I still barely believe it honestly. I’m a student “freshly” outta school with no experience, and I’ve been struggling finding a job for a while.
I had an (first) job interview recently and while I didn’t have much to offer, I seemed to somewhat impress them with my home labbing. I run Proxmox at home for my self-hosted things and got a decent amount of experience with it, and it’s what they use a lot as well. It’s not that common in my age group to be interested in stuff like this, apparently.
Anyway, this is barely worthy of a post, but I’m really excited. I don’t really know how it’ll work out as I still got plenty to learn, but it’s a big step forwards for me.
This is the beginning of something great. The time and place where one starts to realize that passion is the true treasure in the sea of hedonism, consumerism, infantilism.
I got my first and only job in the same way as you did, 13 years ago, and I still am and forever will be better than most of my colleagues that just “do their work”.
It’s not “love what you do”, it’s “do what you love”.
My congratulations to you, fellow selfhoster.
I’ve been in this business for ~15 years… Currently Staff level SRE making a very comfortable living. I have no degree. No certs. No professional training of any kind. I got into it because I setup my first Linux box as a teenager in the late 90s and have never been without one ever since.
The lack of credentials really doesn’t affect me at all.
That being said though, I don’t know that I could recommend that path to very many people any more. It’s definitely possible but the world has gotten so much more complicated from when I was coming up. It’s a lot harder if a way in but for the right person it’s great.
Good for you!!
It’s all about motivation.
I landed a job also just off my homelab. Well sitting in the interview I setup an account for the guy, got him accessed in and let him look at everything I did and could do. You would be amazed how much better it is to be able to show you can do a job then just try to tell someone you can.
Also it’s a huge thing to show a willingness and gift for self learning, a lot of people do not have that. When you find someone like that even if the skills are raw you know that person can be turned into something great.
Hey man it’s how I got into my position where I’m at now, all self taught. I started just as help desks, then the place I worked for had an opening and a Lab technology specialist, which I knew nothing about anything in that field. But in the interview talking about all my home lab projects and goals and just general love for tech. Next thing I knew a week later got a nice pay bump with a promise in a way bigger one if I make it a year. Well now I design PCB and work of very custom hardware and software and it’s all still mine blowing to me.
