Is There No Base of IT Knowledge?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
You could spend years learning Netware or Cobol or something and suddenly find your skills are now a highly niche market, if that. I know that accountants have to stay up to date with changes in the law and such like, but the bulk of their learning is done when they qualified, probably in their early twenties, and those skills remain useful for their entire 40+ year career. If you'd got an IT qualification in 1974, how useful do you think it would still be?
I think that a good comparison is Accounting to being a Windows desktop admin. If you do absolutely nothing but Windows desktop administration, you could, in theory, have learned a core bit of knowledge that was enough to get you started before your first job. And every few years you have to learn a few new things for the new version of Windows, but by and large your knowledge does not get outdated and you keep doing basically the same job year after year. Keeping up with one product is a lot like getting certified again as an accountant. The core is identical, it's just laws that change and people want to make sure you still know the core.
But in IT it is extremely rare that one does that. Like you mentioned with COBOL. Chances are even if you attempted to be a full career COBOL developer, at some point those jobs dried up for you and you had to move to Java or C# and you had to significantly retool yourself. Accounting doesn't see that happen. And the average IT person retools continuously and in the SMB does many different roles every day.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm embarrassed by my lack of Powershell skills, and yet that's only a few years old.
Eight years in November.
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People don't give a shit. Understanding DNS is not that hard. I'm an expert, but there are people more expert than me, and people could be much less knowledgeable than me and still satisfy me. Not knowing that no, I can't change the DNS entry to point http://whatever/thing to http://somewhere.whatever.new/thing45/about is inexcusable if you have anything to do with managing servers. Too many "box clickers" in IT. I barely consider the MCSE people to be IT professionals.
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@ryanov said:
People don't give a shit. Understanding DNS is not that hard. I'm an expert, but there are people more expert than me, and people could be much less knowledgeable than me and still satisfy me. Not knowing that no, I can't change the DNS entry to point http://whatever/thing to http://somewhere.whatever.new/thing45/about is inexcusable if you have anything to do with managing servers. Too many "box clickers" in IT. I barely consider the MCSE people to be IT professionals.
Not quite sure what you mean by a lot of this...
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@ryanov said:
Not knowing that no, I can't change the DNS entry to point http://whatever/thing to http://somewhere.whatever.new/thing45/about is inexcusable if you have anything to do with managing servers.
It's shocking but I bet that you will find that over 50% of the SMB IT pros have no idea how DNS works and think that it does things with the URL. Because they aren't aware of the ISO OSI, URLs, IPs... it seems magic so they add magic-like assumptions to it.
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@scottalanmiller How can you be managing a webserver and not know that?
PS: why does this thing drop my final punctuation? (<- I can get a ? if I put two just there)..
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For the record, I do know how DNS works.
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@ryanov said:
@scottalanmiller How can you be managing a webserver and not know that?
You would not believe how often people do and just stumble through. They follow some directions somewhere and have no idea what their changes to DNS actually did.
Watching people struggle with really basic email issues is similar. MX records really confuse people.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ryanov said:
@scottalanmiller How can you be managing a webserver and not know that?
You would not believe how often people do and just stumble through. They follow some directions somewhere and have no idea what their changes to DNS actually did.
Watching people struggle with really basic email issues is similar. MX records really confuse people.
Wait, what.. there are drugs involved in the delivery of my email? oh you said MX.. LOL.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ryanov said:
@scottalanmiller How can you be managing a webserver and not know that?
You would not believe how often people do and just stumble through. They follow some directions somewhere and have no idea what their changes to DNS actually did.
Watching people struggle with really basic email issues is similar. MX records really confuse people.
With the plethora (one of my favorite English words) of tutorials and walk-throughs and YouTube videos out there, just to name a few, many people are able to accomplish a specific task without having any real understanding of what they did or why they did it. I think that over the next couple years we're going to see an increase in social engineering attacks based on the use of malicious tutorials.
Example: some noob to IT is looking to setup forwarders and is too clueless to do it alone. They Google and find some tutorial that tells them how to do it legitimately but tells them to use "these IPs as they are the best and fastest". They use some malicious servers and all their results start getting spoofed resulting in malware outbreaks, etc. I am sure there are already sites like this, but I can see this going on the rise even more over the next 5 years.
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Not really because malicious sites wouldn't be ranked high enough to appear near the top of searches. I may be clueless on DNS but am pretty good on Google
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Not really because malicious sites wouldn't be ranked high enough to appear near the top of searches. I may be clueless on DNS but am pretty good on Google
That's generally pretty true. Google does a decent job of preventing that. But only decent, it's easy for things to still slip through.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Maybe part if it was that I came from the era of books.
This. We must have visited the bookstore hundreds of times, and usually walked away with a stack of reading material. I still maintain a fairly large bookshelf. My job as a software engineer requires that I be a master of Google-Fu, but whenever I want to learn a new technology for real, I almost have to get it from a book. There is little deep knowledge that can be imparted by reading a blog article or Wikipedia page.
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@AndyW said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Maybe part if it was that I came from the era of books.
This. We must have visited the bookstore hundreds of times, and usually walked away with a stack of reading material. I still maintain a fairly large bookshelf. My job as a software engineer requires that I be a master of Google-Fu, but whenever I want to learn a new technology for real, I almost have to get it from a book. There is little deep knowledge that can be imparted by reading a blog article or Wikipedia page.
True that.
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@AndyW everyone is coming out of the woodwork today!
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@AndyW said:
This. We must have visited the bookstore hundreds of times, and usually walked away with a stack of reading material.
It's true. We went there like normal people go out for coffee. It was a few times, every week. And that was for a period of years. And we would make the rounds of book stores in town to look for bargains or a broader selection. I will still hitting the local bookstores even after I moved to Texas and that was 2010. I remember trying to find a remaining bookstore to shop at at that point, but there were really none left with any selection.
That era of knowing every author, every series, release schedules, etc. was very different than today. I rarely talk to an IT pro that buys any books, let alone dozens every year.
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Wow hello @AndyW long time no see!
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@scottalanmiller I only use books that are given to me. The last book I bought was how to use Microsoft Access 97. I have several on the shelf now about PhotoShop, and I have several for applications that no longer exist. Friends know that my only computer cert is for Commodore Repair, but I have taken a couple of MCSE courses back in 1997-1999.
I do have a good knowledge of math and object relationships, and I have a good understanding of database structures, and it helps to have a solid base of deductive reasoning which I believe are key to success in IT. -
I forgot to mention that my formal education is in Music (Bachelor of Education) and Educational Administration. I firmly believe the elements of structure found in music lead to success in IT. My interests were piqued by Moog.
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@dengelhardt said:
I forgot to mention that my formal education is in Music (Bachelor of Education) and Educational Administration. I firmly believe the elements of structure found in music lead to success in IT. My interests were piqued by Moog.
Mine too, I went to school for music performance.
