Coder's Guild Mailing List

Re: MCSE or equivalent courses - are they worthwhile?

Posted by Matthew Pratt on 1999-04-20

> Or maybe someone knows of a completely different
> alternative that they've
> had a good experience with.
> 

I guess it depends on your current knowledge of
computers at the moment. If you come from a primarily
M$ background then MSCE is probably the way to go.
However in the long run it is known that UNIX sysadmin
generally earn more and have a less stressfull time of
it (even M$ acknowledges that NT has stability
problems). I've heard people at my local Linux Users
Group meeting talk about NT admins that have pagers
driven by watchdog computers that page them when the
NT servers go down. And since NT doesnt have an out of
the box solution for telnet, the admin have to go into
work and reboot them by hand. What a nightmare! 

Also keep in mind that most (Australian) ISPs run
either Linux or a BSD on their servers. 
If your curious you can check what a server is running
at http://www.netcraft.com
Type in the URL and then click "site details" when the
next page comes up. Here are the results for my local
ISPs:
www.dynamite.com.au   --> Linux
www.apex.net.au       --> Linux
www.alphalink.net.au  --> Linux
www.ozemail.com.au    --> BSD/OS
www.goldweb.com.au    --> Linux

I think you get the idea...

Having said that, most clients run 'doze of some sort
and so you may be able to get a help desk job with
very little qualifaction other than telling them you
consider yourself a windoze guru or something like
that.

I think your best bet would be to write up a resume
and approach some of you local ISPs with it. If that
fails then you could try a course of some sort.

I ended up getting a job as a tech at a local computer
service/sales center just by mentioning that I was in
and engineering degree. That and the fact that I was
buying parts to build a computer from scratch.

Also I'm curious as too what course you are doing, and
if its an IT/CS course, what platform the course is
based around? At my Uni all our courses are taught on
Sun hardware and OSs, or PCs running linux which I'm
happy about. We have one NT lab on campus and its not
even for the CS students. In the OS course, the
student get to hack around with the linux kernel, and
their assigment are to modify parts of the kernel to
acheive certain things (although I dont do that course
as I'm doing and Engineering degree).

Also look at the IT section on tuesdays in the Sydney
Morning Herald, as it has a section on jobs and the
like.

Good luck.

===
Matty                                       .
http://members.xoom.com/mattpratt/      _--_|\
mattpratt@xxxxx.xxx                    /      \
s3099239@xxxxxxx.xxx.xxx.xx            \_.--._/<--Canberra,
W2K - The other millenium bug.               v    Australia

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