From the article title: "Does the distro matter?" No. The differences among Linux distros is so slight that any otherwise qualified/competent admin can be expected to easily learn everything important in days or weeks.
Not sure I agree. After years of using Debian, I had a hard time administering CentOS. yum is a cruel joke... and that's when the dependencies aren't messed up. The quality control and the intrinsic design is ... inconsistent. This makes it hard to administer, and I would certainly never take a job where I would be responsible for CentOS or Redhat.
It's not that I couldn't use CentOS and stuff (I have and still do to some extent), but I certainly have a much harder time of it. I guess that would probably change pretty quickly if I really wanted it to.
I don't want to though.
(I've noticed an increase in the number of replies I get like this on HN now. Time was people made an effort to reply to what you actually said (and meant), not just state some tangentially related populist opinion. Maybe it's just me though...)
It may end up taking longer to do certain tasks and they may have to refer to documentation more often than someone competent in that distro thinks they should but linux is relatively universal and once you get past initial setup maintenance becomes rather similar.
In that any task can be completed in an unbounded amount of time. If you want to do things quickly, though, all Linuxes are not the same.
I've noticed an increase in the number of replies I get like this on HN now...
Generally, from the other side a candidate not having experience in RHEL (our bread and butter distro) isn't a deal breaker here. It's somewhat surprising if an applicant has really never used RHEL or CentOS but as you say there frankly aren't that many differences that someone intelligent can't pick up shortly. As long as there's a general knowledge of unix concepts the details of package management and where the config files happen to live isn't enough to get worked up over.
What would be a red flag would be experience in only one distro, ever, even outside work.