"J. van Baardwijk" wrote:
>
> At 12:00 15-8-01 -0400, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
>
> >Rossiter has no military experience, nor is any of his academic
> >experience in security studies - which leads one to wonder how he is
> >capable of analying the tactics and strategy of the United States military
> >in South Korea, for example, or at least to question the validity of such
> >analyses when they are contradicted by the declared beliefs of the
> >Pentagon.
>
> You know, people (including mr. Rossiter) are quite capable of acquiring
> knowledge *without* getting a degree in the subject. For example, I know my
> way around computers and computer networks (that's what my boss pays me
> for!), but I don't have a Masters Degree in Computer Science. Does my not
> having a CS degree make me incapable of, say, analyzing and solving network
> problems?
Actually, all the people I've met who were good at dealing with computer
networks *didn't* have a Master's, most of them didn't even have a
Bachelor's; from my limited experience, I might go so far as to argue
that having a Master's would be a liability rather than an asset as far
as dealing with computer networks goes. The guys I know who are really
good at it got into doing it for a living when their former high school
classmates were in college, so the experience they were getting was
better than a degree, for that particular job.
But my experience is very limited.
Oh, and speaking of computer science degree-holders -- I was with a
bunch in college, and those who came out being good programmers were the
ones who'd done a lot more programming than what was required for
classes. Another example of how *doing* is more important than learning
a lot of theory.
Julia
