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Is a Specialized Education in VLIS Valuable?
neg ebx asks: "Carnegie Mellon University recently started a masters program that revolves around managing very large information systems (VLIS): 'Very Large Information Systems(VLIS) are large repositories of data that can be found in industry, government, military, academic, and scientific settings. They take the form of internet content providers, business transactions, text, video, financial transactions, genomic data, health care management, scientific data sets, etc. Currently, digital librarians manage the information, while responsibilities for operating a VLIS falls to various system administrators, system architects, and database administrators. This diffusion of responsibility results in inconsistent interfaces, a heterogeneous collection of systems that may not interoperate effectively, and a general disjointedness and inefficiency.' If you where going to hire someone to manage your information systems would you see a benefit in them having a specialized education as opposed to 3 or 4 years of experience?"
I finally got an ask slashdot story accepted and noone cared. Is life worth living? I think not.
See you on the flip side,
neg ebx
A degree in VLIS is too specialized. We can expect to see information storage standardized in the lifetime of any presently young college student. There will be niche work in antiquated technologies. Big deal. Anyway this degree is called a masters in library science in Canada.
In wartime... truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. (Churchill)
"Currently, digital librarians manage the information, while responsibilities for operating a VLIS falls to various system administrators, system architects, and database administrators. This diffusion of responsibility results in inconsistent interfaces, a heterogeneous collection of systems that may not interoperate effectively, and a general disjointedness and inefficiency.'"
This sounds more like a communications problem. Anyway what's described above is no different than any other collection of systems in a large organization.
If you where going to hire someone to manage your information systems would you see a benefit in them having a specialized education as opposed to 3 or 4 years of experience?"
Do you see those two things as mutually exclusive? What about once the guy with the specialized degree has 3-4 years of experience? Then the choice might be "a guy with a specialized degree and 3-4 years of experience, vs. a guy with 3-4 years of experience and no degree" or "a guy with a specialized degree and 3-4 years of experience, vs. a guy with 5-6 years of experience and a general degree," etc, etc, ad infinitum.
It seems like every time the issue of education and / or certification comes up on Slashdot, somebody inevitably frames the question this way "experience *versus* education." That's a gross over simplification and completely ignores so many aspects of the real world dynamic. Hiring decisions are made based on many factors, in my experience, and I don't think you can safely generalize many of these things the way slashdotters tend too.
Of course, I'm not really answering your question, am I? I suppose not, but I guess my point is to look at the big picture and try and estimate how all the pieces will fit together both now and in the future.
FWIW, if I were reviewing resumes to hire for such a position, somebody with that degree, from Carnegie-Mellon, would be a strong candidate to go in the "interview this guy" pile. And that's really all education, resumes, etc. are for... to get you in the door for an interview. Once you're there, then the onus is on you to sell yourself. The exact nature of your degree, experience, etc. are just details... what a hiring manager wants to know (as well as possible) is "can this guy do the job, and will this guy fit in here?"
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
We can expect to see information storage standardized in the lifetime of any presently young college student.
Dude, today's college students stand a good chance of living until almost 2100.
Which, ironically enough, is probably about how long it will take to see a pipe dream like "information storage standardization" come to fruition.
If you where going to hire someone to manage your information systems would you see a benefit in them having a specialized education as opposed to 3 or 4 years of experience?" Here's what you do. You weigh the pros and cons about each of their resumes on a standard cheistry scale. Then you throw that out the window, hack into their background files, and check their criminal records instead.
Women- the final frontier...
Here's the deal and these are my thoughts on experience vs. formal education. You can either get your hands dirty doing the work or you can sit in a class room, talk about doing the work, read books about doing the work, and perform some sort of professor guided labs directing at eventually showing you how to do the work.
Now, given that the project you have is going to be of vital, "mission critical", importance, do you want to give it someone who has a track record in doing what you need or someone who's talked about doing what you need for 4 years?
2 cents,
Queen B.
HDGary secures my bank
CMU's masters programs, overall, aren't really that interesting. (The exceptions I can think of offhand are the robotics and entertainment technology programs, and even those are direct career path -- the former into big-time university or defense industry R&D, the latter into being an EA slave). The information and networking program (which is NOT run out of the CS department!) is positively disgusting and run by total idiots -- about three clicks in any direction from that front page will find you some technocrat mumbo-jumbo about cybercrime and cyberthis and cyberthat. These are the people who testify before congress every now and then saying how Internet users need to be protected from themselves.