[Hypertiger]

IT is in the last half of the first stage of collapse... cutting employees and shrinking. The next stage, Kiss of Death, will be drastic wage reduction. Network Security costs should still command a good wage but construction and implementation will become dirt cheap...

My brother in law gets paid 150,000 a year designing and implementing networks... He is a simple minded idiot with very little formal education in computer science. Soon these 6 figure smug bafoons will be gasping for air...

Never have so many done so little for so much... They are doomed.

[mksloth]

AssM, you're trolling with that kind of comment Training, the formal kind, has little to do with the making of a software engineer. Look at the code coming out of Microsoft as a standout example And they're all trained in fairly reputable schools... Formal CS education has little, if anything, to do with good software, or good hardware for that matter.

[mksloth]

F***ed Company had this project termination tied to Oracle yesterday. Guess both BearingPoint and Oracle are taking the hit...

[QuantumOnion]

qo is a formally trained software engineer that writes code for proprietary network hardware. IMHO, formal education helps, somewhat, in that it provides perspective and some insight into various tricks, aka algorithms. Hence, options that might otherwise take time to figure out are known from the get go. But, there is a huge difference between knowing the standard tricks, and creating new ones. Indeed, sometimes leaning too heavily on knowledge of the standard tricks is an impediment leading to rote implementations. Creativity, thinking up the next neat new hack that scales an implementation 10 or 100 fold, is orthogonal to formal training and borders on artistry, or wizardry, take your pick.

qo

[Goldilocks]

Don't know many coders. MI doesn't have to many caves... lol. I do know Admins though. Out the wazoo. The two best networks I know of are run by guys with no certs and no formal college education. I am trying to grow my company in order to snag them both. I call these guys all the time for advice on networking issues. I hire them every chance I get for sidework. Meanwhile their bosses keep them ground down earning jack shit. It is insane. People are so brainwahed by the shitty educational mills.
Certifications are worthless. You can pick up an MCSE after a month or two of dedicated studying if your out of work. A CCNA is not hard either (CCIE's on the other hand..... those are something to respect). how do I know what these things are worth? I have them... not the CCIE of course.... I do have a life. I have to have them for 'credibility' with clients. this annoys me no end.
The certs harden your thinking into an official mold that often prevents you from seeing options that exist - as QO said. I have called MSFT, CSCO, or Sonicwall a dozen times in which they could not figure out a problem (Ok - CSCO only once and that was just because we figured it out first) only to have my friends with no formal education solve the problem within a few minutes with a mere backhanded effort. In fact, their workarounds often lead to greater stability (THE most important thing to ANY admin). Real experience should be all that frigging matters. It's all that matters to me.

[Hypertiger]

Divide and conquer...

[Goldilocks]

"Network guys, to me are primadonnas who treat their little world as if they were the priests of the "holy temple of all things worth knowing in which you shall not trespass". Very territorial, dictatorial and secretive. My suspicion as to the reason for this is that if anyone knew how simple what they do really is, they would all have to take a pay cut or be replaced by community college students."

- This is true 99% of the time. Absolutely. The problem is that the 1% of the time that they are right about, the 1% of the shit they tell you to never touch, when someone breaks that shit..... Look out. 99% of what most admins do IS easy. It's the 1% of what they do that is hard that takes an overwhelming amount of experience to get right. For instance.... let the wrong person screw with Active Directory.... goodbye network....let the wrong person screw with a database or Exchange and you can forget about profits for the year. Most important of all from our perspective.... let the wrong person configure your security.... Goodnight Gracie. Nice knowing ya. It is amazing how thouroughly networks get compromised once they get advertised in the cracker world.
It has never been more important to understand that 'the little stuff matters'.

As security consultants it is our pleasure to come in and fix that 1%. We are very thankful to MSFT and friends for giving companies false senses of competency. It provides us with lucrative work. The problems are always fixable. Even if the fix is a network rebuild. (Yes, we have done this and no it is not worth the extraordinary amount of money you get paid. You literally have NO life until the problem is gone. 3-4 weeks of 3-4 hours of sleep a night does NOT make you a better person. It just makes you an incredible asshole. At least that's what people tell me. I, of course, have no idea what they are talking about.)

[assteroid]

Aint that the truth. I got my degree from a diploma mill somewhere in Florida. While the other brain surgeons, in the hospital where I work, are sweating bullets about how to pay off their student loans, I'm cracking skulls with gay abandon. Cerebellum, cortex, amygdulla, blah blah blah.. these guys go on and on. Trying to impress, no doubt! Hell, it's carpentry. All you need is a little elbow grease and skill with the old drill!

Sorry guys, couldn't resist...I saw the movie, "Catch me if you Can" the other day, about a 17 year old imposter who manages to pull off some amazing scams. Works supervising interns in a hospital, as a co-pilot. Becomes a master check forger. Fabulous...you've got to see it.

A friend of mine was recently hired by a university in Canada to teach computer science for 4 semesters. She doesn't even have a degree in computer science. She is a genius, however. So I guess, especially in the boondocks, that accounts for something.

[DogBoy]

"having no formal CS education "

Hate to pile on here but I've been a programmer for 23 years now and the WORST people I've worked with were the ones with masters or phd's.

And as for the education that the schools are giving kids in CS it's totally bullshit.

I've trained MANY programmers over the years and few of them are ready for a large scale business application coming in out of college.

To my way of thinking what they're teaching kids in CS today is an almost complete waste of time because in the corporate worls we've found they need SIGNIFICANT training to actually do their job AFTER they've got their degree in hand.

Oh yeah they teach 'em how to write one real complex program using logic and techniques that are never really employes in the business world unless they're going to work at Los Alamos or something like that.

But they don't teach 'em how to work in systems with 100's (even 1000's) or source files, many times poorly written like 15-20 years ago.

Most programmers actually spens little time writing pieces of code like the college professor teach them.

Instead they need to know how to manage large systems and sub-systems and testing, and communication, and documentation, and support. Interacting with people and stuff like that.

In my opinion most kids coming out of college with CS degrees are woefully unprepared for the jobs that are available in the corporate world.

CS profs seem to be training every student to work at some gubmint science lab where they write (sexy, complex) little pieces of code that it would take Einstien to understand.

But the vast majority of programming jobs are far less sexy than Los Alamos. They are relatively mundane jobs that don't require much complex thinking but instead often demand simplicity and good ole' hard work.