On Sat, 11 Jul 2015, Joseph Kern wrote:
We can look to the Information Assurance / Computer Security field as an
example of what career has leap frogged us poor Systems Bricklayers into a
full blown profession. They have already established an occupation,
training schools, university level degrees (M.S. in I.A. anyone?),
established local associations, established national associations, and
introduced codes of ethics, the Federal Government has already established
laws concerning employment within the US DoD (DoD 8570.1-M) for Information
Assurance Professionals (indeed ALL system and network jobs require at
least two certifications now within the DoD).
Outside of the DoD, Information Security is in no better condition than System
Administration. It takes no certification to get a security job and frequently
the experience consists of knowing how to break into things (and the fact that
so many in the field are ones who have broken in to other people's systems and
see nothing wrong with doign so makes me seriously question the overall ethics
of the sub-field)
System Administration as a Profession (as described in the formal sense of
Profession as described above) has taken a seat of mistrust in my mind over
the last few years; the ability for a young woman or man to go from
flipping burgers to desktop support tech to enterprise engineer, without
accruing college debt (indeed, actually earning money instead), is the
/primary/ economic strength of our career field, I believe a large factor
in our growth, and something which we should never forget in our march to
Professionalization.
The struggle we all face in determining this path of education is that none
of us have ever taken the same road to understanding, and we all find
ourselves at some point in our career paraphrasing Louie Armstrong: "Man, if
you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know". Any education or
certification program we undertake must focus on fundamentals; systems
analysis, signals analysis, business analysis, statistical analysis,
practical teamwork & project management, and even a little information
theory. To stretch the Jazz metaphor a little further, these are the
harmonic scales which we must practice everyday to remain competent no
matter what instrument we play.
This education must be accessible, verifiable, and fundamentally stable (in
comparison with changing technology). We must not be another vendor based
education track, or be focused on teaching someone how to use the command
line. We /must/ be focused on creating men and women who understand systems
and signals holistically and intuitively. This is a hard problem worth
solving.
how can you impose any verifiable educational requiements when so many in the
field are completely self-taught? and how would you punish people for violating
ethics without the ability to prevent people from working in the field?.
If we do want to say that eventually people need to be licensed to work as a
system administrator, what is everyone's vision of what jobs should require such
a license? does running a website for a mom-and-pop store require such a
license/ what about if you run a mail server anf forum for such a business? what
about running something for your local church (or pick some other charitable
organization? how large must a company be before they are only allowed to
employ "certified" or "professional" system administrators? what should happen
to "uncertified" system administrators who helped build the company when the
company becomes large enough that they are no longer allowed to be employyed
there?
I ran out of money for college back in '94 when I was takinga CS/Math couble
major. Deom there, I have no verifiable education (mostly self-taught,
conference training, a smidge of vendor training) and am in the security
sub-field of ssytem administration.
I view any call for rules that would have prevented me from entering the field
with deep suspicion.
since there are so few formal system administrator educational paths, almost
everyone in the field is giong to be self taught to a large degree. So I think
trying to impose rules that would eliminate the vast majority of people from the
field is a waste of time.
This is why I think that looking at the automotive field is a much better fit
for comparison to system administration than the others that have been
mentioned. It's the one other field that I can think of that allows completely
self-taught people to work alongside of formally trained people.
David Lang
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 9:28 AM, Aleksey Tsalolikhin <[email protected]
wrote:
On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 4:51 PM, David Lang <[email protected]> wrote:
This being said, other than the nebulous "no longer being looked down on"
criteria, what do you think needs to happen (and what could any
organization of practitioners do to achieve these goals, ignoring for the
sake of discussion the small size and budget of LOPSA)?
IMHO, it comes down to training/education.
Profession: a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged
training and a formal qualification.
(
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=what%27s+a+profession
)
A profession arises when any trade or occupation transforms itself through *"the
development of formal qualifications based upon education, apprenticeship,
and examinations, the emergence of regulatory bodies with powers to admit
and discipline members, and some degree of monopoly
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly> rights."*[7]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession#cite_note-7>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession#Formation
Education is the key to professionalization.
JESA submissions are due August 15th:
https://www.usenix.org/jesa/call-for-articles
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