This is the beginning of something great. The time and place where one starts to realize that passion is the true treasure in the sea of hedonism, consumerism, infantilism.

I got my first and only job in the same way as you did, 13 years ago, and I still am and forever will be better than most of my colleagues that just “do their work”.

It’s not “love what you do”, it’s “do what you love”.

My congratulations to you, fellow selfhoster.

Good for you!!

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.

Anyone who has a home lab would be top of my list. It seems normal while being on this sub, but I hardly come across anyone who has one and the skills required to maintain one definite shows in an interview.

Grats on the win!!

I once interviewed a person and spent more than half the time talking about his homelab although it wasn’t directly relevant to the job. Ended up hiring him as well. In my mind, the willingness to self-learn and tinker is an asset.

I wish I could have been the one to snag you up. I learned on my own, and I respect the process.

Pushing through the frustration when setting up was worthy 🙌. Im glad for you!

Congrats! Absolutely worth posting you silly goose. They’ll appreciate your self starter can do attitude. I personally would put someone with a personal projects solely to sharpen their skills at the top of my list.

That’s how I got my first job for sure.

lol, I don’t have lexdysia, but I read your subject line as “Selfghosting got me a job offer” and I was wondering how you stopped responding to your own emails/calls to get a job!!

I landed a job also just off my homelab. Well sitting in the interview I setup an account for the guy, got him accessed in and let him look at everything I did and could do. You would be amazed how much better it is to be able to show you can do a job then just try to tell someone you can.

Also it’s a huge thing to show a willingness and gift for self learning, a lot of people do not have that. When you find someone like that even if the skills are raw you know that person can be turned into something great.

Ask lot’s of questions.

Volunteer to do everything even if you don’t know how to do it.

Never underestimate how valuable “showing up on time” is.

I’m doing a lot of tech interviews for my company. Whenever there’s someone with a homelab I can be 80% sure they have a lot of knowledge in their respective homelab ecosystem (vms/Kubernetes/containers/etc.) and absolutely no problem adapting to new ones. Plus usually some good networking knowledge.

I have a K8s Cluster at home too - it’s not only a great Icebreaker but also a great way to see which technologies the other person has worked with.

Showing interest in tech or programming was always the number one hiring criteria for me.

IT is so a fast changing job that you want to keep up just with your job alone, so if your company wants innovation they need people that do stuff like this in their free time.

This doubly applies for people fresh out of school, cause honestly you don’t learn nearly enough to do the job there. So every little extra gives you a lead against your concurrence.