What does a Unix System Administrator do?

Where are there more career opportunities for a system administrator, in Windows systems or UNIX (and UNIX-derived) systems?

• Would it be a good idea to try to learn one over the other or have a general knowledge of both but not know one better than the other.

• Answer:

  Both sets of systems have nearly a bottomless pit of opportunities to get deep into the guts.  The deeper in you get, the better your understanding, the higher your skill set rises.  So I don't personally believe it is possible for a system administrator to be truly great and actually understand the internals of both Windows and UNIX. That said (and I'm likely showing some personal bias or Silicon Valley cultural traits), I wouldn't be surprised if UNIX admins have a slight edge over Windows admins when it comes to career choices.  The reason I believe is two fold: More choices around scripting languages and those languages tend to be closer to the internals/offer more functionality.  Sure, there are perl, python, etc interpreters on Windows and people clearly use them.  But one is unlikely to find a Windows admin using these tools as a core competency. (This may be impacted by bundling--most UNIX distros these days include one or multiple sets of these language tools). In UNIX-land, there is less of a tendency to use commercial software... and open source software projects are always looking for contributions including things like source contributions, documentation, project management, release engineering, etc.  These are great ways to expand your horizons beyond just pure administration.  (This isn't to say that OSS doesn't exist in Windows; it clearly does.  It just doesn't seem as prevalent.) However!  There are still a lot more Windows desktops out there, so in turn there are more job choices if one were to get laid off.  It really depends upon what your goals are. :)