On Wed, 17 Sep 2014, Hans van der Made wrote:
The sysadmin field is relatively new and the fixed roles we see in medicine
(oncologist, GP, surgeon) probably haven't been fully defined in our field
yet. A professional GP is not a professional neurologist, so we need both
horizontal (level) and vertical (specialty) distinctions. When someone's
life or a large sum of money is at stake, I'd say you want more than just a
professional.
I won't disagree with you, but I think we're not at that point in the
battle/discussion yet.
Right now, we have no agreement that any sort of qualification or professional
status is needed. healthcare.gov is an perfect example of big, well funded
companies getting it wrong.
First establish a need for professional status, then decide how and if it needs
to be specialized.
while I think that there are lots of things that can be specialities, I think
there is still room for the generalist in our field
David Lang
Hans
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:13 AM, David Lang <da...@lang.hm> wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, Paul Heinlein wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, David Lang wrote:
I agree, but I was more asking for thoughts on if this was a good
defintiion of "Professional" and if this definition would work any better
than the previous definitions we've tries to use for the term
"professional" and the follow-up discussions on licensing/certification
efforts.
Ah. I apologize for responding to the wrong question.
I think this definition is useful, because it is the first one that I've
seen that is able to draw a line between the Sysadmin who is running their
personal site or a local club/church site (something that I strongly
believe should NOT be regulated/licensed) and someone running a bank (where
they may have people working there who aren't licensed, but it would be
reaonsble to say that the person in charge if not most of the senior people
should be)
I think I understand your desire to provide solid guidance as to when an
"amateur" can be given charge of a computing environment and when it should
be run only be a "professional."
In the examples you've provided, however, it seems to me that you're
talking much more about the job than the person. A hospital job might
require HIPAA competencies, a retailer PCI competencies, a major ISP
Cisco/Juniper/BGP competencies, and the NSA a willingness to follow the
rules and keep your mouth shut.
I'm not sure that a single term like "professional" really captures all
that -- mostly because it gives the sense that a computer professional at,
say, a Kaiser Hospital would also accepted as a computer professional at
Comcast.
In other words, any mention of "professional" would be immediately be
followed by the question, "professional what?" Certainly not "professional
sysadmin," which is way too broad for any reasonable licensing standards.
None of this is meant to undermine your point that some computing jobs
intersect with basic human well-being; it's just that I cannot currently
fathom any single term to describe the situation.
Medicine, Engineering, and Law all have lots of specialties as well, but
that doesn't mean that the term "Doctor", "Engineer", and "Lawyer" don't
have significant meaning.
I have been very opposed to anything like mandatory licensing in part
because of the slippery slope down to things that obviously shouldn't
require certification/licenseing and in part due to the barrier to entry
that would have kept out a large percentage of the current people in the
field.
This is the first definition that I've seen that had any chance of solving
the first problem.
While HIPPA or PCI are clear triggers that can point at the need to have a
Professional Sysadmin in charge, defining the terms this way makes it easy
to say that the local Deli probably doesn't need a professional running
their computers, but that the local Engineering firm that would go out of
business if they lost their data does.
This is going back to the question of what is the impact of things being
wrong, and what is the probability that the person hiring them could tell
that they are wrong.
David Lang
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