Thus spake "Vadim Antonov" <avg@exigengroup.com>
Stephen - I bet I can do networks much much better than most cisco CCIEs, even after years of doing network-unrelated work :) That's because I understand _why_ the stuff is working, not only how to make cisco box to jump through hoops. ...
You don't. You devote your career to learning networking. IOS is a base skill which is necessary (today) to utilize that knowledge and, more importantly, get a job.
Yawn. Are you serious? Sure, you need to have some idea of what things are and how they work, but finding a magic incantation in IOS manual is not something which only ceritified cisco "engineers" can do. Unless both IOS and documentation deteriorated much much further than I think.
Where did I say that? Read my statement again; I think you're in violent agreement with me.
A person with lots of knowledge and no skills is a liberal arts major, not an engineer.
One of the best network engineers is the world is a liberal arts major :)
I find most of them make great fry cooks ;)
Academic respect doesn't pay the bills.
Sure, being a trained _technician_ pays bills. Just about. In my experience, having a real education does much more.
If you take a non-logical, non-visual, non-geeky technician and push him through a CS program, he'll emerge still a technician. Will a piece of paper make him a more valuable employee? Probably not.
Degrees are, in essence, a certificate that you are capable of learning things by rote and regurgitating them later, possibly applying a small amount of thought (but not too much).
Depends on where you got it. Try to get through MIT or Stanford by learning thing by rote :) I think you'll find yourself with self-esteem below the floor, and a ticket home after the very first exams.
I do have great respect for MIT, Stanford, and a few others. However, only a tiny fraction of 1% of CS grads come from those programs. I'm basing my stance on the rest of the population. S