Security Breach ?

[Guy Fraser]

On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 14:45 -0600, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> Guy Fraser wrote:
> > I am not trying to knock you, or the CISSP program, but in my 
> > experience most accreditation systems are just money making 
> > scams. As the saying goes "the proof is in the pudding", if you 
> > are capable of securing, keeping a machine secure and fixing 
> > machines that have been compromised, then you can claim to be 
> > experienced, and it doesn't matter what letters you put after 
> > your name.
> 
> I second that.  However, the way HR departments work can be described 
> with this simple command:
> 
>     grep -v alphabet-soup list-of-applicants.txt > reject-list.txt
> 
> Basically, very often you get screened out long before anybody competent 
> gets a chance to look into your resume.  So it is up to you.  Not 
> wasting time and money on some alphabet soup and lowering your chances 
> of finding a job, or spending some time and money on some sily title. 
> Sometimes I think this is conspiracy between HR departments and 
> certification organizations...  Whatever it is, it is very profitable 
> business.  Just look how much Microsoft is charging for classes and 
> certificates...
> 
That was absolutely my point.

I am the senior administrator at an ISP, when I started all of our 
servers except one Sun Sparc running Solaris and one Dec VAX running
OSF/1 were running NT, even a Dec Alpha was running NT. I quickly 
moved many of the servers to SlackWare then Redhat until the SCO 
lawsuite made management uncomfortable. Now we have one W2K server 
for customers requiring ASP all of our other production servers 
are running BSD. We had a number of MCSEs since I started, and not 
a single one was a decent administrator. Most of them could list the 
OSI layers, but could not figure out how to configure a firewall.
They tried to replace some of my Linux and Unix machines with 
"more manageable" windows machines, fortunately the constant 
stream of blue screens during testing, was not managements 
favourite colour. I nicknamed the testing room as "the blue room"
to the disappointment of the MCSE at the time. The nickname stuck, 
that MCSE didn't. We had a couple more MCSEs after that, but now 
management is convinced MCSE is a four letter word for danger, or 
my favourite "Most Costs Shall Escalate".

> BOFH...  Hmmmm...  Wonder how that would look in my resume, gota try it 
> out at least once ;-)
> 
I thought that should get a laugh, one of the guys at work even wears
the tee-shirt.