from Hacker News

Ask HN: Invest –$400 on a spare laptop or RHCSA certification?

by shivajikobardan on 11/26/24, 2:56 PM with 5 comments

I am a linux professional looking for my next devops/sysadmin etc roles. I am tired of applying and getting my resume rejected. For a few days though since I tuned my resume, I am starting to get calls for interview. But I get rejected in interview as my knowledge probably isn't as good as those with 10 years of experience.

Now, a RHCSA certification would make me do linux administration on my sleep. But having a small lab over my spare laptop(I only have office laptop at this moment) would help me crack the job given I get till interview. However, a red hat cert will get me towards the interview.

My monthly saving is very low (Near about 80$) and I'd need 3-5 months of savings to afford a certification.

  • by atsaloli on 11/26/24, 3:10 PM

    Have you considered using a cloud VM? Oracle Cloud Infrastructure gives them for free for personal use: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

    Oracle Linux is basically RHEL (rebranded) under the hood.

    Could you practice your RHEL sysadmin skills on an Oracle Linux cloud VM?

  • by Atreiden on 11/26/24, 3:01 PM

    Homelab over certification, easily. The best engineers I know never held a cert. Some hiring managers consider it a negative signal. It's the same problem with bootcamp coders - it's a signal that you need to be explicitly instructed to learn, versus being able to self-start and learn organically.

  • by JojoFatsani on 11/27/24, 12:17 AM

    How bout running a Linux VM on your main pc?