Knowledge of Linux is what greatly helped my software engineering career: I've been told at interviews how rare it is to find a software engineer who understand

Knowledge of Linux is what greatly helped my software engineering career: I've been told at interviews how rare it is to find a software engineer who understands the OS as well as operations/systems administration concerns. If the author is seeing only .NET/Windows jobs, he should either modify his job search query (or look on different sites) -- to look for employers where software development is the core competency (versus "IT" programming jobs), or look elsewhere (either on another job site or in another geographic area). In addition, if he knows Java learning .NET will be trivial.