SA-Pro Episode 0

Comments on SA-Pro Episode 0

SA-Pro is a podcast done by Ben Rockwood. Episode 0 can be downloded from here.

First impression: this is the first podcast I've ever listened to, so I don't know if this is typical audio quality. I couldn't hear Ben at all until I put on the headphones.

I also have concerns about the length of time. I am one of those fortunate, fictional few: I have pretty much a 40-hour week, not including emergencies or after-hours. I am extremely fortunate that my employer permits this, but the this is driven mostly by requirements on the home front -- having autism in the family changes the priorities stack somewhat. But the point is that an hour is a lot of time for me, and I only had the opportunity to listen to the whole thing due to some pretty unusual circumstances, and I don't see time being available to me on a regular basis to listen.

Regarding the content. The idea of setting out an "agenda" for the discussion is good. Gives the audience a good idea of where the discussion is likely to go.

Some time was spent on education and experience. While I am trained as a programmer at the (Canadian) community college level, I've never worked as one. My bosses have told me that my training shows when I do my scripting, either in shell or perl, and it does change how I think of things, but I don't consider myself a programmer by any stretch of imagination, and my resume would probably be instantly discarded by any of the three admins participating in the podcast.

Related to education is certification. One of the problems I have is that I can't really look back on my career and say "this proves I can do x". It seems sometimes that I can't really point to many things and say "I can do x in a general way"; my experiences are all highly specific to the implementations involved. Certification, while useless in a specific sense, do have a general purpose in that they indicate that I can do x to some arbitrary standard. And since most of the real first resume cut is done in many companies by completely non-technical people in HR departments, having the appropriate "buzzweeds" can be instrumental in getting your resume through that first hurdle.

All that said, I don't have any certifications.

I also don't have any experience in large- (or, I think the participants of this podcast might suggest, medium-) sized systems; I've never seen a 100GB database. My customer companies typically have protected datasets of the size of one to for terabytes, with networks and user communities to match. But I have led a couple of successful almost-ground-up network re-architectures for companies of these size in the last two years.

Most of these companies don't have an IT department -- many don't even have a full-time dedicated IT person. And seriously, there are far more companies of this size than there are large companies.

So what does that make me? According to SANS, I am probably not a "senior" administrator, no matter what is on my business card. I am qualified for the niche that my employer has found, and I have been doing this job for the last seven years now.

Writing this all out makes it sound just like so much complaining, perhaps, that I would not count as one of the "peers" for which this podcast is intended. Maybe, maybe not.

I'll try to keep listening though.