Re: RE: present day admin skills

[George Capehart <capegeo () opengroup org>]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 08:40:45PM -0500, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
> 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. ;-)

*Exactly*!

> 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.

Yep.  Had that happen, too.  More than once.  In the end, though, for me,
personally, I still believe I did what was best for both me and my client.
I can't keep an uneducated customer from making a bad decision, (I say
uneducated because if the customer really knew what he/she was doing and
really knew whether the candidate had the appropriate skills, then he/she
would not want to engage me in the first place) but I *can* protect myself.
It's been my experience that I have work a lot harder to manage naive
customers' expectations (and therefore "do a good job") than I do to
manage the expectations of sophisticated customers.  In the case you
described above, even if you had been able to do a marginally better job
than did the person who took it, the chances are pretty high that it
*still* would not satisfy the customer.  Unless he/she is *so* clueless
that they have no idea at all of what they wanted . . .  but then that's
another topic and another black hole that I'd prefer to avoid . . .

> > 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.

Point taken . . . to a point.  Agreed that there are people of all ages
who are amazingly competent, professional, organized and hard-working.
Absolutely.  And, there are too few of us if you ask me. ;->  The point I
wanted to make in my glibness was that, no matter how good a person is,
the longer they do it, the better they get.  Guess it's just a question of
where we put the "good bar" . . .

> 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

Sounds like you just nailed the skills needed by "the best person," and,
you're right, they aren't in large supply.  Guess that means it's a
seller's market, huh?  :-)

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