Usually I write about IT - on various, more or less, highly specialized topics like SAN / storage or FreeBSD, but now I will try to speak on a foreign field, so many readers of my further reasoning will seem quite controversial or even naive. However, the way it is, and therefore I'm not offended. However, as a direct consumer of knowledge and educational services, sorry for this terrible clericalism, and also as an enthusiastic amateur eager to share his dubious “finds and discoveries” urbi et orbi, I can hardly remain silent either.
Therefore, you either skip this text further before it's too late, or humble yourself and endure, because, freely quoting a famous song, all I want is to drive my bike.
So, in order to sort everything out, let's start from afar - from a school, which, in theory, should teach basic things about the sciences and the world around us. Basically, this baggage is presented using traditional methods of scholasticism, such as cramming a carefully emasculated school curriculum containing a limited set of conclusions and formulas dissected by teachers, as well as multiple repetitions of the same tasks and exercises. Because of this approach, in the topics studied, the clarity of physical or practical meanings is often lost, which, in my opinion, causes critical damage to the systematization of knowledge.
In general, on the one hand, school methods are good for hammering the minimum required set of information into the heads of those who do not really want to learn. On the other hand, they can inhibit the development of those who are able to achieve more than just train the reflex.
I admit that in the 30 years since I left school, the situation has changed for the better, but I suspect that this is still not too far removed from the Middle Ages, especially since religion has returned to school and is doing quite well there.
I have never attended a college or other vocational school, so I can't really say much about them, but there is a great risk that the study of the profession there may be reduced to the training of specific applied skills, while losing sight of the theoretical basis.
Go ahead. Against the school background, an educational institute, or university, from the point of view of acquiring knowledge, looks like a real outlet. The opportunity, and even in some cases the obligation to study the material on their own, greater freedom in choosing ways of knowing and sources of information opens up wide opportunities for those who can and want to learn. It all depends on the maturity of the student and his aspirations and goals. Therefore, despite the fact that higher education has to some extent earned the reputation of being inert, lagging behind the development of modern IT, nevertheless, many students manage to work out methods of cognition, as well as get a chance to compensate for the inadequacy of school education and re-master the science of learning autonomously and independently. to get knowledge.
As for all kinds of courses organized by IT hardware and software vendors, you need to understand that their main goal is to teach consumers how to use their programs and equipment, so often algorithms and theoretical foundations, as well as the most important details of what is hidden "under the hood" , are considered in the classroom only to the extent that the manufacturer is forced to do so in order to give general information about the technology, while not disclosing trade secrets and not forgetting to emphasize its advantages over competitors.
For the same reasons, the procedure for certification of IT specialists, especially at the initial levels, often sins with checks of unimportant knowledge, and tests ask obvious questions, or worse: check applicants' reflex knowledge of the material. Like, for example, why not ask an engineer on a certification exam “with what arguments: -ef, or -ax should I run the ps command”, referring to this particular UNIX variant or Linux distribution. Such an approach would require the test-taker to memorize this and many other commands in advance, even though these parameters can always be specified in man if at some point the administrator forgets them.
Fortunately, progress does not stand still, and in a few years some arguments will change, others will become obsolete, and new ones will appear and take the place of the old ones. As happened in some operating systems, where over time they began to use a version of the ps utility that prefers a syntax without "cons": ps ax.
And what then? That's right, it is necessary to re-certify specialists, but it is better to make it a rule, once every N years, or with the release of new versions of software and equipment, to revoke "outdated diplomas", thereby encouraging engineers to undergo certification according to the updated version. And, of course, it is necessary to make certification paid. And this despite the fact that the certificate of one vendor will significantly lose its local value in the event that the employer of the specialist changes the vendor and starts purchasing similar equipment from another supplier. And okay, if this happened only with "closed" commercial products, access to which is limited, and therefore, certification for them has some value due to its relative rarity, however, some companies quite successfully impose certification for "open" products, for example, as happens with some Linux distributions. Moreover, engineers themselves are trying to get hooked on Linux certification too, spending time and money on it, in the hope that this achievement will add weight to them in the labor market.
Certification allows you to standardize the knowledge of specialists, giving them a single certain average level of knowledge and honing skills to automatism, which, of course, is very convenient for such a management style that operates with concepts like: man-hours, human resources and production standards. This formal approach is rooted in the golden age of the industrial age, in large factories and industrial plants built around the assembly line, where each worker is required to perform specific actions accurately and in a very limited time, and there is simply no time to think. However, in order to think and make decisions, there are always other people at the plant. It is obvious that a person in such a scheme turns into a "cog in the system" - an easily replaceable element with known performance characteristics.
But not in an industrial enterprise, but in IT, such an amazing quality as laziness makes people strive for simplification. In the Skills, Rules, Knowledge (SRK) system, many of us voluntarily prefer to use the skills worked out to automatism and follow the rules that smart people have developed, rather than making efforts, researching problems in depth and acquiring knowledge on our own, because it is so much like inventing another meaningless bike. And, basically, the whole education system from high school to IT professional courses/certifications indulges this by teaching people to rote instead of research; training skills suitable for specific instances of applications or equipment, instead of understanding the root causes, knowledge of algorithms and technologies.
In other words, during training, the lion's share of time and effort is devoted to practicing the approach "Как use this or that tool”, and not to search for an answer to the question “Why does it work like this and not otherwise?” For the same reasons, in the field of IT, the “best practices” method is often used, describing recommendations for the “best” configuration and use of certain components or systems. No, I do not reject the idea of best-practices, it is very good as a cheat sheet or check list, but often such recommendations are used as a “golden hammer”, they become inviolable axioms that engineers and management follow rigorously and thoughtlessly, without bothering to figure out the answer the question "why" is given one or the other recommendation. And this is strange, because if an engineer studied и know material, he does not need to blindly rely on authoritative opinion, which is suitable in most situations, but quite possibly not applicable to a particular case.
Sometimes in connection with best-practices it comes to the point of absurdity: even in my practice there was a case when vendors supplying the same product under different trademarks had slightly different views on the subject, so when they conducted an annual assessment at the request of the customer, one one of the reports always contained a warning about the violation of best-practices, while the other, on the contrary, praised for full compliance.
And let it sound too academic and at first glance inapplicable in such areas as support IT systems that require the application of skills, not the study of the subject, but if there is a desire to break out of the vicious circle, despite the scarcity of truly important information and knowledge, there will always be ways and methods to figure it out. At least it seems to me that they help:
- Critical thinking, scientific approach and common sense;
- Search for causes and study of primary sources of information, source texts, standards and formal descriptions of technologies;
- Research versus cramming. The absence of fear of "bicycles", the construction of which makes it possible, at a minimum, to understand why other developers, engineers and architects have chosen one way or another to solve similar problems, and, at a maximum, to make the bicycle even better than before.
Source: habr.com