How I got into Red Hat, Part 1
My path to Red Hat, which began many years before back in August of 2008, is a story I have wanted to tell for a very long time but was afraid to share it. I was a very junior IT contractor with a “fake it till you make it” resume up on dice.com. I had some IT experience but very little Linux/Unix training. Despite this I fluffed my resume looking to get my foot into any door possible when a recruiter from TAC Worldwide got me a gig that would set me on a path for years to come. Across the Charles River from my hometown of Boston, behind the campus of MIT, is a place called Tech Square were I started a Jr. Linux admin gig at Novartis Pharmaceutical.
When I started at the exciting new job, the Sr. Admin took me under his wing. His nickname was Derby and he was the first to teach me many things. I clearly remember early on that Derby was upset I had insisted on using nano to edit files. Nano was a command line text editor, but it wasn’t available on all systems like vi, another text editor. So, Derby sat me down, put my fingers on the home row, and taught me my first vi commands. There are a lot of stories I have from my brief time there, and I hope to tell more of them some day.
Now, you may be wondering why I didn’t want to share this story in full, so I will tell you now I got fired in December, right before Christmas. I didn’t even last a whole 4 months. Most people don’t want to tell you about how they got fired, and for years neither did I. But what I have learned is that the mistakes you make along the way, including getting canned, are a part of the journey and not the end.
I had taken a ticket to free up space on a machine and in my inexperience, deleted part of the Operating System, the binary directory of /usr/bin. I remember realizing I had made the mistake as soon as it happened. I tried in vain to control-C out of it, and sat in my chair in pure terror for 10 minutes, staring at the screen in shock. I knew I had to tell someone. I knew I had to find the strength to get up out of my chair and confess. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But I knew, of course, this was going to get me fired.
Derby was kind enough to escort me out of the building after I was terminated instead of having security march me out to the street. He told me, the best thing I can do for myself is to get a Red Hat certification. That getting this certification will help my resume stand out, float to the top, and that I would bounce back from this. Dare I say, getting fired may have been the best thing to ever happen to me in my career! But at the time I was devastated.
Being on unemployment sapped my soul. Some people view it differently but it made me feel defeated. I placed a lot of my self worth into the job I held so I felt as though I had fallen through the floor to the center of the Earth. With bills looming large in my mind I put my resume back up on dice.com and within a week I went for an interview. I thought the interview was going fine and that getting fired the prior week would be behind me until I had to explain why I left my last contract. I lied, I tried to dodge, and eventually confessed that I had gotten fired and the interview ended right then and there. I had to do something, I had to find a way to fix this. I had to find a way to restore confidence in myself. From my perspective, I had nothing to lose so I started studying for that certificate Derby had mentioned. I started studying for the Red Hat Certified Technician exam.
