On Sun, 19 Jul 2015, Joseph Kern wrote:
Outside of the DoD, Information Security is in no better condition than
System Administration.
Give it a minute. All the big commercial players that want DoD contracts
must hire certified people now. General Dynamics, Northrup, Lockheed, etc.
well, most of those companies have to hire people with Top Secret Clearence,
that doesn't mean that such clearances are ever going to be common outside that
niche.
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?.
Well you can't punish anyone without laws right? That's the lives
Professionals live. Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, CPAs, etc. They have a
structure of laws and ethical practices that dictate their good standing in
their chosen profession both ethically and legally.
the barriers to entry are MUCH lower in IT, and getting lower all the time. All
those fields that you talk about either have aspects that make it fairly easy to
control them. Courts are small and so they can control who accesses them.
Engineers must be stisfactory to the government building comissions. I'm not
sure that CPA really counts because you can do a lot of work in the accounting
field without being a CPA
Linux started with a student working on his own computer, and while most Linux
developers now are being paid for their work, most of them started working on it
as a hobby.
Running even massive systems is now within the reach of hobbiests thanks to
Amazon AWS and similar. But let's ignore cloud providers for now.
Remember that a lot of ISPs started from someone's garage, brining in lots of
phone lines and banks of modems. A similar investment today (in the right
location) would get someone a gigabit Internet connection and more compute
capability than all but the biggest companies had available to them during the
.com days.
Adn over time, the processing power and connectivity available to the individual
is only going to improve. Trying to make laws saying that these individuals are
not able to use these resources unless they are certified.
Add to this the International nature of the Internet, and the idea of
controlling who can manage systems becoems even more outlandish.
I view any call for rules that would have prevented me from entering the
field with deep suspicion.
Bingo David. Which is why I am not sure that "Professionalization" is
really the road forward.
So what is the road forward?
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.
Verifiable only in the context of teaching. Not in charging actual money.
It's a high ideal, and reality will probably fall short, but it's worthy of
effort.
I'm not sure what you mean, most of my learning was not doen via methods where
money changed hands.
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.
For sure. We need to preserve that aspect of this field.
So I think trying to impose rules that would eliminate the vast majority
of people from the field is a waste of time.
Has it been a waste of time for Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, etc? School
costs (the business side of education) certainly haven't dampened the
number of students seeking the education. Do you think the quality of
Doctors has risen since formal education and internship programs were
instituted?
Well, there is a lot of argument that in the medical field, the system keeps out
good doctors as much as it creates them. Talk to people who learn medicine
outside the US and then move here where their qualifications are not recognized.
I am in no way opposed to providing and encouraging education. I just don't want
to have anyone start blessing specific training or schools as the only way to be
educated.
I think you have as much of a chance to enforce "Ethics and Standards" in Ssytem
Administration as you do in Sales.
David Lang
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