Re: certification

[Amy Chused <achused@bbnplanet.com>]

At 12:15 PM 3/13/98 -0500, Mark Sienkiewicz wrote:
>>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.

Well, if it was a well organized list, grouped into "OS specific" and
general areas, and well ordered within those areas, while I wouldn't read
the entire 1,000,000 badge list, I'd certainly peruse the topic headings of
the areas I was interested in.

I rather suspect that we won't even find 1000 badges we want for quite a
while, although depending on how fine the badges are broken down, the
number might grow quite rapidly.

How many possible badges can you think of?

>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? 

I was referring to Solaris since I work in a sun shop, but for other shops
building RPMS packages for Red Hat Linux would be a good badge.  Building a
custom boot CD with all the vender supplied and locally built packages
combined is probably a good badge for a lot of different OS's.  I know it's
been useful to have our boot CD's in all our off-site servers so we can do
emergency rebuilds.

>>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?

Well, a company that demanded that their employees have 50 MB's would have
several choices:
1.  Pay the [very high] premium for demanding such a highly trained &
certified sysadmin.
2.  Search for an affordable sysadmin with all those badges for a long
time, and then finally give up and pay to send their current sysadmins to
training.
3.  Search for an affordable sysadmin with all those badges for a long time
and then finally give up and come up with a more reasonable list of
requirements.

None of those strike me as particularly bad options for sysadmins in
general, although the existing sysadmins and users of that poor company
would certainly suffer while HR learned a bit about plausibility.

	Amy