In the same boat here mate. I left college 2 years and still haven’t found a job. I should’ve stayed in college to be honest, and went on to do some IT course or something.
Everybody is looking for someone with experience, but the irony is, the people who really need a job, i.e. most young people, haven’t got much experience. So it’s kind of a double whammy.
There’s a few adverts on here, not sure if they’re for your standard/qualifications, etc, but all I can say is keep looking.
Although I’m fed up looking, haha.
My advise would be to go down your local industrial estate, and see if anyone is running Linux and would take you on as an apprentice/volunteer so you can learn some more.
I can see where you’re coming from and I know how frustrating it is. I am a qualified computer and communication technician yet because I don’t use Linux in work I can’t get experience to move in to a job in civvy street.
The only think I can say is to apply for jobs anyway. Although most places ask for experience, if you have a good CV and can prove in an interview that you are willing to learn then you may get lucky.
I know loads of guys that have managed to land awesome jobs this way when they leave the forces.
Try and go to some job fairs and speak to employers face to face.
I’d keep putting in for jobs while at the same time looking for freelance work. People hiring freelancers just want to see that you can do the job and the job may be anything from wiring an office to setting up a server for a small business to any number of things. There are plenty of sites out there for freelance work you can search through. You can take it from there to determine what you need to get bigger and better jobs. You may find you like being your own boss and forget about finding a job somewhere else. In any case, you can use this freelance work as experience when you go looking for a regular job.
I wouldn’t recommend that if you want to work on Linux, or any computer equipment really. Everything is contracted out to the ATLAS consortium, and we are still running WinXP!
Just be aware that “RHCEv6” is unlikely to get you a job.
In the IT world people will be interested in what you can “do”, rather than what your bits of paper say.
I’ve a good honours degree in computing and can honestly say that as a bit of paper it’s totally useless and the only two things it taught me were how to drink beer and how poor our educational system can be. (and 20+ years on it’s never been useful re; landing a job)
I know this looks a bit like a chicken / egg experience thing, but the nice thing about computers, you can actually demonstrate what you can do fairly easily by writing your own code, putting up your own sites etc etc… you will “probably” find that in “most” instances, examples of your work are far more useful than bits of paper.
So if you have time on your hands and want to progress your chances of getting a job, don’t worry too much about the “official” lack of experience, go get some experience of your own and publish the evidence. Design your own website and stick it up on the net, then write a bit of code that does something moderately useful and stick it up on Sourceforge. If you can do this and stick in on your CV, it should cut it with prospective employers re; entry level jobs in terms of experience. If on the other hand that sounds a little daunting / a lot of work, you should probably tear up your “RHCEv6” because you will always be competing with people who HAVE done this (!)
See, I’d love a job working with Linux server, computers, etc, but Linux is still fairly new to me.
I can’t program, although I wish I could. The only way I can really learn is by watching someone do it in-front of me whilst their talking and then copying them until I get the hang of it.
I can write Conky scripts, but even at that they aren’t the best and still pretty basic. I’m more than comfortable to CLI, it’s just learning the commands, but I guess that’s what Google is for eh?
Even if I got a job as a Windows IT guy, (although the thought of Windows make me wanna spew) I’d still learn a few things I think?
When I was in School 2000 kids had access to 1 Apple II+ and 1 teletype with a 300/75 acoustic coupler … there was no such thing as documentation, yet half a dozen of us taught ourselves to code Basic by typing in listings from computer mags … and within a year I was coding computer games in 6502 assembler. Now we have the Internet, Google, we can use high level languages like Python and computers are a touch faster … and we no longer have to store our code while developing on audio tape.
Can’t say “I don’t know where to look” really generates much sympathy at this end (!)
I remember at school back in '99 (my first year) we had the very first gen Macbooks and we’d play Kidpics on it haha. We also had an old macintosh too.
What would be the best language to code in? C / C++? Python? Qt?
All these different languages it hard to find a starting point.
As you know I’m not a programmer, but most people seem to suggest Python … and there are a ton of online resources, tutorials, and documentation.
I’m also told it’s not too important which language you pick … programming is more about learning to think and plan in logical steps, than the actual differences in syntax between the languages.
when I was at school I can’t remember ever hearing the word computer let alone seeing one.
we did most things mentally, with pen and paper (real ink, no ball points)
I did progress to a slide rule and was shown a contometer m/c, but could not work it , but in the right hands they were deadly,
when i started work there was a room full of contometers, all worked by young females, so I spent a fair bit of time there but never got to grips with the machines, don’t know why.
At this company they did have a computer which was enormous, you could only look at it through a window, they looked like vending machines just a bit bigger with reel to reel tapes, and it had to be totally dust free, so had dust trap doors and all the operators wore gowns and masks like surgeons.
Probably not as powerful as a smartphone.
Jeez banko, you must be older than me then, at least in my last couple of years of school we had “proper” LED calculators (weren’t allowed to use them though), and ballpoints … LED watches had just appeared, which we all thought were the dogs bllcks … computers on the other hand, were still firmly in the hands of NASA, large corporations, Universities, and the Galactic Empire
Yaeh pretty old…
the only code we learned was morse, dot dot dash.
old in years but young in mind, computers aren’t only for the young,
today had a go on my sons new i4s phone and could not believe what it could do or how quick it was, if I wasn’t paying for his, i could easily go on the darkside, the galaxy note looks pretty good, but us old people have difficulty seeing these small screens.