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So I've been trying to apply for remote jobs since early 2020 but I NEVER heard back from any of the companies that I have applied to. Because of obvious reasons such as (Nationality: Lebanese <== means an Arab, University Degree: None, Name: Mohamad <== means a Muslim etc.)

Why I'm not applying locally? simply because NON of these stupid companies in here know the actual meaning / role of a system admin or any other job really. They simply combine things without studying the responsibilities behind each role, like seriously imagine, I came across over 8 offerings, 5 of them in particular caught my attention in-which they were requiring recruits to have a good background knowledge in HTML, CSS, JS, and for god's sake others had mentioned "Android Development and testing", "CCNA/CCNP/MTCNA" and "E-commerce/Wordpress". What the hell is this? Why we don't have an actual HRs who know what they're legitimately doing? The ones who put these stupid requirements are really lazy workers who just sit behind their desks all day eating donuts and watching others suffer no?

Out of 13 applications till today, I was able to only get through "1" application beyond just emails to a small interview over the phone and an online test which I failed because they had questions about DEPRECATED software and packages and in-depth specific questions that ONLY fits the company's environment (while they should've asked general questions instead). Thankfully they asked me to take a survey at the end of the test and I literally taught the HR or whomever have put those questions on how they should ask things properly. They called the next day and apologized and claimed that they have changed the questions BUT i refused to take the new test they had anyway because that's BS.

I do not have a university degree but I have attended university for two years and my GPA was 3.2 last I checked.
I worked as an IT Manager / Sysadmin for 4 years, maintaining over 35 cloud servers with automation scripts and so many other stuff but I hated my job because it shifted from handling servers to "networking" and I don't like that area although comfortably I know my way around it. So it was a conflict and I had to leave.

My experience is industry driven, not a "Udemy" thing where someone watches thousands of courses and doesn't have any actual working experience in staging and or production environments.

Experience:

OPERATING SYSTEMS
- Windows (3.11 --> 10)
- Linux OS:
+ Debian (Desktop / Server)
+ Ubuntu (Desktop / Server)
+ Arch (Manjaro) (Desktop)
+ Fedora (Desktop / Server)
- Router OS (Mikrotik)


WEB SERVERS
- Nginx (advanced)
But I have also experienced working with other webservers
such as Apache, lighttpd, and WEBrick.


SCRIPTING LANGUAGES (Automation)
- Bash (advanced)
But I have also experienced scripting in other languages
such as Ruby, JS and a little bit of python.


NETWORKING (I HATE NETWORKING )
- Failover (Mikrotik)
- NATting + Portforwarding + IPtables (Mikrotik / Cloud
Services)
- Firewall Rules and telemetry blocking using DNS,
Address-list and L7 Protocol (Mikrotik)
- OpenVPN (Mikrotik / Cloud Services)
- Wireguard (Mikrotik / Cloud Services)


DEVOPS
- Docker (advanced)
- CI/CD for Gitlab
- Kubernetes
- Ansible
- Netdata
- Cockpit
- Monit


SECURITY
- DoH (DNS over HTTPS) for routers
- HTTPS / HTTP2 for webservers
- GeoIP based filtering for webservers
- DNS spoofing for local servers (internal use)
- DNSSEC
- Group Policy for both routers and servers
- Fail2Ban for SSH, FTP and many other protocols
- Data Disaster Recovery and Backup solutions
- Traffic Monitoring and reporting
- Log analysis
- HTTP headers (CORS, CSP, SSL/TLS) for nginx
- SSH/FTP/RDP/HTTP Authentication
and many more


VIRTUALIZATION & SANDBOXING
- VMware
- VBox
- WVPC
- Windows Sandbox


DATABASE & CACHING
- Postgresql*
- Redis*
- Mysql*
*: Limited to:
- Creating, modifying and deleting data
- Creating users with the right privileges
- Authentication
- Setup and configuration
- Backup / Restore
- DB replication


WHAT ELSE DO THESE COMPANIES NEED? I mean "Scaling"? that's part of devops and I don't think I have to write up everything that I know from integrating with AWS or DO to creating mailing servers and configuring them to hella ton of other things... that'd be at least a 4 paged CV tbh and that's not professional.


Please tell me what's wrong with me.
Employers want to de-risk the hiring process. Do you have anything to show these potential employers? A few demo projects on Github showcasing your capabilities are a million times better than a CV. Even better if you can also write a few technical blog posts that introduce your projects.
samer wroteEmployers want to de-risk the hiring process. Do you have anything to show these potential employers? A few demo projects on Github showcasing your capabilities are a million times better than a CV. Even better if you can also write a few technical blog posts that introduce your projects.
But what if I don't use github? Theoretically speaking, github or any similar software development hosting provider such as bitbucket, gitlab or even gitea doesn't fulfill this "needing" and the reason behind this is because companies usually ask for "copyright" over whatever the sysadmin does while working under their environment.

Yes, everything I created came from opensource and technically speaking there shouldn't be something like "copyright infringement" over this but I am a one person against a company and I can't afford fighting for a right, thus I keep things private and not public (as in code/projects) so that I showcase whenever I get interviewed. I think and I do believe this is what the majority of Sysadmins do unless there isn't a contract then that's a different story. But who hires nowadays without contracts? especially tech-driven companies

nonetheless, I do not dislike the idea of showcasing portions of the things a person can do publicly and I think I'll work on that part, so kudos for you for mentioning it.
To be honest, i think many tech leads who will see such experience - will reject it.
1, and major one)You mentioned you dont like networking stuff, but as you are clearly positioning yourself as sysadmin(and you mention programming languages as automation tools/scripting and highlight bash mainly). If you say "you hate networking", sorry, but thats disqualify you as sysadmin. And your developer skills looks like non-existent.
2)Hate, dislike, conflict, it hints new employer your soft-skills are not so good. Try to write it less emotionally and avoid excessive negative emotions during interview. Many employers this days require good soft-skills.
And phrases "i hate networking", "*: Limited to:", is really red flag. You need to think how to fit company, not company need to fit you.
3)Many things are insignificant, that it is really not worth to highlight it as separate points, such as fail2ban or headers setup for nginx is worth few hours of googling.
Or port forwarding. Really? It is basic thing that any advanced gamer know to certain degree.
DNS spoofing too, that single firewall rule, literally.
Perhaps it is not worth specifying specific(minor) completed tasks and programs in such details. It is worth describing them without specifics, but so that the employer understands that you can, for example, perform specific tasks demanded by the market.

Regarding github, as samer said, if you will position yourself as developer - it is a must.
For example, i hate github (i run my own gitea internally), but i do stuff on github too, and publish it, if i think it might be beneficial for other people: https://github.com/nuclearcat/
M03 wroteName: Mohamad <== means a Muslim etc.)
Unless you're applying for the Vatican or a church, most of the companies in the West World don't care. They probably wouldn't even know that your name should indicate your religion. It's just another shitty Lebanese thing to brainwash us and make us feel better or lesser about ourselves.
nuclearcat wroteTo be honest, i think many tech leads who will see such experience - will reject it.
1, and major one)You mentioned you dont like networking stuff, but as you are clearly positioning yourself as sysadmin(and you mention programming languages as automation tools/scripting and highlight bash mainly). If you say "you hate networking", sorry, but thats disqualify you as sysadmin. And your developer skills looks like non-existent.
2)Hate, dislike, conflict, it hints new employer your soft-skills are not so good. Try to write it less emotionally and avoid excessive negative emotions during interview. Many employers this days require good soft-skills.
And phrases "i hate networking", "*: Limited to:", is really red flag. You need to think how to fit company, not company need to fit you.
3)Many things are insignificant, that it is really not worth to highlight it as separate points, such as fail2ban or headers setup for nginx is worth few hours of googling.
Or port forwarding. Really? It is basic thing that any advanced gamer know to certain degree.
DNS spoofing too, that single firewall rule, literally.
Perhaps it is not worth specifying specific(minor) completed tasks and programs in such details. It is worth describing them without specifics, but so that the employer understands that you can, for example, perform specific tasks demanded by the market.

Regarding github, as samer said, if you will position yourself as developer - it is a must.
For example, i hate github (i run my own gitea internally), but i do stuff on github too, and publish it, if i think it might be beneficial for other people: https://github.com/nuclearcat/

You have lots of mix-up of what the sysadmin role is.
I can understand it from the "Lebanese" perspective, but I'm really sorry to say that a sysadmin has "Nothing" to do with networking whatsoever and by networking i mean Loadbalacing, Fail-over, Bonding, DPI, Packet forging and manipulation.. not the firewall, LAN connection, iptable kind of networking because those are sysadmin core stuff.

Also a sysadmin is NOT a developer, another mix-up where unfortunately our culture is used to where you must know java "forexample" in order to be a sysadmin.
Basically if you can do automation it doesn't matter what language do you use, this is why "scripting languages" exist and they are different from programming languages. Bash is a key scripting language that is compatible with vast majority of UNIX based operating systems and I can assure you that i can do almost anything that ruby or python affords in terms of automation in bash, of-course it's not the best solution but usually big companies doesn't mind this. As long as you do it it's fine.

One thing to mention is that we all know in interviews you don't say "I hate" or "I dislike, i just wrote it in here because this is a fellow forum full of mature people who know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't think you do understand roles in their literal meaning for any kind of job. When something that is outside of a contract becomes your full time job against what your main role was.. is a really big deal and it actually causes you to hate your job. Especially when it becomes a habit for the company to assign certain tasks outside of your field to you as a cover up for the free time I earned by doing almost everything automated.

Doing an extra work doesn't hurt from time to time or working on a side project with a team mate doesn't hurt too and I'm not against that so does learning new things like a new scripting language or a new technology because without those you're not improving but only standing still.. At the end it is up to the person to decide which language they're comfortable with the most.


In complex architecture networks port forwarding is a big deal, I'm sure you haven't even experienced playing with iptables on a larger scale than your home network.. it's not a GUI thing that's 1, and 2 I worked with iptables and port-forwarding on multiple cloud servers where I had to masquerade ssh port and proxy it through a VPN into another VPN that's literally the smallest tiny example i can give not to forget docker services and taking security measures, it's a headache and it is part of OPSEC.

Those nginx configuration? just goto stackoverflow (basic step) and see yourself how many job offerings are there just for configuring nginx. you seem to be smart enough to configure it within a couple of hours and using google so kudos for you but i don't use google for the setup or its configuration and that makes it different. compiling nginx with brotli, pagespeed and many modules is not really a simple "apt-get install nginx" and you're done.
setting up a ssl certificate used to be a headache before letsencrypt came into place.

Finally and again, you're thinking small. with a home router? yes! you can do most of the networking stuff! but with the industry you gotta use something like pfsense, debian or any kind of linux OS, OpenSwitch etc..

You made me smile, I'm really looking forward to get to know more about you if that's applicable maybe expand my circle and to get a better understanding on what work do you do.

overall thank you for taking the time commenting on my post!

P.S: I hate github too *highfive*
Hybrid wrote
M03 wroteName: Mohamad <== means a Muslim etc.)
Unless you're applying for the Vatican or a church, most of the companies in the West World don't care. They probably wouldn't even know that your name should indicate your religion. It's just another shitty Lebanese thing to brainwash us and make us feel better or lesser about ourselves.
I want to agree with you,
But... not really, I have applied to a Swiss-based company and when they knew about my nationality they apologized and didn't proceed with the application.

Not everyone including myself knows about how companies work or think but my wild guess? they refused my application because of the situation in here, especially that the company is located in Switzerland and we already know the about money crisis. (Companies try to avoid as many as such disturbance or issues)
your application number is low, 13 is a rookie number, apply for more jobs, out of 50+ applications (all abroad to sweden) I got 3 interviews and 1 job offer. Employers are currently mostly seeking to hire locally due to pandemic.
RandomMemory wroteyour application number is low, 13 is a rookie number, apply for more jobs, out of 50+ applications (all abroad to sweden) I got 3 interviews and 1 job offer. Employers are currently mostly seeking to hire locally due to pandemic.
Yes! i thought so too @hire locals.
I will try 2 things so far,
1- make some of my projects public possibly on github as samer suggested
2- increase my application numbers as you suggested.


thank you!
I am glad this topic was opened in this forum, perhaps we can raise awareness together (I would love if we can have a sticky topic about this)

I was recently involved in an FB group discussion to attend to a recent serious problem titled "Lebanon losing its international place in tech recruiting".

Summary:
International recruiters having a bad experience in recruiting Lebanese tech people and so yeah, to some extent WE ARE BEING IGNORED in recruiting

Reasons (please don't get offended):
-Top people already left the country or got a decent remote job that they won't leave anytime soon.
-"Fresh" dollar issue ruined some of our ethics, some people are leaving companies with unfinished projects for as little as 100-200$ pay increase.
-We don't fit international standards. Most dev people are full stack and so they have very weak fundamental skills in the tech/frameworks they claim they are good in. ex: You claim you know AWS, but you can't pass a basic AWS test.
- We lack the skills to promote ourselves, very little public open-source involvement (I might argue that this is overrated and unpractical in some cases, but nevertheless, we need to know how to better sell ourselves/our skills.)
- Poor etiquette: not showing up to interviews, canceling at the last moment
- Poor English.

For me:
I took this message very seriously and I am working on myself
Guitaret wroteI am glad this topic was opened in this forum, perhaps we can raise awareness together (I would love if we can have a sticky topic about this)

I was recently involved in an FB group discussion to attend to a recent serious problem titled "Lebanon losing its international place in tech recruiting".

Summary:
International recruiters having a bad experience in recruiting Lebanese tech people and so yeah, to some extent WE ARE BEING IGNORED in recruiting

Reasons (please don't get offended):
-Top people already left the country or got a decent remote job that they won't leave anytime soon.
-"Fresh" dollar issue ruined some of our ethics, some people are leaving companies with unfinished projects for as little as 100-200$ pay increase.
-We don't fit international standards. Most dev people are full stack and so they have very weak fundamental skills in the tech/frameworks they claim they are good in. ex: You claim you know AWS, but you can't pass a basic AWS test.
- We lack the skills to promote ourselves, very little public open-source involvement (I might argue that this is overrated and unpractical in some cases, but nevertheless, we need to know how to better sell ourselves/our skills.)
- Poor etiquette: not showing up to interviews, canceling at the last moment
- Poor English.

For me:
I took this message very seriously and I am working on myself
Salute for you for taking the time in writing this.
I must say I do heavily agree with you and unfortunately not everyone is aware of this, some people will literally believe that you're lying when it comes to the hiring process against the nationality especially when there are crisis.

I am actually talking from a professional level even though the amount of "professional" years i spent doesn't exceed 5 years. It all comes to how passionate you are about your working domain and what do you do in your spare time to improve yourself and tons of other things really. So basically you can take two professional humans for instance and notice that one has over 15 years of experience that is "somewhat" very close to the other person who has less than 7 years of experience say. it all depends on the commitment and the passion.

It is sad that i'm currently experiencing it but nonetheless I am looking forward some exposure and as some of our fellow forum members suggested is to increase the amount of job applications that I submit (although i don't find it practical but it seems to be the only way to find a job i guess) along with publishing or making some of the projects opensource.

*High Five* and I really thank you again for your input.
M03 wrote You have lots of mix-up of what the sysadmin role is.
I can understand it from the "Lebanese" perspective, but I'm really sorry to say that a sysadmin has "Nothing" to do with networking whatsoever and by networking i mean Loadbalacing, Fail-over, Bonding, DPI, Packet forging and manipulation.. not the firewall, LAN connection, iptable kind of networking because those are sysadmin core stuff.
Sysadmin is company puzzle solver. Sysadmin that refuse to know basics (and knowing networking stuff like failover is indeed basics) - is bad sysadmin.
https://www.sdxcentral.com/industry/career/skills/top-10-system-administrator-skills/
Check N2
M03 wrote Also a sysadmin is NOT a developer, another mix-up where unfortunately our culture is used to where you must know java "forexample" in order to be a sysadmin.
Thats correct, but as i said, sysadmin without developer skills is very low paid position this days, unless he is extremely qualified and certified in specific niche(for example CCIE) and his job need this knowledge. And yes, this is only case where you can afford saying that you dont need to know specific unrelated fields.
If sysadmin learned programming a bit, then he can try to apply to companies who want "devops" (but dont really know what it means), it is paid way better.
M03 wrote Basically if you can do automation it doesn't matter what language do you use, this is why "scripting languages" exist and they are different from programming languages. Bash is a key scripting language that is compatible with vast majority of UNIX based operating systems and I can assure you that i can do almost anything that ruby or python affords in terms of automation in bash, of-course it's not the best solution but usually big companies doesn't mind this. As long as you do it it's fine.
Big companies actually have strict requirements for procedures/languages/etc you use in automation. They wont accept any language you like to use.
You will have to use automation procedures approved by company documents and teamlead.
M03 wrote Doing an extra work doesn't hurt from time to time or working on a side project with a team mate doesn't hurt too and I'm not against that so does learning new things like a new scripting language or a new technology because without those you're not improving but only standing still.. At the end it is up to the person to decide which language they're comfortable with the most.
No, its not up to person, unless it is very small messy company. No sane company will allow person to use any language he wants, because they need to be sure, that they if this person leave, they can find replacement who can continue supporting things he did. And it is some exotic language or approaches - it will be big problem for them.
M03 wrote In complex architecture networks port forwarding is a big deal, I'm sure you haven't even experienced playing with iptables on a larger scale than your home network.. it's not a GUI thing that's 1, and 2 I worked with iptables and port-forwarding on multiple cloud servers where I had to masquerade ssh port and proxy it through a VPN into another VPN that's literally the smallest tiny example i can give not to forget docker services and taking security measures, it's a headache and it is part of OPSEC.
Not experienced...
You are telling that guy who run 4 large ISPs in Lebanon, and who did (minor) commits to Linux kernel and discovered CVE in netfilter subsystem :)
I did, from ipchains to nft/bpf, including writing my custom load balancer for sort of userspace port forwarder of HTTPS with SNI analysis.
Short stats from it, just for picture:
Tcp:
275744809005 active connection openings
269696793812 passive connection openings
2755888397 failed connection attempts
62260272561 connection resets received
2156895 connections established
27370730278502 segments received
34935981370257 segments sent out
1154331907651 segments retransmitted
3372746464 bad segments received
126071086885 resets sent
HTTPSBALANCER ~ # uptime
07:38:48 up 300 days, 9:23, load average: 9.99, 10.23, 10.09
M03 wrote Those nginx configuration? just goto stackoverflow (basic step) and see yourself how many job offerings are there just for configuring nginx. you seem to be smart enough to configure it within a couple of hours and using google so kudos for you but i don't use google for the setup or its configuration and that makes it different. compiling nginx with brotli, pagespeed and many modules is not really a simple "apt-get install nginx" and you're done.
setting up a ssl certificate used to be a headache before letsencrypt came into place.
You dont need to recompile nginx to add brotli or any other custom module. Yes you will use source tree of nginx, but it will be used only to make .so file of module. This job literally will take minutes, not even hours.
Certificate... i did run them since 200x, there is nothing complex at all to generate certificate, self-sign (or sign at CA), and then put files in config. Also minutes.
I'm a bit familiar with this stuff, its not about ssl, but close enough as parsing certificates is similar hell : https://github.com/nuclearcat/cedarkey
The only thing worse than PEM format is writing parser of them using openssl libraries.
nuclearcat wrote Sysadmin is company puzzle solver. Sysadmin that refuse to know basics (and knowing networking stuff like failover is indeed basics) - is bad sysadmin.
https://www.sdxcentral.com/industry/career/skills/top-10-system-administrator-skills/
Check N2
Absolutely not correct, networking failover is not part of the sysadmin role. While a storage failover is indeed a part of the role.
don't mixup the word 'failover' over multiple things.
nuclearcat wrote Thats correct, but as i said, sysadmin without developer skills is very low paid position this days, unless he is extremely qualified and certified in specific niche(for example CCIE) and his job need this knowledge. And yes, this is only case where you can afford saying that you dont need to know specific unrelated fields.
If sysadmin learned programming a bit, then he can try to apply to companies who want "devops" (but dont really know what it means), it is paid way better.
Can you please define what's a "Developer" in order for us to understand what you're exactly referring to? because I still disagree with you on this one. There's literally a "Developer" position just like a "Network Engineer" position.
Again you're saying things from the lebanese perspective. I am not applying in Lebanon due to this mixup on roles and responsibilities that the companies do.
nuclearcat wrote Big companies actually have strict requirements for procedures/languages/etc you use in automation. They wont accept any language you like to use.
You will have to use automation procedures approved by company documents and teamlead.
I can tell you, I worked for several Silicon Valley companies that had ties with Facebook, and NON of them had such an enforcement for languages. They let you do whatever you want to get the job done, there are literally other people whom exist and are hired to make those things dynamic in organizations such as documenting, analyzing code for backwards and forwards compatibility which have to be adaptable across teams and departments.

nuclearcat wrote No, its not up to person, unless it is very small messy company. No sane company will allow person to use any language he wants, because they need to be sure, that they if this person leave, they can find replacement who can continue supporting things he did. And it is some exotic language or approaches - it will be big problem for them.
it is. But not in here and definitely not in small companies because they do not have the requirements and people to make things dynamic.
nuclearcat wrote Not experienced...
You are telling that guy who run 4 large ISPs in Lebanon, and who did (minor) commits to Linux kernel and discovered CVE in netfilter subsystem :)
I did, from ipchains to nft/bpf, including writing my custom load balancer for sort of userspace port forwarder of HTTPS with SNI analysis.
I stopped reading when you said "ISP". Now i get you
nuclearcat wrote You dont need to recompile nginx to add brotli or any other custom module. Yes you will use source tree of nginx, but it will be used only to make .so file of module. This job literally will take minutes, not even hours.
Not when you have different operating systems and I only gave "some" of the modules, let alone custom modules and lua scripts.
nuclearcat wrote Certificate... i did run them since 200x, there is nothing complex at all to generate certificate, self-sign (or sign at CA), and then put files in config. Also minutes.
I'm a bit familiar with this stuff, its not about ssl, but close enough as parsing certificates is similar hell : https://github.com/nuclearcat/cedarkey
The only thing worse than PEM format is writing parser of them using openssl libraries.
self-signed certificates are not something to do on production servers at all and is more of a network thing again.
this allows you to have more control over your network.
Some companies do not like their website to have certificates issued by "Let's Encrypt" and rather have it from "Verisign", "GlobalSign", "Comodo", "Digicert" etc.
Yes, as you mentioned it's about parsing the certificate because such providers doesn't have a tool to use and you gotta do some scripting in order to renew those. And to be fair? this is a mandatory point to write on your CV/Resume because a lot of "Huge" companies even Google, sometimes in the past few years failed to renew a subdomain certificate and even forgot to renew the entire domain lease in the first place, those are important things to keep a company going and it is becoming more concerning over the recent years that huge companies are being targetted in this area (part of infosec), domain take over etc.

just to make one thing clear, I'm not a perfect sysadmin and I never claimed so, we all have our ups and downs and I clearly need to improve in some areas but our main topic is about "Roles" and "Hiring Process" which is biased
M03 wrote Absolutely not correct, networking failover is not part of the sysadmin role. While a storage failover is indeed a part of the role.
don't mixup the word 'failover' over multiple things.
Failover of networked service is a must for sysadmin as well, it is part of HA skills.
And bonding(you mentioned it) configuration too.
https://www.globalknowledge.com/us-en/course/86284/red-hat-system-administration-iii-with-rhcsa-and-rhce-exams-rh255/
Check this and requirements. It includes:
"Network port security and link aggregation" (which is bonding)
Also if sysadmin don't know how to configure VRRP on his server... thats suck.
M03 wrote Can you please define what's a "Developer" in order for us to understand what you're exactly referring to? because I still disagree with you on this one. There's literally a "Developer" position just like a "Network Engineer" position.
Again you're saying things from the lebanese perspective. I am not applying in Lebanon due to this mixup on roles and responsibilities that the companies do.
Person with necessary skills to write software that match employer requirements. Some employers need "HTML Developers", hehe.
Nobody care about formal definition of "developer" or "sysadmin". Company care if you match their requirements or not.
M03 wrote I can tell you, I worked for several Silicon Valley companies that had ties with Facebook, and NON of them had such an enforcement for languages. They let you do whatever you want to get the job done, there are literally other people whom exist and are hired to make those things dynamic in organizations such as documenting, analyzing code for backwards and forwards compatibility which have to be adaptable across teams and departments.
Thats probably IT sweatshops. Facebook don't hesitate to outsource low skilled jobs to such.
In any reputable company there is teamwork. Nobody will allow single person to do automation on scala or erlang if there is no other engineers who know it and team for sure wont agree on exotics.
M03 wrote Not when you have different operating systems and I only gave "some" of the modules, let alone custom modules and lua scripts.
You gave me modules, i am telling you - those dont need recompiling nginx. And it is trivial job for juniors.
And even if you want to recompile it for some patches that touch nginx code, it is not big deal to make your own package rpm/deb/whatever with your own set of modules.
M03 wrote self-signed certificates are not something to do on production servers at all and is more of a network thing again.
this allows you to have more control over your network.
Some companies do not like their website to have certificates issued by "Let's Encrypt" and rather have it from "Verisign", "GlobalSign", "Comodo", "Digicert" etc.
Yes, as you mentioned it's about parsing the certificate because such providers doesn't have a tool to use and you gotta do some scripting in order to renew those. And to be fair? this is a mandatory point to write on your CV/Resume because a lot of "Huge" companies even Google, sometimes in the past few years failed to renew a subdomain certificate and even forgot to renew the entire domain lease in the first place, those are important things to keep a company going and it is becoming more concerning over the recent years that huge companies are being targetted in this area (part of infosec), domain take over etc.

just to make one thing clear, I'm not a perfect sysadmin and I never claimed so, we all have our ups and downs and I clearly need to improve in some areas but our main topic is about "Roles" and "Hiring Process" which is biased
There is no major difference between self-signed and CA signed(in technical procedure), except who generate signed cert.
I can easily use self-signed cert for my own app TLS service, because i will do certificate pinning in this app by certificate id, and thats fine to use in production as well.
And procedure, generate certificate, make CSR, (send CSR to CA | sign CSR using your own certificate), install private key and received/signed certificate. As simple as that.
It doesnt matter much also, who is your CA, procedures vary, but mostly in verification process. In some cases you will do extensive paperwork to verify identity for EV SSL, but thats obsolete since 2019.
Again, this is very basic procedure.
And I'm pretty sure the problem with expiring domains/certificates is clearly not technical skill issue. They just forgot to include this situations on the list, "what should be automated/monitored".

I might be wrong on some requirements, formally you can say, yes sysadmin require very basic skills (on my view).
But, remember, you need to have something more than insisting on formal(bare) sysadmin skills. Why they need foreigner then?
Please tell me what's wrong with me.
Honestly I don't like your attitude too much, it sounds like you have decided that you are victim of prejudice (muslim, etc.) and that you are so super-great and know so many things (but then you are not willing to learn networking?).

It may be that you are just angry and frustrated and this is not your normal self, so you will get past it or "grow out of it".

Basically I don't know if there is anything wrong with you, nor why you have no success. You seem to have some experience and the skills that you listed are in demand (I'm thinking Dockers, Kubernetes, etc.). One thing I can think of is that on remote jobs you are competing with a very big pool such as candidates from India for example, China and whatnot.

Oh and by the way, yes I am having a similarly sucky experience trying to find jobs online. There are many companies who seem to be looking for an expert in their crappy stack who can work for super cheap.
M03 wrote Salute for you for taking the time in writing this.
I must say I do heavily agree with you and unfortunately not everyone is aware of this, some people will literally believe that you're lying when it comes to the hiring process against the nationality especially when there are crisis.

I am actually talking from a professional level even though the amount of "professional" years i spent doesn't exceed 5 years. It all comes to how passionate you are about your working domain and what do you do in your spare time to improve yourself and tons of other things really. So basically you can take two professional humans for instance and notice that one has over 15 years of experience that is "somewhat" very close to the other person who has less than 7 years of experience say. it all depends on the commitment and the passion.

It is sad that i'm currently experiencing it but nonetheless I am looking forward some exposure and as some of our fellow forum members suggested is to increase the amount of job applications that I submit (although i don't find it practical but it seems to be the only way to find a job i guess) along with publishing or making some of the projects opensource.

*High Five* and I really thank you again for your input.
Sure man, and to keep things in the right perspective:
Finding a job online sucks (much more than recruiting) just because a recruiter is searching the whole world (literally) for the best candidate with the cheapest price tag. Pretty much like we do when we shop from Aliexpress, and so we need to be fair in assessing a recent human conduct.
Friends of mine opening a startup went for Indian outsourcing instead of hiring Lebanese people here. The world is still adapting to the recent "online" boom and please be happy, your CV is impressive, and the tech job market hasn't reached its peak yet.
We are in high demand and we will be more so, and my advice to always improve your skill set to match the market, and if your aim is the international market (for reasons of "fresh" money and finding where you perfectly fit), always UP YOUR GAME.
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rolf wrote
Please tell me what's wrong with me.
Honestly I don't like your attitude too much, it sounds like you have decided that you are victim of prejudice (muslim, etc.) and that you are so super-great and know so many things (but then you are not willing to learn networking?).

It may be that you are just angry and frustrated and this is not your normal self, so you will get past it or "grow out of it".

Basically I don't know if there is anything wrong with you, nor why you have no success. You seem to have some experience and the skills that you listed are in demand (I'm thinking Dockers, Kubernetes, etc.). One thing I can think of is that on remote jobs you are competing with a very big pool such as candidates from India for example, China and whatnot.

Oh and by the way, yes I am having a similarly sucky experience trying to find jobs online. There are many companies who seem to be looking for an expert in their crappy stack who can work for super cheap.
+1. Also I used to get a lot more offers per week before covid, right now everyone wants to hire locally. You'd be surprised how skilled lebanese devs are compared to most europeans/americans. Start by getting out of the "the world is out to get me" mentality. Also I switched 3 online jobs past 4 years and all of them were through linkedin, you'd be surprised how good the platform is.
9 days later
nuclearcat wroteTL;DR
Mostly Good points.
Also for the technical procedures, well explained.
rolf wroteTL;DR
Guitaret wroteTL;DR
RandomMemory wroteTL;DR
Thank you guys for writing your feedback and your own opinions regarding this topic.
I literally wrote this thread in a very calm way hahaha, took my long a** time fixing typos. I didn't rush in posting it nor i was angry or upset about any of what happened / is happening. Maybe putting some words in capslock or typing words with three or more dots after "...." showed some kind of a desperation or something idk.

But i can assure you, I'm not fighting with you and also I really and honestly enjoyed reading the comments / replies because I wanted to know what others might think and obviously some of us had different perspectives and opinions and I'm glad that y'all took the time to read this topic!


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I guess I'm going to rethink my entire career. Not because of something specific like networking, or some technology that I haven't experienced with.
Some other members took my words literal for the networking part and I decided to just pause it right there.

I just found myself doing well around the crypto world and by crypto I mean blockchain and trading.. pretty much trading assets/cryptos/tokens on exchanges.

Surprisingly I made over $500 within a week with a very low wallet balance, so I'm experiencing the possibility to have it as a full time job.
for those whom are wondering, I am not new to trading and cryptos and blockchain... been in the crypto world since early 2016
but hell.. it takes most of your time and it changes your sleeping pattern when the bulls/pumps/dumps happen (which is quite frequent) lmao.
Just watch out, the bull run has been going for months (except couple of days every now and then), and it's easier to make money during a bull run.

Once the market is bearish, it's a totally different game, and many people get liquidated. Make sure you have a risk management strategy in place
@M03 like Hybrid said, trading crypto is like being a kid in a dangerous jungle, so make sure to only trade small amounts and aim for a small profit.

Having said that, I always regret never investing in having a small passive income, even a 400$ a month would mean much to me as I am in a position where my full-time office job is far from being delightful.
The good thing is that living in Lebanon in the last 2 years has made us (at least me) a minimalist, I don't need much money to live:
- I currently always resort to fix things instead of buying new ones.
- Instead of doing things the proper way in my house (decor & whatnot), I try to be creative by purchasing the cheap raw materials and do them myself.
- I have accepted that I am now poor and I am happy with my current lifestyle that doesn't need much to maintain: cheap car, buying used furniture, minimum range electronics, Turkish/Chinese sneakers...
- Cheap going out: hiking, beach, joining a book club, less money spent on dining out...
In short, I am trying to enjoy the free things life has always tried to offer and so I would be happy in finding a remote part-time 600$ job