Round and Round We Go

by Barbara L. Dijker
<[email protected]>

Barbara Dijker is Vice-President of the SAGE STG Executive Committee.

I was struck with a bit of vertigo recently. Reading through the recent missives about the virtues and vices of certification was the culprit.

The SAGE certification committee has been trying to get the topic out on the table so that all the views can be aired. There have been articles in ;login:. At LISA there was a debate. Since then, the sage-members mailing list has had a revived discussion. Finally, comments and pleas are being sent to the SAGE certification advisory council, and discussion has been brewing there.

And there it was. Dizziness, nausea. The cause is not that I'm sick of it the topic. The cause is that the discussion has not only come full circle, it is going in circles over and over again. There may be a few new arguments for certification related to changing markets. However, not a single new insight has been raised against certification in six years.

At the very heart of the debate, and expressed incessantly in an infinite number of creative ways, is the question of whether what a system administrator does can be put in a tiny little box (cubicle, box, cubicle, box) and neatly labeled, categorized, and evaluated. Gut reaction to that idea is pure repulsion. It threatens our identity. It undermines all the hard work we've done to get this far.

Most system administrators practicing today have formal training (if any) in a vaguely related area and learned everything the hard way. My education is in physics and I used to program spacecrafts. What brought most of us into the "profession" was a drive to figure things out, the ability to learn things that weren't well documented, and the naivete to think others would be grateful. How do we measure that? Few of us have had any formal education in system administration ­ because it didn't exist. Due to our experiences, we find it difficult to consider that one can really learn system administration any other way.

At the same time, we all complain about being overworked. I personally can't wait for genetic cloning. Then I (and my six other clones) will be able to work something less than a 12-hour day and have a "normal" evening at home. There are now, after about 10 years, a good number of excellent tutorials, classes, and books on various aspects of system administration. We seem to be able to impart our knowledge base. We should be able to evaluate one's application of that knowledge. We should be able to certify that evaluation. There appears to be value in doing that.

Every "profession" goes through a maturation process. I have no doubt the first doctors were just as arrogant that their skills could not be duplicated or measured. Some still are. Same with lawyers or any other group doing work which involves significant experience and cognitive process. But as the work evolves, the knowledge and practice of the work evolve and can more readily be imparted and evaluated. Think about where we might be without certification of existing professions like nursing. Certification is never a replacement for apprenticeship or on-the-job experience, it's a foundation upon which to build.

Maybe system administration isn't ready for certification yet. But one day it will be. How will we know when? Probably when the first-generation system administrators are long gone and the new generation can't remember their old arguments against it. The new generation will become system administrators not through the School of Hard Knocks but through one of any number of training programs already available, which are improving all the time.