Do you want to achieve something in your life?
Do you want to make a difference?
Well, Linux is probably not the operating system for you, then. It sits on creaky forty year old foundations, and it’s very fond of them, much like you’re fond of grandpa and gramma.
Linux Jerbs are sadly limited, unless you work on SuperComputers1 or possibly highly-intelligent stochastic Black-Scholes Toasters.
Basically, you can babysit an array of LAMP servers (SysAdmin, surprisingly numerous considering that all Linux systems are inherently secure, self-repairing, do not fragment, never get viruses and never require a reboot).
Or you can write a device driver. This is lots of fun! One byte at a time, please. Then you can rewrite it! Lather, rinse, and repeat. The best thing about writing a device driver is that it will live on in the Linux kernel forever; long past the point when anybody can still remember what the device in question did. Not only a jerb for life, but a little binary child of your very own in the permanent digital record!
There are alternatives, such as being a DBAdmin for MySQL (not recommended unless you like wearing underpants on your head, sticking a pencil up each nostril, and going “Wibble. Wibble!”), or maintaining a diseased lump of PHP framework (there are several to choose from, as always with the Loons).
But, to be fair, there are Jerbs out there. And what fun you will have! You can even pick up new technologies!
Thought you knew all about X? (Strictly speaking this is probably illegal south of the Mason-Dixie line.) Very impressive, but have you tried Wayland? Similarly with audio stacks and even venerable stuff like the C library, not to mention the wonderful opportunities offered by dbus.
It’s an endless learning experience, really, which keeps you perky and fresh and goshdurnit L33T. Occasionally you will encounter enraged customers who just don’t know any better and would like to get some work done, but that’s not your problem. Which is just as well. Because, even if it were your problem, you wouldn’t be able to help them.
(There are, of course, a million other people who could help them. Either they’re not at home right now, or else they’re busy doing something different.)
Never forget: you are important. Making your job safe, through insane levels of obfuscation if necessary, is the main thing. And here’s the great thing about Linux! You don’t need to worry about the obfuscation! Linux does it for you!
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[1] I got an interview for one of these, twenty miles down the road. There are apparently two companies in the entire world that supply massively parallel gdb-based debuggers for High Performance Computers, and this was one of those two. My job would have been to support and develop the massively parallel gdb-based debugger.
It paid £26,000 pa.
Comments
if i was a billionaire I would’ve honestly have given 50 mil to a dev to seriously work on wayland. it’s four years and it’s just a pre-blueprint. how many years did it take apple to make quartz.
Quartz? An interesting parallel.
On the one hand you have Apple, who did it in about two years.
On the other hand you have huge, inchoate geological processes, which took millenia.
I think, with Wayland, you’re look and huge, inchoate geological processes.
what pisses me off is that apple did amazing work on the ecosystem circa 2000-2005 and it still gets disproportionate amount of hate from linux/unix haters. i am sure os x, itunes or iphoto suck in some ways, but would anyone deny that they are way more polished, productive products than ubuntu, banshee or shotwell?
And they’re more productive despite only having a handful of features. Part of productivity is the time spent learning to use the tool.
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