Rajagopal Iyengar wrote: > > Dear all, > > I would like to add that as long as you are a CCIE its > irrelevant becuase > you are among the few who has that Internetworking Expert tag > with you.Even > though there are a lot of Boot camps & lots of resources that > are available > for you to gain the knowledge to pass the most difficult > certification.But > it should also be remembered that its the person who has earned > it has gone > through the grind to get it.It takes atleast 6 months of > dedicated > preparation to atleast pass the Lab on the first attempt.I > would like to ask > one Question aren't most of the Network Engineers have an > Engineering Degree > as their Basic qualification does that mean that the value of > the degree > goes down??
Well, the answer is yes and no. Let me explain. Obviously the 'value' of the single and simple degree has declined over the years in the sense that a degree no longer guarantees you a job like it may have in the old days. For example, perhaps 200 years ago, if you had a degree, you were one of the very very few people in the world who did and consequently your chances of that degree'd person to be unemployed were almost nil (or at least, much smaller chance than a regular person to be unemployed). After all, 200 years ago, the majority of people even in advanced nations in the West could not even read or write. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Now of course, literacy is widespread as is college education. The upshot is that having a degree is not the special thing it used to be. Simple rules of supply and demand hold - if supply goes up, the equilibrium price or,in this case, the equilibrium wage, goes down. Certainly the proliferation of fly-by-night colleges and so forth have cheapened the overall value of the simple college degree. Therefore what has happened is that people don't just look to see whether you have a degree, but what school you got it from, what major you chose, what your GPA was, and so forth. Let's face it - some schools are simply more famous and more prestigious than others. Some majors are more difficult than others. So people have looked beyond the degree to assess the 'quality' of the degree. A guy who graduates with a 4.0 in physics from CalTech is going to be considered to be a higher-quality candidate than the guy who barely got by with a degree in art history from Podunk Community College. This same 'relativeness' of quality can and has been happening with the ccie. Let's face it - some CCIE's are simply better than others, and we all know it. But the point is that 'relativeness' ultimately enters into the fray whether we like it or not. Let me give you an example with the college degree. How do elite colleges retain their 'eliteness'? Simple - they only admit a certain fixed number of candidates per year. If you want to get into the Ivy League, you have to submit an application that is simply better than the applications of the other candidates of that year. You don't get admitted simply because you scored a certain number of "points", you get admitted because you got more "points" than the other guys did. Hence, the competition is inherently relative. So while the overall value of a simple degree is getting cheapened, the value of a degree from, say, MIT is not. Either Cisco should impose the same 'relativeness' in the CCIE program, or the market will do it for them. For example, right now Cisco passes 150 ccie's per month. I can envision a scenario where 150 people still pass per month, but not by attaining a fixed score, but rather the top 150 scores of that month are passed. Obviously there are some logistical issues (you should really be comparing people who took the same exact version of the test, etc. etc.) but the general gist of it is that the ccie should be passing people who truly are 'experts', whatever the term 'expert' means at that particular time. Just like MIT admits the top high-school students every year, whatever 'top' happens to mean in that particular year, and in that way, they counteract the effect of Kaplan or PrincetonReview or any other kind of score-raising mechanism. The biggest objection to this idea seems to be that this introduces floating standards, which seems to be an oxymoron - that a guy who passed in one month might not pass in another. Well, yeah, that's the point. Think about it - the term 'expert' changes all the time. 10 years ago (before anybody had even heard of the Internet), an "IP expert" was basically somebody who could set up a basic IP network. Now, an IP expert would be somebody who knew a great deal about IP. Similarly, 50 years ago, practically no high school student would study calculus. 50 years ago, if you were a high school senior and you actually knew a little calculus, you were considered to be a math whiz, Nowadays, calculus is part of many high schools' standard curricula, and to be considered a high school math whiz, you have to know a lot more than basic calculus. The point is that definition of "expert" or "whiz" or whatever superlative you want to use is constantly changing relative to the standards of the time. Therefore, either Cisco must impose some kind of relative scoring in its ccie program, or the market will do it for them. The market already is, by basically discounting the value of the higher-number CCIE's. >Even though u might be a CCIE# 20000.Aren't you > among the few of > best knowledgble people in the networking Arena??And more over > you also get > paid for it +Job Gurantee. First of all, so what if you happen to be one of the few best knowledgeable people. That by itself doesn't guarantee you a job. I know a couple of guys who have PhD's in weird stuff like Egyptian archeology and Greek literature and yes, they are one of the few experts in those fields, but so what? Nobody's really hiring them. Here's a sobering thought. So what if you happen to be an expert in networking? The fact is, most networks out there are simple and don't really need an expert to run them. The number of networks is probably actually declining (slow growth in the enterprise sector offset by a precipitous decline in the service-provider sector as they work their ways through financial problems/bankruptcies). Networks are also getting more and more reliable over time, and even worse, more "throwaway" because gear gets cheaper and cheaper all the time. Network engineers are facing the distinct danger of becoming the latter-day version of the Maytag repairman - highly trained, but no jobs. Speaking of no jobs, you speak of a "job guarantee". Tell that to all the unemployed CCIE's. I know one guy who hasn't found work in 2 years and had to sell his house and car and move back to his parents' place. I know a few other guys who have given up on finding a network job and have gone back to UNIX sysadmin (which is what they had been doing before they became ccie's). I know a few others who are seriously contemplating grad school because they can't find work. The "job guarantee" is, to use one of my cousin's pet phrases, "so 1999". > Please consider the above mentioned view points. 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