On Sun, 10 Nov 2013, Derek Balling wrote:
On Nov 10, 2013, at 3:58 PM, David Lang <[email protected]> wrote:
While the government could impose requirements on companies wanting to get
government contracts, I don't see how they could possibly impose requirements
on every company/organization.
They do it for electricians, lawyers, doctors, plumbers, massage therapists,
interior designers... We are not special little snowflakes. They'll turn their
all-powerful Eye of Sauron our direction sooner or later. Events like Snowden
and Healthcare.gov increase the odds of its fiery attention.
How many people change light fixtures, switches, or outlets without being
certified electricians?
The biggest problem with them regulating System Administration is trying to pin
down what they are regulating. Do they regulate running your own computer? do
they regulate supporting other people's computer (what about your parents, being
the 'computer guy' for an office that doesn't have someone hired for that
purpose, or for a non-profit)
The examples of some states trying to impose taxes on IT work is a good example
of how hard it is to try and pin down what is regulated and who is doing the
work.
Now, it is possible to have a field that has certification and similar
without them being mandatory for everyone. If you look at Auto Repair you
will see a field that has lots of certifications (both vendor and
'independant'), but you can still be self-taught and work without such
certifications (although in some places, government regulations try very hard
to regulate the independants out of existance, I'm in California and see a
lot of this)
In New York, you can't run an auto-repair shop without a license. Just FYI.
A license for the business is needed, but I'll bet that once you get out of the
big cities, you would be able to find a lot of cases of 'Joe fixes cars for
people' where Joe is known to be good at the job, but has no license or
certification.
There are a lot of things that governments try to regulate, they aren't always
succesful at it.
Case in point, the attempts to regulate ridesharing as taxi services in some
cities. Some of the organizations they are trying to crack down on are de-facto
taxi services, but how do you draw the line? and can you really do anything more
than crack down on such services that become 'too big'? It's just too easy to
have a place for people to coordinate such things.
David Lang
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