It’s no secret that the field of system administration has struggled for respect among computer scientists. When I broke the news that I was taking a job as a system administrator directly out of college, a fellow graduate asked sarcastically, “Why would you want to be a janitor?”
System administration principles are typically not taught at universities, where “education” (concepts and frameworks) is valued over “training” (explicit instruction of tasks). It’s true that system administration courses and a couple degree programs exist—but they are the exception rather than the rule. The state of related curriculum in K–12 education is even more dire.
The belief that education and training are separate is harmful. It’s helped make computer science educators hostile to efforts to adopt system administration curriculum and a CS degree largely irrelevant when hiring Web developers.
Changing education will take a long time and we need to do it. But we can start making the change we want today. Teaching basic system administration is something that we can all learn to do, and should all start doing, right now.
Selena Deckelmann is a major contributor to PostgreSQL. She specializes in open source software development and product management. She's an internationally recognized speaker on open source, PostgreSQL, and developer community. She founded Postgres Open, a conference dedicated to the business of PostgreSQL and disruption of the database industry. She founded and co-chaired Open Source Bridge, a developer conference for open source citizens. She founded the PostgreSQL Conference, a successful series of east coast/west coast conferences in the U.S. for PostgreSQL. She's helped run other conferences like WhereCampPDX, BarCampPDX, and PG Days. She is currently on the organizing committees for PgCon and OSCON. She's a contributing writer for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Manual and Student Guide.
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BibTeX
@conference {255719,
author = {Selena Deckelmann},
title = {Education vs. Training},
year = {2012},
address = {San Diego, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = dec
}
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