Re: sysadmin qualifications (Re: apt-get vs. aptitude)
berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:
Le 18.10.2013 16:22, Miles Fidelman a écrit :
(though it's pretty hard to get hired for anything in the US
without a bachelorate in something)
I do not think it can be worse than in France.
Ok. I wasn't sure about that, though France does seem as credential
crazy as the US.
I was under the impression that European schools tended to have a more
clearly defined, and distinct "trades school track" (not sure the right
term to use) than we do in the US - with direction set by testing
somewhere along the way.
It's certainly possible to learn stuff on one's own, but my
observation is that true depth and bredth requires some amount of
formal education from folks who are already knowledgeable. It's like
anything - sure there are self-taught violinists, but most who've
achieved a serious level of skill (much less public recognition)
started out taking years and years of lessons.
I do not say that best guys never have years of lessons.
I think that, lessons by knowledgeable people will help you to develop
your knowledge faster, in only one direction, while the self-learners
will learn less, and in many directions, so they will probably not be
as expert.
Then, for both kind of guys, what really matters in the end is how
many problems they solved ( problems solved, not products released ).
Accomplished craftsmen
(and women) have typically studied and apprenticed in some form.
Self-learners studied, they simply made it themselves.
My sense is that self-learners tend to learn what they're interested in,
and/or what they need to solve specific problems - whereas formal
training tends to be more about "what you might need to know" - hence a
bit broader, and more context.
I sure wouldn't trust a self-taught doctor performing surgery on me -
That's why some professions have needs for legal stuff. We can not
really compare a doctor with the usual computer scientist, right?
And I said "usual", because most of us do not, and will never work, on
stuff which can kill someone. And when we do, verification processes
are quite important ( I hope, at least! ), unlike for doctors which
have to be careful while they are doing their job, because they can
not try things and then copy/paste on a real human.
Actually, I would make that comparison. A doctor's mistakes kill one
person at a time. In a lot of situations, mis-behaving software can
cause 100s, 1000s, maybe 100s of 1000s of lives - airplane crash, power
outage, bug in a piece of medical equiptment (say a class of
pacemakers), flaws in equipment as a result of faulty design software,
failure in a weapons system, etc. Software failures can also cause huge
financial losses - ranging from spacecraft that go off course (remember
the case a few years ago where someone used meters instead of feet, or
vice versa in some critical navigational calculation?), to outages of
stock exchanges (a week or so ago), and so forth.
Ok, but now we're talking an apples to oranges comparison. Installing
developers tools is a pain, no matter what environment. For fancy,
non-standard stuff, "apt-get install foo" beats everything out there,
and "./configure; make install" is pretty straightforward (assuming
you have the pre-requisites installed).
But when it comes to packaging up software for delivery to
users/customers; it sure seems like it's easier to install something
on Windows or a Mac than anything else. Slip in the installation CD
and click start.
You mean, something like that ?
http://packages.debian.org/fr/squeeze/gdebi
http://packages.debian.org/fr/wheezy/gdebi
Seems to be that there's a huge difference between:
- buy a laptop pre-loaded with Windows, and slip in an MS Office DVD, and
- buy a laptop, download debian onto a DVD, run the installer, get all
the non-free drivers installed, then apt-get install openoffice and wade
through all the recommended and suggested optional packages - and then,
maybe, have to deal with issues around which JRE you have installed?
Just for reference, I use a Mac and mostly commercial software for
office kinds of stuff, plus a company-provided Dell running Windows -
both running MS Office. Now my SERVER farm is all Debian. I will note,
that for a lot of server-side stuff (particularly my mail processing and
list manager) I find I get much better results (and newer code) by
compiling from source, than by using the package system.
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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