I beg to differ, I went to a community college and everything was locked in to Microsoft; certs, software, and MS approved coiurse guidelines (MS had given them some sizable grants to push the students to leave and use their products. I know work for our states biggest university and it’s still the same way. Literally out of thousands of employees our small group in IT are the only ones using macs and building/deploying products in a Linux environment. Being in the position I’m in allows me to get a look at the other Colleges/Universities across the state and it’s pretty much the same process across the board. A fair enough chunk of CS students coming in are disappointed about the M$ based CS tracks. They came in expecting to learn Linux, Python, Ruby, JS, Docker, and k8s. I’m hoping in the future in the CS guidelines will diversify and let people choose either a OSS/programming, MS, and Cisco/Networking tracks to be a little more open to real world needs.

Good riddance. I say that as the owner of an MS Partner! I want potential consultants, not people with one trick up their sleeve.

Blow Red Hat: I want an applicant describing how they installed Arch or Gentoo and only use say RH or whatever to tick supportability boxes for something. Someone who can install Gentoo already knows how to fix all other broken Linux boxes, without breaking into a sweat. A completely broken Linux box does not faze me because I spent many years repairing the fallout of running emerge.

Cisco. Hmm well at least it is reasonably easy to translate into Dell or HP. Juniperese on the other hand is rather different. Given that Cisco invented nearly everything including some horrendous security exploits, I'll let that slide!