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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.
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"
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?
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.
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."
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.