You’re comfortable with Unix. But there’s trouble on the horizon. First, you notice that sales of Windows NT servers rose 84 percent last year, compared with Unix’s anemic 15.4 percent growth, according to International Data Corp. (IDC), a market research firm in Framingham, Mass. (OS/2 server sales plunged 40 percent, in case you were wondering.)
Then, you notice that Microsoft is already pushing the next version of NT–Windows NT 5.0. Sporting the latest management tools plus fancier support for multiprocessors, NT5 is touted as being able to offer the kind of enterprise-level performance that has been the province of Unix systems running on RISC boxes–but it will run on PC boxes costing a quarter as much.
So, is it time to forget those “eunuchs” jokes and retrain with NT? Well, maybe.
But first do some thinking and make a careful evaluation before you decide to take that step.
First, NT5 has a lot of hype in its luggage. Second, further technical training is always a good idea anyway. Third, maybe that training doesn’t have to be in NT. And fourth, maybe it’s not technical training you need anyway.
As for the hype: Don’t get stampeded. Analysts don’t even expect NT5 to be out until this time next year.
When it does appear, “NT won’t bury Unix,” said Randall Kennedy, analyst at the Giga Information Group in Norwell, Mass. Unix works better than NT in large installations, and can bridge the gulf between 98 and 99.99 percent uptime, he said.
And with the size of the program doubled (to 32 million lines) over NT4, and most of the core “kernel” being replaced, Giga Group is advising its clients not to touch NT5 until it has been out for a year and gotten past the teething stage.
Unix is typically used for mission-critical databases, while NT is used to provide file-, printer- and e-mail-sharing to an average of 25 Windows desktops in an office, noted Dan Kusnetzky, analyst at IDC. The two worlds don’t overlap. “Unix is being used productively now. It would be silly to discard it for something that would require hard work to get it running the way things were,” he noted.
But there are still those ominous sales figures to think about. Meanwhile, the demand for Unix training materials has fallen in the two years, since he started selling NT material as well, said Ray Swartz, head of Training On Video in Santa Cruz, Cal.
“Most administrators have to learn how both operating systems work,” Swartz said. “As such, I sell NT videos to Unix people. I sell Unix videos to NT people. I sell both subjects to companies all the time, too. It is hard to say, based on my company’s experience, whether Unix people are abandoning Unix and moving to NT, or whether they are simply acquiring new skills.”
If they are not simply acquiring new skills, perhaps they should. “If I were a Unix administrator I would want to understand NT,” said Kennedy at Giga Group. “Some CIO is likely to get the NT religion after Gates visits him, and the mandate will come down to convert.”
But maybe running out and learning NT is not the total answer, indicated Steven J. Banke, president of Computer Network Consultants Inc. of Chicago, which provides solutions, consulting, training and personnel in both domains.
After all, he noted, operating systems run applications, and applications manipulate databases. What organizations urgently need are database administrators.
“It’s a fairly short lead-time to build an application (with multi-tiered architectures) but it is an ongoing requirement to maintain the database,” Banke said. “And that requires unbelievably talented people who really understand databases. And while it depends on experience, those with Unix backgrounds have an easier time (retraining as database administrators) since they are more familiar with coding, which is done in the Unix world and which databases require.
“When a person is looking at retraining, he needs to ask himself if he is retraining for the short term or the long term,” Banke added. “The need for operating systems administrators is short term, since it is driven by system changes. But data is added to a database every single day.
“The demand is unbelievable. I would like to hear from every person who has heard of any version of Oracle–I could probably place all of them,” he added.
He cited a nine-year veteran getting hired in the $80-$90,000 range, and a rookie with a few classes who got hired in the $40-$45,000 range.
Freelance Oracle programmers get $150,000 to $200,000 yearly, he said.
And he points to a recent salary survey of people with professional certification from Microsoft. Those with MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) certificates actually saw their average income fall $3,100 during the last year, apparently because of the influx of newcomers that doubled the population to 35,000. (Although that left them at $67,600, which is not exactly in a soup line.)
The survey, incidentally, shows rookie MCSEs starting at $34,600 but jumping to $57,400 after one or two years of experience.
You can find the survey at www.mcpmag.com/members/98feb/fea1main.asp.
Holders of other certificates, however, continued to experience raises, with certified trainers jumping $8,000 to $74,100, showed the survey.
Those with the Microsoft Certified Solution Developers (MCSD) sheepskin averaged $85,500. But getting a certificate takes about a month of studying and costs something over $6,000.
But “NT v. Unix v. Whatever” is really the wrong question, Banke said.
“Technology is a very human business, and it is important to have interpersonal skills as well. I have seen a lot of technical people who did not excel in their careers because they had no interpersonal skills,” he said.
“And I have seen a lot of not-top-end technical people excel because they had strong interpersonal skills. Those are harder to develop and you get the best value when you have both.”
But–alas–there’s no certification program for that.
