Yes and No. In my opinion, it's more a reflection of the culture of the shop in which it is used than the specifics of a distribution. A good admin should be a

Yes and No. In my opinion, it's more a reflection of the culture of the shop in which it is used than the specifics of a distribution. A good admin should be able to get up to speed on any distro within a few days and should be able to wrangle BSDs and other more exotic flavours of unix derived OS's easily. What really matters is the history of the shop and the systems and the culture which has grown up around them. Any distro can be badly managed. If you're logging in to the servers using a VNC session as root, you're doing it wrong, no matter what distro is supporting you. Being an admin at an established shop does entail a certain amount of putting up with decisions that were implemented before you showed up. What matters is if you are going to have the authority that goes with the responsibility that your are being asked to take on. If the expectation is that you will keep a patched together system on the air it matters a lot whether you are expected to replace it and manage the transition to a new infrastructure with grace and aplomb; or if you're being asked to be the janitor in a lunatic asylum where all the devs have root on the production machines and you'll only find out about changes when the system breaks... The first is a professional challenge, the latter is a path to madness.