and Puppet configuration.

I think there will be a lot more technical depth in this one. I will be dealing with Jenkins as well as Hadoop (I think he said). They use KVM for virtualisation. They also have a huge storage system. On the job spec it does say I will be not only working with the Devops engineer but also working with the storage manager.

Projects in this job is upgrading Red Hat from 6 to 7 and upgrading Puppet to latest version.

They also stressed my scripting skills which I think is a good sign as the big money is in scripting.

I have to go with my brain on this one and probably go with the more boring role out of the two.

The first one was fun and hip and full of women. I saw Dom Jolly walk out the building for example. But the role has no training budget and I don't think has the technical depth I'm looking for.

It's a pure web hosting role.
 
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Powershell, Chef, Puppet and Docker, all somewhat related and all up and coming in demand skills at the moment. Our recruitment side of our business is really struggling to find Scala devs if you have any programming in you:)

Seems most of the money is moving away from infrastructure type roles to devops.
 
Having worked in with Unix/Linux for a number of years I would go for the role that offers the greater introduction to technologies deemed DevOPS.
The Linux admin role is naturally moving this way and I agree the scripting aspect is very important.

Puppet can be daunting at first but is a great tool to learn and will aid system automation and scripting knowledge.
Ansible is good and easier to pick up but both have their use cases. I have found it great for quickly knocking out patches, software installs etc.

In terms of Production Linux I would always steer towards Redhat or CentOS, mainly because of background but I have found them more widely used commercially that Ubuntu.

Good luck with what you decide.
 
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