I still barely believe it honestly. I’m a student “freshly” outta school with no experience, and I’ve been struggling finding a job for a while.
I had an (first) job interview recently and while I didn’t have much to offer, I seemed to somewhat impress them with my home labbing. I run Proxmox at home for my self-hosted things and got a decent amount of experience with it, and it’s what they use a lot as well. It’s not that common in my age group to be interested in stuff like this, apparently.
Anyway, this is barely worthy of a post, but I’m really excited. I don’t really know how it’ll work out as I still got plenty to learn, but it’s a big step forwards for me.
I’ve been in this business for ~15 years… Currently Staff level SRE making a very comfortable living. I have no degree. No certs. No professional training of any kind. I got into it because I setup my first Linux box as a teenager in the late 90s and have never been without one ever since.
The lack of credentials really doesn’t affect me at all.
That being said though, I don’t know that I could recommend that path to very many people any more. It’s definitely possible but the world has gotten so much more complicated from when I was coming up. It’s a lot harder if a way in but for the right person it’s great.