Blog 13

What kind of jobs are out there in the Linux field, where are they, and how much could you make? Research the Internet and tell me what you find.

There is a ton of information on the internet about Linux jobs, salaries and areas. One of the sites that I thought had a lot of information was www.payscale.com . You could look at graphs of just about everything, by experience, location, job, size of company, and on and on.

I grew up in Montana and I would love to go back there. So, I looked for Linux jobs and salaries in MT. It’s sad, the State is hiring but the salary is $56,000. For MT, that is pretty high. When I left MT, I was making between $29,000 and $32,000 (I can’t remember which, it was a long time ago). My dad had worked at the State for 30 years, had a college degree and I was making more than he was.

The job that I looked up was for a Linux System Administrator. Here are some areas and what the internet says Linux administrators are paid.

Helena, MT $56,000
Billings, MT $61,000
Boise, ID $56,000
Reno, NV $71,000
Spokane, WA $73,000
Sacramento, CA $77,000
San Francisco, CA $81,000
Portland, OR $72,000
Salem, OR $77,000
Eugene, OR $80,000
Klamath Falls, OR $79,000
Pendleton, OR $90,000

The lowest paying type of job is the System Administrator and the $62,500 range and the highest was the Sr. Software Engineer in the $94,000 range.

If you looked at salaries by experience, I found the following: minimum experience less than 1 year the salary was around $59,000 and over 20 years experience pays over $100,000. That just gives you an idea of the start of your Linux career to what you would be making at the end of your career. That’s a pretty good range.

There are several different paths in the Linux field. Some of them are:

System Engineer
Programmer
System Administrator
Software Engineer
Web Developer
Jboss
DBA/Developer

LinkedIn Jobs had 31 pages of jobs that required Linux experience. All the jobs seemed to be in large metropolitan areas with the bulk of them being in CA, around the Bay area. There was one job listed for Microsoft. I could not resist looking at the job description and it did say that they required Linux experience. I think that’s funny, Microsoft wanting Linux.

Reading some of the job descriptions and requirements was intimidating. I think every one of them required a 4 year college degree and lots of experience. It seemed that there would not be very many people that would qualify. On the upside, it was really nice to see that even in the current economy there are a lot of Linux opportunities out there.