Re: musing about degree requirements (long)

[Dan BRINEGAR <vr2link -at- VR2LINK -dot- COM>]

Oh, man, I guess I just can't *shut up* tonight....<grin/blush>

Donald J. Plummer, Department of English, Bowling Green State University wrote:

>Can we agree to try and put this in some kind of perspective?  Can we
>recognize that this is perhaps what is happening--the maturation process of
>a young profession?  Do these thoughts resonate with anyone?

See Douglas Adams on "Perspective."  <smile>

At the risk of repeating the "Yeah? Well, *MY* Daddy's taught university
courses, too!" argument of my original Freshman English fiasco; I'll
mention that he's been communicating technical information for fifty years
next June.... he was an instructor or electronics engineering
tech/electronics engineer  for the first 20 years of his career, but it all
involved technical communications.

Ah, but here's the generational difference, *because* Dad "came up thru the
ranks," he showed *me* how to do the same thing, and 'cos he was the
guru-of-gurus at the first company I contracted at, I was able to gain
entry into this trade by putting ten years in the ranks to work thru the
contacts in the trade I made as his kid... If it weren't for that advantage
of My-Daddy's-a-General, I'd'a been locked out of the techwriting
profession completely.

All the TCs I know from Dad's generation came up thru the ranks.... most
TCs my age came in with a degree and no practical experience.... at least
the ones I know personally....

Now, is it that the trade is maturing (of course it is maturing, and the
body-of-knowlege involved in the practice of TC is being codified and set
in stone), or is it that the industries we work in are experincing horrific
progress and technological upheaval?

[minor exaggeration follows:]

I can imagine the MBA VPs or Technical Managers who left school ten or
fifteen years ago and needed 11 weeks of training to be able to use Office
'97 would firmly believe that only someone with a _university_  education
could  possibly work in hi-tech today... and many university academics who
watched the community college staffs and the technical institute skunkworks
figure out the Internet and put it to work for their students (or left
academe altogether and started Net-related companies) were "cheating" or
cutting corners somehow.... The supernerds I've known over the last few
years are already making money on the Net, and don't really *need*
university degrees to keep making money for the forseeable future (tho
several have gotten them anyway, just-in-case) -- but what about the rest
of us? GenXers are more comfortable with technology than any other
generation, but my generation hasn't figured out how to manage them yet
(and GenXers may well tell you they'll do it themselves, thank you... and
don't wanna be managed)

[/exaggeration]

I wonder if the fact is that for "normal" folks, this period of
generational flux and technological discontinuity isn't something akin to
vaccuum tubes giving way to transistors (except that the underlying physics
of the two technologies wasn't all that different) giving way to personal
computing: the management methodologies developed in WWII and applied to
IBM and GM simply weren't applicable to Hewlett Packard and others -- the
culmination of that management revolution and the technological revolution
didn't happen until Apple and Compaq and Microsoft ... almost forty years
after the discontinuity...

Yet once again with the Internet and Virtual Corporations and the bloodiest
business competition yet seen, nobody knows *quite* how to manage it....
and *this* wave of management, technological and *generational*
discontinuity only took twenty years to get here!

The stack of dog-eared business books on my other desk are all concerned
with managing the IBMs, HPs, and GMs (who *just *got* the last management
revolution), yet can't agree at all on what to do about the latest tech
revolution.... the only remotely relevant management gurus in that stack
are Drucker and Deming, covering the same basic concepts of quality and
business they did forty years ago.... and it took management forty years to
think they understood them and say "I knew it all along."

It took them forty years to figure out what Drucker and Deming were telling
them about knowing their customers and the reasons they were in business:
Drucker is the last surviving great-business-guru and still telling
managers how to go about understanding their customers and businesses, and
he throws in a ton of historical perspective to boot... but how is anyone
gonna figure this stuff out in the five years we have till the next
upheaval? (Drucker *still* doesn't have a checklist, and those who *do*
have checklists  are talking about running Apple, HP, Compaq, and MS as
they were  twenty years ago with forty year-old assumptions about customers
and business!!).

I don't blame management at all for trying to get a handle on the
situation, and I'm far enough in-between two generations to be able to both
get ticked off when management doesn't *get it* about what I want to do,
and at nearly the same time decide to create a *form* on _paper_ to deal
with some work situation I can't control.... <shudder>

What are the new gurus talking about, by the way?

Well, Tom Peters and _Fast Company_ magazine are simply saying "go with
your gut; if it works, grreat; if you screwed up, try again.... that's all
the plan and management you have time for: hungrier faster guys are out
there who are taking many more shots at the target than you are, odds are
that while you're trying to gain control of the situation, those hungry
fast competitors are hitting the target once in awhile before you take your
first shot and satisfying your customers, or giving them the stuff you're
not quite ready to deliver yet."

So, anyway, what I was thinking was that no business or profession has the
opportunity to mature at the  same rate they've had in the past -- we had
a thousand years to develop a mature seafaring profession; a hundred years
to develop a mature railroading profession; thirty years to develop a
mature mainframe servicing profession; ten years to develop a mature
distributed enterprise computing profession.... and there's precious little
work available in any of those professions today....

what's next? There will be an utterly new Mac and NT operating system in 6
months and updates every six months after that -- a new version of Word and
Framemaker every year for the next two... Internet technologies none of us
have even guessed at will be the Next Big Thing before your current college
freshmen graduate: and all of this will obviate everything we've learned
except how to learn.

What if three years from now, we woke up, gargled the confetti out of our
mouths, checked to see if our compuyter knows what day it is, and
discovered every profession we've trained for is once-again in it's infancy
because all our paradigms have changed?

-----------------------------------------------------------
Dan BRINEGAR, CCDB Vr2Link
Performance S u p p o r t Svcs.
Phoenix, Arizona

vr2link -at- vr2link -dot- com
http://www.vr2link.com
"Show up, be there, think it up and do it, exceed your job-description,
 control your own means of production (that's yer brain)! "

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