| Up all night staring at the fridge | by marasmus |
| So how is it that all these "technical schools" are cisco/MS/novell certifying every monkey that walks through the door? They put shitty radio ads on during the demographically-challenged part of the day, when only construction workers have the station of choice on. They target idiots using really idiotic ads and swear they can get them MCSE/CNE/A+/@#$)(@#*$@) certified, and supposedly get this 5-tooth cement-worker a wonderful new job in computing.
Being an engineer-level geek isn't possible by a spontaneous career-change. People who are currently unmotivated to find a field they enjoy are NOT going to be able to walk into a job, even with these classes and "certifications", and either enjoy their job or do well at it. The computer field is quite exclusive and, well, vicious, against those who are not also heavy computer hobbyists. I've seen more than my fair share of paper-flailing cerificate-holders come out of these asshole programs. What's scarier is that the popularity of these programs and certifications is rising exponentially. The quality of certificate-holders is dropping exponentially. The question is if business will acknowledge this shift of quality accordingly and adjust to it. If they do, then the value of certifications will drop significantly. Certifications will be necessary in order to get a tech-support job instead of a high-end job, and certifications will not be acknowledged or used as a credential base for high-end jobs. If they don't, they will be hiring cement-pourers with a piece of paper that says they're qualified network administrators. That will screw up a LOT of businesses. Oh wait... that's what's happening now! sheeit.. i shoulda wrote this a few years ago. :) Personally, I'm not sure which is worse - losing value in the certification or just normalizing everyone to the same barely-above-AOL level of knowledge and claiming everyone is fit to jump the bandwagon and be a network administrator or router programmer. Heh, I'd LOVE to see one of these smacked-down bitches get right out of cert-school and go program a BGP-4-running router at a Tier 1 or Tier 2 provider... They'd screw up something and take out an entire region of the US from the Internet. That'd be just *wonderful*. I'd be *so* happy that I have to explain to my staff, who subsequently have to explain to our clients and their users, why they can't transfer information across the internet. They'll think "wow, if it was that easy for an idiot to get certified, I'm gonna stop selling used cars at an auction house and become a CNE too!" Next thing you know, we have a publicly-butchered communications network that has less reliability than an overclocked SMP Cyrix running Windows NT Enterprise Server with a SoundBlaster PCI card. I can't wait for that day to happen. Won't be long - in fact this exact thing has been happening in Chicago at least twice a week for the last month, and has made my job a real bitch. I think the governments of the world should regulate the networking and routing and quality standards of the backbones in their jurisdiction, because the private sector is too concerned with lowering costs and speeding up thing at the dismay of reliability or quality. An OC-3 with 95% uptime is SHIT to me compared to a T-1 with 100% uptime. I'd rather have a 4-cylinder toyota or honda that ran every day and night than a 12-cylinder jaguar that needs to be serviced monthly. I'm starting to believe that capitalists are fundamentally stupid creatures who try to compensate for their ignorance with "vision" and "marketing/management skills". I'm starting to really grow sick to my stomach with the economic model that the US lives by. For as much as I bitch about the rigidity and staidness of academic culture, I entirely prefer it over the chaotic, barbaric, fix-the-bleeding-scars-as-i-tear-more-in-my-skin mentality that our capitalist culture is using. Stay up all night sometime and stare at a fridge that has an OSHA-compliant "hazardous chemicals" warning sign on the front. All sorts of things start coming to mind. | |