I’m certifiably insane, have a doctorate in frustration, and many studies published of “Oh, fuck, what is this? I don’t have time for this now, I have shit to get done”.

Good luck.

I’m a self taught child of the 80s that loved to mess around with basic and serial modems when I could finally get 1.

Honestly, I got my first job by low balling the salary and knowing my shit enough to answer questions.

After 1 year I went to a new position paying double. And so on and so forth.

everyones just like, “10 years of experience”…nobody is hiring people without experience so people without experience cant get experience…i dont get it…

None, anymore.

Eventually you end up with a resume/knowledge that sells itself.

I’m not talking about government jobs that require certain certs, though.

The only certification I have is from the Kansas City Barbeque Society, allowing me to act as a judge in BBQ competitions.

Things are probably different nowadays, but at least 15-25 years ago you could just apply for IT jobs and if someone lied about their skills it would hopefully show during the technical interviews. I don’t know if that counts as getting in very early.

No certifications, no degrees, just good, old fashioned 15 years of experience.

I’m fresh off the school bench myself, and work is now requiring us to take RHCSA, RHCE and Terraform certs. As we are consultants this is the only “proof” customers will trust when they choose us for various jobs.

So far so good though, starting with RHCSA and it’s really good practice, especially for getting to know the ins and outs of the Linux system(RHEL). The learning material (the official stuff from red hat) is also very thoughtful, with theory, quizzes, guides and labs.

Best of luck 🙌

Nothing current.

But I know what I know and I am very upfront with things I need to learn. One of those two things must be getting me positive results.

Wait! I have ITILv4. Go me.

No university degree, did an apprenticeship 14 years ago in germany. It was three days a week of learning sysadmin things within a company (Windows, Linux, network devices) and two days a week of school, where the theoretical stuff was taught.

After 3 years, I was a newbie sysadmin and capable of managing Windows and Linux environments. I did no further certifications back then.

Over time, especially since I wanted to move more towards Linux, automation, containers and cloud native things from 2022 on, I did some certifications (LFCS, RHCSA, RHCE) which helped me to land a job where I now work 100% with Linux and containers and kubernetes.

I did it to:

• learn the things I had experience on from the ground up and fix the all the “holes” I never had to work with before in the day to day job and get a verification of my skills.
• learn additional things that were not part of the apprenticeship but are useful as a sysadmin today (automation, containers, git, etc)

I’m still learning to build up knowledge of kubernetes and will eventually take exams on that topic as well.

However, there are certifications with questionable value to them (in my opinion), like multiple choice tests for single tools or the like.

I’m a fan of performance based lab exams, where you get 20 tasks from all the scopes of the product to solve and have to actually apply the knowledge you gained to pass the exam by solving real world problems.

By learning for those kinds of exams, you cover a product or technology - almost - 100%. Unlike learning by experience only, which can be very individual. You can for example totally manage 10 linux hosts with ansible for 10 years without ever having to use facts, roles, etc. Just by writing very big playbooks.

Does that qualify for 10 years of ansible experience?

In reality, companies have a certain size and use-cases, so you’ll do the absolute minimum to get something running/implemented securely (most of the time, I know there are exceptions). So imho certifications provide a birds eye view and force you to learn different areas of the product, which may be very useful, out of scope, etc.

But just passing a certification exam once doesn’t equal years of real experience either. It’s a mixed topic. For a point in time, you knew enough to pass the exam, so if your certification is still valid, it would be reasonable to assume you still know what you’re doing, that’s all.

No certs and degree isn’t in CS. I just have lots of experience.

My pathway was basically:

1. Got a low tier job as a glorified intern (paid)
2. Switched jobs a few times, pay increasing each time. Chose interesting jobs.
3. Left a low paying gov job for contract work. Got hired full time by one of my contractors.
4. Have stayed at that job. Golden handcuffs.

German here, no certs aswell

I got in to IT by just writing on my CV what I know I can do and what I learned in my free time.

Some company interviewed me, I could convince them that I really know a lot of stuff and that got me in.

Ever since then all I had where the companies I worked at and that was sufficient

So funny that almost nobody got certs working in IT, same for me basically, I have a BA in Business Administration and thats it. ^^;

In my anecdata (TO), all the sysadmins I know have a CS degree. I don’t know many. Personally I haven’t professionally been a sysadmin per se but I’ve done cloud infrastructure design, development and maintenance at scale and I do have a CS degree. A CS degree from a good school teaches a lot. Not so easy to get these days with the higher prices of everything.

PhD in Quantum Optics

Still waiting for the day my education pays off.

I have a Sec+ but that’s just a job requirement; the only parts of the test that I’ve actually used were public/private key cryptography, and even then I was just dumbing it down to explain to end users. Otherwise it’s all just experience.

Degree requirements are mostly there to satisfy HR (and can probably be waived in most cases), IT is realistically a trade profession.