I’m happy to be able to directly attribute my livelihood to Linux, which is kind of a cool thing to think about.
Would love to hear other anecdotes as to how others got into tech/Linux.
I’m 44 and got my start in 2009, after doing a myriad of other things, like carpentry, aircraft catering, etc.
After an injury, I was basically ruled out of any jobs that required consistent physicality, so I hunkered down and decided to just focus in on Linux full-time (I was already somewhat of a Linux hobbyist, but knew I had a lot of learning to do). After about 6 months of self study, I decided I wanted to work for a webhosting company, and that I really wanted to work in the hosting/server/datacenter/Linux environment. So NOC Technician is basically where it’s at for that sort of thing to get a foot in the door.
I was hanging out in an IRC channel for a local Linux user group, and lo and behold, there was a guy who worked in a local datacenter/hosting company. I got the manager contact from him, and basically called and emailed and bothered the hell out of him until he relented and said OK come work as an unpaid intern. I worked hard, learned and incredible amount there (they hired me on after a few weeks, albeit very cheaply of course)— DNS/network/webserver/troubleshooting, all the fundamentals, and there were incredibly smart and brilliant people there that I learned from. Those were very cool days.
From there I kept learning and have done fairly decently for myself. Good amount of luck on the way probably, sort of right situation/right timing... have worked at two very large ISPs/telecoms in Systems and Server Operations since then.
Wanted to share this maybe to also give encouragement to people just to keep trying and working hard and it can work out. Potentially also a good message in this hard time of the Coronavirus.
Would love to hear some other foot-in-the-door stories.
One of the bands - Elastica - wanted to shoot a music video and needed 100 fans to be in London in 2 weeks time... the band asked me if I could send a letter, I had 2,000 names and addresses and I got a few friends to volunteer and we hand-wrote 2k envelopes in 5 days and posted them with a phone number to call if you wanted to be in the video... then we went to the management company and manned the phone. They got their 100 fans and had a waiting list of another 200.
The band management company asked how we did this and whether they could put us on a retainer to do it in future as they had big plans for another band - Blur - and I pointed out that it was infeasible to write so many envelopes so often. But I believed a computer could do this, so if they bought me a computer and covered postage and packing, I would build a way to keep in touch with the fans of their acts.
They bought me an IBM 30386 and I had it in the upstairs of the squat. There was a hole in the roof so this part of the room was covered in tarp, and we stole the power from another loft as the hole in the roof granted crawlway access to other lofts. I had never used a computer before as I came from poverty, but I got a book from a library, a reference book on basic, and used that to programme a simple database based on text files, with index text files that I could then mail merge into envelope labels. Scaled that slowly up to be a full database (single user of course), and then a stock control system as staying in touch with fans meant we expanded into selling T-shirts mail order - which produced a surprising amount of revenue.
That was the start... and by then it was 1994 and a lot of the bands that were nothing were about to be something.