At 9:10 PM +0000 1/3/03, nrf wrote: > > >There it is. You hit it right on the head. > >I think a lot of people are emotionally invested in the cert process and >have lost the forest for the trees. One especially ugly manifestation of >this is the phenomena that people who are certified automatically think they >know everything about everything and therefore don't need to continue >learning.
And part of that is that if they do feel they need to learn more, it's along the same lines of product-specific material. > >> >> A couple of personal observations: I have no interest in getting into >> top corporate management, but I have and will be in senior technology >> management. nrf, it seems, distinguishes simply between management >> and non-management. In Cisco's case, I'd have no interest in John >> Chambers' job, but I might in Christine Hemrick's -- a former >> colleague at GTE. > > There is no hard and fast rule. Just like anything in life, it's not all >black-and-white. I concede that even some people can enter top management >with no degree. But what I'm saying is that the higher you go, the harder >slogging it gets. You need to do more and more things to compensate for >that lack of a degree that higher up you go. This is why the higher up you >look in any company, the higher the percentage of grads. By the way, Ms. >Hemrick is a grad. Yep. But, having spent time in the same lab in early to mid-career, it wasn't the only determinant. Doug Humphries was also in the group, and, IIRC, was a dropout -- at least, he had sufficient battles with the University of Maryland administration that it would surprise me that he finished. Doug went on to found and sell Digex, and is now both doing advanced content distribution and venture capital. > > And again, I would reiterate that perhaps the most important facet of a >degree is that it gives you flexibility to change your career. Do you wanna >stay technical forever, or might you feel like doing something else sometime >in your life? There's a reason why the Wall Street banks, for example, >recruit at college campuses , but not at the local high school. Bankers, by >the way, are another group of people who make more money in a week than we >make in a year. You seem to be making an assumption that career changes are necessarily to make more money. Personally, if I were going to change careers, it would variously be in some aspect of medicine, fine art photography, politicomilitary strategy or professional cooking. (I do have one friend that has worked for both CIA's, the Culinary Institute of America and the Central Intelligence Agency. Do NOT make her angry when she has a knife.) As it is, I do some things in all of these. Obviously, I might write full time -- I'm working on some projects not in the networking area. Now, I'm too old to go through a full MD program, but I can (and do) participate in medical research as long as there's some MD around to sign the right legal forms. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=60244&t=60244 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
