Re: Common operational misconceptions

Paul Graydon wrote:
>> Yes I'm serious, they were CCNP qualified, hired as a NOC engineer for
> an ISP & Hosting company.  For the company the NOC team was the top tier
> of customer support (3rd line+), they looked after routers, switches,
> firewalls, servers, leased lines, and so on.
> This individual was perfectly capable of regurgitating all the facts,
> figures and technical details you can imagine, probably pretty much the
> entire CCNP syllabus.  What they didn't seem that capable of was
> actually applying that to anything.  I'd bet good money that if I'd
> asked him at the time what the 1918 network ranges are he'd have been
> able to tell me.
> This is exactly what we're teaching kids to do these days (makes me feel
> so old that I've already been saying this for several years and I'm only
> 31) standardised tests aren't marked based on ability to apply
> knowledge, just the knowledge itself.  Hence my view, give me someone
> who knows how to think over someone who is qualified to the hilt.  These
> exam cram 'do a CCNP in a week' courses only serve to make it worse.
>
> Paul

Ahh, I get you now...thanks.

Took me back to '64 and the battery of tests (all day!) I was given before getting hired by IBM for the 360 rollout.  I 
was amazed by the amount of questions of the "if gear a turns ccw, what does lever b do?" variety.
Later I was told that -all- the testing results were important, even the psychological ones, but what they really wanted 
to find was the best analytical *mind*.

Best,

--Michael