We track both severity and priority. Severity is graded into
1. Critical/Showstopper (weightage 3)
2. Serious (weightage 2)
3. Medium (weightage 1)
4. Low (no weightage)
5. Nice to have (which in many cases is actually a change request)
Priority is graded as
1. Immediate
2. High
3. Medium
4. Low
Severity is used to analyse the Quality of the software by assigning weightages and then calculating the overall average of all the bugs. If the severity index is more than 1.5 the software is still not stable.
Priority is used to attempt to fix bugs. The priority gets bumped up automatically if a bug has not been fixed for more than a week. So if the developement team hasnt fixed a medium prioruty bug for more a week it becomes High priority since it means developers are not fixing bugs or the project in some way is out of control. This can also mean that developers are too busy fixing high and immediate bugs and havent come around to medium bugs which indicates that the project is slightly out of control.
CTO is more of a role in a software or hardware company who is reponsible for the technology issues and in many cases can also be the chief architect or some such fancy nomination.
CIO provides Management information to take decisions about business. A CIO is a must in all companies esp non software who is responsible for running the EDP or MIS operations (as they are called) and abstracting that information for the top management to enable them to take decisions.
A non software/hardware/tech company does not need a CTO. But software/hw/tech companies will need someone who will provide technical direction. Many times the COO/CEO herself is providing that direction and in that sense is the CTO/CEO such as Big Bill, Steve Jobs?, etc.
Here are some retention strategies adopted by software companies to hold on to their talent.
Before that you have to understand why people and how they leave. It is rarely a well thought out plan. They mostly leave when they are down in the present job and the other guy is offering something better. Make sure it is difficul to get your guys. You may not stop all of them but you will be surprised how many you can stop.
1. Benefits which accrue at the end of the year or two years. I mean stuff like fully paid vacation (including travel and stay) to someplace every 1/2 years. They will loook forward to that and it will stop some of them from taking offers from prospective employers. I mean you have worked hard for 1.5 years and the company is going to pay for that vacation to that paradise island and you have made plans. Are you going to quit and take up something at this point. You will negotiate that with the new employer and it will push your costs very high.
2. Stock Options. One more golden handcuff which helps hold employees.
3. Bonuses for staying five years. Paying a 30-40,000 dollar bonus at the end of five years helps hold on to employees and makes sure that getting them is a lot harder for the competition. Especially after they have spent a couple of years. By that time if you are a small company you would have grown enough to afford it.
4. Of course I am assuming that you are not paying them below industry average. A sense of pride in working for the company can be instilled by involving the family in terms of letting them come to work. Parents, family and siblings should be encouraged to come to workplace and also be part of something. Also encourage partnerships and friendships developing in the company. You wouldnt leave an organisation where you have friends and when things go bad you have a valve to let off steam about what happened at the office.
The problem is not with the way management treats IT people, it is the way companies treat IT. It is a specialised field which should be left to the experts. Only professional software services firms can provide the following to IT people. Professional Growth, Professional Pride, COnstant training on new technologies and specialised treatment for specialised task force.
Just as miners are treated differently and the wall street types are treated differently IT professionals are different. How can a company whose main line of business is selling industrial equipment provide career growth and professional growth to the small IT dept in the basement. Instead of looking to provide better facilities and treatment to IT people it should look to outsource the entire IT to a services company. I dont think that companies hire mechanics to fix their employees cars. They go to the nearest garage. The IT services companies have evolved specialised atmospheres where technical people are kings. I work in one such company and the typical compensation for the support staff such as admin or finance or hr is much lower than the technical guys. Technical guys are treated with special care. They have help desks which will help us take care many little things such as arranging for parties, arranging for accomodation for my personal guests ect. All this so that I can concentrate on my job.
It will also solve the problem of constant training for employees and feeling left out in an environment where everybody is discussing how company A will survive the market crunch and the IT guy is discussing how linux will affect Windows. As far as employees of company A are concerned linux can go take a walk, they are more worried about other things such as their jobs.
Imagine someone comes up with a robot that can write software. Then your grandma could use the robot to create programs. Would software engineers love the robot? Take out engineers and put in farmers and weavers. Take out robots and put in the factories and looms. And things will seem a little more clearer or rather bleaker. All people who feel threatened by technology have a right to protest against it. Ridiculing that right aint right. BTW there is an inherent contradiction in the argument that the original luddites were heroes. Has not crime reduced over the years, has not lifespans increased and has not medical science made advances. By that argument luddites must have been wrong and therefore not heroes but stupid.
The problem with democracy is that you should understand that the majority opinion wins. If you argue that the majority is a fool then you are facist.
1. To cut down costs and more importantly speed of communication with the rest of the world especially other villages and cities. The costs of communicating through long distance calls is very high and the Internet can cut that costs by a tenth. When you realise that people in the villages do not have CASH to spend on communication they will welcome the Internet. However just because they do not have cash does not mean they are necessarily dirt poor. They dont need a A.C/fan to keep themselves cool. They dont need to drink coke. The food is very simple and easily available. They take care of their own most of the times unlike city folk who dont care for the people around them.
2. They can access Govt information which is one of the major costs since htey have to travel to the nearest city/town to get that. The govt in some states is also ensuring that all records and process information is available on the net for the convenience of the people.
3. They may access the net for education. While this may not be widely used, this is a possibility.
4. Medical help and information. The Primary Health centres in villages which are staffed by nurses can get help from doctors across the world and from databases. Medical Information can be maintained thru the net at a central location for help and analysis.
5. Information collection. One of the problems with India is the lack of reliable information about various things. How many acres under Rice, Wheat and SUgar Cane. What is the expected yeild. WHile this may seem worthless information to geeks, this helps the govt plan a lot of things such as how much should the waterflow thru a dam should be. HOw much electricity is needed, which will really help a country.
I should know becos I come from an Indian village.
Most legal disputes take ~25 years to be settled in India. If you shift your base here, you dont have to worry about court cases. Why do you think MS opened their second R&D centre in India!!?
One of the most important attributes of geek gods is the amout of persecution they have gone thru. Come on, which self respecting geek would not like to get persecuted. One that parameter I guess Kepler would come very high up. He was killed! right! And what about Galileo. And without these guys, all you slashdotters in the US would never have been there becos you would have fallen off the earth's edge. Something to think about.
I would like to see an LSDN online with comprehensive information that is well organised like the MSDN Online site. The metaphor of books is well used there. It would help system administrators, developers and managers in finding information quickly at a single point.
I think no technology that has so many dangers will be adopted in the form it is. People will wait till it matures or is safe. I really dont think I am about to wire up my tubelight to the internet till I am sure that it is safe from someone using my home network to toast my house.
I dont know much about the US but as far as India goes, Geeks R good. They r more revered and given more importance by society than jocks. The jocks in our society r the nogood layabouts who wont get a job, and whom u would never allow ur daughter to marry. And no they r never seen as leftists. On the contrary most of them do well enough to go to the US to make loads of money (heard of Sabeer Bhatia, Sanjay Kumar and Silicon Valley) so they r not definitely confused with leftists. Like I said in India - Geeks R Good.
Would you go to a mechanic who claimed to solve all your servicing needs with a screwdriver. Call me old fashioned but I wouldnt. Would you go to a consultant who claimed to solve all your problems with Linux. Again, I wouldnt. Just as M$ is wrong in its "extreme right" stance, Linux users could be getting into the trap of "extreme left" stance. The problem is not with right or left but with "extreme" Any extreme is bad. Too much of anything can be bad. (including middle. That is why I keep fluctuating)
Okay NT is not as good as it should be. LInux is not God either. It has its fault too. On the desktop it is not very good. And X sucks. It is a different matter that is sucks independant of the OS.
What people will have to look at is both NT and linux will coexist. I want an alternative to NT not another NT in disguise who claims that he can do anything and is the be all and end all. I need an operating system that will augument and give me choice. We are using linux on our network to get somethings done. But I would still rate Win as a better desktop OS. HOpefully Linux will become better in the coming years. And so will NT. Then all of us will be winners becos there will be competition and also better features. Linux should thank NT for the competition and respond to issues raised by NT admins instead of ridiculing them. FOr example, there are no apps to match Notes or MSX. There is no Directory Services and so on. Concentrate on having better features. Not on NT.
Understand that the success of Linux so far has been becos it quietly concentrated on providing a better OS and not on hype. Dont worry about the hype. Do a good job and it will pay off.
Arent you missing the point? If you want the best and it happens to be a CSS, you will be led up a dependency trail which will eventually catch up with you. Your costs will go up and you may not have enough OSS people to help you when the time comes. If all people start thinking the same way, the time will come when the CSS people will totally dominate the SW field and all users will have to dance to their tunes.
Look at performance holistically. Performance consists of many factors including the ability to modify SW if required. Dont take a very one sided view of performance.
Since you are all gamers, I am sure you understand that this is a strategy game. You have to not only win against the evil forces by blasting their brains, you also have to play an intelligent game by NOT playing into the hands of people who can take advantage later. These are rules which are not displayed with F1. I hope you win this game. Best of luck
How much is enough money? One billion? Two, three or four? And what software should we buy? I am sure that the association also has a study (by Mindcraft?) which shows which educational software are best for the mental growth of children. That would be of great help to administrators, teachers and children who dont know that they are not spending enough. This will also give us a simple checklist of software that needs to be bought to keep the association happy. They can revise the list every six months so that all schools will also know exactly what to buy and when to buy it.
I remember a questionnaire from MAD magazine which asked questions about your address, where you work and what time you would at home and finally asked you to sketch your house key.
I think it may be too premature to look at migrating from NT to Linux right now. What is needed is concentration on Linux-NT coexistance and working together. Linux will have to put the foot in the door by getting in as Web Servers, Proxy Server and File and Print Server. Co-existing with NT. Over time as SysAdmins get used to Linux and also understand that Linux is better than NT they will shift to Linux by pointing out the robustness and cost effectiveness of Linux. This will also earn them brownie points for reducing the cost of IT in the organisation. It should be their idea.
I work in an office where NT and Linux coexist. We plan to use Linux as a proxy server. We are also getting a linux based web server. We are not moving desktops to Linux yet. But you can bet that over time we will slowly but surely.
Who will Microsoft Fight? As M$ itself has agreed they have to fight the process, not a company. It is going to be Gulliver against thousands of Liliputs. He can never win.
The key areas for battle are going to be Training, becos if you look at the early success of Unix (I am not suggesting that it is not now) it was becos of its free availability in the campuses across the world. Linux too has to be omnipresent in all the teaching places in the world. All students should learn Linux first. Linux and maybe Windows. In such a scenario the weakness of NT will automatically surface. Also people will start wondering why they should pay for NT when Linux is free.
Linux will not need a voice. Linux will be the voice - the voice of conscience. Let us ensure that the next generation of students across the world know Linux before they actually come to work and see OSes like NT. They will laugh Nt out of the market. Meanwhile let us counter the NT threat by ensurign the one more college or school installs Linux to learn all about operating systems and applications. For evey threat one school. For every bug in NT one person (that itself should cover the world including bugs)
This will also mean training and certification courses which will help people. And please dont have exams like the MCP exams by Sylvan Prometric. The easiest exam to pass is the MCP in NT. I have seen (I am not kidding) people who have not seen the NT OS who can write and pass the exam. People in my country have mastered the system of exam passing by going thru braindumps.
We need more poeple who can conduct training programs on Linux. LUGs should take a more active role now to counter. LUGs should adopt and help schools, universities and colleges.
Who will Microsoft Fight? As M$ itself has agreed they have to fight the process, not a company. It is going to be Gulliver against thousands of Liliputs. He can never win.
The key areas for battle are going to be Training, becos if you look at the early success of Unix (I am not suggesting that it is not now) it was becos of its free availability in the campuses across the world. Linux too has to be omnipresent in all the teaching places in the world. All students should learn Linux first. Linux and maybe Windows. In such a scenario the weakness of NT will automatically surface. Also people will start wondering why they should pay for NT when Linux is free.
Linux will not need a voice. Linux will be the voice - the voice of conscience. Let us ensure that the next generation of students across the world know Linux before they actually come to work and see OSes like NT. They will laugh Nt out of the market. Meanwhile let us counter the NT threat by ensurign the one more college or school installs Linux to learn all about operating systems and applications. For evey threat one school. For every bug in NT one person (that itself should cover the world including bugs)
This will also mean training and certification courses which will help people. And please dont have exams like the MCP exams by Sylvan Prometric. The easiest exam to pass is the MCP in NT. I have seen (I am not kidding) people who have not seen the NT OS who can write and pass the exam. People in my country have mastered the system of exam passing by going thru braindumps.
We need more poeple who can conduct training programs on Linux. LUGs should take a more active role now to counter. LUGs should adopt and help schools, universities and colleges.
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We track both severity and priority. Severity is graded into
1. Critical/Showstopper (weightage 3)
2. Serious (weightage 2)
3. Medium (weightage 1)
4. Low (no weightage)
5. Nice to have (which in many cases is actually a change request)
Priority is graded as
1. Immediate
2. High
3. Medium
4. Low
Severity is used to analyse the Quality of the software by assigning weightages and then calculating the overall average of all the bugs. If the severity index is more than 1.5 the software is still not stable.
Priority is used to attempt to fix bugs. The priority gets bumped up automatically if a bug has not been fixed for more than a week. So if the developement team hasnt fixed a medium prioruty bug for more a week it becomes High priority since it means developers are not fixing bugs or the project in some way is out of control. This can also mean that developers are too busy fixing high and immediate bugs and havent come around to medium bugs which indicates that the project is slightly out of control.
CTO is more of a role in a software or hardware company who is reponsible for the technology issues and in many cases can also be the chief architect or some such fancy nomination. CIO provides Management information to take decisions about business. A CIO is a must in all companies esp non software who is responsible for running the EDP or MIS operations (as they are called) and abstracting that information for the top management to enable them to take decisions. A non software/hardware/tech company does not need a CTO. But software/hw/tech companies will need someone who will provide technical direction. Many times the COO/CEO herself is providing that direction and in that sense is the CTO/CEO such as Big Bill, Steve Jobs?, etc.
Here are some retention strategies adopted by software companies to hold on to their talent.
Before that you have to understand why people and how they leave. It is rarely a well thought out plan. They mostly leave when they are down in the present job and the other guy is offering something better. Make sure it is difficul to get your guys. You may not stop all of them but you will be surprised how many you can stop.
1. Benefits which accrue at the end of the year or two years. I mean stuff like fully paid vacation (including travel and stay) to someplace every 1/2 years. They will loook forward to that and it will stop some of them from taking offers from prospective employers. I mean you have worked hard for 1.5 years and the company is going to pay for that vacation to that paradise island and you have made plans. Are you going to quit and take up something at this point. You will negotiate that with the new employer and it will push your costs very high.
2. Stock Options. One more golden handcuff which helps hold employees.
3. Bonuses for staying five years. Paying a 30-40,000 dollar bonus at the end of five years helps hold on to employees and makes sure that getting them is a lot harder for the competition. Especially after they have spent a couple of years. By that time if you are a small company you would have grown enough to afford it.
4. Of course I am assuming that you are not paying them below industry average. A sense of pride in working for the company can be instilled by involving the family in terms of letting them come to work. Parents, family and siblings should be encouraged to come to workplace and also be part of something. Also encourage partnerships and friendships developing in the company. You wouldnt leave an organisation where you have friends and when things go bad you have a valve to let off steam about what happened at the office.
Debian it is.
The problem is not with the way management treats IT people, it is the way companies treat IT. It is a specialised field which should be left to the experts. Only professional software services firms can provide the following to IT people. Professional Growth, Professional Pride, COnstant training on new technologies and specialised treatment for specialised task force.
Just as miners are treated differently and the wall street types are treated differently IT professionals are different. How can a company whose main line of business is selling industrial equipment provide career growth and professional growth to the small IT dept in the basement. Instead of looking to provide better facilities and treatment to IT people it should look to outsource the entire IT to a services company. I dont think that companies hire mechanics to fix their employees cars. They go to the nearest garage. The IT services companies have evolved specialised atmospheres where technical people are kings. I work in one such company and the typical compensation for the support staff such as admin or finance or hr is much lower than the technical guys. Technical guys are treated with special care. They have help desks which will help us take care many little things such as arranging for parties, arranging for accomodation for my personal guests ect. All this so that I can concentrate on my job.
It will also solve the problem of constant training for employees and feeling left out in an environment where everybody is discussing how company A will survive the market crunch and the IT guy is discussing how linux will affect Windows. As far as employees of company A are concerned linux can go take a walk, they are more worried about other things such as their jobs.
Imagine someone comes up with a robot that can write software. Then your grandma could use the robot to create programs. Would software engineers love the robot? Take out engineers and put in farmers and weavers. Take out robots and put in the factories and looms. And things will seem a little more clearer or rather bleaker. All people who feel threatened by technology have a right to protest against it. Ridiculing that right aint right. BTW there is an inherent contradiction in the argument that the original luddites were heroes. Has not crime reduced over the years, has not lifespans increased and has not medical science made advances. By that argument luddites must have been wrong and therefore not heroes but stupid.
The problem with democracy is that you should understand that the majority opinion wins. If you argue that the majority is a fool then you are facist.
1. To cut down costs and more importantly speed of communication with the rest of the world especially other villages and cities. The costs of communicating through long distance calls is very high and the Internet can cut that costs by a tenth. When you realise that people in the villages do not have CASH to spend on communication they will welcome the Internet. However just because they do not have cash does not mean they are necessarily dirt poor. They dont need a A.C/fan to keep themselves cool. They dont need to drink coke. The food is very simple and easily available. They take care of their own most of the times unlike city folk who dont care for the people around them.
2. They can access Govt information which is one of the major costs since htey have to travel to the nearest city/town to get that. The govt in some states is also ensuring that all records and process information is available on the net for the convenience of the people.
3. They may access the net for education. While this may not be widely used, this is a possibility.
4. Medical help and information. The Primary Health centres in villages which are staffed by nurses can get help from doctors across the world and from databases. Medical Information can be maintained thru the net at a central location for help and analysis.
5. Information collection. One of the problems with India is the lack of reliable information about various things. How many acres under Rice, Wheat and SUgar Cane. What is the expected yeild. WHile this may seem worthless information to geeks, this helps the govt plan a lot of things such as how much should the waterflow thru a dam should be. HOw much electricity is needed, which will really help a country.
I should know becos I come from an Indian village.
Most legal disputes take ~25 years to be settled in India. If you shift your base here, you dont have to worry about court cases. Why do you think MS opened their second R&D centre in India!!?
One of the most important attributes of geek gods is the amout of persecution they have gone thru. Come on, which self respecting geek would not like to get persecuted. One that parameter I guess Kepler would come very high up. He was killed! right! And what about Galileo. And without these guys, all you slashdotters in the US would never have been there becos you would have fallen off the earth's edge. Something to think about.
I actually thought of Linux Solution Developers Network. Also LSD(N) Online also would give most developers a high :-)
I would like to see an LSDN online with comprehensive information that is well organised like the MSDN Online site. The metaphor of books is well used there. It would help system administrators, developers and managers in finding information quickly at a single point.
I think no technology that has so many dangers will be adopted in the form it is. People will wait till it matures or is safe. I really dont think I am about to wire up my tubelight to the internet till I am sure that it is safe from someone using my home network to toast my house.
I dont know much about the US but as far as India goes, Geeks R good. They r more revered and given more importance by society than jocks. The jocks in our society r the nogood layabouts who wont get a job, and whom u would never allow ur daughter to marry. And no they r never seen as leftists. On the contrary most of them do well enough to go to the US to make loads of money (heard of Sabeer Bhatia, Sanjay Kumar and Silicon Valley) so they r not definitely confused with leftists. Like I said in India - Geeks R Good.
Would you go to a mechanic who claimed to solve all your servicing needs with a screwdriver. Call me old fashioned but I wouldnt. Would you go to a consultant who claimed to solve all your problems with Linux. Again, I wouldnt. Just as M$ is wrong in its "extreme right" stance, Linux users could be getting into the trap of "extreme left" stance. The problem is not with right or left but with "extreme" Any extreme is bad. Too much of anything can be bad. (including middle. That is why I keep fluctuating)
Okay NT is not as good as it should be. LInux is not God either. It has its fault too. On the desktop it is not very good. And X sucks. It is a different matter that is sucks independant of the OS.
What people will have to look at is both NT and linux will coexist. I want an alternative to NT not another NT in disguise who claims that he can do anything and is the be all and end all. I need an operating system that will augument and give me choice. We are using linux on our network to get somethings done. But I would still rate Win as a better desktop OS. HOpefully Linux will become better in the coming years. And so will NT. Then all of us will be winners becos there will be competition and also better features. Linux should thank NT for the competition and respond to issues raised by NT admins instead of ridiculing them. FOr example, there are no apps to match Notes or MSX. There is no Directory Services and so on. Concentrate on having better features. Not on NT.
Understand that the success of Linux so far has been becos it quietly concentrated on providing a better OS and not on hype. Dont worry about the hype. Do a good job and it will pay off.
Arent you missing the point? If you want the best and it happens to be a CSS, you will be led up a dependency trail which will eventually catch up with you. Your costs will go up and you may not have enough OSS people to help you when the time comes. If all people start thinking the same way, the time will come when the CSS people will totally dominate the SW field and all users will have to dance to their tunes.
Look at performance holistically. Performance consists of many factors including the ability to modify SW if required. Dont take a very one sided view of performance.
Since you are all gamers, I am sure you understand that this is a strategy game. You have to not only win against the evil forces by blasting their brains, you also have to play an intelligent game by NOT playing into the hands of people who can take advantage later. These are rules which are not displayed with F1. I hope you win this game. Best of luck
How much is enough money? One billion? Two, three or four? And what software should we buy? I am sure that the association also has a study (by Mindcraft?) which shows which educational software are best for the mental growth of children. That would be of great help to administrators, teachers and children who dont know that they are not spending enough. This will also give us a simple checklist of software that needs to be bought to keep the association happy. They can revise the list every six months so that all schools will also know exactly what to buy and when to buy it.
I remember a questionnaire from MAD magazine which asked questions about your address, where you work and what time you would at home and finally asked you to sketch your house key.
I think it may be too premature to look at migrating from NT to Linux right now. What is needed is concentration on Linux-NT coexistance and working together. Linux will have to put the foot in the door by getting in as Web Servers, Proxy Server and File and Print Server. Co-existing with NT. Over time as SysAdmins get used to Linux and also understand that Linux is better than NT they will shift to Linux by pointing out the robustness and cost effectiveness of Linux. This will also earn them brownie points for reducing the cost of IT in the organisation. It should be their idea.
I work in an office where NT and Linux coexist. We plan to use Linux as a proxy server. We are also getting a linux based web server. We are not moving desktops to Linux yet. But you can bet that over time we will slowly but surely.
Who will Microsoft Fight? As M$ itself has agreed they have to fight the process, not a company. It is going to be Gulliver against thousands of Liliputs. He can never win.
The key areas for battle are going to be Training, becos if you look at the early success of Unix (I am not suggesting that it is not now) it was becos of its free availability in the campuses across the world. Linux too has to be omnipresent in all the teaching places in the world. All students should learn Linux first. Linux and maybe Windows. In such a scenario the weakness of NT will automatically surface. Also people will start wondering why they should pay for NT when Linux is free.
Linux will not need a voice. Linux will be the voice - the voice of conscience. Let us ensure that the next generation of students across the world know Linux before they actually come to work and see OSes like NT. They will laugh Nt out of the market. Meanwhile let us counter the NT threat by ensurign the one more college or school installs Linux to learn all about operating systems and applications. For evey threat one school. For every bug in NT one person (that itself should cover the world including bugs)
This will also mean training and certification courses which will help people. And please dont have exams like the MCP exams by Sylvan Prometric. The easiest exam to pass is the MCP in NT. I have seen (I am not kidding) people who have not seen the NT OS who can write and pass the exam. People in my country have mastered the system of exam passing by going thru braindumps.
We need more poeple who can conduct training programs on Linux. LUGs should take a more active role now to counter. LUGs should adopt and help schools, universities and colleges.
Who will Microsoft Fight? As M$ itself has agreed they have to fight the process, not a company. It is going to be Gulliver against thousands of Liliputs. He can never win.
The key areas for battle are going to be Training, becos if you look at the early success of Unix (I am not suggesting that it is not now) it was becos of its free availability in the campuses across the world. Linux too has to be omnipresent in all the teaching places in the world. All students should learn Linux first. Linux and maybe Windows. In such a scenario the weakness of NT will automatically surface. Also people will start wondering why they should pay for NT when Linux is free.
Linux will not need a voice. Linux will be the voice - the voice of conscience. Let us ensure that the next generation of students across the world know Linux before they actually come to work and see OSes like NT. They will laugh Nt out of the market. Meanwhile let us counter the NT threat by ensurign the one more college or school installs Linux to learn all about operating systems and applications. For evey threat one school. For every bug in NT one person (that itself should cover the world including bugs)
This will also mean training and certification courses which will help people. And please dont have exams like the MCP exams by Sylvan Prometric. The easiest exam to pass is the MCP in NT. I have seen (I am not kidding) people who have not seen the NT OS who can write and pass the exam. People in my country have mastered the system of exam passing by going thru braindumps.
We need more poeple who can conduct training programs on Linux. LUGs should take a more active role now to counter. LUGs should adopt and help schools, universities and colleges.