[ale] bout me company

Jeff Hubbs hbbs at attbi.com
Fri Feb 15 00:18:41 EST 2002



Well, you can practice Linux advocacy in several ways.  One that isn't going
to work very well is dissing people who live only in Windows' little fishbowl.
 Believe me, I understand the urge.  But, just as feelings of superiority
rise up in you, feelings of inferiority or at least the threat of inferiority
rise up in them, and that's never a positive place to maneuver someone else
into.  

Basically, anyone who has dealt only in WinWorld hasn't been working in IT
very long simply due to the math (NT only became something you could gainfully
utilize c. 1995-1996).  As the MS "axis of evil" arose, the goal became to
encourage as many people as possible to become NT/2K sysadmins ("engineers"),
and many did - many with no CS or engineering education or background.  Through
that and the philosophy of "wizard for this, wizard for that," sysadminning
became more like unskilled labor.  Because there are so many, the salaries
and rates tend to only get so high.  This of course only benefits MS, who
can claim that TCO of NT/2K is lower because you don't need degreed pros
to run the iron (although, as I've implied, organizations who try this do
so at their peril).  

The fact is, WinMan bought into a system not of his making but of MS and
probably a lot of other entities looking to make a buck.  That's what was
there for the accomplishing.  Perhaps he looked in Computer User and
saw an ad like this one I'm looking at right in front of me here:  "Get Certified
Today and Start Your IT Career Tomorrow...$5,995 includes 100% instruction
by...MCSE...instructor,...testing at large VUE testing center, breakfast
and lunch each day,...training with your own...computer...", etc.  "Guaranteed
Passing!", the ad says!  Guaranteed passing??  Damnation, sign me up!  I
was a shift supervisor at Wal-Mart, now I'm going to be an MSCE!!  GUARANTEED!

Now, the heck of it is, among all the people who go into this pipeline, some
of them are going to be whip-smart; genetics, environment, and happenstance
will have come together in one person here and one person there, and they
will have spent about a dollar a minute over 14 days to go through a class
like this and they'll work very hard and they'll study hard and they'll do
very well...but for what??  Where exactly would the challenge have been,
especially if the training outfit offers "Guaranteed Passing?"  No matter
how smart WinMan or his legions of WinMen and WinWomen are, exactly how far
can they go with their training?  

Clifford Stoll (of Cuckoo's Egg fame) has written that there are many,
many more people who have gone to work with computers than there needs to
be, to the point that other professions - right down to auto mechanics and
plumbers - are getting shorthanded.  Tried to get a car worked on at a dealership
lately??

So I guess what I'm saying is that we need not feel loathing for WinMan.
 One of the key strengths of living in Linux-land is that we tend to attract
people toward it and the economics of the situation lend itself to doing
just that with very little load.  Some time back, I recall posting to the
ALE list a story about something that happened one time when I was at the
Perimeter CompUSA.  I brought some Linux magazine with a distro CD attached
to it (Storm, I think) to the register and the guy who rung it up for me
saw the mag and said "I've heard about Linux - is it any good?"  So, I gave
him my twenty-second answer and he seemed receptive.  I started to walk away
after paying and I stopped myself and said to him, "Look, I just bought this
magazine - I can do with it what I please, right?"  The guy looked at me
funny (happens a lot) and kind of nodded.  As I started ripping the plastic
off the magazine, I said, "I can download this and burn myself a CD anytime
I want...you take this one" and I just handed him the CD out of the magazine.
 I lost almost nothing, yet I gave him enough software to run a small country.
 For all I know, he might have thrown it away without as much as looking
at it or he might be hacking kernel code by now, but the point is, he had
it in his hands - legitimately.  What he did or did not do with it was up
to him, not MS, not some training outfit.  
Wouldn't you agree that these people need our help more than they need our
scorn?

- Jeff

fgz wrote:
008901c1b5c9$91f3c310$0f8a99d1 at jupiter">
  Well put, and diplomatic also. Stiffled my impulse tothink poorly of the WinMan just on general principles.  :)A classy read, Jeff.-fgz
  
  
  
  
  




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