{"id":315,"date":"2017-12-29T14:28:26","date_gmt":"2017-12-29T14:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bootstrap-it.com\/blog\/?p=315"},"modified":"2017-12-29T14:29:49","modified_gmt":"2017-12-29T14:29:49","slug":"would-you-hire-a-junior-linux-admin-with-these-skills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bootstrap-it.com\/blog\/?p=315","title":{"rendered":"Would you hire a junior Linux admin with these skills?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Smart and experienced admins are worth their weight in gold, but how many of them had that kind of value when they started out? Building up a solid and reliable IT team to serve your operation can be like planning a high-risk, long-term investment. So the best hiring managers will have a pretty clear idea of what they need right now\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0where they\u2019d like to be in a year or two.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll want your young admins to already have some core skills, of course, but also the ability to leverage what they already know to build on them. After all, not only is it impossible for any one person to be familiar with all the Linux tools and best practices currently out there, we can\u2019t even be sure\u00a0what they\u2019ll be<\/em>\u00a0in five years.<\/p>\n

So just what are those core skills that are both useful right now\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0make future learning more effective? Well I haven\u2019t got a monopoly on the truth, and I\u2019d love to hear feedback from the community.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s how I think it might work. I designed my Manning\u00a0Linux in Action<\/a>book to use real-world projects as teaching tools. Each of the core skills required to run Linux systems will be covered, but only when needed for a practical project.<\/p>\n

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The pre-release version of\u00a0Linux in Action<\/a>\u200a\u2014\u200aI\u2019m actually about 85% through the draft chapters. The book is discounted on Manning\u2019s site: use code\u00a0hackernoonlinux50\u00a0<\/strong>to get 50%\u00a0off<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The goal is that by the time readers are done, they\u2019ll have learned everything they would have from traditional sources. But by working through more than a dozen real, in-demand administration tasks using key research tools (like man, info, and online search techniques), they\u2019ll hopefully begin to gain confidence and independence.<\/p>\n

Just so it should be useful for as many readers as possible, the book packs some basic survival skills into Chapter One. Those include the Unix Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, navigation, file management, some tricks (like tab completion and file globbing), and sudo. But from there on, you\u2019re off to the races.<\/p>\n

During the project planning stage, I divided the key Linux admin skills into 15 domains. I then associated each domain with the specific tools that a junior admin would expect to use. These domains and tools (illustrated below) are the overall curriculum expectations around which the book would be built.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The base material from which my book was\u00a0built<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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But the book\u2019s\u00a0structure<\/em>\u00a0would be built around projects like:<\/p>\n