Sure - I work mostly in finance with linux/devops/app support/programming experience. I becm senior linux admin position by the time I was 27 after some very interesting work at some HFT companies. Low latency tuning, monitoring, resolved many outages, etc. At one point, the owner of an HFT company came up to me and asked me to fix the latency issues that were causing the company to fail, which I did in a couple days. Problem was, I never really got any chance to learn the core linux tools like bind, etc since they weren't really ever relevant. So, when I got a position at a traditional linux shop without knowing the core utilities, I was viewed as completely inexperienced and nobody really took me seriously. It was very strange to go from being treated as a rockstar generalist to go to the opposite. The company decided my experience wasn't really valid and moved me from the linux team to the devops team after I did a user audit for a subpoena by FINRA really, really well well. That role ended up just meaning "troubleshoot why X trader's trade didn't receive Y price." all day, which wasn't what I was hired to do. Instead of doing that, I wrote a bunch of tools to interface with the infrastructure. Emails explaining the tools were entirely ignored and even made fun of, so I left. On my last day, I demoed a tool I wrote that dynamically built json output for all application environments which was loved, despite it being ignored 10 times in the past. Lesson there was that presentation is often significantly more important than the work itself.
When I tried to get a new position later on, everybody was expecting cloud and web development experience, which is experience I don't have. Insistence that it was within reason to learn cloud utilities never worked, even with experience building tools to build vmware instances in bulk. For the positions that I was qualified for, I found myself having more knowledge than the interviewers, so I gave off an unintentional arrogant vibe. For example for a job I was really interested in, I got dinged for my answer to the question, "How do you print all open sockets?" for answering "lsof -i". Apparently netstat was the only acceptable answer. That sort of thing happens all the time, and interviewers do NOT like to be corrected - the number of senior admins who don't know how file handles work is asinine.
It got very, very tiring very quickly and I just kind of gave up. I'm now working in building up investigative journalist and data analysis experience to get out of the linux field. It's going pretty well, but there's little money in it so far. If that doesn't work, a few interesting positions in infrastructure security are in the pipe.
Thanks for the answer! Interesting to hear what you're doing now, as it's something I've been eyeing myself. Aside from money, do you find interesting opportunities/problems to look into?
(one recent little example of what made me think of this was the scene in the documentary Spotlight where the journalist analyze volumes of data on priests' assignments and whatnot - all by hand. I couldn't help but think it'd be so much easier to OCR the pages and analyze the data with some basic scripting.)
-Sued the mayor of Chicago for his phone records and won. Still working on it, but I met up with a journalist to discuss last Monday.
-Doing HFT systems tuning as freelance (pays the bills, too).
-Submitted a major infrastructure bug to comcast. Talked to their CISO and everything.
-Did the same for Northwestern, but with less followthrough.
-Learned a bit of R, significantly improved my python, did a bunch of random silly projects.
-Made a proof of concept for a domestic violence shelter finder for a hackathon. Just handed off the code to a few junior coders to ride with.
-Made a minecraft 3d printer print a png mural by pulling from github in-game. Limited myself to only using textures in the game without color transformations. Became a really hard problem, since the 'pixels' used by the printer don't move. Learned more than I'd thought from that project.
