[SunRescue] OT: Advice on Certification

[Devin L. Ganger]

On Fri, May 04, 2001 at 10:18:15PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
 
> On Fri, May 04, 2001 at 08:18:21PM -0700, Brian Dunbar wrote:

> > I _want_ my next job to be much more involved with 'unix' so my question is
> > .. how important ARE credentials to the people doing hiring for unix admins?
> > I'm going to take the tests (but I don't *like* tests) I'm just looking for
> > .. encouragement?  Someone to give me a kind word? (did I say I don't like
> > tests?)
 
> Who would companies rather hire?  Fresh college grad with certifications
> and no hands-on experience, or someone who has pulled his share of
> all-nighters?

Well, Bill, *that* depends on whether they're being short-sighted or not.
The college grad with certs and no experience is cheaper -- in the short
term...
 
> Go for the certs, but dont rely on them solely.

Exactly.  However, if you're serious about establishing your bona fides,
the certs are not a bad step *in conjunction* with other things to build
experience.  Download Sol8 for Intel and run it on a spare box.  Get one
of the cheap Sparc boxes and put Sol8 on that, too.  If you have broadband,
find some non-profit (charity, church, something) that needs to have a
website and host it for them off of your Solaris box.  Or, if they need
someone to help them with computer support, do that too.  A SS5 with Sol8
and PC Netlink 1.2 makes a handy print and file server for a cluster of
Windows PCs, with full NT domain networking -- plus it can be a web server,
a mail server, and so on, without the licensing costs and the massive
security vulnerabilities.

-- 
Devin L. Ganger <devin at thecabal.org>
find / -name *base* -exec chown us:us {} \;
su -c someone 'export UP_US=thebomb'
for f in great justice ; do sed -e 's/zig//g' < $f ; done