How I got into Red Hat, Part 4
I had wandered into Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty when I got a notification on my phone. It was my exam results. This could not be good, the test ended only a couple of hours ago. I thought about not opening the email, not letting the bad news ruin the rest of the day. I put my phone back in my pocket and resumed my hunt for the Statue. Only a few steps later my phone teleported out of my pocket, back in my hand, and the email was opened. I just couldn’t help myself.
The results of your RHCE Certification Exam are reported below. The
RHCE Certification Exam allows candidates to qualify for the
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Red Hat Certified Technician
(RHCT) certificates. Please note that the RHCE designation is
understood to both include and supersede the RHCT designation.RHCE requirements: score of 70 or higher on RHCT components (100 points)
score of 70 or higher on RHCE components (100 points)RHCT requirement: score of 70 or higher on RHCT components (100 points)
RHCT components score: 70.4
RHCE components score: 90.9RHCE Certification: PASS
Congratulations — you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified
Engineer!
I got the same score on the RHCT and, despite a complete workstation melt down, a near perfect score on the RHCE. I was stunned. I put my phone back in my pocket and continued into Battery Park. On this Friday, July 3rd of 2009, the day before Independence Day, I stood staring across the water at the Statue of Liberty. I had never seen it in person before and I wondered what other people felt when they saw it for the first time. I felt as if I had defied the world.
On the Bolt Bus back to Boston my mind was still reeling from everything that had happened. The storm, the meltdown during the exam, and still somehow I pulled it all off. I set out to get these certifications so I could get a good job without a college degree or years of experience. I bet more than I could afford to lose on myself to get it done. But in that moment, not even I really understood the value of an RHCE, there were only about 35,000+ RHCEs worldwide.
The next day I went out to a 4th of July party. I celebrated getting the certificate and I told friends my crazy story about my trip to NYC. Little did I know, this would be my last summer living in Boston. My first interview with my shiny new RHCE was a disaster as I was asked “What exactly is a Red Hot Certified Engineer?” It turns out, if you have severe typos in your resume, they’re not going to take you seriously at all.
Eventually I landed a contract for a Linux Admin through HPE. It was only a 6 month contract, but it was more money an hour than I had ever seen before and debt had been pilling up to the ceiling. The interviews went well so I packed what I could of my belongings into my car, put the rest in storage, and drove to an Extended Stay motel in Sterling Virginia where I would live for the next 8 months.
While the job was in Sterling VA, I had 2 weeks of training to attend at the main computer center in Bowie, Maryland. This place was nicknamed “The Glass Castle” because the walls of the office space were all glass. And in this Glass Castle I would meet a number of people important to me, including the first Red Hatters I ever met.
It was supposed to be a 6 month contract, but I was there for almost 2 years before the decision was made to close the Sterling office. In that time I had learned so much, I had the opportunity to work with and learn from so many skilled people with tons of experience. I learned tips and tricks from older engineers, I stuffed my tool bags full from reading their scripts and their bash histories. But most of all, I began to learn about Red Hat. Not Red Hat the Linux distribution, but Red Hat the company.
Calvin, Bryan, Michelle, and Leo were the first Red Hatters I met in my career. I was in awe of all of them honestly, they were all so skilled and impressive. It was from them that I learned more about what an Open Source company was, and how it operates. In a world where behemoths of IT like Microsoft and Oracle were cast as greedy villains, there was a company like Red Hat who gives everything they make away for free to whomever wants to use it. A place where you can sleep easy at night after a long day of work. I learned that when a company chooses Open Source solutions, that when the software is free, the value is not in a license you paid for but the employee who wields the software to accomplish your goals. From this I learned my value isn’t that I have an RHCE but that the RHCE instead shows the value in me.
So many of the people I worked with at the Glass Castle helped me grow to be who I am today. What I didn’t know at the time, was that many of the people I worked with here would also go on to join Red Hat as well. Some of them like Calvin are still here to this day. I will always look back at this time in my life as something special, but all good things must come to an end.
With my contract coming to a close I had to find another job and interestingly enough, the company that found my resume up on dice.com was none other than Monster.com
