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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.
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!”
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"
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?
Eh, I've been both an IT guy and a lawyer, and honestly the bar exam isn't particularly hard or connected to what lawyers actually do. From what I've heard the higher-end certifications in IT do a decent job.
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."
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.
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.
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".
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.
I more or less agree with your assessment (but I'll eventually disagree ha ha!). My formal education was in music performance. However my hobbies were (and are) computer science, amateur radio, physics and theology. Yes I'm an autodidact. But have studied at two major universities.
In the realm of critical thinking... a deep theoretical understanding is priceless. Because theory is flexible. But more important in my mind is an understanding of the RFCs behind how all this stuff works. Know them, and you can really troubleshoot. Know them, and you get to be the "pro from Dover" when no other tech can solve a problem.
With a mass of knowledge- comes the possibility of thinking critically. This is of course assuming the person in question has a mind big enough to form quality theories of their own. The problem isn't always education... it's also quality of the brain. And the larger a field grows, the lower the mean IQ of it's members.
To illustrate:
I once watched a recent computer science graduate (A Truly Dubious and Short Lived IT Director) introduce a recursive loop into an Ethernet network, on an unswitched segment, which resulted in (you guessed it) significant portions of an 18 building WAN/LAN system to simply go offline. Explaining to this person why things didn't work was useless. They thought they were an expert (because of the degree). Sadly, all of the information they spouted about the problem was completely correct- except the application of that information.
You can't really teach people how to apply information, if they cannot build working models which closely match reality. Sure.. anyone can come up with an idea and call it a theory. But can you come up with a theory that works?
So in a sense, I fall back once again to the idea that the talent pool is diluted. At the same time, the equipment is becoming more and more appliance packaged.
My solution? I'm looking around for something different to do for the next 30 years. If I can get up to speed fast enough, I'll participate in AMSAT. I'll go back to performing music. Maybe even get a physics degree.
But I'll be free to be excellent.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
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.
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.
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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