Re: SAGE, certification, and you

[dengland@alarismed.com (Dave England)]

I guess we should of had a debate of the issues before we voted.
I went back and looked at how I voted and I voted for certification.
After reading everyone's opinion and reflecting a little more on the
subject myself I do not think we are ready for certification.

o I've seen more than a few certified Microsoft and Sun technicians
  that don't know how to fix a problem that they are supposedly
  certified for.

o I've interviewed plenty and even hired a few SAs that had lots of
  book knowledge but couldn't do the job.
  
o It's my experience that often one needs to resolve problems that you
  have never worked on our seen before.  And therefore a good junior SA
  has the ability to break a problem down to find the cause.  And senior
  SAs have some intuitive ability to suspect the source of problem and
  then prove their theory.  I cannot imagine a test that would show this.
  
o Also in my many years, and an expanding crop of grey hair, as a UNIX SA I've
  only attended a few courses and conferences. It's hard to get the time and
  money from corporate companies and when I could family responsibilities
  precluded me from leaving town for a week.  Most of the companies I've
  worked for only budget for one training session per employee a year and they
  prefer that you to take it locally.  While I wish I would have been able to
  attend more, it certainly hasn't meant that I haven't been learning. Often
  a new project comes out of nowhere and you need to learn as you go. I've
  never seen a business environment where you can say wait I need to take a
  class before I can do that project or solve that problem.  Is it fair
  to say the more certificates one has the more valuable they should be?
  Let's face it on the job experience is a very critical part of the
  knowledge of a good SA.  How do we give these people their due?
  
o I have used tests for years on SA candidates.  What I've found is
  many people could tell me the command see available memory, running
  processes or whatever.  But only a few could actually find a server
  that acted as a flex license server, NFS or NIS server when I actually
  sat them at a terminal.  I need both skills in an SA, but I feel
  certification would only judge the former not the latter.

o I'm not even sure we could agree on what areas an SA should have skills
  in for certification.  Here's my list: NFS, NIS, sendmail, HTML, C,
  Makefile, flex, RIP, SH, C-Shell, public domain software products,
  3rd party software products, OS commands, printer utilities, PERL, tk,
  tcl, expect, DNS, File System management products, Backup products,
  anonymous ftp setup, and Firewall products and security issues. And
  then repeat these on all of the OS platforms.

I agree with Tina lets work on better education methods, Web page
tutorials, and knowledge databases.  Can't we do more than we have to
"advance Systems Administration as profession" in this area first.
We can come back and review certification after we have some way
to learn what one can be certified for.

Isn't it amazing that the non-technical part the world is only now
finding out about discussion groups when we've had these tools for
years.  Let's use them more often and not only talk about important
subjects like this in meetings or at conferences.


Dave England                         dengland@alarismed.com