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Our Education System Is Failing IT
Nemo the Magnificent (2786867) writes "In this guy's opinion most IT workers can't think critically. They are incapable of diagnosing a problem, developing a possible solution, and implementing it. They also have little fundamental understanding of the businesses their employers are in, which is starting to get limiting as silos are collapsing within some corporations and IT workers are being called upon to participate in broader aspects of the business. Is that what you see where you are?"
Most of the folks in IT are Operators of Interfaces.
Most people think critical thinking is something that "haters" do.
So horrible that hardly any of the European or American young IT workers are qualified.
Too bad there was not some way we could get around this problem. You know perhaps get around this and maybe save some money too hmm.
Just think about how horrible it would be if CIO's and MBAs wrote such an article and published in a well known magazine that they could give to EU politicians and senators on something that needs to be done RIGHT AWAY!
http://saveie6.com/
This is what happens when your field turns from a niche specialist thing where only experts will have a chance to get in... into a field where they're selling degrees during commercial breaks for Jerry Springer. You want the smarts ones, you need to pay for them.
The best people know they can find a job pretty much anywhere, so they often do. Fail to attract and retain them and you're left with only the mediocre ones at best. It looks cheaper to the bean counters because they only try to reduce the cost of the bean seeds without properly accounting for the harvest.
A training company I'm working with has done some research into this topic. They found that only around 15% of people in Canada/USA are critical thinkers. It would be great to see more critical thinking in IT, but most people just aren't wired that way. And with IT being such a broad field, not all IT jobs require sophisticated critical thinking skills.
That said, I'm not opposed to exposing people to situations requiring critical thinking, or stretching people to develop those skills. Let's just not get upset when Joe Cablemonkey isn't a masterful critical thinker.
I would love to see a neutral, non-lobbying group formed solely for the purpose of periodically certifying the quality of IT professionals by live demonstration, a la the bar exam for practicing attorneys.
College exams don't count; all they prove is that the student knew (or was able to cheat enough to pretend that s/he knew) CS theory just long enough to pass the coruse. It says nothing about current knowledge or software development skills on non-toy projects.
we need more trades / apprenticeships in IT and not CS that is a lot of theory and lacking in hands on skills.
Education is failing IT. IT is failing education too.
Oh computers will help education! We'll all be geniuses all we need is more computers!
Look. Heres a video of a cute cat doing something stupid! It's the most popular thing on the planet right now!
Okay, let's start with my hours, salary, and other benefits... If they're going lay on extra workload, make sure there's a matching increase on the flip side.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
People who are weaker at root cause analysis tend to get stuck and Level 1 or 2 tech support. More capable people reach the advanced analyst levels and do well there. Since the demand for support analysts is roughly L1 > L2 > L3 > L4, it might look like "most IT workers can't think critically."
You can't blame everything on our education system.
First, the majority of people do not possess the ability to think critically. You can't teach that skill. You can try to foster what ability a person might have but you can't turn someone with no ability to think critically into someone who exemplifies that ability. By middle school someone either can think for themselves or they can't.
Second, why is everything the education systems fault? Why don't parents encourage their children to think critically? Why aren't parents responsible for enriching their child's development so that they develop the skills needed to succeed.
Reality check: not all teachers think critically. There are a lot of people of average to below average intelligence / critical thinking ability that are teachers. Want great teachers? Do you want the cream of the crop? Then pay them to deal with your whiny privileged spawn instead of the much more glamorous and lucrative jobs they have. Instead of attracting the best talent we have states actively eroding teacher benefits which drives the talent away and opens the door for Teach for America type excuses for real teachers.
Yes I agree there are a ton of people in IT and every other profession who completely lack the ability to think critically.
No I do not blame "our education system"
("IT" is producing intelligent, knowlegable adults who have a wide an reasonably in-depth knowlege of use in the workplace.)
If someone is skilled at IT, deeply understands computers and networking, and has critical thinking skills, they can get a better job. There are few people like that anywhere. Why would they be sitting around in IT? They should be designing a router.
And frankly speaking, they don't need to know the deep depths of how everything works. It would be silly for a hospital to demand that every staff member have the highest level of education. It's a waste of resources. The vast majority of work can be done by less skilled people. Just like in a hospital, if a diagnosis seems difficult, you can bring in the expert. You don't need a building full of experts. Sure, it would be nice, but the waste would be staggering.
Is Slashdot linking to Bennett Haselton's dad now?
If the IT sector were really that devoid of workers with an iota of critical thinking ability, the entire state of IT in the country would be in shambles. Now he does have some valid complaints (ie plenty of Cert WIZARDS!), but the entire article is one giant strawman he constructed. I don't think IT (or at least non H1Bs) is any worse off than any other sector of the US job market. This strikes me as a case of "this new generation sucks a lot" which we roll through every 20 years or so. The WW2 generation said the same thing about the Boomers and Gen X.
The first track consisted of self-motivated high school and college students who taught themselves the necessary PC skills to get a job, sometimes before graduation. The second was the trade school, which produced droves of "certified" 20-somethings ripe for the picking in the rapidly growing IT field.
My mileage will vary from most of the people here, but these two sectors make up a small minority of what I've encountered. The first "track" is essentially career service desk folk. They don't really need to think super critically. They aren't paid enough to. The ones who are very good at it end up as Tier-2 or Tier-3 support. They do triage work and respond to critical incidents. They need to know how to diagnose problems and think critically. The second track definitely exists. I've met them. I haven't seen them actively employed for the most part, and those that were employed didn't remain for long.
The circle jerk in the comments section is pretty hilarious too.
But I guess we're cheaper if we're terrified, eh?
The vast majority of people that I have interviewed have no clue how to properly troubleshoot. I ask everyone the same question. User calls and says they cannot connect to the interwebs. What do you do? The simulated problems is that the DNS service on the internal server has stopped therby not resolving host names. Almost everyone starts with the obvious of check your cables and then reboot. I have tried to guide people to the answer for 45 minutes with some to no avail. These are people with YEARS of experience in IT, most looking for Network Admin jobs. Most hardly have a clue how to use a command prompt to troubleshoot the possible answer. I have interviewed college grads with an emphasis in databases that could not tell me what a primary key was. Our education system is not failing IT. IT is failing because it lets unqualified people have jobs in IT. People with no motivation and they want to be successful but either have no clue or no real desire to do anything about it. Part of the problem is that people are under the delusional belief that anyone that can set up email on their iPhone is a genius and therefore should be allowed to build their network. Trust me, all they are good for is setting up email on your iPhone. And many of them can't do that right either.
people who think critically can't pass L1 quotes and other stuff that to smart for them. Best buy and other places used to pass over the people to smart to sell the rip off extracted warrantys
Though I have seen a few less-badly run ones. Sometimes there's actually a competent guy in there, trying to manage a few hundred servers and dealing with constant user abuse. Sometimes there're nothing but a bunch of monkeys who will just keep trying to reboot the machines in the hopes that will somehow fix all those misconfigured servers. The single unifying theme is that there are never enough resources allocated for even the best people to do a good job in those departments. I could point to companies that could be growing two or three times faster if not for their shoddy IT practices. Or companies that will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to BFI their IT solution, while shackling their developers with Citrix. I guess because even on today's ultra-fast computers, everyone deserves the experience of doing all their work on a network-connected computer via 2400 bps dial-up. I suppose IT will take the blame for that as well, though. It's OK. They're used to it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It isn't education, it's the lack of experience. We've outsourced so many of the entry level jobs, where are the young people supposed to learn? That's the real cost of outsourcing...without an entry-level position and ability to learn how to troubleshoot, there's no place for kids to learn how to do their jobs. Most of the really good systems engineers I know started on the help desk, worked desk-side support and then did infrastructure support (servers/network/storage/security). They understand that their jobs still come down to delivery of solutions to the end-user. They understand that the end-user doesn't care what backend BS broke, it's just that they can't do their job. We're missing that at the mid-level...and most of the really great infrastructure people are in their 40's now.
And yet the process most of today's IT pros use to learn a skill amounts to asking somebody else how to do something.
Well, that's progress. Progress involves not having to know how the layers underneath work. This allows operating at a higher level of abstraction. How many drivers can change a spark plug today?
The trouble with this in software is that our abstractions are still flaky. Computer users still have to worry about bugs which allow stack overflow attacks, library bugs, backdoors in firmware, and middleware which doesn't conform to spec. (Hardware is in better shape. Users rarely have to worry about CPU design errors, voltage control problems, electrical noise, static electricity, failed gates, or connector intermittents, all of which were problems with early mainframes.)
Computing has become, to some extent, a ritual-taboo culture. We have huge books of examples on how to do things. If you take API documentation and write code to exercise the API in ways not used in examples, it is likely that many of today's APIs will fail. As a result, asking someone how to do something is more likely to work than reading up on an interface and expecting it to work as documented.
(Open source doesn't help. Ever try to get a bug fixed in open source code? I have bug reports with clear test cases that have been outstanding for over five years.)
Apparently there aren't enough welders in America. Not everyone needs to be in IT, or graduate from college.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
IS majors can't hack it. They have, "Leadership in IT," seminars. They want tech jobs, but they're afraid of tech.
While they're doing that, CS majors are solving complex problems.
Quit hiring from the wrong pool.
redirect from classic.slashdot.org no longer works and takes you to horribeta version.
18 year old single women in my area.
Enjoy that, dice.
Are the business leaders and their "collusion" with the vendors. It's all too easy to require new IT talent to be "Cisco-certified" or Java-certified or this-or-that certified. Think about it. Cisco wants their certified engineers to be "recipe-followers". If they run into a brick wall, they're supposed to run home to mama so the business can buy Cisco support time and contracts. Likewise, the business doesn't want to risk it with someone who isn't Cisco-certified because that gives Cisco an out in case things go wrong (i.e. "your guy messed with something he shouldn't have messed with, covered in clause 32-a-X-35-b-VII-(x$^32) in the support contract, written in 2 point Arial font in white ink. Pay us more or fuck off.").
The same principle applies to other technological areas. I'm not defending them, simply pointing out their (twisted, so-so far gone) logic. It's about risk management and having someone to blame (or sue). That's what the suits care about. It's the single, solitary reason M$ was never in any real danger from Linux on the desktop - corporate IT departments were NEVER going to move away from being able to point the finger at Redmond when shit went down. It's all about self-preservation, really.
Remember that in business (moreso in BIG business), the higher up you are, the more important it is to cover your ass, over being good at your job.
IMHO education does not teach how to explore new possibilities. It teaches rules and discipline. Some times, if you are lucky, you find someone that can jump start your brain to think critically and try to find new answers to old questions, that people already answered for you. That is the beginning of the process to find new questions and the respective answers.
In Computer Science the education issue is specially bad because we are taught how to think like the machine. How to constraint our thoughts to fit that little box that is good with math and nothing else. And then teach the machine how to do that. Ow... the irony.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
I think that with the advent of how the technology revolution has progressed, the general population sees geeks these days as having admirable qualities. As such, they want to get into the industry, due to mainly it's higher than normal salaries. The movement of "everybody should learn to program" has some pitfalls. I think it's philosophically good that "everybody should learn to program", but on the downside, those that can't hack it, shouldn't be in technology, pardon the pun. Computer science has its origins in pure mathematics. It is a super-science, nothing less, but this is often overlooked, due to the massive amounts of hype that goes on these days with technology. Many people believe that because one is a whiz at using electronic gadgets, this by default, makes one good at computers, with the stretch towards being a programmer. The university I attended has always stated that "we are not a trade school". I sincerely believe that this is an important distinction to make. Many people who attend trade schools sometimes poo-poo the university education, although the converse I've not seen to usually be true. It's not that by default, a university gives a superior education, but its main focus, at least in my own experience, is to teach the fundamentals, abstract thinking, critical thinking, and broader thinking than just a narrowly focused subject. It's not to learn the latest hip language or acronym to stick on their resume. I strongly believe that studying other subjects other than computer science can enhance learning in computer science, something that a university has traditionally believed as well by "forcing" a minimum number of credits in other subjects. As an example, the notion of Agile development is nothing new at all to myself. One famous person stated about 40 years ago, "be like water", and at least to me, that sums up what the core of what Agile development is all about.
As someone who works in ICT as a network administrator it's quite simple. Stop hiring Windows only "IT professionals". I was hired by my employer because I had Cisco studies under my belt (CCNA courses not exams) as well as a broad base in Linux/Unix/Macintosh as well as Windows. I am working in an environment that is 99% Microsoft, but I slip in the odd Linux machine where it helps me work better. Too many people are locked into the mindset of click click, and Microsoft does nothing to make people look into deeper causes of problems. It's shit like rebooting for driver installs, software updates, small patches etc. That is killing the knowledge of IT workers. The Unix mentality is: oh you broke an application, guess you'd better go fix it, because a reboot sure isn't going to. Whereas on Windows, there's a 50/50 chance that what killed your app is crappy memory management on the OS, or a bad configuration. Far too many people graduate with degrees then just happily cruise into their $40-50k/year jobs. Then when they get called upon to do real IT engineering/sysadmin work, they stick their hands up, because they think that troubleshooting some idiot's exchange issue is the same as reinstalling a proper Cisco or Juniper router/switch. Hell I had a level 2 tech the other day, complaining that it was "so hard" to boot a router into rom-mon mode, and upload a PRE-MADE! config file for $400/hr and that he'd have to document it, because it's so hard. What the hell? that stuff is second nature to anyone who's done entry level Cisco, a course that gets taught at High Schools here! The lack fo basic commandline skills is sickening. The amount of money being wasted on over-priced software is sickening. Because noone is spending the time to learn alternatives to the junk they're using now.
Sounds an awful lot like the generic refrain: "Kids these days..."
Or harkening back a few years:
"What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"
4th century BC (Plato)
When people believed you could use a computer without being able to program. That's how mandatory programming courses got shut down and the incompetence "trickled down".
I run your network, I don't make you money directly and I couldn't care less what it is you sell because my job is not influenced in any way by what you do unless you screw it up and don't have the money to pay me.
If IT workers knew how to think critically, they would go into programming, instead.
*cough* OK, that was mean. The thing is, critical thinking skills are notoriously difficult to teach effectively. Maybe we should put more effort into hiring IT workers who can solve problems, instead of looking for people with the right combination of resume bullet-points. If we created greater demand for critical thinkers, instead of creating demand for certifications, perhaps we would see more effort put into learning to solve problems.
Or not. Maybe we just wouldn't find anyone to hire.
If you weren't so public school "educated", you would be thinking how could it not be.
Never mind the IT industry, critical thinking is probably the single most important skillset /anyone/ can have, yet for the most part it's not actively taught to anyone other than philosophy majors. Critical thinking skills should be taught to everyone as a fundamental part of basic education, never mind post-secondary.
Except that, like it or not, the entire world knows who G. W. Bush is and what country he led, whereas the name of past Swedish prime ministers amounts to minor trivia at most. Could be because the US was and currently is the largest economy and politically most internationally active country in the world... or it could be because he bombed your country or one of you allies, but you will know who he is.
if you want people who can solve problems that fewer than 10% of humans can figure out it will cost you. you can't revise your curriculum to make someone's brain work better.
Anyone who takes one out has no capacity to think critically about anything.
Then they enter a career where management fucks them constantly; No Overtime Pay and No W-9 Contract Work and Industry Leaders spending Billions to bring over more H1B's and try to build systems like they are a manufacturing line that fail spectacularly and in ever more grandiose and wasteful fashions. When you hit 40, your career is over. Over 15% of MIS graduates are jobless.
Kids these days are seeing the writing on the wall, and that's why enrollment is down for computer science, why existing IT staff are making career moves out of the path, and why companies are literally running their systems and people to the point they are willing to and in many cases do end the business. If your ERP system went down tomorrow, and it was gone. As in no backups, no ETA on getting back online, you get to stop and start from scratch. What would you do? We just avoided that where I work, twice; the previous admin put up a shit-fest about how everything he had setup was fine and guess what. I'm still swearing at him. Management finally "Got it" and they finally Got that they have someone that can get them setup, but I don't trust them. Whatsoever.
And that's the thing; IT gets more complex, they demand more, but business people don't and they don't want to understand anything. They just want it to work.
Most college programs get people to a certain level of understanding about various systems, however vendors, and both Microsoft and Cisco is notorious for this, do not focus on simplifying the understanding of their systems and conveying that understanding to their students. When you read the cert book and take the course, you only get about 25% of what you need; the rest has to come from lots of research which is time consuming and honestly, when you are working 80hr weeks who has the time. Employers want jaberwockie employee's; they want to buy skills and not the people. They view Lean as a way to asset-strip their workforce further and DevOps as an IT person who is a master of everything at half the cost. They completely miss the fucking point.
My next position I've written down 6 questions, and if management doesn't answer all 6 correctly, I will not work for them. They are simple questions.
A: What's your companies greatest asset? (People; any other question is a red flag).
B: Why should I be interested in the long-term health of your organization? (If You cannot explain this to me, your company is fucked 7-ways from Sunday).
C: If I bust my rear and complete a half dozen projects for you in the next year. The sum of increased revenue and saved capital is between 5 and 7 figures, what is my reward? (If you don't know this ahead of time you are doing it wrong).
D: Why should I trust that you will reward me? (If you can't answer this, wrong).
E: Why do, or don't, I fit into your corporate culture? (Tells me what you are looking for and if you are going to lie to me; if you lie to me at an HR interview, then that's endemic in your corporate culture and you are fucked.)
F: Why would I want to work for you and not work two jobs flipping burgers instead? (The correct answer here is "you make 3x as much and work half the hours". Any attempt to compare the job to flipping burgers in any other way is a sign of a sick organization.)
Over my course of 13 years in IT Consulting, one of the most often repeated compliments is that I am a "genius" for being able to get up to speed on business requirements and advance a narrow feature set that was more value-added to their user base all over a single conversation.
While I've always seen my ability to understand "C-Level Speak", "Marketing Logic" and business principals as tangible assets that should define the software, I never thought I was anything but slightly more adept than other developers, since it was to me at least a given that all developers account for the business principals we are developing against -- I see now that perhaps I am a rarified quantity.
However, this has prevented me from using services such as O-Desk which focus on having customers spy on screen shots and key strokes of your "clocked in time", as I am all too aware that my most meaningful work is done while having a beer or 3 while I chill-intensify while mulling over the business aspects gleaned during that conversation and deriving user-flows and architectural concepts, which are then presented for approval and adoption. No keystrokes can be logged during that interval, which is really the most value-added and happens throughout the dev cycle as features are added and I work with the stake holders to really hone in on a core feature-set, since the reqs at that stage will change as they work to attract more stake holders. Instead, ODesk and their ilk think I am merely a shit shoveler who's time is merely spent writing code, good or bad.
As long as employers see employees as an infinite source of cheap disposable labor that can be swapped out like a widget, then a un creative cog in a machine is exactly want they are going to get. Only when employers put effort into professional development, and actual career paths will they get creative and talented employees.
The issue is that so many of the students are so far behind that you can't bother with critical thinking if you want to prepare them for college.
Which means the only way to give them a proper education is to accept that some kids are not college material.
Do that and the whole system falls into order.
Stop trying to turn kids that have a hard time reading at age 15 into astrophysicists, lawyers, and surgeons. Its a wasted effort.
Rather, get those kids something that will actually be useful in their life. Some job skills that will let them support themselves. And maybe THEIR kids will be college material. But anyone that can't read at age 15 needs to be put on a more realistic career path.
What I've just said is politically incorrect. We're supposed to believe that people that can't read at age 25 can become president or something if just try. Well, no. It isn't happening. Get over it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That is what CAUSED the problem in the first place.
Without the theoretical background you don't have the skills.
IT is a mathematical field... but it is no longer treated as a field of mathematics, so you get very few with the mathematical problem solving focus that is required to solve problems...
HR often focuses on the technology first, not the organization's industry. If they value company knowledge they'd pay more to keep existing staff. But, they instead often want to dump the older people for those allegedly knowledgeable in the shiny new thing of the month.
Table-ized A.I.
When I was young, I went down to the IBM store with a knot in my handkerchief (which was the style at the time) and
No, wait, the other thing.
People are no lazier/stupider/etc than before. You're just older.
Things would be much better off if we took more money from education and spent it on the military and wars. We could create thousands more jobs for people majoring in canon fodder.
Maybe we would see more people in IT with problem solving skills / critical thinking if we stopped scaring them off with so many amature rote memory based technical interviews. It's ridiculous! IT professionals need to hire people based on their prior work and references and just quit all the sillyness. Who cares if Joe cant remember how to do a bubble sort by hand during an interview, the guy has been professionally coding fo 10+ years etc. To even think that anything significant can be ascertained via technical interviews shows a lack of understanding of how the human mind works; all you will get with most of these silly test are people that are good at taking silly test.
I laugh at inappropriate times.
You just need to get the smart ones interested and run remedial classes with lots of examples for those that don't catch on quick.
It's no different to reading or writing, or basic math. Would you argue that you can't teach most people to read and write? Sure you can't teach someone to be the next Shakespeare, nor are you going to teach advanced calculus to someone who doesn't like math, but we're talking about people not monkeys and dogs here.
And as for parents....parents who weren't taught how to think critically can hardly pass that knowledge on to their children.
... "PC" / Windows generation. People my age (upper 30's and above) grew up around a range of different computer types, from those that had no operating system, to those that booted straight into a BASIC of some kind and loaded programmes from cassettes. Through University I was exposed to a huge range of platforms from severely overloaded SunOS minis (which somehow just kept chugging along even with over 400 active users, in a mere 32MB of RAM), to SGI machines, VMS machines. There were labs of Wyse / DEC terminals, X-Terminals and even some labs outfitted with Intel 386 and 486 machines running DOS and Windows 3.1.
We grew up when computing was "fun".
Now, computer users tend to get a PC, pre-installed with Windows, primarily to play games on and their "computing". Their computing education consists of typing in Microsoft Word, putting together slide ware using Microsoft PowerPoint and maybe adding up a column of something in Microsoft Excel.
Like a poster above, I've set practical tests when interviewing for network administrators (the switch and router kind), that have usually consisted of eight scenarios that follow on from one another. Starting from a simple "put port X of switch A into VLAN J", trouble shooting a fibre link (mismatched SX and LX optics) to redistributing routes from one protocol to another. I had one guy manage to crash a Linux laptop that was running minicom full screen, still unsure how he did that.
I highly recommend practical labs to anyone interviewing. It really does sort out the chaff from the wheat.
The AWS stats usually only count Union workers who are defined as welders. There are many jobs in factories though that weld, but they aren't "welders" so they don't get counted. Pull numbers from many sources when you're trying to make a point. I mean if you really were a statistician you'd know that, but since you just play one on /. you don't count. See what I did there?
If you're a year or two from 50 then you're most likely either autodidact or were one of few people with some sort of education in IT.
I'm young enough to having gotten my degree in an established but still fairly new profession, meaning my professors were mathematicians by trade. Knuth was required reading and the classes were very heavy on algorithm theory. People graduating today likely have an education that reflects some tech actually used in the industry and the professors are first- or second-generation IT people. We didn't touch anything remotely related to cisco for all my years at university but I knew the algorithms they and similar devices operated with. Modern graduates are cisco ninjas but they have comparatively little mathematical background to know *why* things work and few have coded a line of assembler in their lives.
This technical proficiency but lacking in background knowledge makes people aggressive. It's a perfectly human trait: we become more cocky and assertive when we are on thin ice because, in a competitive field, everyone wants to "fake it til you make it" and being uncertain is a sign of weakness others will pounce upon. It's a toxic state of affairs and is unsustainable.
IT education has, in your lifetime, gone from being a practically non-existent field to an academic and theory-heavy discipline to being a glorified trade-school. Of course, graduates would be more cocky today than before. They are less flexible, less capable of adapting and extremely box-bound when troubleshooting a tricky issue because they are trained on the equipment, not the theory. Additionally their egos are continously stroked by tech blogs catering to the "digital natives" so everyone thinks they are a rockstar coder.
Employers want the lowest cost idiot.
They prioritize certifications over degrees, to the point that someone like myself who has contributed to the Linux Kernel can not get a job without a meaningless certification.
I mean *FUCK* if advanced degrees in Computer Science & Computer Engineering are not valued as much as a certification in answering the phone, then those employers will trained phone monkeys instead of people who understand what is going on inside the box.
A computer scientist should be able to code a device driver or an OS kernel. He should be able to program a FPGA and a microcontroller on the same shift. He should be familiar with every OS from 360 to 3.14.1. He should speak a dozen programming languages, from BASH to Scheme and switch between many assemblies seamlessly. He should speak markup languages like PCL 5 and PS. HR idiots say that is wasting your time, and that you should have spent the last 10 years specializing in something that was released last week.
Yes, I said HE. Because people referred to as SHE generally don't major in CS despite all the affirmative action in the world. If some black chick who CAN NOT SPELL HER OWN NAME gets the job over me, because your HR department is racist & sexist, you deserve to lose your company.
When HR idiots are not being sexist or racist, they are insulting at best. They do not understand the questions they are asking, then if you don't give them the words they are looking for (if you give them synonyms) they interrupt with "No no no" or worse yet, they give you that "you're bluffing" look from behind their fake glasses.
If you want people who can solve problems, give them original questions, not the same question I've heard at the last 5 interviews with idiots who are all working out of the same book. At every interview, the HR idiots have a wrong answer they got out of an HR manual!
Maybe we need a final solution to the HR question?
Who is "this guy" and why should we give a shit about his opinion?
It's simply that there aren't enough smart/motivated people. :)
I live in an eastern european former communist block where outsourcing is done *to* not from. Back 25 years ago you could safely assume anyone in IT was there because he was passionate, learned shit on their own every day just to improve themselves, solved problems on their own instead of being told to.
Now... kids see IT jobs are well paid, rush to IT education in droves, understand nothing and get their meat shop job right after graduation. It's a total pain to find someone young that thinks beyond pasting code from Stack Overflow. If they've heard of Stack Overflow.
However, I think that simply the number of competent people has remained the same, while the total number of people in IT has grown 20x. You just have to work harder to find them
A technical interview is mostly a sign the interviewer lacks problem solving skills. Jargon and syntax are easy to test. Pass one of these and you'll probably spend your days working on projects that are a mess before you even arrive. Your new co-workers don't know what's important, they probably value complexity because it makes them feel good about themselves, their code will demonstrate the hard way to do things, and your new boss will probably already be of the opinion that your salary is money shoveled into a hole.
Evaluating a candidate's work using a natural language is a lot like problem solving and requirements gathering. If your interviewer lacks those skills, then those things probably aren't done well at this potential employer. If the candidate lacks the ability to describe his work in a natural language, then he probably lacks those skills, too.
Maybe we would see more people in IT with problem solving skills / critical thinking if we stopped scaring them off with so many amature rote memory based technical interviews... all you will get with most of these silly test are people that are good at taking silly test.
Firstly what kind of IT workers are we discussing? IT support, web designers, network administrators, software developers, architects, computer science professors? There's a difference. Anyway. I personally got my first tastes of programming as a kid about thirty years ago. I have a bachelor's degree in computer science and have been working as a developer and also as a development manager for many years. Currently I'm working full time and at the same time I'm studying part time for my master's degree. And I'm actually quite impressed by the students I've met at the university. They don't have much real work experience in development, but they most certainly are very intelligent and talented. Some will go on to take a PhD, some will start working in the business after finishing their master's degree. No matter what direction they decide to head towards, I'm 100% confident that the next generation will be excellent at diagnosing problems, developing solutions, implementing them, and everything else that is needed. I'm not at all worried for the future of computer science anymore.
In this guy's opinion most managers can't think critically. They are incapable of diagnosing a problem, developing a possible solution, and implementing it. They also have little fundamental understanding of the businesses their employers are in, which is starting to get limiting as silos are collapsing within some corporations and managers are being called upon to participate in broader aspects of the business. Is that what you see where you are?
FTFY
> Linear time should be expected (if it takes longer per ticket when there are more, thats bad, but non-polynomial, thats just horrid)
If one person is having trouble with the web site, there are x0,000 possible causes, so you start with "what are the symptoms they are experiencing, what browser are they using", etc. If there are a flood of tickets about the web site, a few of which mention "can not resolve host name", you have have a DNS problem. More tickets = more information = less time to fix.
If he asked the junior if he knew the protocol in depth, and the answer was "yes", the junior secerely lacked criticlal thinking. If he didn't even understand the question he is in wrong place. Not to talk about packet communication. I don't even work the field, but I guess education does help in some things. You get the foundation, and a small peek of many fields, so you learn how little you actually know.
I don't live in sweden, but I'm willing to bet if they have "no child left behind" policy, they tackle it by getting the left behinds up to speed, not by stopping education alltogether. I admit my knowledge might be a bit dated, but sweden at least used to have very, very good basic education. With no kids left behind.
who wants to get into tech when everythign you can do is sit on a phone answering it all day
Philosophy to come up with the right argument and psychology to make it stick
Unfortunately, philosophy is very far from coming with the right argument. I took a philosophy course in college, to "broaden" my outlook, and it had the exact opposite effect. Read any text by a philosopher, and in the end you'll get to the conclusion that perhaps there could be one or two good ideas there, if it had been written in a hundred words instead of a hundred pages. That's why sometimes a philosopher seems so smart to the uninitiated, they have read only the aphorisms and quotations, they have never had to pore through a full book written by a philosopher.
IT is a field for many different specialists. In the most common forms, what is needed is an expertise in human interfaces, we need graphics designers to create the screens and writers to create the documentation. In that sense, yes, it's all about expertise in the humanities. The vast majority of IT work in development is about personal and corporate software, of which data input and presentation is the bulk of the thing.
Logic and mathematics, although it's behind every software, is a very small part of the development job. However, it cannot be totally disregarded, because it's an essential part.
There's the dilemma we face. We cannot just exempt people working in IT from training in the essential parts most of them will never use, because we never know when those skills will be needed.
Those programmers who say "I've never used a differential equation" are people who slept through their calculus courses and cheated at the exams. If you are simulating pitching a ball or you are calculating the profits from an investment fund you are using differential equations, and you should know how to do the job. Unless you work for a big company, you cannot be assured that the only things you'll ever need to do is drawing screens and writing manuals.
I work for a small IT company that shall go unnamed. And I hate my job because it is basically making the trash software of a number of vendors like say Intuit and Microsoft work on the trash hardware of a few vendors like HP work. Or it is telling people no Apple doesn't simply let you export for notes from your iPad or organize your contacts into groups on your iPhone. It is boring menial frustrating work. It is however work that is available.
So let me tell you about my company's hiring process. Well formatted resume and the ability to answer a few questions on the phone gets you a tryout day. We give you some old junker PCs and ask you to evaluate them, install Windows and setup a Quickbooks install. That interview day fails 9 out of 10 people. We work with the 1 out of 10 that pass with more practice PCs, role playing and just getting them to read the newspaper (online).
Two observations: this is not just an educational issue it is cultural. We have lost a fix-it ethic needed for people to enter fields like IT and auto repair. Second, the big PC companies wish that independent IT shops would disappear because getting consumers to buy new stuff continuously is the only way to support their bottom line.
He's spending his time bemoaning "the state of IT" instead of actually teaching or documenting. Classic middle management approach the actual problem which solves *nothing* but generates lots of Gant charts.
It starts at university, where students learn for exams and not to understand the matter. They are often unable to think at all. If they have a problem, they would not even try to define it and, at least, then google it. They do not read manuals. Faced with a more complex problem, e.g., in a practical course, most of them fail. As, I assume that they are not stupid are general mentally unable to think, it must be laziness. This laziness is a trained behavior learned in school. In school you also have only to write exams, but never to understand the topics deeply. You can learn for and forget after every exam. In history, in writing etc. Especially, when learning to write an article, people should start to think in a structured way. The truth is, they do not.
The second obstacle in IT is prejudice. If a technology, concept or method X is new or a technician is unfamiliar with, it is considered rubbish. As this might be true with some X and other X might be just new names for old X, critical thinking would help to distinguish real new helpful X from the rest. But instead of thinking they rely on hunches. While a hunch is good, you must back it up with a solid examination.
we type in passwords all day and read useless email all day. we don't actually do any work.anymore
I've heard much about older engineers being fired for being too old and not being able to find a job. Maybe it's easy to find plenty of capable employees if your willing to hire older ones.
I work for a major British bank and I see the precisely the same. IT people have become less and less well rounded, less able to think critically. Historically there were always a proportion of IT folks with strong IT skills but poor soft-skills (albeit many were borderline Aspergers). But they were often blended in with people capable of thinking critically, understanding the business, and communicating effectively so it worked out well. And even the most nerdy of the 1970s/1980s were relatively well rounded by today's standards. For example, Bill Gates was on his school's football team, was a voracious reader and could evaluate/write legal text. Nowadays with the influx of east and southern Asians, which is the large majority of our IT line staff, skills have become narrow. The gentle submissiveness and low-cost which made them attractive as employees backfires when then don't challenge bad ideas, cannot communicate, cannot orchestrated broader aspects of work, or low quality work results in crap systems expensive to maintain. Part of it has to do with their educational system, too often modeled after the old Soviet pure technical education. Some has to do with poverty, a well rounded education is expensive. Some of it has to do with culture, narrowness is the norm. Some of it has to do with cost-cutting, well rounded staff are more expensive. But it is to the peril of IT management to recognize where narrow skill staffing is appropriate and where it is not.
...not to mention vendors who also bought into the promise of The Cloud (TM): You'll never grow old, and you'll never die. No, that was Coccoon. Here we go: You'll never need an IT staff again.
Given I am in IT for 15 years - I have quite the understanding of business processes and flows (by chance having the business degree).
What bothers me though is that the business doesn't seems to know what exactly it want from its own IT.
Perhaps it is the business who should start getting familiar with the IT, especially when the company is making IT products.
If I may quote mr. C.Sagan: "We accepted the products of science; we rejected its methods" - I believe that pretty much applies to IT as well.
Affordable, know the business end, know the technical end.
Yep, I'm one of those "IT directors" that operates interfaces. I studied EE and graduated with a Comp Sci degree.
Sure, I learned all about this stuff - circuits, logic, algorithms/math...etc. I ended up not making products, but implementing/using them. I understand how the spanning tree protocol in my switches uses a tree data structure to detect and eliminate loops - but do I really need that level of knowledge to be an effective IT guy?
The reason IT guys have devolved into "operators of interfaces" is that of efficiency. I'm the sole guy here in a small school with 200 people in multiple locations depending on me to keep the lights on. I don't have time for lengthy customization or "roll your own" IT products.
So efficiency requires that I take products out of the box "operate the interfaces" according to best practice guidelines and move on with life.
That's just the way it is.
THAT is what you'd NEED to take to understand how computers use logic.
Additionally: I've NEVER had to do a "change over time" calculation as applied to say, a thermocouple (as in differential equations) - as in engineering design coding!
Still = more-or-less, I have in business reporting or other forms of analysis done for mgt. usually!
(From 1994-2008 I basically did MIS/IS/IT coding as a "day job" using heavy SQL in stored procedures in the DB backend on a server, many times, cross-platform to midrange systems from IBM or Solaris UNIX, with front-ends written in MSVC++, MSVB4-6, & Borland Delphi).
By then, I'd also received the MIS concentration degree (Bachelors) & later did the CSC work (Associates) to get the background that helped me more than I thought it wouold in that realm of business, immensely in fact, in understanding the goals of various departments & the "formulas"/algorithms we used, as both a programmer-analyst/software engineer OR network administrator.
Does it help? Absolutely - NO questions asked.
APK
P.S.=> HOWEVER - From the sounds of it, it doesn't seem you took the RIGHT philosophy course to make your determinations... apk
Easy to blame schools but the parents spend much more time with their children and should have a more formative influence on the child. Many don't, I am not sure why they even had children. My child can't read.... I could read before I ever got to school (Thanks Mom). My child has no work ethic and so on and so forth. Until you fix your parenting don't try to fix the schools or even lay the blame at their feet. If your child is underperforming or if your employee is underperforming, what have YOU done to resolve that issue?
Most people can't think critically, why should IT be any different? *shrug* You get what you pay for. If you want highly trained employees with good critical thinking skills you're going to have to pony up a decent salary. Fail to do that and you get to scrape the bottom of the wage barrel like everyone else.
To save money, business removed incentives to grow and prosper.
To save money, business set limits to courses and educations.
To save money, business outsourced core experience and competence outside their own company.
To save money, business outsourced skills and talent outside their own country.
To save money, business cut down on technological management.
To save money, business declared silos defunct, while building more gigantic walls against IT departments and IT operations centers.
What we see are consequences of business decisions.
It's a very long story, but I basically worked as a fixer for an HPC company on contract for a few years. I'd log in remotely or (occasionally) fly out and fix messes made by people who didn't know how to solve problems with Linux servers using critical thinking. I'd watch them sometimes and they'd try the only thing they knew how to do, over and over again, without realizing that it wasn't fixing the problem. Instead of narrowing down what could be causing the issue and then doing some research/googling/RTFM and bothering to understand the issue, they'd just reboot the machine over and over, progressively screw up config files worse and worse, and then eventually I'd get called in to fix it. I don't know if it's possible to teach critical thinking skills, or if they're just developed over a lot of self-directed experiments, or if it's an issue of intelligence, but it's got to be costing companies untold millions of dollars every year in the US alone.
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Programming is a mathematical field.
Software engineering and architecture are mathematical fields.
IT is like plumbing but you don't get other people's shit on your hands.
IT workers today are fully trained and for the most part fully capable of thinking critically in my experience.
Issue has NOTHING to do with anything written in the article. The root cause is more linked to hiring people incapable of doing jobs in all fields (not just IT) to lower overhead costs, resulting in a seeming decrease in standards. Education is not lacking, and the new CC is a looming utter failure. It is based on my own teachers critical thinking curriculum and created by my classmates, John King for instance. Critical thinking is key, but not the way the CC is changing our education system. If CC goes ahead the result will be US with no scientists, mathematicians or engineers. Its future educational standards that is a danger to the IT of today not present educational standards.
My brother's school has the largest of the three student populations, my sister-in-law the second largest and my sister's school is the smallest, at about half the size of my sister-in-laws school.
I am certain that if the teaching staff were really good, and the curriculum superb, they would still fail to produce enough functional IT professionals given the social hurdles that the majority of their students face.
Most people also consider critical thinkers as nit-pickers, whiners, and difficult to work with or intractable.
They need to teach real technology at earlier ages such as junior high school.
Real technology, not just 1 or 2 vendors worth of certification training.
Its amazing how many Cisco certified college freshmen (from high school classes) cannot distinguish between what Cisco calls a native VLAN, General Mode, and trunking mode and how the rest of the switching world would interact with Cisco enterprise switches in a hybrid environment.
Imagine this on a bigger scale where Microsoft trained students couldnt reboot a Linux box since its missing a start menu, or understand the Init modes of Unix as a whole and the similarities in BSD, Linux, SCO, AIX, etc.
Even worse, they lack the critical thought to consider disabling CTRL+ALT+DELETE in the /etc/inittab of their Linux servers just so a Windows person doesn't use that to wake up the screen and login like a Windows user and inadvertently reboot a critical Linux box !
Or Students taught on Macs never were shown the BASH shell and taught basic network troubleshooting skills like netstat, ping, traceroute, ifconfig, nslookup/dig. I still surprise so-called Mac experts today by pointing out it does in fact have a text based shell, just like Windows so you can do some basic troubleshooting with a few simple commands that carry over between operating systems.
netstat -r produces the ip route table on Mac's, Windows, Linux, and most Unixes. You can see static, default, and even dynamic routes in the table, yet Cisco certified students arent taught this at all in the high schools where I live.
netstat -a shows all ports and sockets including listeners on most systems
ping and traceroute are available on most platforms and behave similar enough
nslookup/dig is available on just about all platforms, yet no high school course Ive seen demonstrates the use of this outside Microsoft classes that show how to troubleshoot active directory DNS in Windows environments.
Heck, most of the students I meet dont think critically enough to understand that consumer "routers" are really a collection functions, among them, "routing". NAT/PAT/Stateful Filtering/VPN/Proxy/IP Helpers/DHCP server/Wireless Bridging/Wireless Routing/etc.
True industry standards need to be taught by the education system with a minimum of vendor specific focus other than to figure out how to make the various proprietary and industry standards mix together and how to maintain it.
There should be major courseware based on standards like "IPv4 networking, IPv6 networking, Operating Systems, Hardware standards, Internet, RFC's like 1918 private networking, open source products like Linux, Apache, MySQL, SMTP servers, etc along with proprietary commercial products like Windows, SQL Server, Exchange server, Apple, and yes, even .net framework basics, Java basics, C++ basics, etc.
DOS batch files, Visual Basic Scripting, and Powershell along with Perl Scripting, BASH scripting, security contexts in a managed LDAP type directory whether its Active Directory or other directory systems should be tough since they are basic requirements of IT managers now a days.
DOS commands like dir, rd, md, move,CACLS/XCACLS and the unix/linux/bsd similars like ls, rm, mv, chown, chmod
A full cloud education is also still missing. Most students I meet cant think of the cloud beyond media consumption, dropbox, Xbox games, or social networks. There is a much bigger cloud world that even junior college students dont get, and mostly dont seem to care about.
Truly there is a gaping hole between what is taught and what still needs to be learned at 18+ years old after they graduate.
I don't know how we got here, but education is touted as the solution and the cause of all of life's problems.
Lack of jobs? People need more education.
Crime? People just need more education.
Most of these problems are huge and have more to do with other factors like industrial policy, culture... than education which tends to mean the school system.
There was an article recently about Japan making sure people can make things by hand to keep the knowledge so we can automate it better. That is part industrial policy, part culture, part education, part corporate policy...
Or for that matter, during the big recession, Germany paid the wages of its industrial workers, to keep them employed at companies producing goods. Again, industrial policy.
Similarly, this guy has a problem with people not being able to think critically. Here's a magic thought. There isn't a profession on Earth where most people 'think critically' to the level people want of IT workers. Even doctors and lawyer who make hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most just end up learning some very key skills and repeat it. There are a few brilliant lawyers and doctors, but most are just pretty skilled at doing the same tasks over and over. I don't mean to belittle it and I hope no one else does either.
And he wants critical thinking from IT workers who make a decent, but not top wage.
Here's the problem with 'IT'.
You shouldn't need lots of people with critical thinking skills. Most of 'IT" work can and should be run like infrastructure. Well trained people, probably unionized/accredited/guild (like construction),
Right now, people only think IT needs a lot of critical thinking because it is so poorly run. Things constantly changing with no benefit, a skilled and trained workforce is not maintained, architecture and planning not done. Standard tools not there...
Note, that I speak of IT here. There is definite design work that does need critical thinking and innovation. But the number of these jobs is small and these people are definitely out there. Whether they stick around or are in the right role is a different story.
and my favorite dirty phrase "best practices"... Meaning "tell me what to do, I have no clue what the theory of operation is"
It's sad and in my opinion, from over 30 years experience, the product of testing and certification programs.... And manager/HR people who look for exactly those properties.
CASTE.. With Indian workers it always matters what their feelings about/membership of CASTE... I HATE the caste system so much.
I've worked with quite a few and a couple examples illustrate.
I worked with a small group of people 5 or so and 2 were higher caste with 'VIP' parents. (they bragged all the time). The other members kissed their feet and told them their shit smelled great. God.. just a waste of money.
I once spent 2 hours arguing over a small design issue, with them wanting to over complicate the shit out of it and talking down to me (employee one step below the person who fucking hired them). Anyway, boss comes in, listens for a bit and sees the logjam and then calls a lunch break.. Indian team storms out, meets back up with boss in hallway and starts dripping honey and making lunch plans.
I went to my desk, spent 45 minutes writing code and implementing my design for the issue at hand and then spent 15 writing something up explaining it and setup in the conference room.
I'm waiting and eating as they come back into the room with boss, Super duper high caste douche stating 'obviously this other way will not work' and looking pointedly at me.
And there is my boss, looking up at the screen and says 'Good, I knew you would take care of this during lunch. See guys, it obviously DOES work.' God, you should have seen the pissed death stare they gave me. They were all about meetings, plans, overly complicated designs, and bureaucracy.. And of course lunches out with the bosses.
Counter to that, I worked with a different larger team that was based in the 'boondocks' of India.. The top guys were lower caste and all/most employees were low cast.. BEST GROUP EVER. Honest, detail oriented, hard working.. Always did what they said they would, if they had problems meeting a deadline they gave us plenty of notice and explained why (flooding once, 4 day power outage another time).. In many ways they seemed 'American' in their approach.. As in pragmatic and result orientated. Every last one I dealt with was friendly and worked like they had something to prove. Counter to the higher caste who seemed like they happily filled out 5 forms on their way out of their mothers vagina and expected you to thank them for gracing a small person like you with their attention.. Such arrogant fucks.
You don't want generalizations? Don't base your society on generalizing people into castes.
2,000 + years of inbred bureaucrats fucking each other and hating on people who actually do work does not make a superior, just a superior idiot.
Anyway, it all depends... Caste.
Like beheaderawsp eluded to, back in the day (before IT was coined), IT people were propeller heads who enjoyed their systems and got paid to play. Some took college courses for various things and some learned on their own and sucked up everything they knew from books and mentors. They also knew how technology could benefit them and their employer, and since normal people didn't quite know what the concept of IT was, the nerds ran the IT entity themselves developing business acumen.
Then someone went ahead and officially branded IT as a field. It went to hell in a hand basket from there. IT Departments were formed and headed by dim witted executives who introduced bureaucracy, believed salesmen, and driven by their urge to put feathers in their caps. IT duties got divided up so there was less cross-training. More and more non-IT people started to influence IT. Now, unfortunately, IT Departments are swamped by people who think they know better than the propeller heads. And the real propeller heads are reduced to toolies.
Now, we're swamped with entitled college grads with degrees in Drinking and Sports Management trying to manage IT. Makes the perfect breeding ground for mediocrity.
However note that this approach will be for bottom tier IT workers, it will not have a lot of opportunity for promotion and there will be major problems when (not if) the IT field changes. Ie, we train someone with hands on skills with .NET and then in a decade suddenly no one uses .NET anymore and the person again needs retraining (as opposed to the university trained person who has learned to be adaptable). Or the person loses their job at a Windows house but there's an opening for IT at a company that uses MacOS but the person has no hands on training with it. That's a major problem even today, there are dumb IT workers by the truckload that can not do a bit of work that was not covered on a certificate test. If your entire IT staff has a narrow focus and you ask them to redesign the system from scratch, move away from Microsoft-only products, then they'll just give you a blank stare. It's really sad when a worker getting a decent salary literally starts whining that they don't know how to do something and are unable to learn how on their own.
Bullshit. Anything that can be broken down into a QA set is not IT at all. That is manual labor based off a playbook. Might as well replace the people with a phone tree.
What happens when there is no playbook and no simple solution? Real inventiveness is hard, takes time, and there is a certain amount of risk involved. Executives dont want want to hear any of this, and employees either too scared to speak up, or too powerless to influence.
The real problem is that management degrees do not include enough computer science and are not taught how to incorporate the culture of science into their business model. -And vice versa.. science degrees rarely include business and social classes that will help them lobby for their causes in the corporate environment.
I've seen it and the increase over the short time doing it myself. I've talked with older profs too - some degree is the "get off my lawn" old person bias where everything in the past is better but a large degree of it is legitimate. IT work at least how I teach it is big on problem solving.
Immigrant students from certain countries have a really hard time. Many younger students (traditional) are just as bad in similar ways. Not all but then it's never absolute for such things. I'm noticing a pattern; somebody else can worry about a formal study... when it gets so bad that people explore the problem and enough results widely known... only THEN does something happen. probably not a tested result either.
They can't problem solve and don't know what it even is. They think it is basic search, skim, memorize and recall. Their other knowledge often seems similar so even their foundation skills are WROTE LEARNING. I think this is the core of the problem, the students with a WROTE LEARNING based education (usually big on standardized testing since that encourages everything to revolve around 1 simple metric) these students are ill-prepared for having to actually apply concepts. Sure they eventually (not all of them) start to think but their abilities are poor due to lack of experience. Some students refuse to change and will resort to techniques that served them so well for most their "education" since that is proven as well as a long term conditioned behavior, these people are hopeless. I get them back again after flunking them and they simply will try over and over until they can memorize enough of the course to squeak bye. If I changed the material around enough they would NEVER pass my course except by accidentally gaining some understanding so they can pass. Plus you have the fact tools like google make it easier to use the non-thinking approach to solve problems so even things that used to require thinking can be done half awake. Online and take-home exams are extremely foolish in today's environment.
Naturally, the modern school system doesn't like flunking "customers" and has a completely fucked up mentality about education. Now the college system is slowly being infected by the same idiocy -- I know, I have relatives who've talked about the public education system's demise and many of the same things they saw are migrating into my world under a lot of the same false reasoning as well...
To be fair, some students WANT to learn. I really feel bad for those who have a poor background who really struggle to grasp this stuff; that is something I notice more with the immigrants - they sincerely work hard while the Americans don't seem to care; overly confident that their half ass skills are plenty good. The immigrant is more upset when they don't "get it" when my grading system shows them doing poorly and their old useless techniques fail them.... they will end up blaming me unless other profs follow thru (not caring what the "customer" thinks) while the Americans won't hold it against me, as if the whole thing is a meaningless game/sport between me and them.
Maybe it's just me (at the ripe old age of 28) and the people I normally associate with (decently educated people) but isn't the entire point of being in IT to be able to diagnose a problem, develop a solution, and implement it? Fundamental understanding of business is an afterthought for me until i got my current job where i interface directly with the CEO and learned a lot about business.
As well, personally, the solution and the implementation are the same thing to me. WTF is wrong with this hunk of technology and how do i make it work again? Hardware tends to be black and white (unless you've got a very whimsical piece of hardware like an Abit IX38 QuadGT motherboard...) and software involves any number of combinations. Networking can be an entirely other monster.
If you can't deduce what part of something isn't working or have the ability to find out why (assuming you didn't know the answer in the first place), you have no right to be in IT or call yourself an IT person.
There are really only 3 professions based on the multi-thousand year long history of people in the world, Doctors, Lawyers and Priests. Everyone else is a craftsman.
As soon as I'm ordained by Microsoft, I can be the latter.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
> Have you never had to deal with constant interruptions from management and clients/customers asking about the status of tickets?
I know what you mean.
"I'd be glad to talk to you about this. Right now, would you prefer that I discuss it with you, or go fix it?"
That line normally puts an end to any interruptions. :)
I've been fortunate that I've always been in a position where I can ask that question. I've either been the president of the company, or the system owner - the only one who can fix it. For Y2K, I did hire a couple of extra people to answer the phone and say "We apologize for the inconvenience. We are aware of the problem and working on resolving it." It turns out that we didn't need them for Y2K since that was just a display issue for any sanely designed software. 2038 could be a much larger problem.
I would ask has there ever been a time that a majority of the working population displayed critical thinking skills? Old timers will likely say, "Back in the day..." but I wager that when they were the young-uns, the older timers likely said the same thing about their skill set. I think the vast majority of people indentured to a wage from top to bottom of the workplace hierarchy are lacking in the ability. But as noted in above comments, I'm just another hater too, or so they say.
Our education system has been failing a lot more subjects than IT. Although I know the majority on here are liberals, school is not a place for indoctrination into any political belief as that is time taken from learning the important subjects like science, history, and English. We need history to prevent redoing the mistakes of the past. We need to be able to construct our writing into logical order, so people will understand what we are talking about and to get our point across no matter what your political beliefs. Being able to out shout the opposition wins no argument and loses converts. "Common core" is far worse than bad. Their approach to math makes it overly complicated, they are weak on science and strong on political correctness. IOW they teach kids to be meek and obedient little elves. They kill creative thinking which is essential for science. Get hold of a teaching guide for common cor. Don't listen to either side. Read the manual and decide for your self. If our school system is poor with science, it will look great compared to common core. They are dumbing school down to the lowest common denominator and making it a cheering section for the entitlement crowd.
t's really sad when a worker getting a decent salary literally starts whining that they don't know how to do something and are unable to learn how on their own.
I agree whining is unprofessional, but I don't see why in IT it's assumed you should be able to pick up anything on short notice with no training.
Our CAD drafters get training on new releases of the software as it can be pretty different, and they can use having new features explained or pointed out.
I don't know why when it comes to general computer use people are expected to get it by osmosis.
And when you're talking about an entirely new environment, sure they probably could wing it enough to get it going, but how likely is it they won't make some boneheaded mistake that might have been avoided if they got basic training on a new platform or design.
A personal example: I come from AD and Group Policy. We started doing Puppet for other platforms. My first inclination was to say, this is probably like a slightly different implementation of GPOs, so I will install an ENC, The Foreman. Then I'll have hostgroups mirror my AD OUs. It turns out that helps, and hurts. Trying to apply manifests to hostgoups like GPOs on OUs can work, but in the way you end up writing manifests, it's often easier or better to do filtering in the manifest (or I'm finding that right now anyway, maybe it'll be different after a few more years). I generally shy away from filtering inside a GPO - both because it's kind of weird (WMI filters, deny apply permissions, GPP with Item Level Targetting) and because it's non-discoverable. In Puppet, a particular manifest pretty much lays it out, so you're not wondering about which of 3 different methods might be making something not apply...
Now, I think I'm doing OK, but maybe having training on Puppet would have had me make a better choice in the beginning, or point out some fundamental thing I'm still getting wrong, but don't see because I'm learning enough to do my current task as I go.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
I certainly have to pick up everything with no training. That's why there are college degrees so that people learn how to learn. Sure, occasionally you bring in a corporate trainer for a day for their product when it's obtuse, but generally you should be able to point people to the stack of manuals, white papers, and the web.
Wah, wah wah. The younger generation is going to hell; the sky is falling; if only those kids were as smart as, good-looking as, (insert your own description) we were/are. I've heard same complaints everywhere - so boring. Yes, there are many ignorant, annoying, lazy people in every profession. In fact, I remember some I worked with in the 1970s and earlier, and some of them were OLD and had advanced degrees and positions. And I'm sick of all the "critical thinking" talk, since no one can define what that means. I'm 76, so, of course, I'm outstanding at everything!