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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