How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education
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I started learning when I was middle school aged back in the early 80s. I learned DOS because I was fascinated with computers, that is all my computer had on it. I had to make boot discs and learn how to manage the memory if I wanted to play games, ahh Star Control I and II, those where the days! Back in the 80s and 90s to do cool stuff you had to learn how the computer worked, I remember running my BBS system. All before you had Google or the internet. Now I think all we have are people that know how to push GUI buttons. They don't understand what that button really is doing. I don't really program that much but I find bugs all the time and often it is because someone didn't understand how the computer really works. I took a break from computers when I was in law enforcement for several years and I was scared when I went to change careers and actually get into IT because it had been so long for me just even away from it as a hobby. After getting in the field I wasn't worried at all. It seems like they don't teach the basics.
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@PenguinWrangler I did this as well in early 90s. Once i skipped school and dialed into a bbs so i could get shareware versions of a bunch of games. Phone bill was like 350 that month. That was a paddlin.
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@PenguinWrangler said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
It seems like they don't teach the basics.
They don't. No schools are, that's for sure. And almost no mentors are. I can't believe how much of what I explain on SW day in and day out is just "baseline" stuff that was expected from any entry level IT guy in the mid-1990s. Sure I've updated some licensing prices and a few vendors have changed, but all the basics are still the basics. The "hot new tech" that so many people are excited to learn... we were doing in the 1990s at home. I'm not sure how so much baseline is missed today, but it is often huge. And a little baseline goes a long way.
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It's like RAID, just as an example. One hour of learning "what RAID is, what parity is and what mirroring is" combined with a trivial amount of "these are the naming conventions" is all you need to basically know everything that there is to know about safety, speed, capacity, cost, etc. Yet it takes thousands of threads covering that topic and people get it ass backwards every day. You can Google it till the cows come home but without the baseline, it is really hard to know which information is right, relevant, up to date, or applicable for the given situation (e.g. RAID 5 is the devil!!! But only from 2009 on, and only with Winchester disks and SSDs are fine and... and.... )
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
It's like RAID, just as an example. One hour of learning "what RAID is, what parity is and what mirroring is" combined with a trivial amount of "these are the naming conventions" is all you need to basically know everything that there is to know about safety, speed, capacity, cost, etc. Yet it takes thousands of threads covering that topic and people get it ass backwards every day. You can Google it till the cows come home but without the baseline, it is really hard to know which information is right, relevant, up to date, or applicable for the given situation (e.g. RAID 5 is the devil!!! But only from 2009 on, and only with Winchester disks and SSDs are fine and... and.... )
If I see another question about RAID.......... you hold them down and I will pepper spray them.......
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@scottalanmiller Misinformation definitely plays a role
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@G-I-Jones said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
Can you define for me, what you consider "baseline" knowledge? It sounds to me like you're referring to common sense.
I'm having a bit of trouble seeing your point in the examples you've given. I'm super open to understanding this though, could you elaborate a little more please?I feel like I've read "baseline" knowledge somewhere else on this forum or another, is that a post already?
Forgive me if it is.I'm with Scott - the baseline information can't really come from just plain Googling, because you don't know the right questions to ask. The reading of structured books in the mid 90's gave me my baseline for networking, IT, RAID, Windows, etc. Sadly it didn't go into the reasons why RAID 5 had failure zones, at the time it was basically accepted that you did RAID 5 unless speed was an absolute requirement, then you did RAID 1 or 10 (well you could do RAID 0 if you didn't care about the actual data, but that was rare).
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@wirestyle22 said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
@scottalanmiller Misinformation definitely plays a role
A huge one. That's why a solid baseline is important AND a solid knowledge of how to access good peer review or other sources.
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@Dashrender said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
I'm with Scott - the baseline information can't really come from just plain Googling, because you don't know the right questions to ask.
That's so big. What questions do I need to ask? If I just Google, I know what command to put into Windows. With a solid baseline, I know that I should have been on my Cisco router.
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I think today it is easier to get farther on less knowledge because of the technology. Back in the 80s and 90s you really had to understand how everything worked together. I think it is easier today than back then. I believe the internet and Google have exacerbated this. Before you had the internet, in today's form, you really had to search out people. You learned from live people. My first BBS that I set up when I was 13, was done with the help of an older kid. He was 17. He came to my house and taught me how to do it though. I really looked up to him. He was awesome. I also believe that the IT community was much more willing to teach back before today. My Uncle introduced me to some IT guys at his work. They mentored me in the late 80s and early 90s. I volunteered at my Uncle's work, it was a non-profit. I will say that, at least in the USA, we taught better before the internet, not to say there hasn't been good things with education and the internet. What I see is missing is critical thinking and logic skills. Once you know the baseline, anything on the internet you should be able to use critical thinking and logic to do a "sniff test" and see if they are selling BS.
I believe this is from the fact that in the USA at least, that is all I can really comment on, that we might value the information but we never value the teacher. Especially in IT. I think this is why the baseline is so hard to find. We have devoured our teachers. I liked the post you had on that Scott.
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I'll take this from a different tack.
I think back in the 80's and 90's (actually from the beginning until the internet) that the interest was low, but those with interest made a real effort to find like minded people and get the help/training the wanted/needed. But with the internet age, you have casual users turned IT pro mostly because their boss has no respect for the profession and says - hey, I've seen you google before, so that means you know how to setup a nuclear reactor, right? Great - you're now in charge of our IT. This is evident every day in SW.
I don't think have have fewer resources, I think we have the same number we had back then. We just have a lot more people today groping at those resources. But even saying that, many of these people aren't even really trying. They aren't learning the foundational things that really only can come from a book (ok in rare cases you can find a teacher/mentor).
But that said, not all resources are created equal. For example, I learned my MCSE from books and a few lab PCs. The MS training courses covered RAID 0, 1, 5 (I can't recall if 10 was mentioned, and RAID 6 definitely was NOT mentioned). But the underlying math that today shows us why RAID 5 on HDDs is no longer viable was never mentioned. So I see Scott preaching at people about - OMG how can you consider RAID 5 acceptable? how can you not know the math that shows that UREs make RAID 5 on HDDs mathematically crazy? To which I answer - that wasn't part of the course-ware I studied.
The question I ask is - Where, Scott, did you run into this, and why was it important enough for you to know it?
Now of course, those of us who have seen the math now understand why RAID 5 on HDDs is untenable, but this really only became a thing in the mid 2000's. Before that, normal admins did they even know about UREs? and if so, why or how did they become aware of them?
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@Dashrender said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
I'll take this from a different tack.
I think back in the 80's and 90's (actually from the beginning until the internet) that the interest was low, but those with interest made a real effort to find like minded people and get the help/training the wanted/needed. But with the internet age, you have casual users turned IT pro mostly because their boss has no respect for the profession and says - hey, I've seen you google before, so that means you know how to setup a nuclear reactor, right? Great - you're now in charge of our IT. This is evident every day in SW.
I don't think have have fewer resources, I think we have the same number we had back then. We just have a lot more people today groping at those resources. But even saying that, many of these people aren't even really trying. They aren't learning the foundational things that really only can come from a book (ok in rare cases you can find a teacher/mentor).
But that said, not all resources are created equal. For example, I learned my MCSE from books and a few lab PCs. The MS training courses covered RAID 0, 1, 5 (I can't recall if 10 was mentioned, and RAID 6 definitely was NOT mentioned). But the underlying math that today shows us why RAID 5 on HDDs is no longer viable was never mentioned. So I see Scott preaching at people about - OMG how can you consider RAID 5 acceptable? how can you not know the math that shows that UREs make RAID 5 on HDDs mathematically crazy? To which I answer - that wasn't part of the course-ware I studied.
The question I ask is - Where, Scott, did you run into this, and why was it important enough for you to know it?
Now of course, those of us who have seen the math now understand why RAID 5 on HDDs is untenable, but this really only became a thing in the mid 2000's. Before that, normal admins did they even know about UREs? and if so, why or how did they become aware of them?
Microsofts own MCSE material for the NT4 covered this. As did Ed Tittles guides for the Server+ exam. CompTIA and MS both required it.
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I didn't read the white papers, if that's what you're talking about - I read the main books that were at Borders at the time.. though I don't recall the publisher.
And even if it did cover them, most of us don't recall every single detail ever discussed in any of these books.
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@Dashrender said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
I didn't read the white papers, if that's what you're talking about - I read the main books that were at Borders at the time.. though I don't recall the publisher.
And even if it did cover them, most of us don't recall every single detail ever discussed in any of these books.
I'm talking about MS' official exam study books. Literally from Borders.
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@Dashrender said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
And even if it did cover them, most of us don't recall every single detail ever discussed in any of these books.
Hardly "details", it was the fundamentals on which all other RAID info was based.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
@Dashrender said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
And even if it did cover them, most of us don't recall every single detail ever discussed in any of these books.
Hardly "details", it was the fundamentals on which all other RAID info was based.
If I still had my NT 4.0 books I suppose I could look it - do you have them? I'd love to see a picture of the page.
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@Dashrender said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
@Dashrender said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
And even if it did cover them, most of us don't recall every single detail ever discussed in any of these books.
Hardly "details", it was the fundamentals on which all other RAID info was based.
If I still had my NT 4.0 books I suppose I could look it - do you have them? I'd love to see a picture of the page.
No. I have away hundreds of books years ago. Basically nothing in print anymore.
We didn't have Google back then and those were the only books that I had.
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Another thing that I just thought of... Somebody gets fed to the wolves. For instance: At my last job, I was just kinda shown a diagram of the servers, network, and the associated IP ranges and my boss at the time said, "Go forth and conquer."
When things broke, I was told to fix it.
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I reckon this happens in College and Universites, they simply skip the basics and jumn straight to teaching RDBMS and how to develop web app with it via MySQL or Oracle or MsSQL and thats it, it skimps alot of detail on how they are supposed to stay up and operational, they simply wants you to teach you something that makes you get money fast, and the rest is somebody else problem.
Also in my Egyptian university, Oracle like pays them money or sponsor them, thus we get taught alot about Oracle 10g Database Express edition, however like I said no one sponsors the basics of how to setup everything properly cause perhaps its hard to make money from that as soon as you leave College, cause they assume everything will be ready for you. btw I majored in M.I.S but i rarely do any SQL work, currently More like an I.T Generalist.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
@scotth said in How Do Such Big Gaps Get Missed in IT Education:
I, by no means am an expert in IT, but I've found that after many years and many issues, that I wonder if it's possible to develop a 'feeling' for systems rather than needing to constantly needing to Google log messages. I catch myself constantly deciding that something doesn't 'feel right' even though the issue isn't glaringly obvious.
I agree there. In software circles it's called "smell". After 28 years in IT, one of the reasons that people bring me in for troubleshooting is that I can often "feel" a system and sense what is wrong long before people can dig through logs or whatever and I know when to say "I know this sounds crazy, but this almost impossible thing... I'm sure that that is what happened."
But that doesn't help for someone who, for example, has never even heard of virtualization. That's a pure gap. He can't be faulted for not "sensing the lack of it" when he was unaware someone had made it. Now how he never heard of it, that's what worries me. What sources and articles and groups and people is he dealing with that never talk about or mention it?
That's not just software circles. It's a universal business term. Growing up, my father taught me about "the smell test" in business. It's basically that if something doesn't sound or feel right, it probably isn't. And the same principle applies in troubleshooting and life in general. I know what Scott is referring to, although I've never done it at the level he has. The big problem is that people in IT don't know where their gaps are, the field is large and so they miss fundamentals because other people deem them "unnecessary" but it creates these gaps. The other problem is that a lot of the people doing the teaching don't really know IT from a reality standpoint, and at best know it from an outdated academic perspective, like using a medical textbook that's a hundred years old.
