My First Steps in IT Career
How I went from skipping university classes to landing my first sysadmin job — the CV, the interview, and the questions they asked.
At 20, second year of Computer Science, I was barely showing up to classes. Not because I wasn’t interested in tech — I’d been running servers since I was around 11 or 12, first Metin2 and CS communities where I was doing admin work, dealing with MySQL not talking properly to the site, figuring out why users couldn’t register, that kind of thing. University just felt disconnected from any of that.
Dacian was the one who actually got me moving. We’d run an online gaming community together back in 2012, so he knew exactly what I was into. When he spotted a System Administrator listing at a company called Netex, he basically told me I was applying. Sysadmin roles are rare around here — most people still equate IT with programming — so this one stood out.
My first CV was written in Notepad. I printed a physical copy to bring with me just in case, because I genuinely had no idea if sending it digitally was enough.
Shoutout to @Dacian for the push — wouldn’t have moved without it.
The Interview
I dropped off the CV at their headquarters and was told HR would follow up. About a week later they called to schedule. The interview was with an HR rep and the IT department head — conference room, pretty standard. They introduced the company, asked me to talk about my experience and what I was looking for.
I had the logic for most things but not always the right vocabulary to go with it. Turned out that was fine — the conversation ended up more relaxed than I expected because of it.
The Questions
If you’re a beginner, try to answer these before checking.
Q: What is the administrator user in Linux?
Show Answer
Note
A: root
Q: How do you view open ports locally on a Linux machine?
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Note
A: netstat -tulpen
Q: How do you view open ports on a remote Linux machine?
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A: nmap
Q: What are the basic file permissions in Linux?
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A: r - read (4), w - write (2), x - execute (1)
Q: What are the ports for https, ssh, imap, smtp, dns, etc.?
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Note
A: http - 80; https - 443; ssh - 22; for the rest I don’t have them memorized, but I can find any of them quickly: cat /etc/services | grep -i mysql
Q: What is /etc/shadow?
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Note
A: A file containing local users and their encrypted passwords on Linux systems, readable only by root.
The Offer
The day after I actually went to a lecture — enrolled in Timișoara, commuting from my hometown, attendance wasn’t great. I wouldn’t recommend it; I think university is genuinely useful, it just wasn’t landing for me at the time.
I hadn’t finished the class when my phone rang. Got the job.
Slightly above minimum wage. I didn’t care about the salary, I just wanted to be doing something real. Everything after that is on the about page. Still grab a beer with my former department head sometimes.
Gallery
Some nostalgic photos from that period
