Re: Database Design

Austin Durbin wrote:

> I could not have said it any better. Any thoughts as to how we arrived at
> such a point? In the coporate IT world it seemed to start with the advent of
> packaged systems and the introduction of tools such as VB.

I think we arrived here by two different contributing pathways.

1. Personal Computing

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   In the days when dinosaurs walked the earth ... those of us that got into IT did it on mainframes where we paid, often dearly, for every tick of the CPU. We learned methodologies. We learned to comment code. We learned to read and study before coding. There was no opportunity, not on an IBM 360, 370, or similar hardware to hack. So we learned to read our code, line by line, and walk our logic.
2. Management

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   Once again, harking back to ancient times ... those that managed IT were people with degrees in IT ... code bangers themselves ... and the resources, hardware and personnel, were considered valuable.

Now most IT projects and operations are managed by people that couldn't save their own lives if they had to send "Hello World" to a printer without a canned software package and a GUI. So we have managers, hiring DBAs, developers, etc. that haven't the skill to evaluate those they are interviewing.

A friend of mind was interviewed by Bank of America for an IT position. The VP interviewing him had the following to say at the beginning of the interview "If I knew what questions to ask you I wouldn't need you" and you can accurately guess the quality of work in his department from that alone.

<RANT>
We are the only "profession" in which practitioners expect to be able to work without credential. No one is practicing medicine, law, accounting, engineering, dentistry, pharmacy, etc. with so little evidence of skill. Consider that anyone of us could walk into a pharmacy, count pills, and put a label on the bottle. Yet no government in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, or any other first world country, would let us do so without a pharmacy degree and passing a government sponsored exam.

So we pay for our "wild west" mentality by watching our jobs being offshored to those as qualified as we are ... because there are no official qualifications to do what we do. </RANT>

-- 
Daniel Morgan
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/oad/oad_crs.asp
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/aoa/aoa_crs.asp
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
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