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 w
