Re: Common operational misconceptions

[Paul Graydon <paul () paulgraydon co uk>]

On 2/17/2012 10:55 PM, Michael Painter wrote:
> Paul Graydon wrote:
> > Give me someone who can already think and analyse over someone who
> > 'knows' it all, any day.  You can be qualified to the hilt but
> > absolutely useless in the real world (I've watched CCNP and higher
> > struggling to figure out why they can't ping a 10.0.0.0/24 address at a
> > customers remote site, not even realising it's a private range, let
> > alone trying to trace the path of the ping,)
>
> Hard to believe, but you're obviously serious.  What are their job 
> titles?  What were they hired to accomplish?
> Also hard for me to understand that someone could study for CCNx and 
> not get exposed to Private space and 1918...what am I missing?
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