Is There No Base of IT Knowledge?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I think one of the biggest difference with IT and other white collar careers is the pace of change. If you compare it with accounting, the field of accountancy hasn't fundamentally changed that much in a century, it's still basically double-entry bookkeeping. Whereas IT changes constantly.
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 know IT guys who suddenly find they're working in a company with physical servers running Server 2003, Office 2000, Windows XP, Blackberries and Exchange 2003 and they're struggling to find a new job because they're out-of-date, even though the technology they're using is only ten years old. The tech world has moved on. I'm embarrassed by my lack of Powershell skills, and yet that's only a few years old.
Sometimes I envy accountants. Tapping away on the same Excel spreadsheets year after year. The biggest obstacle most of them have had is re-writing their Louts 123 functions to work with Excel. It sometimes looks such a relaxing career.
On the other hand, I suspect I'd be bored out of my brains.
Accounting is far more understanding law than crunching numbers. My father is a CPA, and actually I'd have to say IT and accounting are a lot more similar than you think. Someone who was a CPA 10 years ago and didn't keep up their CE for whatever reason, and loses their license, or at least loses it as being current, can have a lot of ground to make up to get it back. I want to say that something like 10% of people, tops, pass all four sections of the CPA exam on the first try. Most have to do at LEAST two separate stints. Now, I agree that there is no field more dynamic than IT. Things are changing faster than ever and keeping up, even when you're doing it day in and day out, is a real struggle. You learned Exchange 2013? Great, company is moving to the cloud, so learn Office365. Now learn Powershell. Now learn Server 2012. And so on, and so forth. I'd say the biggest difference is when you specialize in something in Accounting, you aren't really expected to venture outside your specialization. IT doesn't have that. Even if you're amazing at one or two things, you are still expected to have a broad understanding of lots of other things, even often to get a job in that specialization.
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A CPA is a bit different than a general accountant. CPAs have to be certified and deal with tax laws.
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@scottalanmiller said:
A CPA is a bit different than a general accountant. CPAs have to be certified and deal with tax laws.
An accountant has to deal with tax laws too. To be honest, an accountant without a CPA license is not going to be used for much more than a tax preparer or a bookkeeper...
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@scottalanmiller As a rule....
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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.
