On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Brandon Allbery wrote:
On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 5:50 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidel...@meetinghouse.net
<mailto:mfidel...@meetinghouse.net>> wrote:
Well, ok - but when a word has a well understood definition -
doesn't an alternate definition take us into Humpty Dumpty land?
It can, if used generally without advertising it beforehand. When presented
as it has been here, specifically to get people to think about the
alternative, it's clearly food for thought: how does this notional
definition affect your viewpoint?
Not so much offend, as wondering the point (and maybe being just a bit snarky
- it's been that kind of a day.).
It's been an "interesting" day for me as well.
But seriously, returning to the discussion in progress - see comments below:
--
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, Paul Heinlein wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, David Lang wrote:
Our work sure qualifies under the first point, and while large shops have
checks in place, Snowden has shown that even the NSA can't prevent a
rouge Sysadmin from doing series damage, and is no different than a large
Engineering or Law firm that can attempt to put in similar checks, but
can't possibly hope to prevent all problems.
thoughts?
Most organizations put large obstacles between their sysadmins and a host
of corporate activities, e.g., hiring full-time employees, purchasing or
selling capital assets, entering into binding legal agreements.
Most organizations put obstacles between their sysadmins and a small
subset of data, e.g., employees' self-encrypted files (password managers
or SSH keys), some legal/personnel records.
Few organizations can do more than that without having a huge budget for
both system administration and security. Personally, I wouldn't want to
work for one of them.
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.
If one is trying to make the distinction of professional vs. non-professional
to other people - like management - changing definitions seems like a
non-starter.
the initial poster of the definition referred to any other group as being in
some lesser category.
And he was right in a way, "Professional" can be applied to anything that makes
you a living (including Professional Swindler), but it's also clear that there
is a line somewhere where jobs above that line are very different from ones
below it, and there has been a lot of debate as to which side of the line System
Administration belong, with clear examples on both sides.
Thinking of things in this different way, it's clear why there are examples on
both sides. And this could possibly give us a handle on defining the difference.
Though perhaps when framed as "when do you NEED a professional," or
certification, or licensing - vs. "what is a professional" - then the
definition might apply.
As suggested by this point:
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 the problem can be approached from both directions
What does a professional look like (which we've talked about extensively)
and
when do you need a professional (for what sorts of jobs)
This is very much the second. But in defining "when do you need one", I think it
also can feed into "what is one"
David Lang
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