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IT from Technician to Profession?

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by beads 4 views

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Over the course of my lengthy, 5 day (including the weekend), vacation. I began thinking about the overall state of the IT economy.

IT is slowly comming out of its 3-4 year economic slump as it has before and will again. Its a cyclical thing. Get used to it. So, heres the real question: How does IT become a profession instead of just a technician's job?

Allow me to set some specific guidelines that are widely accepted so we don't have to negotiate a few terms.

Profession:

pro?fes?sion Audio pronunciation of "profession" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-fshn)
n.

1.
1. An occupation or career: ?One of the highest compliments a child can pay a parent is to choose his or her profession? (Joan Nathan).
2. An occupation, such as law, medicine, or engineering, that requires considerable training and specialized study.
3. The body of qualified persons in an occupation or field: members of the teaching profession.
2. An act or instance of professing; a declaration.
3. An avowal of faith or belief.
4. A faith or belief: believers of various professions.

Technician:

n)
n.

An expert in a technique, as:

1. One whose occupation requires training in a specific technical process: an electronics technician; an automotive technician.
2. One who is known for skill in an intellectual or artistic technique.

Now, when doing my undergraduate studies I was taught that a profession was much more limited than the above loosely based definitions in that a profession was limited to requiring an advanced education where admittance to the field would ultimately be determined by a profesional organization by passing some form of standardized testing procedure(s). That is to say actual 'professions' would include: Physicians (not 'doctors' which is a pet peeve of mine), Dentists, Lawyers, Certified Public Accountants and Engineers. Short list all and all.

What the IT industry instead or has allowed to become an area where anyone can call themselves an 'IT Professional', 'Computer Technician', 'Network Engineer', et. al. without the slightest bit of actual training or knowledge. Theres simply no law against it. Though I suppose I could buy a garage and refer to myself as a mechanic its just as useless for me to say.

Are we hurting ourselves by not setting the highest of standards? In an industry with a surprising number of standards applied to nearly everything we do we are surprisingly lax about setting standards on the human capital side of the equation. How does a technical field become an acredited profession?

Calling much of the support staff: Engineers or Network Engineers really ticks off the 4 year PEs (Professional Engineers) of the world. Yet, I have a Bachelors, Masters and Ph D in Computer Science and much of what I do and have done in the past requires a great swath of cross disciplinary skills, i.e. Heat disapation, economics, structual engineering, bandwidth analysis, break and fix, forecasting, statistics and an entire host of others. These are just a tip of the iceburg when you think about it. How would a newly created professional organization set testing standards? Its been tried before and obviously failed miserably. Same can be said for unionizing IT.

My observation is that IT needs to strive forward in order to be taken less for granted and more like other recognized fields of study. Untill IT decides what type of field it wants to be the field will forever be given a back seat to more developed fields of study. Theres a good deal to be done here and I am interested in hearing or reading your remarks on the situation as these are all very broad statements and questions.

Enjoy!

- beads

64 replies

by jbaker

As in most other things, IT cannot really be compared with any other job/profession. In IT, a technician is generally a person that works on the component level, troubleshooting, repairing, and replacing bad hardware and/or applications.

Most IT Professionals work at multiple levels, from component all the way up to network or LAN/WAN/MAN. They have to knowledge and skills to work across multiple disciplines, from light programming to configuring a server.

by ole88

While I agree with you that "Most IT Professionals work at multiple levels" they all still have a specific area of IT that they specialize in. Someone who knows the networking side of the house very well is still going to remember server configuration or some programming language they took classes in. I say that IT can be compared to other professions. Everything starts out as a job, moves to career level, then ends up being a profession - think about it. You have shade-tree mechanics, mechanics and then you have ASE certified mechanics. The third one would be a professional. Many of these people specialize in a specific make or set of makes of automobiles.

In IT, you have your perpetrators (or infiltrators) who just have some certification with no formal training, then you have your green ranks (fresh from college in the past few years), your career people who have been in it for several years and are working on knowledge of a specific area, then you have your professionals who have been working for several more years within a specific subject/knowledge area.

Anyone can setup a Microsoft or Unix platform and get it running, but can they keep it running and/or fine tune it for a certain task or set of tasks? That is where you get your professional, someone who can do the requirements gathering, decide on a specific course of action and tools, set it up/code it, test it and configure it as needed. The people running around with a certification in IT and formal training in stock trading most likely can't do it - or they can't do it right. That is what makes us professionals.

by dc guy

The meaning of the words is in the connotations, not in the dictionary definitions.

A "professional" is someone who is recognized by their peers as qualified to be one of them. That permits them to charge for their work, distinguishing them from "amateurs." This is an important distinction and is used universally in the creative "professions." Formal certification is not necessary. If you're not a good guitarist word will simply get around and nobody will hire you to play.

"Professional" also means that you have a body of knowledge beyond the basic skills of your trade, another distinction from the amateurs. When somebody engages the services of a professional, they expect objective advice, someone to tell them all the stuff they need to know but don't. A professional admits when it would be a bad idea to do what you want even though you're willing to pay them. "Sure, I could retrofit a block heater into this 25-year-old diesel engine that you drove up from Miami easily enough, but it will leak coolant, and maybe even oil, forever after."

So, are we professionals? Do we know enough about our client's business and the track record of IT to be able to discuss frankly with them the down side of their proposed project? If they haven't done their own risk analysis, do we do it for them, and if the chance of success is so low that it would be foolish to tackle it, do we tell them? If we try to be honest and tell them, will all the rest of our fellow "professionals" do the same, or will twenty of them jump at the chance to grab the money?

It also comes down to our ability to even do what we say we can do. The quality of the artifacts we deliver to the people who pay for them is, on the average, woeful. If a civil engineer, an automotive engineer, a chemical engineer, an electrical engineer, an architectural engineer, or any other kind of engineer delivered a product with the failure rate, ergonomics, and mismatch between features and requirements of the average information system, their name would become legend and they'd never work again.

Plumbers do better work than we do without even going to college. Can you imagine walking into your newly remodeled bathroom and having the toilet or the shower work as poorly and as dangerously as the internet? Would you pay them? Would you even let them walk off the premises without fixing it?

We are not engineers and we are not professionals. We are amateur shade-tree mechanics who have fooled the entire population of the planet into paying us.

by gralfus

I am a professional and not a "shade-tree mechanic". I have not fooled people into paying me, I do things for them that they are not able to do, and that they don't want to learn. I am an expert in my field, educated well beyond my coworkers and light-years beyond my customers. I am paid to make the systems run smoothly, and they do run smoothly. If there is a problem, I can fix it. Because of my learning, I can intuit solutions to problems that other techs are scratching their heads over. I can design systems where there are none, and can put them in place if there are no installers to do the job. I am straightforward with advice about what will constitute the best solution, as well as compromises that can be used for the short-term. If my customers choose to disregard that for the almighty solution of a "hired-gun" then that is up to them; I have advised them well. (And yes, I am way overqualified for the job I do, due to the current market.)

Yes, many people who have the tag line of "engineer" are not even close to being professionals or engineers. I understand your grievance against them. But some of us here really do fit the category of professional.

by amcol

I've read a lot of your posts and with all due respect you really need to get a grip on yourself.

Your chronic pessimism and constant bashing of IT and all the people in it serves no purpose, other than perhaps a personal one. You've alluded in other posts to having had some bad experiences over the years...so have we all. I don't know if you're really trying to dissuade people from entering or staying in the profession, or you're just trying to make yourself feel better with a little no-cost venting, or whatever...in any event, I really don't care. Feel how you want about yourself, your own job performance and satisfaction, that's your perogative.

Having said that I have no clue why you stay in the industry. You frequently talk about plumbers, as you have herein. Why don't you just become one already?

What irritates me is when you, or anyone, cavalierly brushes off an entire industry and profession. Are we professionals? You bet your sweet bippy we are. I decided to enter IT as a profession in high school, majored in IT as an undergraduate, and have made my living as an IT practitioner ever since...for 35 years. Am I unusual? Not by a long shot...there are countless thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people around the world who can tell you a similar story. And according to you none of those people are professionals? Where's your pride, man?

"The quality of the artifacts we deliver to the people who pay for them is, on the average, woeful." Measured against what benchmark? You've bought into the nonsensical attitude, perpetrated by management and perpetuated by the media, that perfection is the only acceptable standard. How many companies have adopted six sigma as a rallying cry? None of them actually practice it, but it sure sounds cool to talk about it. You've been in the industry long enough to know that every single thing we do, without one single solitary exception, is a complex complicated integrated cross-referenced system. Will there inevitably be errors in such an environment? Perhaps not on your planet, but here on Earth we're human and we make mistakes.

You compare a working toilet to the Internet. Please. The last time I looked there were just a couple more moving parts to the Internet than there are in your basic PRS (Poop Removal System). Yeah, there are systems that do need to work in near perfection. When we send up a space shuttle it would be kinda sorta nice if it came down in the same condition it started out. But in virtually any system that doesn't have an actual life/death element to it there has to be some toleration for error.

"Do we know enough about our client's business and the track record of IT to be able to discuss frankly with them the down side of their proposed project?" Maybe you don't, but I do. And everyone who works for me does. You know why? Because we're professionals. And we take our jobs and the business of our organization seriously. Do you?

"We are not engineers and we are not professionals. We are amateur shade-tree mechanics who have fooled the entire population of the planet into paying us." Speak for yourself, and don't you dare dismiss the millions of the rest of us who don't have the psychological baggage you seem to be carrying around. You need an attitude adjustment, and quick. In the meantime, figure out how to practice your profession as a professional or find yourself a new way to make a living and leave the rest of us alone.

by ole88

I couldn't have put it better myself. One more comment on being professionals is how you conduct yourself in the business environment - that also separates the pros from the wannabes.

by shaunbed

Like it or not many people agree with the core of what DC guy is conveying if not the specific words used to convey his message.

Incidents like Y2k and the .COM boom have not increased public trust in the IT profession. Many people did take advantage of these times and our current economy is in many ways the result of these times. These individuals have created our current view of IT and how people look at us.

How many times are we presented with the image of tech workers as people who never work and are overpaid or people with redundant laughable job titles (watch OfficeSpace)? We are not selling ourselves well as a profession.

Y2k and the .COM boom were not IT failures and should not reflect poorly on the profession. They were about people who did not understand technology or thought to exploit technology for business gain. They were about accounting practices which cooked books to create artificial success and manipulate the stock market for personal gain. These are not IT functions. They are business functions. The snakeoil is the people in control of IT in the country not the workers. The snakeoil is the Worldcoms and Enrons.

Ironically, the .COM boom and Y2k supposedly occured because we let techies run things instead of business people or so we tell people. This is a lie. It was led by business people and venture capital who saw a perceived advantage and took it. It was lead by business people who did not understand IT. The good news is we have now rectified this problem. We have successfully fired the business people who didn't understand IT and hired more business people who don't understand IT.

The biggest problem is the people who know business and don't know IT are really good at selling themselves while the people who know IT are relatively aweful at selling themselves. The better story becomes the 'truth'.

This is the 'truth'. IT workers are very lazy and highly overpaid. You can take anyone and easily train them in the field to do any IT task. Most projects fail because the average IT worker is incompetent. We have a shortage of talented IT professionals in this country because most people in IT are as dumb as nails. IT is a field based on easy to learn hard skills. IT professionals do not have soft skills and are all cogs in the wheel. They are replacable. IT programmers all have exaggerated egos and are hard to work with. IT programmers live under the mistaken impression that everyone else in the world couldn't do their job better if they wanted to.

What we need to do is this..

We need for IT to have some control over the businesses that make fancy statements and tarnish the industries reputation. We have CMM for businesses but we need something stronger. We need for IT professionals to audit a company's practice so they can not sell snakeoil. Company's should not be able to strongarm their employees into signing off on impossible projects or deadlines. The codes of professional ethics we have are nice but as long as business has all the leverage, they are impractical.

We also need IT to sell itself better. People need to understand that we are hard working individuals with skills. We have hard skills and we have soft skills. We are an asset not a liability. People need to understand the difference between business failure and IT failure.

by dc guy

The best one can hope to do on a forum is to start a constructive dialog. I appreciate the postings of the people who disagree with me. Perhaps I am pessimistic, I spent a lot of time in civil service and you don't see IT at its best in that environment.

I agree with Shaun's initial premise, that many of the people who are not in IT but have to use IT do not think highly of us and our products. The excuse that an automated information system is more complicated than a toilet is simply of no importance to them. Either what we build works reasonably well or it doesn't, and in my experience most laymen find Windows-based IT rather exasperating. Some bite the bullet and become their own software mechanics, some have children or friends who can make it work, others settle for just using Excel and e-mail.

We need processes that can do what our users require, which is to construct software with the reliability of telephony, the security of the highway system, and the ergonomics of an automobile. If we can't do that then our excuses don't matter; civilization will sputter to a halt as it periodically does, waiting for progress to restart.

My ranting at my fellow IT professionals is largely based on the fact that most of them resist the very concept of process improvement. They duck out of presentations on the CMMI and Six Sigma. They don't want to learn how to perform risk analyses or requirements inspections. All they want to do is code and test, the fun stuff, like it was still 1965.

But I disagree enormously with many of Shaun's details. I have never found IT workers as a class to be lazy. Their typical work week is fifty hours, the current national average, and they are inured to working nights and weekends for long stretches when poorly managed projects require it.

IT is NOT easily learned. You really do have to have an IQ of around 125 to survive in this field and the experts are on a par with the best attorneys and mathematicians, 140-plus. The average computer program has ten or more levels of decomposition, from the hourly job schedule to the picosecond instruction execution rate; compared to that the average mathematical formula with only three levels is practically flat.

Sure a lot of us are weak in people skills. (Some of us to the extent that we berate each other in public forums, but I doubt that many outsiders read this so cut me some slack.) Egos, difficult to manage, yatta yatta, okay. Creative people who don't spend a lot of time working with other people can be that way, it's not remarkable.

My gripe is with IT management. Not the people themselves but the culture that locks us into this death spiral. We start with a pool of candidates that is highly weighted AWAY from people skills and concerns for the "big picture." We eliminated the position of first-line supervisor as soon as the ubiquitous and omnipotent workstation started squashing organizational pyramids, so the people never get much mentoring in those skills. Then we promote them directly into management. Does that seem sensible to any of you?

Talk about a process that needs improvement, how about IT's HR process? I have worked for a lot of managers who were basically decent folks who really believed in what they were doing, but they didn't have a CLUE about how to do it.

As for Y2K, I was there too Shaun, and I say you're dead wrong. I personally saw the crisis coming in 1988 and started screaming about it to everyone within earshot. I'm proud to say that as a result the municipal government I worked for started on remediation in 1995 and was flat cold 100% finished in 1998. But other IT experts, especially in the private sector, were not so persuasive. It was the BUSINESS managers who refused to worry about something that was not going to show up on the next quarter's reports. They figured they'd be gone before the crisis hit and somebody else would have to worry about it.

Y2K was the biggest IT project ever; every living person who could still read Cobol was brought out of retirement or flown in from the Third World to work on it. The fact that we managed to get ALL of the red-blanket systems remediated by midnight on New Year's Eve was one of history's most momentous events, but the general public was led to believe because the traffic lights were working, the jail doors hadn't popped open, and there was still beer for sale, that there never was a Y2K crisis. Nobody realized that the unremediated yellow-blanket systems were evidence that they were wrong. I kept buying diet pop cans with expired aspartame and garbled expiration dates well into 2000. I didn't get an electric bill until June and then it was for more than $5,000.00. My bank's computer couldn't produce an accurate mortgage statement for the entire year, which apparently had thirteen months. I was glad that the expiration dates on medicine, the electric company's power generation system, and the bank's ATM network had gotten top priority.

Y2K wasn't our fault. Business managers wanted to let somebody else deal with the consequences.

We're capable of doing amazingly good work in a crunch. The problem is that there are too many crunches because our profession itself is not well structured.

Oh, and at 61 I'm not in a good position to start over as a plumber's apprentice. So I've stayed in this profession, doing my best to fix the problems I see. I spend most of my time ranting at managers and executives because my beef is with them, not at most of you. But many of them do read TR so I vent here to reach the ones I don't meet personally, as well as in letters to the editor and the occasional published piece.

by beads

Yes, if done properly what we do is Engineering. Do it badly and its little more than Administration. The latter never sat with me well.

If I can calculate, using real math, how much bandwidth, disk space and breaking points of every system on a network before failure. How does this differ from any other type of Engineering?

Too often I hear IT folks say: "Its fine" or "Its good enough..." Its never just good enough. Unless its you getting the 3AM phone call saying that the CEO can't get into email from Singapore. Then its really not so "good enough", now is it?

We need to enforce our own standards or be forever compared to every other "hard profession" out there.

I can install a toilet but it doesn't make me a plumber now does it? I can build a square building but hardly makes me carpenter. Just makes me handy. And if the ladies don't find ya' handsome, they should atleast find ya' handy!

- beads

by avid

what happened to you to make you such an a##? all you do is whine and complain. you lnever have any substance to back up your opinions. i realize that this board is a place for people to voice their opinions, but i think you should get some "Professional" help. Or hell, call a plumber maybe he can help!

by ole88

In the years leading up to the dot com fallout, many people who were trained up as accountants or heating/refrigeration techs (name just about any other field) who decided to "get on the money wagon" just grabbed a book, took a test and got certified in some facet of IT. This was totally wrong. What has hurt us over the last several years is that many people are running around with paper MCSE's and the like but without a real background in IT training. Then employers decided that they were going to require a college education. If we as industry professionals either start our own institute or join an existing one that will have us, such as the IEEE, we will then lay the groundwork for controlling our industry from infiltration. Think about it, the electricians have the IBEW and there are similar institutions for many other professions.

So why don't we have a well known, out in front, defined institution for IT/IS professionals? This would have to be our first step to not only standardizing, but strengthening our profession. By having a standard body, we can then have a set of core values that all IT professionals should work by. Before long, we will have proven ourselves and employers will start to look for an affiliation with the institution as part of their hiring process. This does not mean that everyone has to be a member, but as American Express puts it - "Membership has it's priviledges."

If you think about it, at one point in time, many of the "developed fields" you spoke of were not so developed and had no institutions or unions behind them. It took a few forward thinkers to start it up and get it moving. After the "startup period" for these organizations, new and exisiting professionals in these fields began to migrate into the ranks of these institutions and that is how they are where they are today. People have learned that you don't trust a mechanic unless he/she is ASE certified. Others (depending on where you live) will not (or cannot) hire an electrician unless they are a member of the IBEW. The IBEW is both an institution and a union.

Here is how I arrive at my definition of a profession:

1) You choose the major field of study you have an interest in (like IT or Engineering)
2) You start working various "jobs" within the field to get a "taste" of them
3) You decide where you want to "specialize" within the field (much like a physician deciding to become a Podiatrist)
4) You work to further your knowledge in the specialty you have chosen and you are now on a professional career track.

When you get to step 4, you notice it is no longer a job, but has become a career. You have a career when you find your niche and are a professional when you know your niche well enough to be seen as a sort of expert by your peers. With that said, there would have to be levels of institutional membership. You can't be called a professional until you have reached the point where you know your career track and have obtained a certain level of intimate knowledge of that subject.

That is my two cents - take it or leave it. I would still be interested in your comments either way though.

by beads

The reason that it seems that thier are SOOOOO many idiots in the field is... well, because there is a great number of idiots in the field.

We need to have professional standards established if we are ever going to have any respect in the business side of the field. Otherwise people do treat us a bit like shadetree mechanics.

Hadn't thought of adopting the IEEE as a resource. It would be easier than setting up something like the ITEU (Information Technology Engineering Union), or some other high falutin' sounding name.

Every 'Engineering' discipline has had to do the same thing. The problem with IT folks is that the good ones are too busy keeping everything else working to do much more than that.

Engineering first came into being as siege engineers. Otherwise you'd be called an architect, mason or carpenter. These men built siege engines. Large structures used to assualt the walls of a castle, trenches to hide in and tunnels to go under those same walls. Leading to what we refer to now as 'Mechanical Engineers'. Other engineering disciplines came along much later. But no one would take them seriously except in time of war. So they united and applied thier skills to peacetime endeveours as well.

- Barbers used to do Dentistry as well as Surgery.

- 'Doctor' come from Physicians but liked the name Doctor better as Physician had a negative stereotype. A 'Doctor' comes from obtaining a medieval license to teach. A master's degree (three additional subjects)was enough to support you and your family. A Bachelor's degree was enough training (originally in four fields) to support one's own needs.

Its time that the IT field grew up and enforced some standards on its own.

- beads

by shaunbed

I was being sarcastic when I said that IT was easy to learn and that IT workers were lazy.

My point was that these were the perception many people held and that it definitely was not fact.

I also was saying that Y2k was business's fault not IT. Y2k has been spun off as a 'fake' project created to make IT people lots of money concerning a problem that never really existed. Business spin is IT was all greed at the technology level. This is not true. There was greed at the business level.

1. IT managed to handle the real Y2k problem very well.
2. Business managed to spin off several companies aimed at fixing the Y2k problem that had limited impact. These were usually of the 'silver bullet' type.
3. When Y2k failed to hurt the econonomy, business blaimed IT for overhyping their value and claimed they were fraudelantly coaxed into spending too much money.
4. Y2k should never have been a problem if companies had kept a constant investment in new technology rather than only spending when technology became a big problem. Companies have a hard time quantifying IT value but are really good at quantifying IT cost.

The overall impact is that in the public's eye, y2k resulted in a loss of trust for the tech industry.

by amcol

You read Shaun's posting the same way I did, and I had to reread it a few times before I got that he was in fact being sarcastic. It wasn't very well worded so it was easy to misread it in such a way that it appeared he meant what he was saying. No harm, no foul.

I don't entirely buy that your main beef with IT is the management. You've written too many posts that bash IT generally speaking, and make specific references to developer and analyst level professionals. You've done it here again as well. However, that's neither here nor there...this last post of yours is far more well reasoned and moderate in tone than a lot of others you've written, and I accept it on its face.

I also don't buy at all your comments about Y2K. It's hyperbolic to say system remediation was "one of history's most momentous events", just as it's equally hyperbolic to say that "civilization will sputter to a halt" if we don't improve the quality of our systems. Y2K was absolutely mostly hype with a little fact mixed in. You're right that a lot of business managers chose to ignore the whole thing because they figured they wouldn't be around when the nanobits hit the fan. However, in addition and far more importantly, we IT people are also at fault...we ran around with our hair on fire screaming the world was going to come to an end if we didn't add two bytes to the date fields and we never really were able to make that sale, to a great extent because the people we were trying to sell it to weren't as dumb as we thought they were and saw it as the more of the same kind of hype the dot commers were dishing out (remember that whole debacle was going on at the same time).

However, that's all neither here nor there as well. This thread is about professionalism, and whether IT is a profession or a trade.

I discern from your more recent remarks that you aren't quite so cynical about your fellow IT'ers as you appeared to be in your first post. I agree with some of your contentions...some technicians are in fact not interested in the highest standards of quality, some are in fact only interested in doing the same job they've always done all day long and never making any progress at all, some products that should work much better than they do are in fact unacceptably flawed, and some managers who are in fact sincere human beings and sincerely try their best are sincerely inept at what they do. Fine. But the plain fact of the matter is those comments also describe most other industries and most other ways of earning a living, and to single out IT as needing to hold itself to the highest possible standard before we can be considered, or consider ourselves, "professionals" is to propose a bar so artificially high that jumping over it is impossible. If you can't achieve a goal, why bother to try? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and endless cycle of failure.

I take no offence at anyone who considers IT practitioners anything less than totally professional. I know how I conduct myself, and I know how I require those who work for me to conduct themselves, and those standards of professionalism are good enough for me. I don't worry about what I can't control. I do take violent exception to those that consider teachers to be professionals yet limit their compensation to something barely above subsistence wage, to those that consider firefighters and policemen to be professionals but don't equip them with the necessary tools to do their jobs and save their lives due to budgetary limitations, to those that consider nurses to be professionals but look sneeringly down upon them because they aren't "good enough" to be real doctors, etc. All these people, including those of us in IT and countless others in every other field of endeavor, are all professionals...mostly because we view ourselves and conduct ourselves as such. With discipline, attention to detail, maturity, empathy for others, respect for our employers and shareholders, and the daily desire to do the best damn job we can possibly do. And then to do better than that tomorrow. THAT'S what truly matters.

by shaunbed

Unfortunately, you don't get practice writing by staying silent.

I really need practice writing. I have a lot of trouble seeing things the way other people do.

The sarcasm seemed obvious to me but I have noticed I have had other similar problems with interpretation here and there.

I guess the bad part is the people who get the way I speak. They encourage me to think good things about my writing despite the fact that the masses regularly fail to get my point and I regularly fail to correctly understand the masses. With most people, my communication abilities can be a real brick wall.

by amcol

Your post was well thought out and well articulated. You presented a thoughtful argument thoughtfully. The problem was one of perspective.

Small piece of free advice...put yourself in the mind of your reader. Read what you write as if you hadn't written it, as if you were the intended recipient and not the author. If you don't understand what you've written, no one else will either.

by worm22

I don't disagree ... but what about those of us who, like myself, come highly reccomended by PROFESSIONAL sysadmins/IT security professionals?

I'm good at what I do (web programming ... primarily PHP/[insert given DB here]). I've been turned down for jobs because I have too many cert ... also been turned down because I don't have a degree (nevermind that I was the most qualified and experienced applicant).

With all the self-study materials out there ... It's a hard line to draw. Part of the problem is that Hiring Managers don't have the tech skills to screen out the posers from the programmers.

I don't disagree with you. There are too many trained/half-trained chimps in IT and they are cheap to hire ... nevermind their failures and the security breaches they cause ... I just don't know what the answer is. If you find it, let me know ... I'm trying to start my own web dev company and it would be a great thing to have on my side.

by rayjeff

"I'm good at what I do (web programming ... primarily PHP/[insert given DB here]). I've been turned down for jobs because I have too many cert... also been turned down because I don't have a degree (nevermind that I was the most qualified and experienced applicant)."

That is one of the main issues that is seen as a problem. The person with a/many certs. I guess there really isn't a hard line drawn between persons like you and others. But the main this is having the experience/background before getting certs. I don't know your background before getting all of your certs and I'm not disrespecting you or downing you for what you have accomplished. But you could be considered an exception.

"I don't disagree with you. There are too many trained/half-trained chimps in IT and they are cheap to hire ... nevermind their failures and the security breaches they cause ... I just don't know what the answer is. If you find it, let me know ... I'm trying to start my own web dev company and it would be a great thing to have on my side."

I have question to your comment of "There are too many trained/half-trained chimps in IT and they are cheap to hire". Who are you referring to? I've been in IT almost six years now. I started while still a student at the college I attended. Now, would this make me a trained/half trained chimp? Let me put it another way. At the current job I'm at, I've had to train myself in many areas because of the IT structure. There is no training for staff...the department is very small (3 persons)...I'm more highly trained then all of the IT department so I'm seen as a threat.

Hiring cheap? Not in this part of the country. The requirements of jobs are unrealistic for the area. For examplem a typical IT job wants someone with the experience of say a high level programmer. But what are the educational requirements...a high school education.
There are many variables that come into play.

by ragingbull

rosary, beads, huh? I have no money while waiting. What do I wait huh? To get a deeper stick shoved to my rear. Go to hell.

by jdougherty

I agree. There should be some form of standardized test that separates casual techs that help family members with email problems and professional technicians. For now, it seems, that the MCSE or CCNA will have to do as the method for branding someone as a true IT professional

by thebofh

I happen to work in an area of South Africa known as Venda in the Limpopo province, and as an IT manager I get a lot of people looking for work in the IT industry, their CV's are "tatty" they have done IT courses that I?ve never heard of i.e. Network Systems2 including electrical engineering since when is electrical engineering part of IT. What has happened to the good old A+,N+ and MCSE?
When I ask simple questions like what?s Ram and front side bus and network topologies and installing XP pro, they don?t know.

I then try and help out a BEE IT company that supplies computers to the government for quotes on computers, the prices are ok about R300 more than Joburg, I order some computers and after waiting a week I get told that the computers will have linux even though I asked for XP pro, and then the price jumps up by R1500.

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