Multi-armed Shiva Syndrome: Knowledge vs Skills
In continuation of the previous post .
It seems to me that most of the “non-standard profile” computer specialists and system administrators formed spontaneously, and most of them have gone the way when they had to maintain different types of printers, tinkering with 1C, and mail, and the client bank to set up, and solve the problem with video playback on the boss's laptop. I may be wrong, but as far as I can see it in my environment, the majority went this way.
The path I speak of is the path of the "many-armed Shiva." The path of multiple skills and relatively little knowledge. Those who have switched to the path of knowledge go up. Those who stayed in the way of skills - remain approximately in the same place where they were.
Let me take a little “popiaruyus” and tell you about the mega-skills that I had left with my life baggage.
')
I deliberately wrote out the most garbage skills that are usually not even written in resumes, because they are too trivial. If this list had become 50 times longer, would I have become a more qualified specialist? Not.
The reason is skills, not knowledge. In every new situation, I have to study the problem from scratch and look for solutions. Yes, the experience of the previous ones allows, in analogy, to solve new ones, but the analogies are not at all always fair ...
Now consider the reverse example. How do you think, how much time will it take to study a bind to a person who is well aware of the structure and principles of DNS operation, although he hasn’t seen the bind A couple of days to study the specifics of the bind (for example, view) and sniffing at the most non-obvious things, a few days of messing with real bandages - and this is quite a specialist. Why? Because, even if he doesn’t know exactly how the slaves are notified in binde, he knows for sure that he needs to find a method to notify the slave about updating the zone. It remains to find out how.
Similarly: what do you think, how much time will it take for a person who is well versed in the PKI (but did it only under Windows) to master openssl and raise its own CA? I do not think more than a few days.
Knowledge lies deeper than skills. You can be able, but not understand. Understanding, you can always figure out how to do it.
The time spent on skills is incremental time. Having a skill before starting work saves you N time. Once (having a skill you save time on acquiring it). Time spent on knowledge is multiplicative time. It will not speed you up here and now, but will reduce each N in gaining skill in the relevant area by a certain amount. And the more such “multiplicative” factors you have, the greater the time savings, and the wider the areas in which you can, in principle, acquire skills. And so these skills will be more fundamental (because instead of memorizing the sequence, you will know the causes and consequences).
And it is with this problem that most administrators in small companies face. They do not require knowledge and understanding. It is necessary that it works (good or bad, it does not matter. There are no people who could appreciate it, so that “at least somehow”, if only it worked). But besides the main work there is a mass of secondary, which requires attention and time, but is completely unrelated to knowledge. I listed a rather wide list above ...
However, let's leave me alone. It is enough to run through the eyes on the vacancies, as the hair stands on end from that power and complexity of work as an administrator:
Example:
If we take this announcement seriously, then an attempt to study at least half of the above will set us up for a couple of years for books. Administering MSSQL? As a minimum, it would be good to know SQL, to know the features of MS SQL, to know about replication methods, organizing subscriptions and publishing, writing backup scripts on SQL itself ... Exchange and AD? Another huge pillar, the development of which is very, very difficult (knowledge of the AD scheme, skills of working with adsi, PKI ...). And then it gets worse. You also need to “keep websites up-to-date” (aka being an editor, and most likely, a designer, and a coder (no wonder PHP is written)), and there is also 1C, which needs to be “fixed configuration” (you need know accounting, know the language 1C, know the principles of the configuration ...). We simply will not talk about such trifles as “knowledge of cisco”.
In fact, people just need an advanced enikeyschik who will keep all this in relative order. And yes, they will force it to tinker in the 1C configuration, redo the design of the sites, figure out why synchronization on the PDA does not work, etc. etc.
In the end, if you start working with all of this, then you will never learn all this fundamentally. You will not become a good 1C programmer, you will not become a good PCR coder, you will not become a designer, you will not learn AD so that you can easily come to a large organization to deal with one-way trust relationships between trees in the forest, bridge servers, GPOs with reference to AD nodes ... [I write within my qualification, perhaps there is something more next].
At this job you will have two ways:
The second way is in no way connected with official duties, moreover, it contradicts them (the employer does not need a “very smart” one). But it is he who leads to the possibility of specialization. Because it is impossible to specialize without fundamental knowledge, an enikeyshchik with 20 years of experience (you will not believe, but I know this) remains an enikeyshchik, although, perhaps, it has tremendous skills.
What is the reason for this? I spoke with several directors of medium-sized companies (50-150 people) "heart-to-heart" - and I was struck by how they relate to the work force. We spoke in a situation where these words could not hurt me, so I think they were frank.
They need people who will do everything. They do not need specialists narrow profile. If they decide to separate the work of the programmer and the web designer, it is only because “this is very disgusting”. Through force. At the first possible case, trying to make a designer also a sales manager, content manager and photographer in an online store.
They need generalists with great flexibility and depth of skills "well, how much is." And they do not need "nothing special." And most importantly, such "universals" change very easily, because in each specific area it is not so difficult to study it (at the level at which they are required). You can take the first administrator, and in a week he will understand this PBX, in a month he will become familiar with ekscheynzhe, even if he had never seen him before.
The reason for this (this is my speculation) is how they relate to business. Most are not sure what will happen tomorrow, and not in the sense of “succeed or not”, “competitors will eat or not”, but in the sense of “what else will they suit us”. Most do not want to invest in employee training, because they are not sure that they will not have to drastically change their business from (for example) book publishing to the potato trade, or to “cut the money out of here”. In such circumstances, investment in employee development is folly. Tomorrow everything will be spoiled and it will be necessary to make experts on potatoes, so let the sysadmin imprint while the book is up, he still understands computers well ...
... We add that the majority of any successful leaders are relatively good psychologists in the sense of "personnel processing". And in such situations, they try to show you the insignificance of your work. This is done not by direct text, but by some primitivization of the attitude towards the results ... Probably, it is better not to say anything about it than the xkcd comic at the beginning of the article.
Career multi-armed Shiva can not be. Probably somewhere there is only one person on the planet who can learn everything at the same time. But most physically can not. The only career path (if you leave aside government agencies and warm lazy places in semi-state Gazprom) is specialization. And for this you need to go strictly in the opposite direction - to the basics. If you know well the cores of modern operating systems, then you can become an expert on a specific Microsoft linux enterprise with ease.
And the position of an upgraded enikeyschik gives opportunities for this. When the deadline does not hang over your head, you can spend a month studying something abstract, and not in the mode “by tomorrow morning it should work, although I don’t understand at all what the message 'invalid reference for storage” 'during the start of the mail server ".
The only danger is sluggishness and non-necessity of studying (it is possible to tinker for a couple of months, get stuck on trifles and quit).
It seems to me that most of the “non-standard profile” computer specialists and system administrators formed spontaneously, and most of them have gone the way when they had to maintain different types of printers, tinkering with 1C, and mail, and the client bank to set up, and solve the problem with video playback on the boss's laptop. I may be wrong, but as far as I can see it in my environment, the majority went this way.
The path I speak of is the path of the "many-armed Shiva." The path of multiple skills and relatively little knowledge. Those who have switched to the path of knowledge go up. Those who stayed in the way of skills - remain approximately in the same place where they were.
Skills
Let me take a little “popiaruyus” and tell you about the mega-skills that I had left with my life baggage.
- Setup of automatic telephone exchange Multicomm, Panasonic, Simens
- Configure WiFi access on SOHO routers
- Configuring SDSL Modems
- Setting up bank clients (I will not disclose the list, there are 20 different pieces)
- Setting software from the tax (taxpayer LE, PERSW, etc.)
- Setting up more than a dozen different types of instant messengers, the ability to diagnose them (not always a trivial task, especially in the MSN area)
- Configuring an outlook in various configurations, including RPC over HTTPS, disabling caching mode, setting up forms, creating your own forms, managing rules
- Methods for replacing cartridges on more than 40 types of printers, knowing how to view toner consumption and the number of pages per copier.
- Ability to crimp the fifth category
- Some experience of messing around with the protection of telephone lines
- Configuring videonet, including resolving an excessive number of interrupts from video capture cards
- Organization of a telephone switching box for 10 numbers inside a small power box (I don’t know what they are called, round ones for wall sealing)
')
I deliberately wrote out the most garbage skills that are usually not even written in resumes, because they are too trivial. If this list had become 50 times longer, would I have become a more qualified specialist? Not.
The reason is skills, not knowledge. In every new situation, I have to study the problem from scratch and look for solutions. Yes, the experience of the previous ones allows, in analogy, to solve new ones, but the analogies are not at all always fair ...
Knowledge
Now consider the reverse example. How do you think, how much time will it take to study a bind to a person who is well aware of the structure and principles of DNS operation, although he hasn’t seen the bind A couple of days to study the specifics of the bind (for example, view) and sniffing at the most non-obvious things, a few days of messing with real bandages - and this is quite a specialist. Why? Because, even if he doesn’t know exactly how the slaves are notified in binde, he knows for sure that he needs to find a method to notify the slave about updating the zone. It remains to find out how.
Similarly: what do you think, how much time will it take for a person who is well versed in the PKI (but did it only under Windows) to master openssl and raise its own CA? I do not think more than a few days.
Knowledge lies deeper than skills. You can be able, but not understand. Understanding, you can always figure out how to do it.
Time math
The time spent on skills is incremental time. Having a skill before starting work saves you N time. Once (having a skill you save time on acquiring it). Time spent on knowledge is multiplicative time. It will not speed you up here and now, but will reduce each N in gaining skill in the relevant area by a certain amount. And the more such “multiplicative” factors you have, the greater the time savings, and the wider the areas in which you can, in principle, acquire skills. And so these skills will be more fundamental (because instead of memorizing the sequence, you will know the causes and consequences).
Multi-hand Shiva Small Business
And it is with this problem that most administrators in small companies face. They do not require knowledge and understanding. It is necessary that it works (good or bad, it does not matter. There are no people who could appreciate it, so that “at least somehow”, if only it worked). But besides the main work there is a mass of secondary, which requires attention and time, but is completely unrelated to knowledge. I listed a rather wide list above ...
However, let's leave me alone. It is enough to run through the eyes on the vacancies, as the hair stands on end from that power and complexity of work as an administrator:
Example:
Skills: Windows 2003, AD, Microsoft Exchange, MS SQL, IIS, ISA, HyperV, 1C, Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, BIND, vWare Server, knowledge of HTML / CSS, PHP, HP and Xerox printers, cisco and dlink routers.
Responsibilities: administering the enterprise network, maintaining the operability and relevance of the company's websites, ensuring the operation of the mail system, administering 1C, updating and correcting configurations, servicing office equipment and SCS.
If we take this announcement seriously, then an attempt to study at least half of the above will set us up for a couple of years for books. Administering MSSQL? As a minimum, it would be good to know SQL, to know the features of MS SQL, to know about replication methods, organizing subscriptions and publishing, writing backup scripts on SQL itself ... Exchange and AD? Another huge pillar, the development of which is very, very difficult (knowledge of the AD scheme, skills of working with adsi, PKI ...). And then it gets worse. You also need to “keep websites up-to-date” (aka being an editor, and most likely, a designer, and a coder (no wonder PHP is written)), and there is also 1C, which needs to be “fixed configuration” (you need know accounting, know the language 1C, know the principles of the configuration ...). We simply will not talk about such trifles as “knowledge of cisco”.
In fact, people just need an advanced enikeyschik who will keep all this in relative order. And yes, they will force it to tinker in the 1C configuration, redo the design of the sites, figure out why synchronization on the PDA does not work, etc. etc.
In the end, if you start working with all of this, then you will never learn all this fundamentally. You will not become a good 1C programmer, you will not become a good PCR coder, you will not become a designer, you will not learn AD so that you can easily come to a large organization to deal with one-way trust relationships between trees in the forest, bridge servers, GPOs with reference to AD nodes ... [I write within my qualification, perhaps there is something more next].
At this job you will have two ways:
- Having scattered with secondary duties to indulge in ignorance of idleness (yes, all these duties will occupy you in a calm state well an hour a day, maximum)
- Do self-study. And it does not have to be any books on ekschenzhu or even "books on Linux" Calmly, slowly to learn the principles of the network, to study DNS, DHCP, to master the PKI, to bury in LDAP and understand that AD - not the navel of the earth. Read about modern networks (which are no more similar to the OSI model than children's telephony from two phones by wire to a modern cellular base station). Explore deep Linux, understand modern technologies in it, dig deeper in the source text ...
The second way is in no way connected with official duties, moreover, it contradicts them (the employer does not need a “very smart” one). But it is he who leads to the possibility of specialization. Because it is impossible to specialize without fundamental knowledge, an enikeyshchik with 20 years of experience (you will not believe, but I know this) remains an enikeyshchik, although, perhaps, it has tremendous skills.
"The Nits of Capitalism"
What is the reason for this? I spoke with several directors of medium-sized companies (50-150 people) "heart-to-heart" - and I was struck by how they relate to the work force. We spoke in a situation where these words could not hurt me, so I think they were frank.
They need people who will do everything. They do not need specialists narrow profile. If they decide to separate the work of the programmer and the web designer, it is only because “this is very disgusting”. Through force. At the first possible case, trying to make a designer also a sales manager, content manager and photographer in an online store.
They need generalists with great flexibility and depth of skills "well, how much is." And they do not need "nothing special." And most importantly, such "universals" change very easily, because in each specific area it is not so difficult to study it (at the level at which they are required). You can take the first administrator, and in a week he will understand this PBX, in a month he will become familiar with ekscheynzhe, even if he had never seen him before.
The reason for this (this is my speculation) is how they relate to business. Most are not sure what will happen tomorrow, and not in the sense of “succeed or not”, “competitors will eat or not”, but in the sense of “what else will they suit us”. Most do not want to invest in employee training, because they are not sure that they will not have to drastically change their business from (for example) book publishing to the potato trade, or to “cut the money out of here”. In such circumstances, investment in employee development is folly. Tomorrow everything will be spoiled and it will be necessary to make experts on potatoes, so let the sysadmin imprint while the book is up, he still understands computers well ...
... We add that the majority of any successful leaders are relatively good psychologists in the sense of "personnel processing". And in such situations, they try to show you the insignificance of your work. This is done not by direct text, but by some primitivization of the attitude towards the results ... Probably, it is better not to say anything about it than the xkcd comic at the beginning of the article.
Personal interest
Career multi-armed Shiva can not be. Probably somewhere there is only one person on the planet who can learn everything at the same time. But most physically can not. The only career path (if you leave aside government agencies and warm lazy places in semi-state Gazprom) is specialization. And for this you need to go strictly in the opposite direction - to the basics. If you know well the cores of modern operating systems, then you can become an expert on a specific Microsoft linux enterprise with ease.
And the position of an upgraded enikeyschik gives opportunities for this. When the deadline does not hang over your head, you can spend a month studying something abstract, and not in the mode “by tomorrow morning it should work, although I don’t understand at all what the message 'invalid reference for storage” 'during the start of the mail server ".
The only danger is sluggishness and non-necessity of studying (it is possible to tinker for a couple of months, get stuck on trifles and quit).
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/93213/
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