In my experience it is often better to hire people who are curious, motivated and at least a little …

In my experience it is often better to hire people who are curious, motivated and at least a little bit intelligent than people who already possess specific skills. You can argue until you're blue in the face about if my approach was the right one, ultimately though what we did worked, was incredibly lean, easy to understand/troubleshoot/debug and most importantly it served the goals of the business. Could we have gotten up to speed with the Windows way of doing things? Probably. There were so many niggling problems with the platform that were not part of my prejudice, that if we continued to go that route I am certain that 1000's of our person-hours would have been consumed even if we had been absolute experts, things like the fact that windows bonding in 2012R2 was done in userland, that joining to the domain requires a reboot (which will break your software if it's registering to take workloads on boot), that powershell versions are often incompatible and that interface devices are very difficult to deterministically reference. …