Re: RE: present day admin skills

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () magpage com>]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 11:40:57AM -0500, George Capehart wrote:
> Sometimes the Right Answer (TM) is "I appreciate your interest but this
> falls outside our area of expertise and we feel like we would be doing
> ourselves and you a disservice by attemtping to do this."

I've given that answer on occasion.  Of course, it's a judgement call: if,
say, I'm familiar with 80% of the problem space and it looks like the other
20% isn't particularly nebulous, risky, or ill-defined, I'll probably take
it on.  If, on the other hand, I find myself saying "Wha...?" constantly
as I read the statement of work, then the best thing I can do for a
client is turn my palms up, admit that I'm in over my head, and offer to
help find them someone who eats this stuff for breakfast.  The trick, of
course, is to do this up-front so that nobody gets burned or upset by it. ;-)

Much to my chagrin, however, I've turned down work on several occasions,
only to find that someone even *less* qualified than me has managed to
land it.  They invariably botch it, leaving me wondering if, at worst,
I could have at least done better than *that*, and if, in the end, I really
did the best thing that I could for my client or myself.

> I don't see how an 18-year-old anything can be good . . .  ;->

Oh, I do.  I've seen a couple who were amazingly competent, professional,
organized, and hard-working.  Granted, they're rare -- maybe even very rare --
but I would never rule them out based on age.  Same for a 58-year-old.
Competence, problem-solving abilities, cogent writing skills -- all these
things are hard to find, and when they show up combined in one person,
my first thought is to grab 'em and consider any gaps in their background
as (mostly) minor problems To Be Solved Later.  Clueful people adapt -- fast.

To bring this back around to firewalls: I (mostly) regard the entire area
as a lot of unexplored territory.  As far as I can tell, even the experts
in the area spend a lot of their time going "What the !@%?"  -- which isn't
surprising, given how new all this knowledge is, how fast attack methodologies
are evolving, how fast Internet services are changing, and so on.  I think
a lot of what we do is "make it up as we go along" because we have to:
while some "best practices" are well documented, there just isn't a cookbook
approach to nearly anything we do.  And because of that, it's hard to find
"the best person" for these kinds of tasks: it really seems to demand
a problem-solving, investigative, nit-picking, determined sort of mind,
and well, those aren't in large supply.  (Aside: unless, of course, the
economic slide continues, in which case I expect to be in the bread line
with Marcus and Fred and Gene and Steve and everyone else. ;-) )

---Rsk
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