Re: certification

[Mark Sienkiewicz <mark@chokey.mo.md.us>]

>At 03:50 PM 3/12/98 -0500, Mark Sienkiewicz wrote:
>>How many "optional" merit badges is too many?  It IS possible to
>>offer too many.  Given that there can be only a few, you must choose
>>them carefully to avoid using up your small number without covering
>>everything that needs to be covered.
>
>You're making an assumption that I disagree with.
>
>Why do there have to be only a small number of merit badges?  IMO, there
>should be a small number of "recommended basic" merit badges, but a near
>infinite number of merit badges for specialized bits of knowledge.

Would you even READ a list of 1,000,000 possible merit badges to
find out which were relevant to your job posting? This may sound
extreme, but I think it proves my point that there is an upper
limit.

We can now get ot the question of where the upper limit is.  I
believe that the limit is much less than 1,000,000.  I suspect is
is on the order of 100.  If I am right, we need to take care with
creating highly specialized merit badges, lest we make the list
too long.

I can see how you might disagree with the value 100, but what would
you say to 500, 1000, 2000, or 5000?  At what point is the list 
too long to be worth looking at?

Of course, there may be another possibility:  You could argue that
the upper limit is (for example) 1000, but that it would be impossible
to think of that many merit badge topics.  I don't think I would
believe that argument, though.  It sounds too much like "6 computers"
or "4k words of memory". :)

>I envision merit badges for DNS, News Concepts, News-INN, News-Cyclone,
>Backups Concepts, Backups-Amanda, Backups-Legato, SSH, PGP, Jumpstart,
>Building Packages, Building Boot CD's, Security Concepts, SecurID
>Administration, Perl, Tcl, Expect, Building a secure anonymous FTP server,
>and many more.

Maybe a good way to get started would be to try to enumerate the
merit badges that people are actually interested in.  You've
listed 18.  

b.t.w. Some are ambiguous.  By "Building Packages" do you mean RPMS
for Red Hat Linux, pkgadd compatible media for Solaris, or possibly
something else?  Boot CD's for what kind of a system? Your list
might represent more like 25.  Since that is only a fourth of the
upper limit of 100 that I was hypothesizing, I may be estimating 
too low.

>No one would be expected to have all of them.

I believe that nobody would be expected to have all of them, but
suppose your HR department found out that of the 100 available
merit badges, 50 applied to subsystems used in your company.  How
would that affect the hiring process?