RE: present day admin skills

[Ichinin <ichinin () swipnet se>]

My 0.02c,

(Disclaimer: Errare humanum est.)

Over the years i've worked as a network tech, Systems technician,
Programmer and teacher. Some people i've med have a certain
amount of skills and some have less. The amount in group number
two are unfortunately - many. (Alot of them seem to be working at
my ISP!) Some have academic degrees, some have certifications,
some are self taught and some have experience, and ofcourse - in
different combos.

Guy X had 3 years of academic credentials; Ok, so how come he didn't
know what Netstat is? Guy Y had experience, but only with NT - his
Unix/Netware skills were total c**p. Guy Z had great social skills,
but his ability to comprehend computers and learn by testing or
picking up a book were nonexistant.

Many people are hired because of their ability to convince the
interviewer of how great their "Winnt /B" typing skills are, and
how many products they know about. This is so wrong; many of the
MC** holders lack basic skills in MSDos, Networking and
troubleshooting, many programmers i've met lack simple logic skills.
Shocking... It doesn't help much either that the .Gov where i live
have totally destroyed the marked by pushing out x thousands of
certified people and alot of academic institutions are concentrating
on recieving government money paid per each student they accept,
reducing overall quality. Not teaching things that are of absolute
importance in real life (i.e. troubleshooting) are also a problem.

Problem is it is hard to decide for the interviewer to know if the
applicant have the necessary social/technical skills to do the job.
(Lately, there have been much concentration on social skills, which
 incidently, may explain alot of this thread...)

What i would like to see is when the interviewer does his/her job
there would be some kind of practical test to make sure that the
individual have the minimum required skills needed for the job
(and i'm not just saying that because i'm a practical person.)

Some people are treated as all around experts just because they
excell in a special field, Example: i have nothing but respect for
say Schneier as a cryptografer, but i wouldn't trust him with a
CGI-scanner - just as well as i should not be trusted with 
analysing crypto implementations, even though i have a good
understanding on how key agreement (etc) works.

Point beeing; hire competent INTERVIEWERS that are capable to
determine (by practically testing the applicant) to see if they
can back up their skills by putting theory into practice, instead
of hiring someone who MABY will have the required skills. 

This would provide a good quality control for corporations,
problem is - Where would you find good interviewers? (Well,
for starters, there are alot of tech's out there that like to
try something else...)

Regards,

Glenn Larsson
.SE

(By the way - my cv is @ http://www.geocities.com/Ichinin/ ;o)


P.S> My personal obstacle: at every other job i have i'm beeing
percieved as a threat by people with "non experience based"
credentials, they are afraid of loosing the job because i came
along, beeing mostly self taught and doing a great job. Then they
feel the need to BS me to make further employment less likely.
I suspect that some have gone even further...

One note to those people: It didn't go BANG and then i had some
good skills, i've been using computers since 1983 (7, i am now 28)
and i've had 22 computers, i've spent countless hours behind the
keyboard exploring new frontiers, working overtime/on vacations,
reading tonnes of magazines, books, attending semilars, my first
relationship went to /dev/null (and so on). And guess what? I'm
still learning one thing (minimum) every day - Are you?

All i want is that us autodidact people recieve some respect for
our hard learned knowledge - is that so much to ask for?
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