Good for you!!

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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

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!!

Congratulations nice! I run a homelab server too running about 15 services, apps and sites I programmed/designed, and free software like Plex! I just enjoy it, I also have AI pipelines for like stable diffusion and rvc ,

I think the hard part of home lab is scaling and designing/organizing your files and infrastructure. I literally have a monorepo with submodules of projects all of which are connected meticulously using containerization like docker, pods, etc . I’m able to bring up websites quickly like to the Internet in production as well. it’s crazy. I used to pay for a VPS, and use control panel, etc, waste of money xD

homelab is great, but time consuming and learning curve

I landed a job also just off my homelab. Well sitting in the interview I setup an account for the guy, got him accessed in and let him look at everything I did and could do. You would be amazed how much better it is to be able to show you can do a job then just try to tell someone you can.

Also it’s a huge thing to show a willingness and gift for self learning, a lot of people do not have that. When you find someone like that even if the skills are raw you know that person can be turned into something great.

When I’m interviewing people for any entry level, or even low level sysadmin positions, discussion of a homelab is always on my list of questions. I’m looking for not only the fact it exists, but also the passion you have talking about it. I can work on tech skills, but I can’t teach passion.

I’ve got my job years ago because of my (selfhosted) project. That’s a great start!

upvote for good post

When I interview entry-level IT operations candidates, discussion of home labs puts the candidate at the top of the list, all other things being equal. It’s hands-on experience and demonstrates an interest in tinkering… and will show that the candidate knows how to solve problems (including how to Google problems).

Only once has that strategy failed me, and it wasn’t even a terrible fit - just a bad one.

Hey man it’s how I got into my position where I’m at now, all self taught. I started just as help desks, then the place I worked for had an opening and a Lab technology specialist, which I knew nothing about anything in that field. But in the interview talking about all my home lab projects and goals and just general love for tech. Next thing I knew a week later got a nice pay bump with a promise in a way bigger one if I make it a year. Well now I design PCB and work of very custom hardware and software and it’s all still mine blowing to me.