Good for you!!

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.

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.

“Tell me about your IT setup at home” is my favourite interview question, followed up with “And what are you planning next?”. I’ve been using it for years now, and it’s been an excellent assessment every time.

It lets people talk about a technical area that they’re super-familiar with, and also lets them show how they think about planning/purchasing/budgeting. It’s also weeded out people who really aren’t at all interested in computers - this is fine for some roles, but for most, I want someone technically-focused.

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.

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.

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.

Grats on the win!!

Anyway, this is barely worthy of a post, but I’m really excited.

As well you should be! Also, I think it’s very worthy of a post. You put in the work, and even though it was “only” a home lab environment, it has given you real-world applicable skills. Good on ya!

One of my coworkers always tells people “Just start with a Plex/media server” and it grows from there. It’s worked for at least four of us who work on our team and I’d say we’re all doing some cool things now. Good luck friend! Keep labbing

Basically same for me. Didn’t do this stuff in my last job (95% of the time) I’m doing now and speaking about my homelab really helped sell my interest and learning abilities in the job interview.

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

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.

this is barely worthy of a post

I strongly disagree. This is really awesome and I’m pretty sure a lot of us would not mind getting a job because we dabble in servers as a hobby. Congratulations!!

Companies love someone who spends their free time learning skills that benefit them.

I’ve always made sure to mention my personal interest and the last few years my full-server rack at least a short summary.

It’s gotten my foot in the door quite often when talking to managers with some IT knowledge; ones that don’t have any I wouldn’t want to work with anyways.

Good luck at your new job OP!
And don’t listen to the disgruntled old-timers that say you’ll stop exploring in your free time, they’re just jealous and/or have kids with very little free time left.