I'm really getting sick and tired of people who have a stack of certificates but who can't tie their own shoe laces. If I have to hand-hold any more SixSigma black belts through the simplest process of not alienating the client whilst still getting the job done I will probably show up on CNN next day as the guy who took an Uzi to the office...
It seems as though you can't walk in to a Starbucks in this part of the world without discovering that the guy squeezing the beans has some god-damned MBA from some two-bit third world flea pit. Every person who arrives for an interview for any position regardless of how technical claims to be Cisco Certified to some degree or other, but strangely they just sit there and grin at me when I start asking them how they'd design one of our networks.
I sort of "get it". I understand how hard it must be to stand out from the crowd when the crowd has literally billions of people in it, and to figure even in the top 50% is maybe fantastic because they at least means there are a hell of a lot of people further down the food chain to you. I sort of "get" that...but I don't get all the expats who seem to want to join in with that crap instead of just standing out on their own merits.
Today (not just today...it's been a while now) I've been once again disillusioned by a person with a lot of certificates. This guy left the company just the other day (and would have been fired if he'd stayed any longer) after spending months digging us into a worse and worse mess on a site with a client. Throughout the process he's been telling me all is good, he's been telling me he's on top of everything. He's been telling me he's in constant touch with the vendor who sold us the equipment he's been trying to get work, and he's been telling me that everything is being done to resolve the problems.
Bull...shit...
All of it.
We paid this guy good money. We even touted the guy around, telling people how great we were because we had such a highly certified engineer working with us...sigh...
I don't have time to follow these guys around holding their hands and making sure they're doing things right. Why (and I have used this expression several times already this week) have a dog, and then shit on the carpet yourself?
The process of resolving problems seems to be beyond so many people nowadays. So many people would rather sit in front of a PC monitor and stare at it for hours and hours in the hope that some solution to their problem is going to just leap out at then...when we all know that it frequently does not.
Fix things. Make things work. It does not matter that you ask for help or that you do not know all the answers, finding the solution is all that matters.
I get a little annoyed with people who try to pull the old "we need to solve the problems ourselves if we are going to learn". No, my friends. You need to fix the fucking problem so the company can get paid and thereby pay your god-damned salary at the end of the month. Full-fucking-stop!
You want to learn? No problem, we'll send you on a training course. Fix the problem and we'll make enough money to do that, otherwise call the god-damned support line, read the fucking manual in your own time and do what you get paid for!
One of our young (well younger than me anyhows which is happening quite a lot lately - old age great) support agents asked me about the sitting the CCNA exam today. I was like okay... He was going to read the book, do the practice questions and give it a crack. I asked him if he'd ever heard of subnet masks? He was vague. I mentioned it would be necessary to be able to work out network subnets without an IP calc for the exam....
ReplyDeleteI can't fault the guy for trying to better his qualifications. God help it you need to if you wanna jump out of being a support agent at our place, but it seemed like it was a big ask.
I said - look you'd be better placed to tackle a MCP exam first. Perhaps MS workstation and/or server. See how you get along. Good place to start, although everyone and their dog has/is a MCP. But I did say to him - look at the job market here. No-one wants support guys, they all want production line droids or software engineers of one sort or another. Much more likely to get a foot in the door with someone who is hiring software guys at a junior level. (Well perhaps not - who does hire juniors any more?) But think about it I said, look at this company - one support guy (me) looking after the infrastructure for 130 people. Do the maths, support like my role isn't the way to go 'cos its a career with many dead ends - no chance of bumping up the career ladder if you're the only guy doing the job..
Don't think I'll make it as a career advisor.
I think your outlook on the opportunities for people with networking skill are a little blinkered - but that's not a-typical of a lot of the people I talk to in typical Enterprise ICT support roles.
ReplyDeleteAll of those guys seem to spend 95% of their time answering the old "I can't get access to xyz folder on the server" and "I can't print" issues. Dull dull dull.
It's a strange world I could not survive in.
What you're missing is that the real world (that place beyond the walls of your office) runs almost entirely on IP networks.
Industrial systems, building management systems, security systems, environmental monitoring systems, public address and audio communications systems, fire systems - you name it. IP is everywhere and someone has to design, deploy and support all of that stuff.
Contrary to popular misconception we don't just plug it all into the existing network and hey-presto. We almost always deploy a new and separate network for that stuff.
Very frequently the industrial networking guys know a heck of a lot more about the nitty gritty of networking than the office LAN guys, because we need to use the complicated stuff just to get the networks to actually work and stay working. We actually use things like multicasting and vlans all the time. We actually use all those security features they list in the datasheets.
People who thoroughly understand networking and can design and deploy the sort of networks we routinely install are in short supply and in high demand.
Never aim for mediocre. You're likely to underachieve, and then where'll you be?
What you say is true. I wasn't saying never go near Cisco but my outlook is blinkered by the jobs market and the reality I'm looking at. Location plays a big part in it. Also this guy (and myself) are never going to get very far with our CCNAs to do the complicated networking stuff you mention. Sure I know my way around various Cisco devices. But the cost of achieving further qualifications in this field are, to my eye, detrimental in the present economic climate - A lot of money for very little employment opportunities here.
ReplyDeleteI *know* I could go to another place/country with these qualifications but that isn't a practical solution at present.
I agree totally with the dullness of my job. It is rather limited and I've tried to move into other IT roles lately but with no success... No one aims to be mediocre, sometimes it just happens despite our best intentions.
Don't settle for dull, Dan. There's so much more to life and you only get one chance at it.
ReplyDeleteThe Cisco certs seem to give people an ok grounding - but that's only half theh story. If they learn the theoretical side and also have the spark of imagination and a solution-oriented brain they're useful.
I'm an advocate of life long learning but I'm not a great example. I just don't have time now to do anything more than I'm doing already, but I force my guys onto training all the time and we train internally to keep people focused and understanding what we're trying to achieve.