From: Jay Hennigan (jay@west.net)
Date: Sat Apr 03 2004 - 03:57:59 GMT-3
On Sat, 3 Apr 2004 trouse@cisco.com wrote:
> Thanks for sharing this story. It touches on alot of issues that many
> of us can probably relate to.
>
> I say all this to lead into my question: What is the equivalent
> experience level of a ccie? Say someone with no experience get a CCIE
> ( with hard work and commitment none the less ), what are they good for
> in your opinion? Are they not a valubable engineer?
Absolutely. And the hard work and commitment in a lab environment is
a form of experience, even though not on-the-job. What such a person
might lack is the respect for a customer's or an employer's production
network.
By this, I mean that reloading a lab router or making changes that break
things that you know how to fix become routine in CCIE training and
preparation. If you work for a stockbroker, or a bank, or the FAA in
air traffic control (to cite a few mild examples), this type of habit
can be quite counterproductive.
With CCIE lab preparation, speed and the knowledge of not-the-best-way
practices are of the essence, and the traffic flowing through the network
is relatively light in terms of running a router out of memory or CPU if
configured sub-optimally. And the traffic is of little or no importance
or intrinsic value.
A "lab rat" CCIE with little practical experience is certainly a valuable
engineer, but a prudent employer is going to want to impart some other
skills before turning over a production network to such a person. Such
a CCIE will probably excel at diagnosis and troubleshooting before gaining
the design and scalability planning skills needed for large, critical
production networks, IMHO.
-- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Administration - jay@west.net WestNet: Connecting you to the planet. 805 884-6323 WB6RDV NetLojix Communications, Inc. - http://www.netlojix.com/
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